Death Becomes Them
Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous & the Notorious
Alix Strauss
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- Thus began an article I wrote for the “Lives” section of the New York Times almost a decade ago. I’m as fascinated by funerals today as I was then. I blame my odd attraction to death and memorials on my being an only child—actually, the only only child in my family. For as many generations as I can trace back, everyone has had several children—except for my parents, who decided to have just me. Growing up, there were no holiday dinners spent bonding over burnt turkey and overcooked stuffing, no long-distance, late-night phone calls, no group vacations with family members.May 26 2024 10:28AM
Chapter 1
- We respond to the story as it propels our transference of our own feelings onto that other person.May 27 2024 2:51AM
- Suicide and darkness have long plagued the ultra-creative. Their self-destructive vices and passion for excess follow them like a trail of empty bottles, and often beg the chicken-or-egg question. Is it their sadness that makes them so brilliantly creative, or does their brilliance and ability to create induce their sadness?May 27 2024 2:51AM
- Dating back to Plato—who often spoke about creative individuals and how they were susceptible to melancholy—we have separated clinical insanity from creative insanity. Seneca is often quoted as saying, “There never has been great talent without a touch of madness.” Even nineteenth-century essayist Charles Lamb noted the too-close-for-comfort connection in The Sanity of True Genius: “So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity; the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found in the sanest writers.”May 27 2024 2:52AM
- In 1897, Emile Durkheim’s classic Suicide: A Study in Sociology was published. This French sociologist claimed that every suicide could be classified into four types: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic. He found that single people were more likely to kill themselves than married folks. Protestants were more likely to die from a self-killing than Catholics. And urbanites were at a higher risk than ruralists.May 27 2024 2:54AM
- Freudian analyst Karl Menninger said that there are three components to suicide: the wish to kill, the wish to be killed, and the wish to die.May 27 2024 2:54AM
- Dr. Shneidman says that a suicide will happen when three factors collide. First, a person reaches his psychological threshold for pain—which results in his inability to envision any escape other than death. Next is easy access to life-ending tools—say, a gun, a knife, pills. Lastly, the person enters into “perturbation,” an agitated state where he feels his discomfort and anxiety are intolerable. If these conditions coincide, a suicide attempt is inevitable. To reduce the threat, at least one of the three conditions needs to be reduced.May 27 2024 2:55AM
- While men are quick to reach for a gun, women gravitate toward overdosing or cutting themselves. Half of all people who commit suicide see a physician within a month of their fatal act. Parents, obese men, and pregnant women are less likely to commit suicide than anyone else. Divorced men commit suicide 400 percent more than women. And if you’re a sixty-five-year-old male or older, in poor health, divorced, or have lost a loved one, and are living in a metropolitan area, you’re part of the highest suicide group.May 27 2024 2:56AM
- Lastly, there’s location and method, which are as specific and personal as the act itself. For the impulsive, this could mean a bridge. For the control freak, perhaps it’s his home, surrounded by the comfort of prized possessions. Others select the quiet solitude of a hotel, where their act can take place uninterrupted and unnoticed, no mess for a family or friends to clean up. For some, such as actress Peg Entwistle, who jumped off the Hollywoodland sign, the method of suicide is symbolic, adding defiant significance to their act: the use of a father’s gun, the swallowing of a mother’s pills, the killing of a lover while on vacation and the subsequent shooting of one’s self. Some leave notes; others surround themselves with press clippings, photos, and fan mail. And some just disappear, leaving their death more of a mystery while removing the negative stigma suicide can bring; without proof, anything is possible. Without hard evidence, nothing is written in stone.May 27 2024 2:57AM
- Though suicide ends a life, it ironically keeps that person’s life story alive. Regardless of method or location, planned or impulsive, the suicide’s inner torment and utter anguish haunts our culture for decades.May 27 2024 2:57AM
- COPYCAT: Studies have found that when the suicide of a celebrity or political figure happens, a copycat effect is 14.3 times more likely to occur. Highly publicized stories increase the U.S. national suicide rate by 2.51 percent during that month of media coverage.May 27 2024 2:58AM
Chapter 2
- Monday is the most common day to kill yourself, whereas Saturday is the least popular. The idea that most suicides take place over Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve is a myth. Most suicides happen during the springtime. The thinking is this: people expect the winter months to be more depressing; so when cheerful summer appears, and things have not gotten better, they feel a greater sense of despair, and thus take their own lives.May 29 2024 7:39AM
Chapter 3
- In 2001, James Pennebaker, a University of Texas psychology professor, and Shannon Wiltsey Stirman, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a study of poets who’d killed themselves, and whether their writing foreshadowed their demise. The study looked at the work of John Berryman, Hart Crane, Sergei Esenin, Adam L. Gordon, Randall Jarrell, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sylvia Plath, Sarah Teasdale, and Anne Sexton. The researchers found that poets who committed suicide used many more first-person singular references (such as I, me, and my) and fewer first-person plural words (we, us, and our) than did non-suicidal poets.May 29 2024 7:42AM