The Johnsons' last embrace

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
- Plato

I thought the same thing, Jaybird. The engineer will have to live with that forever.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. -- Plato

I thought that was attributed to Philo of Alexandria. That line, which is great, sure seems apocryphal. I bet Maya Angelou first wrote it. ;-)

You're right about that, Elizabeth Anne. It was a merciless, vicious, hateful thing to have done. I think that tormented woman knew exactly what she was doing with that, too. There's a Randy Newman song titled, "I Want You to Hurt Like I Do." Precisely.

I knew a man, in his 50's when I met him, whose parents had committed joint suicide when he was 25 years old. Obviously I never met his parents, and all I knew about the story was what he told me, which wasn't much. I didn't get the idea that they blamed him for this as this mother did.

Nevertheless, my friend was profoundly messed up, whether by this experience or by other factors I don't know, but this certainly didn't help. By heroic effort he became a very successful attorney and managed to marry and have a family himself, but I certainly cannot say that he was a happy person - very much the contrary. He himself attributed a lot of his unhappiness to this double suicide.

If you feel impelled to destroy yourself, by whatever means, it is important, I think, to minimize if possible the damage to other people. (The train engineer, as some above have pointed out, is a human being too, whose feelings deserve consideration, to say nothing of the son.) Someone who uses suicide as a weapon deserves only scorn and anger, not sympathy.

Kozaburo is exactly right. There's a lot to this story that hasn't come forward and I think whatever it is it's going to be ugly. I feel so sorry for the poor son who has to live with those vindictive text messages. What kind of mother could possibly leave their child with that sort of emotional baggage? Any kind of happiness the young man might have found in that romantic relationship is always going to be tainted. Who wants to be the wife that caused your M-I-L to kill herself?

One can't blame it on mental illness because it was the decision of *two* people.

Psychiatrists have used the expression folie à deux to refer to a situation in which two people act on the basis of a shared paranoid or delusional belief. (For example, some people have diagnosed the behavior of the two young men who were responsible for the Columbine school shootings as a folie à deux.) Of course, I don't know anything about this particular situation.

I thought that was attributed to Philo of Alexandria. That line, which is great, sure seems apocryphal. I bet Maya Angelou first wrote it. ;-)

All the really good quotes have multiple attributions, it seems.

Who wants to be the wife that caused your M-I-L to kill herself?

Sure would make for awkward Thanksgiving Dinner conversation...

This is certainly a short story at least.

But that's pretty cold, isn't it. These were real people, not characters. There is and will be real suffering here.

Art needs more distance from this kind of thing that I can muster right now.

I don't see it as art at all. It doesn't make sense that both parents would kill themselves over their grown son's choice of a wife.

Sounds like more of a cover story to me. Something that's hiding a deep corruption, scandal, etc., for which they felt there was no way out.

I pretty much gave up the "You'll be sorry when I'm dead," kind of thinking by the fourth grade. What an ugly thing to do to one's son.

I get where Rod is coming from re: the imagery of the whole thing - but that seems a bit like mythologizing it - the real story here is a mother - who disapproves of her son's choices - sends him a text message that 1) puts the blame on him for what she and her husband choose to do and 2) tells him not to come to the funeral as her final act of spitefullness. One ugly story. Then add that they chose to use another human being (the train engineer) as the unwilling instrument of their death - real noble. I went to Victoria Falls many years ago - turns out it is a popular spot for westerners to kill themselves. Someone had done such the day before and all the tour groups were abuzz with the story and their response was all sympathy for the person who had jumped from the falls. The African tour guides though - saw it as an act of selfishness and their sympathy was for the person's family. I saw that as an example of the culture of modernism that gets discussed so often here - our sympathy goes right to the individual without thought of the community of people who are affected by the act of that individual - the Africans - thought of the community.

Some years ago Fred Meeks had an article in the Baptist Standard about suicide. It's worth reading the whole thing, but this paragraph is perhaps the most relevant:

One of the issues before us today is the belief of some that ending one's life is an acceptable way to demonstrate a genuine commitment to Christ. Suicide is thus seen to be giving one's life to Christ so that he/she can be with him in heaven. In response to such thinking, we need to point to the clear teaching of the Bible that the true "sacrifice" required of Christians is to give one's life in living for Christ (Romans 12:1-2). The Apostle Paul himself demonstrated this in his own personal "struggle" described in Philippians 1:21-26. Subject to depression himself due to imprisonment, criticism and other types of persecution, Paul admitted his personal desire was to die and be with the Lord. However, he stated that what was more necessary was that he should go on living so he could minister to others. In Philippians, he encourages Christians to look beyond themselves and transform selfishness into the desire to serve others.
http://www.baptiststandard.com/2002/4_15/pages/comment_meeks.html

I can see Rod's point -- there is a certain sad Flannery O'Connor-like feel to this, but I'm completely horrified by the post-death trauma these people willed upon those who survived them.

My heart goes out to their kids and prospective daughter-in-law. While I am usually sympathetic toward someone so beleaguered by life that suicide seems a valid option, this is one case where I find it difficult having any sympathy for the dead.

Re: Suicide is selfish as it is, but why involve people who have nothing to do with your issues, like the driver of the train?

Indeed. Not two months ago someone decided to commit-suicide-by-train on the track next to my step-sister's house. She's still isn't mourning for her mother's death, and came home to find her yard closed off with yellow police tape, and a small army of people picking through her yard for body fragments.

Re: What kind of mother could possibly leave their child with that sort of emotional baggage?

My older brother killed himself when I was 18. He left a vicious complaint behind the details of which I would prefer not to go into even at this lengthy remove from the event. Basically he blamed all of us, including our long-dead mother, for the fact that he had screwed up his life with drugs and supidity. I don't think my father, who had survived the deaths of three wives and an infant daughter, ever really did get past that. Wounds like these don't ever really heal. Eventually you just learn to stop prodding at the scar tissue and move on.
By the way, aren't Christians still supposed to believe that suicide is a serious sin? To me it seems that the act is a giant flip of the middle finger to God as well-- take this life and shove it, is what it says.

By the way, aren't Christians still supposed to believe that suicide is a serious sin? To me it seems that the act is a giant flip of the middle finger to God as well-- take this life and shove it, is what it says.

That is a correct statement of the traditional doctrine as I understand it. So far as I know, this view is still the view of most if not all Christian authorities.

However, within the last generation or so, with our expanding awareness of the prevalence of mental illness and brain injury (though unfortunately there's still very little we can do about either one) has come an increasing sensitivity to the notion that a suicide might not have been in his or her right mind at the time. It is also very traditional Christian morality that to commit a serious sin you must have some (rather fuzzily defined) sane grip on yourself, and if you do not have that for whatever reason the seriousness of the sin might be mitigated in God's sight. Or some action might not be a sin at all, if you are far enough out of your mind.

The law very clumsily makes the same distinction as to murder and other crimes. Whether a death is first degree murder or involuntary manslaughter (or, perhaps, not chargeable at all) or anything in between can depend very largely on the state of mind of the killer.

Sometimes I think we go too far in excusing suicide. Surely there are people who indeed are sane but who are simply defying the Lord of Life. The thing with suicide, though, is that the perpetrator is out of the reach of the law, by definition. And Christians are counseled not to judge the souls of other people. (Whyever would it be our business to determine the judgment of God on someone who is now deceased?) So even Judas, who tradition says was both the betrayer of Christ and a suicide, is given the benefit of the doubt by the churches. Perhaps, surely, he wasn't thinking straight.

Wow. Terrible to pull their son into it, and who cares that he was "adopted." What does that have to do with anything? Does that mean they loved him less than if he were their "birthed" child?

All of this reminds me of a terrible conversation I had with my own father. The black dog must have been chasing him in the worst way and he said that he wasn't going to wait for a stroke or heart attack but as soon as he felt it getting bad, he was going to kill himself. I asked him if he'd given any thought about how that would impact his kids and grandkids. He paused for a moment and then looked at me with a puzzled expression and said, "well, why would they care?" Indeed.

As the postscript to this, I told him to make sure that he left my phone number off any suicide note. He laughed at that. I didn't.

Your name above is me.

hmmmm. interesting.
a month or so ago, my texas town voted to allow the sale of alcohol within city limits for the 1st time since the 1880's. katie bar the door.