I’ve been told that the majority of suicides in the United States occur in June, and my father’s was no exception.
In a cruel irony, the anniversary of his death falls on Father’s Day every seven years or so, but I don’t think he planned it that way.
The reality is that people who are suffering at that level of despair or clinical depression are not, as my mother was the first to remind me, in their right mind.
And my father’s mind, as evidenced by a track record of sparkling accomplishments, was a brilliant, sensitive one.
Although he was a successful attorney by profession, I’ve often wondered if he should have been a forest ranger as he’d once dreamed, rather than a lawyer trapped in a Los Angeles office and nightmare traffic. Oh, how he loved the outdoors.
I do know that if he had been in his right mind, he would not have made a choice of such radical permanence, and left the life and daughters he loved so much.
On that long-ago June morning in 1976, I frantically attempted to absorb all at once the fresh tragedy in my teenage mind in an immense effort to remain sane, saying to myself over and over: “You can handle this, you can handle this.”
Behind those words I knew that a whole future had been annihilated and that in fact it was going to be very difficult to handle the coming days, weeks, months, and years.
Heartbroken is too small a word to capture the sense of devastation.
I had an intense desire to make it okay somehow, to feel as if my life and my future had not been instantly and irrevocably shattered, that my heart was not broken.
But of course it wasn’t okay, and I had to survive somehow without shutting down. I could not conceive of a future without my dad, yet I had no choice but to begin.
Fortunately, until he became the ultimate absent dad, my dad was the ultimate loving one, so I have no dearth of happy memories to cherish in the wake of this tragedy, and it is those I choose to honor around this time of year.
It was he who introduced me and my sisters to the beautiful high country of the Sierra Nevada - to Tenaya Lake, pictured above, and Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park - he who took us horsebackriding in the Santa Monica Mountains, he who shared his love of folk and classical music (most especially Bob Dylan, Chopin, Bach).
In short, Jayme was a father who taught me how to live even as he suffered from a complex despair.
And so when people ask why he did what he did, I prefer to stir the dialogue towards the finer points of the man - his humor, his affability, his boundless curiosity. I have tried not to allow my father’s suicide to be the act that defined the whole of his life - either for myself or for others with whom I share his memory.
But it is a complex, challenging legacy.
The reality is that while the immediate emotional impact of my father’s suicide has waned, the devastating loss is one that will forever endure in my heart. One does not “get over” a suicide.
Nonetheless, time is the great healer. As the painful immediacy of grief has moved further and further into my past, I have learned that the heart does mend strongly in the broken places, that there is a corresponding hunger for joy, and that there may be a greater capacity for joy because the sadness and the loss have cut so deep.
I have had the emotional fortitude to wait out the darkest moments that life has thrown my way.
How I wish my father had.
