At the risk of nauseating Rob Long, I offer a few words on suicide, about which I have learned more than I would have cared to.

I’ve seen many sorrows in more than 30 years as a cop, but the images that haunt me most are the suicides.  My first, when I was just weeks out of the police academy, happened on the beach.  A woman called the police to report her husband missing, and it was my partner and I who were assigned the call.  The woman greeted us at the door of a beautiful home near the beach, showing us inside to take in the trappings of what was – or had been – a prosperous life.  There had been financial setbacks, she told us, and she was worried that her husband would not be able to cope with the sudden change in the family’s fortunes.  They kept a gun in the house, and when her husband did not come home as expected she feared the worst.  When she found that the gun was not in its customary place, she called the police.

It was wintertime, or what passes for wintertime in Los Angeles: gray skies, a bit of drizzle, and a biting wind coming off the ocean.  My partner and I began to trudge across the sand of what appeared to be a deserted beach.  But there was someone out there, down near the water.  From a distance, he looked to be sleeping.  Or perhaps he was just gazing up at the passing clouds.  But as we got closer we could see the gun near his hand, and then the blood in the sand, and then the wound in the side of his head.

He had no pulse and he was cold to the touch, but we still had to call paramedics to make the official determination that he was dead.  And as we waited for them, we realized we would have to violate a standard crime scene protocol.  Detectives are always reminding patrol cops not to disturb anything, to guard the scene until photographs can be taken and evidence collected.  But the tide was coming in; if we didn’t move the body and the gun, they would soon be under the waves.  So we dragged the body to a place just beyond the high-tide line and put the gun in the sand next to it, trying to approximate the position it had been in.  Yes, the scene was ruined, but the alternative would have been worse.  I had never touched a dead body before.

The paramedics came and went, leaving the body covered with a white sheet.  I was grateful not to see his face anymore.  When more cops and a sergeant arrived, it fell to my partner and me to deliver the news to the man’s wife.  She had seen the paramedics arrive in a hurry and leave slowly, so of course she knew what the news would be.  “I have to tell the kids,” she said.  “How do I do that?”

I was 25 at the time, and I don’t have a more satisfactory answer to that question today than I did then.  We arranged for a friend of hers to come over, and when she arrived, followed by the detectives, my partner and I walked back out to the beach to relieve the cops watching over the body.  It was our radio call; if anyone was going to stand out in the cold and wind waiting for the coroner, it was going to be us.

So there we were, my partner, me, and a dead guy.  A more seasoned cop might have been able to make small talk with his partner under the circumstances, but I was anything but seasoned.  I just stood there in silence looking out at the ocean.  How could it be, I wondered, that a man with what appeared to be so much to live for – a pretty wife, loving kids, a beautiful home near the beach – how could it be that the best option he could think of was to go down to the water’s edge and shoot himself in the head?

It was a starkly beautiful day, with the clouds and the whitecaps and the seagulls and all.  Surely, he had been out on this beach many times and, surely, there was a time when he could appreciate the beauty and be glad to be alive.  But not today.

I thought of that man when I learned of Robin Williams’s death.  Like the man on the beach, Williams had – or seemed to have – so much to live for.  And yet he came to that dark place where he thought both he and the world would be better off if he was dead.  Most of us can’t imagine it.  And if we can, we keep it to ourselves.

My brother took his own life some years ago.  Beset by financial and health problems, he came to that same dark place.  I delivered the eulogy at his funeral, a challenge in the writing and a bigger one in the delivery.  Before the service began, I had to invite the people attending – and there were lots and lots of them – I had to ask them to move closer to the front of the church.  My family was seated in the front pew, and everyone else had taken seats as close to the back as they could, as though they were afraid to get too close to us.  It left an awkward, empty space between our family and everyone else.  “Come on up closer,” I said, “we need you to be near us right now.” 

Before he killed himself, I had no idea how desperate my brother’s situation had become.  No one else did, either.  My brother had many, many friends.  There wasn’t a person in the church that day who wouldn’t have helped him if he had but asked.  But he never did.  He just kept walking toward that dark place, alone.

He had withdrawn from the rest of the family, never returning phone calls or appearing at family gatherings.  When my wife and I went through his belongings after he died, we found the invitation to our wedding unopened on his dresser.  It haunts us still.

In my eulogy, I told my brother’s friends that there may be someone else in their lives who is nearing that same dark place, perhaps even someone sitting here with us.  Don’t ignore it, I implored them.  Don’t wait for that awful phone call and wish you had done more.  It’s been a long time, but I still bear the guilt that I didn’t make more of an effort to reach out to my brother.  I suppose I’ll never get over it completely.  I’m not sure I should want to. 

As Rob said in his post, we’ll be hearing a lot about depression and suicide in the days to come.  My wish for everyone here on Ricochet is that the closest you ever come to suicide is seeing it on television.  If there’s any comfort to be found in the news of someone’s suicide, it’s in the knowing that his suffering is at an end.

But for those left behind, it has only begun.

Image Credit: Flickr user Mike Murry.