All Over

My mother killed herself on a Friday evening, March 9, 1969, just as the sun was going down. Earlier that day, she and my brother drove north up the California coast to Santa Barbara and back. The two of them had a late lunch at one of her favorite greasy-spoons, then returned home.

I got home from school before them and was puttering around the house barefoot and completely lost in thought about a college boy, a friend of my brother's, who was turning 21 the next night. Smart, funny and eager to amount to something, John cut dashing figure in his yellow Porsche-356 convertible. He was a welcome change from the surfers, football players, and small-town heroes at my public high school. Thrown together as a result of our mothers’ friendship, we’d grown closer through our mutual passion for sailing small boats. By that Friday afternoon, I had developed a full-blown, high-school-girl crush on him, which I pursued single-mindedly.

When my mother walked in the backdoor and through the utility porch to the kitchen, where I stood beside the water-cooler, glass in hand, she paused to kiss me on the cheek. I brushed aside her kiss, impatient with the show of affection. I didn't know, you see. Couldn’t know. That it would be the last time I would see her alive.

How many times I’ve replayed that scene in my mind. She knew that she was kissing me goodbye. She was a suicide survivor herself, my grandfather shot himself with a hunting rifle in my grandmother’s kitchen just weeks after my mother married my father. Why did she do that to me, leave me with such a haunting final encounter?

I don’t remember how she reacted to my brush-off, so lost was I in daydreams. The last thing she said to me was, "I'm going to go take a shower, then lay down for a nap."

"Okay…." I said, then went back to thoughts of John.

"Hey, I’ll help you wash the car…whaddya say?" my brother snagged my attention. His love affair with cars was already several years old, and and could spend hours washing and detailing them. I was a lot less enthusiastic, but the prospect of water, a hose, sponges, and bubbles…it would kill some time.

So that’s how we came to be alongside the house washing the family VW Bug when my mother shot herself in her bedroom just yards away. We were drying the curvy, white fenders and shiny hood with ragged towels as the sun dropped below the horizon, when I thought I heard something. Having no idea what was happening, however, I ignored the sound and promptly forgot about it.

We finished and went back into the house. My brother flopped down on the couch and flipped on the TV while I went toward my bedroom to change clothes. At the last second, however, I veered off in the hallway and headed for the closed door of my mother’s and father’s bedroom. "I’ll just check in on her," I thought and cracked open the door.

I glanced in. So much did I expect to see her sleeping that I was in the act of closing the door again to proceed to my own room, when the thought intruded. "People don't sleep like that."

I opened the door again and stepped into the room. My mother was sprawled on the bed, her head toward the door, surrounded and partially obscured by throw pillows. The orientation, the unusual contortion of her body and the fact she was stark naked momentarily froze me. I knew something was wrong but shock was setting in, making me slow on the uptake. True to my emergency plan, though, I was determined to take charge and fix whatever was wrong.

So I stepped back into the hall, yelling to my brother in the living-room, "Something’s happened to mom!" and grabbing the phone. I dialed "O" for operator—this was before the advent of 911—and told the women who answered that we had an emergency and needed an ambulance. "I’m not sure what happened, but my mom’s hurt," I said, and gave her our address. She didn’t keep me on the line.

While I was on the phone, my brother peeked from the doorway into the room, then returned to the living-room where he collapsed in uncontrolled weeping. After I hung up, I re-entered my parents’ bedroom, determined to do whatever was necessary to keep my mother alive until the ambulance arrived.

No panic, not this time! Although my actions were pointless, there was nothing I could do to save my mother. She’d made certain of that, putting the barrel of my father’s .357 magnum into her mouth and pulling the trigger.

Unaware of the futility of my efforts, however, I moved several throw pillows away from her face and that’s when I saw that she had used them to muffle a gunshot. They were soaked with blood and the revolver lay near her hand. I realized there was nothing I could do, but I didn’t—couldn’t—admit to myself that she was dead.

I left the bedroom and began pacing—the hall, the living-room, the kitchen. I couldn’t sit down, couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t cry. It seemed like forever until I heard sirens, although it was probably only minutes. As they approached, our German-shepherd, "Soldier," loose in the backyard, began howling, creating an eerie duet of sirens and cries that sent chills up my spine.

The police arrived first, followed by the ambulance, then more police. Drawn by the commotion, a crowd began gathering in a semicircle in front of our house. I stood in the darkened dining-room, peering through the slit in the curtains and felt shame, then loathing toward the strangers and their morbid curiosity.

I turned from the window as a young EMT emerged from my mother’s bedroom and strode toward us down the hall. I remember his approach as if it happened in slow motion. I was thinking, "The professionals are here now. Miracle-workers. They’ll save her." I still hadn’t let in the horror of what I’d seen in the bedroom.

When someone is shot, especially with a weapon like the one my mother used, the bullet makes a relatively small entry wound and a very large exit wound. The result is quite different than what Westerns and war movies of the 1950’s and 60’s typically showed. In those, people drop dead from gunshots with no wounds at all. No trauma, no blood, no guts spattered all over the wall.

Whereas my mother had, in effect, blown the back of her head off, splashing bits of bone, brain and blood all over the pillows, the bed, the bedclothes. The bullet had lodged in the ceiling, making a hole that would remain for weeks until it was finally repaired. Weeks, during which I slept steps away, down the hall, sometimes alone in the dark because my father had already started dating and spending nights away.

The EMT strode his slow-motion way down the hall and stopped at the edge of the living room. He shook his head, his expression bleak. "It’s all over," he said.

I’ll never forget those words. All over. My brother’s weeping crescendoed. I stared at the EMT, feeling like I was floating inches off the floor, strangely disembodied. I felt cold—deadly cold—but no other emotions at all, beyond anger at the curious bystanders outside, and shame at the awful, ugly spectacle I was caught up in.

Later that night, I would also feel disappointment: I won’t get to go to John’s birthday party. Then remorse at my selfishness.

But in the living room, facing the EMT, I cut off all feelings and focused on my father. He was going to come home from work and find all this drama! The ambulance, the police, flashing lights and the crowd. "We’ve got to let my dad know," I said to the half-dozen police officers crowding the inside of my house.

Ever since he’d arrived, the sergeant in charge of the scene had been trying to calm me down. "Please," he’d say. "Why don’t you just sit down? For a minute?" His eyes beneath his cap were filled with concern.

But I couldn’t sit down. Sitting down might lead to crying, like my brother’s, which would signal acceptance on some level that all this was actually happening. That it was, indeed, all over.

I couldn’t admit that, yet.