My mother used to threaten suicide quite often. She would leave the house late at night in deep depression and anger and come back about time to get dressed fro work in the morning and tell me how she was thinking of killing herself the night before and why she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
I guess that went on for about five years, while I was in college, living at home. She had a lot of problems. Someone convinced her to see a psychiatrist and she said that the sessions made her so upset that she couldn’t drive, so she asked my sister to drive her. As my sister was sitting in the car, waiting for my mother, she came running out of the doctor’s office in Chestnut Hill, saying that the doctor told her that he knew what was wrong with her and that all she needed was a good man and he was ready any time she was.
You what? I think that cured her. She got mad enough to say that she didn’t need anyone, she could make it on her own. She lived to be ninety three.
That last sentence was supposed to be, You know what? I think that cured her.
It’s not as though she didn’t have good reason to be messed up. She had more things happen to her than any one person should, starting with being molested by her own grandfather at the age of 13. At sixteen her parents had to call the police because the guy across the street was lying in wait with a rifle to shoot anyone she went out with. Then my dad had a heart attack and died when I was in high school and a lesbian from our church started putting the moves on her and her boss exposed himself to her. She got a new job as a bank teller and got robbed, the guy put a gun to her head and told her fill the bags and locked the rest of the people in the vault. There were probably other stories as well, but it seemed like her life was one crisis after another.