Secret Sorrow series: a narrative about suicide's impact

Published in The Post-Star (A1)
5/24/06
Editor's Note: This is the fourth in a six-part series. All are online at www.poststar.com/arts_life/suicide

When Karen Padowicz's uncle called her on a December day almost 25 years ago and said her parents were coming to visit, she guessed why.

"Roger's dead, isn't he?" she asked.

Her older brother, 37-year-old Roger Maune, had hanged himself.

It was an act that would shape the rest of Karen's life and career. She now works for the Warren-Washington Association for Mental Health, developing programs on mental health and suicide prevention.

But speaking out about her brother's suicide didn't come easily.

Her parents arrived at Karen's apartment in Schenectady that night, nodded tearfully, and quickly shuttered their pain behind silence.

"No one wants to talk about suicide. That night was like any other night," Karen remembered.
"My mother read a magazine. My father read the paper. My sister cooked. I said, 'Don't you think we need to talk about this?' "

Special bond

Karen had visited her brother about two weeks earlier at their parents' apartment in Florida.

"Roger and I had a very unique relationship, like we were spiritual buddies or something," she said.

She remembered the "trust game" they played as kids, which involved falling or jumping into her brother's arms without looking.

"One day, I jumped out of my second-story bedroom window and he caught me," she said. "I trusted him with my life."

Maybe that's why she woke up about 4 a.m. that night in Florida to discover her brother silently climbing over the balcony.

"I jumped up and said in this kind of theatrical voice, 'Roger, you can't kill yourself on your parents' balcony! What will the neighbors think?' " Karen remembered. "That was the right thing to say. It brought him back."

For the next two hours, Roger was lucid. Their conversation flowed as it had in the old days, and Karen thought everything was going to be OK.

"Then it was like a switch turned on inside. He went from coherent to -- just this other place -- so quickly. And I sort of snapped, too, because it destroyed my optimism," she said.

They fought, and Roger left the room. As he walked out the door, he turned to Karen and said: "Just remember, go toward the light."

That was the last time she saw him.

A sensitive soul

Roger was one of those people who seem to be born burning at both ends.

"He and his friends were the kind of people I always wanted to be -- curious, interesting, passionate people. They were people who really lived," said Karen.

In the late '60s, Roger was a striking young man. He was about 6 feet tall, with a Roman nose, big blue eyes and a reddish-blond beard.

"He was such a pretty boy," said his younger sister, Lorraine Dejohn. "Damn it, he had the longest eyelashes, and that wavy hair -- oh my gosh!"

In Karen's childish imagination, he resembled a young Einstein, and she considered Roger just as brilliant.

"I called him the dictionary. Any questions I had, he just knew the answers to," she remembered.

He was the artistic, "Beatnik" type who wrote poetry and listened to jazz. He sang beautifully, played several instruments, and loved to act.

His intensely sensitive nature proved both a gift and a burden.

"Once, he told me: 'Carrie, Carrie, do you know trees cry when you cut them?' I would crumble if I felt the things he felt," Karen reflected. "I mean, how do you live with that depth of feeling?"

He didn't know.

A black aura

Fissures in Roger's mental health began showing up in his mid-20s, leading to a psychotic breakdown that landed him in the hospital.

For the next decade, he became increasingly convinced he was evil.

"He was so totally sure that he had a 'black aura' that was harming people," Lorraine said. "He didn't want anyone near him."

At the height of his paranoia, he would only talk to Karen from around the corners of rooms, fearing that his inner darkness was contagious.

Soon, he moved away to Syracuse. He and Karen communicated through letters, but for a long time, she didn't understand the depth of his problems.

"All I saw was this beautiful human being," she said.

His parents and siblings tried to help him, but they rarely shared their struggles with each other. Stoic self-reliance was considered the best way to handle problems in the Maune family.

Years later, Karen discovered that her family had a history of mental illness on both sides: a great-aunt and grandmother who went in and out of institutions after "nervous breakdowns"; a great-uncle who hanged himself; a cousin with bipolar disorder; another cousin whose teenage child committed suicide. She also found out that when her parents had picked Roger up at the hospital after his first breakdown, psychiatrists had warned them he was at risk of committing suicide.

"If I had known that then, it would have shaped the decisions I made after, no doubt about it," said Karen.

The burden of care

Medication couldn't shake the voices of condemnation from Roger's brain, but it did shake his body. The side effects of several psychotropic medications left him with a debilitating Parkinsonian syndrome that sent him to the hospital again in the late '70s.

Karen moved to Syracuse to care for him when he got out of the hospital, and discovered that he had been sleeping in his car in front of his apartment.

"When I got there, I realized the extent of his illness," she said.

Not long after that, he decided to stop taking his medication.

Eventually, Karen's emotional resources were so exhausted by caring for Roger that her physical health was in jeopardy. She turned to her sister for help.

Lorraine, divorced and living alone at that point, took Roger into her home. She talked to him over coffee and cigarettes at the kitchen table, night after night. She would have hugged him, but he wouldn't let her come close.

A cloud of despair had enveloped him, and it was impossible to penetrate with words.

"I talked to my brother until I was blue in the face, but I just couldn't help him," Lorraine said. "Now, he didn't say he was going to kill himself. He didn't go out looking for someone with a gun to kill him. But he kept talking about this black aura, and I couldn't get him to go to a doctor or sign up for unemployment. ... He didn't seem to feel he was worth the effort."

After 10 months, Lorraine couldn't take it anymore.

"He was driving me crazy -- and I'm not crazy," she said.

In October, she sent him to live with their parents, who had just moved to Florida.

Silence

Roger's illness often drove him to wander, so when he disappeared in early December, no one looked for him. His body was found in a grove of trees by firemen responding to a brush fire near his parents' house. No one knows exactly how long he had been there.

His body was cremated immediately, but it wasn't until almost a year later that his ashes were scattered on the land of a close friend. There was no funeral; no grave to visit.

"When you don't have that, it haunts you," Karen said. "There's no sense of closure."

She held out a small red jewelry box, lined with a yellowing square of cotton.

"This is all I have left of my brother," she said, pointing at a few pebble-sized white fragments she snatched from the scattered ashes. She is creating a memorial stone in her backyard, to honor Roger and their father, who died of cancer three years ago.

"My mother and father both had cancer twice, and I honestly believe it's because they held that grief inside," Karen said. "You know that Simon and Garfunkel song, 'Silence like a cancer grows?' It's really true."

Her mother is still alive, but refused to be interviewed.

"For my mother, the chapter is closed. It hurts too much," explained Lorraine. "She did say that losing a child should never happen to a parent."

For both Lorraine and Karen, talking about their brother's death has been a form of healing.

"I think this is important, so people can see how suicide affects not only the person who has taken their own life, but how it affects the whole family," said Lorraine. "I'm not stigmatized by it. My friends know that Roger committed suicide. It was horrible, terrible -- and I think it was preventable, but I didn't know what to do about it. I hope this helps other people."

Feeling the pull

Roger's death sent Karen into a tailspin that she believes was her own attempt at suicide. She spent the next four months in "the most destitute bars possible," drinking heavily and often driving afterward.

"I just did not care," she said. "My behaviors at the time were death-driven and death-seeking."

As she lay on her couch in a stupor one Sunday, she began to lose feeling in her limbs. She was overwhelmed with a sense that she was dying.

Then a thought came to her: "I think you're going into a diabetic coma. Eat some oranges."

She did, and as her body revived, so did her mental clarity.

"You could say that Roger reached out to me," she said. "I realized that he would never want this to happen."

She said family members left behind by suicide often feel pulled toward self-destruction.

"When someone chooses death, it's so contrary to the survival instinct that you think there must be something inside them that's broken," she said. "I began to see it as an inevitability that I would break, too -- so I almost sought it out."

In the years that followed, she tried to bury her grief by becoming a workaholic, and has only recently begun to confront her emotions about Roger's suicide.

"I remember thinking: Karen, if you focus on this, you may go totally insane," she said. "Working kept my mind on other things."

Karen ended up at Warren Washington Association for Mental Health about eight years ago.
She calls the mental health field "my professional swan song," the natural endpoint of the painful journey that Roger's death prompted in her personal life. Her goal is to reduce the public stigma surrounding mental health disorders, and get a message across to those struggling with them.

"People need to seek treatment," she said. "We know more now, and treatment can be highly successful. You don't need to suffer the way people suffered in the past. There's help."

She also offers a warning to those grappling with the grief of a loved one's suicide.

"A lot of people seem to think that if you just ignore or deny something painful, it will go away -- but it doesn't," she said. "It becomes like a lead ball inside of you that grows thicker with each passing year, and makes it harder to access your core emotions. I still can't cry."

She finds release in words, if not tears.

"I love being able to talk about my brother -- to honor him; feel him again," she said. "I haven't been able to do that before."

Roger is gone, but Karen feels that he left her with a gift.

"He left me with this knowledge that people can get to a point where it becomes black and white: Do you want to die or live?" she said.

"And once you realize that you want to live, it's a very powerful feeling."
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SIDEBAR: Mental health and suicide

There is no universal cause for suicide -- each death represents a complicated individual choice.

But according to health professionals, most suicides are triggered at least in part by untreated mental illness.

"I would say that in a very large majority of cases, there is a diagnosable condition present, but it's a minority of people that are actually in treatment," said Dr. Paul Benveniste, operations manager of Behavioral Health Services at Glens Falls Hospital.

The National Mental Health Association estimates as much as 30 percent of the U.S. population has a mental health disorder, a substance abuse disorder, or both.

Depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety or panic disorder and schizophrenia are the most prevalent mental illnesses.

The association also notes that, although treatment success rates are as high as 80 percent for some of these conditions, millions of Americans with mental health disorders do not receive adequate treatment.

"I think we have a culture and a drug industry that actively promote partial treatments and quick fixes," Benveniste said. "The implication is that in one little pill, you can solve all your woes ... but in most cases, you can't help a person deal with their mental health symptoms without addressing how they think, feel and act."

In cases of depression, for example, medication is often much more effective when combined with psychotherapy, he said. But many insurers cover only a limited number of counseling visits per year, if they provide any mental health coverage at all.

"Mental health is viewed by insurers as a barely necessarily evil ... something that can be squeezed," he said. "But I would say that, in the long term, there are greater costs associated with not treating mental health than treating it."

Rob York, director of the Office of Community Services, which oversees mental health services in Warren and Washington counties, said stigma is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to mental health treatment and suicide prevention.

People are reluctant to seek treatment for depression because there's a public perception that it's "all in their head," he said, but that's false.

"Depression is a real, biologically based illness. Brain studies have shown that changes in the brain occur that medication can correct," York said. "It's not something you can 'just get over,' as some people believe."