Rejecting Denial and Embracing Sorrow: On Writing the Story of a Husband’s Suicide

In my first attempt to address the subject of my young husband’s suicide, the story I wrote bore no resemblance to the reality of his death, or to my own life. I thought this was what creativity was all about. The best thing about that earliest work was its title, The Child Widow, which was a gift from Philip Roth, my first reader, who awarded it like a gold star when he encouraged me to consider myself a writer. After that false start in 1970 I went on to write other novels. I also tried many other times to write about Tim. Finally, because the title was too good to waste, I set aside those previous efforts and wrote “The Child Widow,” an energetic short story published by the literary journal Ploughshares and designated among “100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2003” in The Best American Short Stories. That was good enough for me, so I called my original ambition fulfilled and let it go. Or so I thought.

The turning point came suddenly and relatively recently, with my former mother-in-law’s death at age ninety-two. Her obituary in The Boston Globe described Helen as predeceased by her four sisters—who are named—and survived by her three children. It failed to mention my husband, the son by whom she had also been predeceased.

My memoir The Silence of Your Name: The Afterlife of a Suicide was published fifty-one years after the suicide of my twenty-eight year-old husband, and it aims to confront the denial that accounted for that omission—a notorious murder-suicide, involving my husband’s aunt, that was unacknowledged within the family for decades—and, necessarily, to expose the specific circumstances, and the legacy, of my own enduring shame.

In the summer of 1970, my young husband and I were co-leaders of an Operation Crossroads Africa group of American and Canadian student volunteers. We were assigned to Wenchi, the ancestral village of Ghana’s Prime Minister, whose brother and sister were Wenchi’s Chief and Queen-Mother. Before making our way upcountry, Tim was briefly hospitalized in Accra after an overnight fever and other inconclusive symptoms sparked a radical sleep deprivation that persisted for the next week, and drained him. Once in Wenchi, I tried to involve the local hospital in his care, but all they offered was sleep medication. We were moved into the guest room of Jean and Hélène, French Canadian CUSA volunteer teachers at the secondary school where our group was housed.

And here is what I had avoided writing, until I no longer could:

After the injection at midnight, and once I was certain it had taken effect, I lay down on the mattress on the floor next to his bed for my own first real sleep in all these days. Jean told me later that at around 3 am he’d found Tim in the hall and brought him back to bed. It was just before dawn that Jean heard Tim moaning and woke me—“Viens! Viens!”—when he found Tim on the floor of the shower room. I grasped right away that, in getting out of bed, Tim had to step over me as if I weren’t there.

From the doorway I saw that Tim’s torso was smeared with blood as if with a child’s finger paints, but I can’t pretend to more of an impression because I leapt on the excuse of seeking help by jumping on the back of Jean’s motorcycle as he sped away. It wasn’t that Jean was asking me to come with him to fetch the doctor, rather that, if I’d stayed, I’d have needed the power to try to save Tim’s life. And what then? By fleeing, wasn’t I also protecting us both from having to confront, face to face, what he’d done to himself? It may be partially true that I chose to spare us this, but primarily, I escaped. Clinging to Jean on the back of his motorcycle, I wanted him to keep driving. This is the flaw—in me—that cancels out Tim’s. It’s the love I still feel for him.

Tim was still alive when Dr. Beltman arrived at the house in the ambulance, giving the doctor a life to try to save. On the cement balcony where I waited, shivering in the heat, I watched the day’s first light fully arrive, numb with dread. Without any real information about Tim’s condition I already knew that for the rest of my own life I would be guilty of abandoning him.

When Dr. Beltman reemerged from the house he regarded me through the rectangular metal-rimmed glasses that I still always notice on European men because of him. “Your husband is died. Dead,” he said, correcting his grammar.

During the decade of American assassinations our hearts had broken for the three heroic young women in their black veils, but until Jackie and Ethel Kennedy and Coretta Scott King, my idea of a widow was my grandmother. On that balcony I accused myself of cowardice in not protecting Tim from himself in the first place, and then, failing that, for not holding his bloody head in my lap for the rest of his life.

After his body was removed to a morgue for the police autopsy required in the case of an “unnatural” death, I tried to imagine what Tim would want next. I decided that, since cremation was the family’s choice when his father died exactly a year earlier, I would arrange for this service to be provided there in Ghana. And when I learned that cremation was only customary in the minority Hindu community, it proved fitting. Tim was an ordained minister in the Congregational Church but a believer in radical ecumenism. A political activist—a peacenik—I felt that, though admittedly startled by the traditional pyre set ablaze on a hilltop in Accra’s City Cemetery, I could welcome the ritual on Tim’s behalf. As the Hindu priest explained the ceremony, the fire returns the elements of the body to the elements of nature because they are perishable. But the spirit is indestructible and can never perish.

The ashes arrived by mail in a biscuit tin, identified as “Human Remains” on the customs form, and Tim’s mother and I quietly buried them in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in the family plot of Tim’s maternal ancestors. Early in our relationship Tim had taken me there to stroll among those gravestones, and while I had asked him then about the pink marble marker for his mother’s oldest sister, Josephine—“Wife of Albert Smith Bigelow”—Tim knew nothing about Josephine, the bride of six months whose dates revealed that she had died at twenty-one, my age at the time. Who could have predicted that the next stone to be placed in that plot, just five years later, would bear my young husband’s own name and telescoped dates? Or that Josephine’s scandalous death would be linked to his by the same dense silence.

We know that denial plays two roles in human life: the positive force that allows a person to rebound from a disabling loss, and the negative force that buries the truth in order—or so we believe—to make life livable. In addition to accommodating the family’s longstanding and hard-won reliance upon denial, the challenge for me was to finally understand my own relationship to denial. I was unable to judge others without first admitting to myself that each of my attempts to write The Child Widow as fiction had failed because I still always included the possibility that maybe the suicide wasn’t entirely deliberate. I knew better—I was right there in the next room—but I still found it possible to deflect.

With my mother-in-law’s denial I was given a way, and a reason, to modify actual circumstance. Without understanding its origins in her buried family history, I didn’t know how or why to penetrate the destructive aspects of the denial. I felt so relieved by her lack of blame—of me—that I willingly honored her preference for a modified version once I understood that this was what she could live with. She didn’t seem to realize that her firm resolve not to speak of the trauma—because I respected her—silenced me, too. I had yet to recognize that forgiveness depends entirely on facing the truth.

In 1976, six summers after Tim’s death, Geoffrey Wolff published Black Sun, the story of Harry Crosby’s flamboyantly reckless life, which ended with his shooting his lover—Josephine Rotch Bigelow—and then himself in a laboriously chronicled murder/suicide pact. The revelation in Black Sun prompted a collective outrage against the biographer—kill the messenger—by the dead girl’s four younger sisters.

I read Black Sun immediately, twice, and noted that while it portrayed Harry in often excruciating detail, its author exhibited little curiosity about either Josephine or the husband she betrayed. By his own account, Harry had introduced Josephine to the opium to which he was addicted, self-medicating the war trauma he suffered in France, and while the medical report filed after the murder-suicide made no mention of opium, an empty quart of scotch was found with their bodies. The tabloid New York Daily Mirror revealed the alcohol content of the dead couple’s brains—hers twice his—and declared “Jo-Jo Bigelow” almost literally “dead drunk.” The medical findings also concluded that Harry had shot Josephine first and then himself, but not until several hours later.

I learned the heroic story of Albert Smith Bigelow too late, from the prominent New York Times obituary marking his death in 1993, at age eighty-seven. In the sixty-four years beyond that December day in 1929 when Josephine lied about the purpose of her visit to New York for her final rendezvous with Harry, Bert’s exemplary life was one of deep personal fulfillment and great public courage.

Having enlisted in the Navy the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the news was released of the atomic bomb exploding over Hiroshima, Bert immediately recognized what he saw as the immorality of war. He and his second wife, Sylvia, a nurse, then hosted two “Hiroshima Maidens,” for a year, during the multiple plastic surgeries to correct for the disfiguring injuries caused, at age seven and thirteen, by the bombing of their city.

Bert came to embrace nonviolent acts of civil disobedience through Quaker teaching and by the revolutionary examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. He wrote The Voyage of the Golden Rule: An Experiment with Truth, an account of a thwarted peace action to halt what he called the “monstrous delinquency” of the U.S. government’s planned nuclear test explosions in the South Pacific. In the presidential election of 1956, when Eisenhower was reelected in a landslide, Bert wrote in Dr. King’s name as his candidate for president.

Congressman John Lewis described Bert’s bravery as a civil rights activist in his 1999 book, Walking with the Wind: A History of the Movement. Lewis was a twenty year-old college student and Bert was his middle-aged seat-mate, two of the thirteen Freedom Riders on that bus ride in May of 1960 that ended in Anniston, Alabama when their bus was firebombed by a mob of Klansmen, many still in their church clothes on that Mother’s Day.

By devoting the rest of his life to heroic acts of nonviolence, Bert Bigelow had performed the ultimate alchemy of turning violence into nonviolence. This is another way of saying that, by embracing sorrow, and in refusing the easier option of denial, a greater opportunity is created: the transformation of grief into love.

My own transformative experience occurred when I finally revisited Ghana, where I discovered that the Chief and Queen-Mother of Wenchi from 1970 were still the Chief and Queen-Mother decades later. They had welcomed us to their village and now they welcomed me back. Over dinner in her home I learned from the Queen-Mother, named Nana Frema, that, in this interval, the successful military coup against their democratically-elected brother, Prime Minister Busia, had caused them to suffer prolonged public threats. And although the Queen-Mother asked to hear about my life as a writer and, eventually, as a wife and mother, I understood, and welcomed, her one question about Tim’s suicide, “But don’t you think it was a bit selfish of him?”

When she then asked if I would like to visit the place where Tim died, I answered, “Yes, please.” And here is my memoir’s account of that reckoning:

The Queen-Mother’s conventional request for permission to enter was answered by the current resident’s melodic “Akwaaba!” We stepped through the open door into the hallway, which was painted the same “shocking pink” as Nana Frema’s guest bedroom. I knew which closed door concealed the shower room, but we were first invited into a living room crowded with upholstered chairs and an oversized couch for such perfunctory conversation that I can only recall feeling nervous. I tried to imagine my being this welcoming if a foreigner appeared at my door without warning to see the place where her young husband had bled to death thirty years earlier, and had to hope my presence here wasn’t too rudely inconsiderate. From where I sat I could look into the spare room where the Canadian strangers who were our hosts had made up the spare bed for Tim in the middle of his next-to-last night. I couldn’t have invented the intimacy that would be forced upon us in the next thirty hours, concluding with Jean’s summoning “Viens! Viens!” The walls of that little room were now blue, trimmed with the cheerful yellow woodwork that ran throughout.

The Queen-Mother encouraged me not only to look at the small shower room but to take a picture of it, which I did, like a tourist at any historical site. Those walls were now painted blue and tiled white to shoulder height, domesticating the cubicle I remembered as bare. There was a frosted glass-louvered window on the outside wall to provide light and air, and from that threshold I noted how the shower head extended in an arc from the left wall, with two corner shelves for bathing supplies and two thin towels hanging on a high rack. In a corner of the cement floor was a white enamel basin with a smaller blue plastic bowl inside it, and this became my focus. I knew I could never make myself cross that threshold, but from that same spot where I couldn’t, before, I made myself examine the ordinary drain down which Tim’s life had vanished. I looked, and I saw it.

On that other morning when I witnessed the formal procession of the Chief and the council of Elders robed in black Adinkra cloth, a bearer held a large black parasol over the Chief. They smoothly navigated that exterior staircase to enter the same doorway through which Tim’s body had been removed from the building to the flatbed truck that took it to the Kumasi morgue. I could see now that their mission to purify this defiled space seemed to have worked.

I left the building this time struck by its mundane character, and by the nonchalance with which I’d been received. If the situation were ever reversed I doubted my ability to reciprocate this gracefully, but I vowed to. It was as if the terrible event that had taken place in that shower cubicle had passed into the realm of legend, which almost made me feel as if I were no longer held to blame. Or maybe never had been.

Although my first purpose in turning from fiction to memoir was to restore to Tim the identity eliminated from his mother’s obituary, by being equally honest about myself, the consequence has been a private experience of that ultimate alchemy that turns violence into nonviolence and grief into love. With The Silence of Your Name: The Afterlife of a Suicide my reward for rejecting denial is my retrieved love for Tim, and now too for myself.