Saying Goodbye. Finally.

There has been a lot in the news the last two days about celebrity suicides. I don't usually share those stories on my social media. We can't really know the inside story and the subject is so painful for many families that are left behind after the loss of someone they loved to suicide.

Taking your own life runs in my family. Like bipolar disorder runs in my family. Sometimes difficult and painful. Sometimes hysterical. And never boring.

The young woman in the photograph is my paternal grandmother. I was born when she was 40. She was my primary maternal unit. When I was born she took took advantage of my mother's eye surgery for detached retinas to whisk me off in my bassinet to her flat on Noe St. This incident began my childhood of being bounced back and forth between my grandparents and my parents. I could have gotten a lot of air miles out it if they had had such a thing back then.

My grandmother was an odd woman, but when that's all you know then that's your normal. I'm older now than she was when she died. I'm very likely a lot more experienced in the world than she was and more educated. And as I look back, my adult self could see the unhealthiness there. But not my teenage self.

When I was 17 I went to visit my mother in another state after a separation of 8 years. I was gone for a couple months. While I was away my grandmother shot herself using a gun she had taken away from my father when he had threatened suicide years before. She was 56. I was devastated when I learned of how she died. And I felt responsible for it because I had left her. I carried that guilt around for decades.

It wasn't until after my grandfather had died that I learned more of the story. He had remarried and his beloved 3rd wife (she was a real healer) was the holder of all his stories. It turns out that my grandfather had signed her into the hospital because she so depressed and acting out. My grandmother had called him and begged him to take her home. And he relented. And he carried that guilt for decades.

We don't always know the whole story. Even the stories in our own family. Even the stories in our own house. We can't be inside someone's head. We can't understand the suffering of another person. Not really completely. We can only do our best.

So I think trying to figure out why a family we don't even know, didn't do something to help their family member, who we also didn't know, doesn't make very much sense. I hope we can just feel compassion. And be available to the people we love when they are in distress.

And do our best.

If there is an upside to my grandmother's illness it's that after she died and my grandfather began packing to move, he found thousands of dollars squirreled away inside the dozens of Reader's Digests on the bookshelf. I wish I could save money like that.