When I was 18, my oldest brother (22) committed suicide. Three weeks after his body was found, his wife (22) committed suicide. They both were brilliant college seniors. This was in 1966, and the military draft for VietNam was heating up. My brother had appealed to our parents for financial help so he could continue his education. His wife had done the same with her parents. Both of them were refused help for ideological reasons, not financial ones.

I loved them both. They were brilliant, kind, funny, helpful people, and very much in love. They knew what they wanted to do with their lives (teach) and both had been working hard towards their goals.

The message I got from their deaths was that if parents would not support such worthy kids, I was surely fucked because I had been a very troubled teen and I was already working for wages and paying room and board at home, while saving as much as I could so I could find my own place to live.

Yes, I’m still alive and bitching, but unlike my brother and his wife who had huge potential, I’ve contributed little to ‘justify my existence’, a phrase my mother was fond of using.

The losses and bitterness remain painful. I sometimes wonder how my sister-in-law’s younger sister dealt with all this pain. She was my age, and she and I were in our siblings’ wedding. 

Understandably, she and her family never had anything to do with my family after the deaths and funerals, as they surely blamed my brother, and by extension, his family of origin.

Coda: My brother was the reason our parents got married. Before my father died, he told one of my younger brothers that he could have helped his son, and didn’t, because it wasn’t what my mother thought was ‘best’. My father (49) committed suicide four years after his first-born son’s death.

He had a bum heart that couldn’t be fixed back then, and my mother was screwing around on him.

My older sister had a decent family and work life, and 3 very smart kids. My 3 younger brothers were devastated, and two of them also killed themselves, one at age 22 (he had idolized our oldest brother), and one at age 49, just like our dad.

Most people don’t believe our family stories, so we gradually stopped talking or writing about it all, except with therapists or counselors or doctors. People don’t believe that THEY could survive such losses.

So, now and then, I offer myself as a living witness. Maybe it’ll help someone.

-Maryjesse Johnston