One of the things that puzzles me, here in the wee hours of the morning, is why my mother killed herself that way?
She knew what she was doing. She’d watched her mother die, hideously, of cancer. One might say, of a self-induced cancer.
So she knew the horror and misery that particular type of suicide inflicted on the people around her — the people who had to care for her and clean up after her as she died.
She surely knew my father loved her more than life itself. She must have known she was imposing a peculiarly ugly horror on him.
She must have known — should have known, because she wasn’t stupid — that if I took off working on the Ph.D., I would be thrown out of the program. She knew that would mean eight or ten years of my life and effort wasted, thrown down the drain.
She knew — as we all had known since the late 1950s — that smoking causes cancer. She knew her gawdawful smoking habit made her little girl sick, chronically ill from the clouds of sidestream smoke filling the air in their home.
But still she puffed away. Puffed and puffed and puffed until she puffed herself into the grave.
Yeah, I know: it was an addiction.
But addictions can be overcome. She knew nicotine is addictive. She knew she could rid herself of it, even if the effort to do so would be hard and uncomfortable. But hey: harder and more uncomfortable than dying of cancer? Harder and more uncomfortable for the man who waited on her through all the vomiting and the gawdawful sickness and the horror? Harder for the daughter who watched her die and almost lost her own future to her mother’s suicide?
One wonders, here in the wee hours of the morning…
