Earlier this month, I had a garage sale and got to meet some of the elderly neighbors from down the street, people who have lived here for a thousand years and can tell you the history of every house and every family that lived in it. One of the gentlemen I met, a retired widower who spends all his time fixing up old cars, told me all about its prior owners, first a local judge, then a couple of professors that fought famously bitterly every night, and then the family that lived here before us: a married couple and their two children. The other gentleman, a retired pharmacy professor who is hard of hearing and is fighting cancer, came later, and unceremoniously told me some news that I have been trying to avoid since we moved in.
I can not reveal too many details because I don’t know who reads this blog, and any local who does a little research is easily able to identify who I’m talking about. The short version is that the wife killed herself in the house after a long battle with severe, debilitating depression. It was a terribly traumatic event for the family, as can be expected, but it was especially so for the children who witnessed their mother’s final act.
But the gentleman that told me was so matter-of-fact and macabre about it, and gave so much grisly detail that I, cringing, tried to focus on the strangers picking through my unwanted things until he got bored and went back home.
I knew about it before we moved in. My mother tried to talk me out of this house, worried that it was bad luck. I told her that was a load of crap — I had loved this house so much from afar that when it went up on the market it was practically serendipitous. Over the years, people who knew the family tried to tell me what had happened, but I stopped them. I didn’t want to know. I met the former owner once, when I found his wedding photo album pressed against a wall in a rarely used closet, and called him to retrieve it.
But occasionally, I wondered why there were so many renovations done to the house at once. One bathroom was redone very hastily while another was built anew — quickly enough that a bedroom window was walled off into the interior of the house. Was that paint on the floor in the basement? Dark things. Darker things. Sometimes I wondered whether my mother’s superstitions were well founded.
And then there was my neighbor in the driveway revealing the secret with so little reverence: it was Mrs. Peacock, in the Kitchen, with the Gun. How long it took them to “clean up the mess,” and “the children were there,” and “planned it ahead of time so they’d find her,” and “such a nice lady, she spoke a little Italian and sometimes she’d come over and practice with me.” Had our surroundings been any less absurd, I’d have wanted to drop to my knees and cry.
I’m familiar enough with the legacy of suicide, how it is preceded by it’s victims, their suffering, crescendoed with the losses of the living. (Shortly after I wrote that post, we lost three more friends and family members to suicide.) I won’t lie and say that, in my battle with depression as a teenager, I didn’t try it. It runs in the family, in my husband’s family — the way I say it, it sounds contagious. In my experience, depression sometimes is. You don’t catch it from a house though.
Sometimes we get their mail. Today we got a newsletter addressed to the previous owner as a reminder that September 6th is the beginning of National Suicide Prevention Week. I thought I might remind you too.
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