Suicide survivors who themselves took their lives: Charles Boyer, John Berryman, and Ernest Hemingway
by Ernest Shulman, Ph.D.
Imagine parents in a support group for those who suffered an adult child’s death. They are discussing the impulse they have been feeling to kill themselves. They are not exceptional. According to a survey, many bereaved parents of a suicide consider ending their lives: “The urge to be with the child is … as great as … the need to end the pain” (Blank, 1998, p. 83), “exacerbated by the sense the child is not really dead, but awaits rescue. The search for the dead child is shared by most bereaved parents, whether their lost child was very young or an adult” (Blank, 1998, p. 113.) “This grief leaves a permanent void requiring reorganization of parents’ lives. But at first they struggle to cling to their dead children: They become zombies, members of the walking dead” (Blank, 1998, p. 82). Eventually priorities are reordered, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
Charles Boyer (1899-1978), Hollywood actor and once the epitome of the handsome French lover, and his devoted, inseparable English wife, Pat, lost their only child. In 1965, Michael, 21, shot himself. The Boyers never recovered. Continue reading››