January 10, 2004
My grandmother, nee Hazel Beebe, was a nurse, who met my grandfather, Russell Conwell Olmsted, when he was recovering from the bends. The bends is the very painful syndrome that occurs when scuba divers come up for air from significant depth too fast. My grandfather was not a scuba diver, however, he was an engineer who worked in the Lincoln Tunnel during its construction. Owing to the depth at which the worked, the bends was an occupational hazard--though I think it was poorly understood at the time.
And I may be completely wrong that this was the cause of the hospitalization during which my grandparents met. My grandfather was also injured in a grain elevator accident in Cuba sometime around 1920, I think, and at one point was sent up to Bellevue in New York City to recuperate. In any case, she was one of his nurses during one of these hospitalizations.
My Uncle Donn told me this. I asked him about some family history at the time of the death of my own father, in 1996. I had never gotten a satisfactory response from my Dad regarding why his father, Russell, had been found dead in his car of self-induced carbon-monoxide poisoning in 1942. I believe this occurred at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. He left no note, at least that’s what the sons were told. I asked my Uncle what he thought the reason a prosperous man with a healthy family would kill himself at the prime of his life. Donn surmised that his father suffered from chronic pain from his myriad past injuries, and couldn’t take it anymore.
Suicide is invariably cruel to the survivors it leaves behind, but it seems that much crueler when the cause of it is shrouded in mystery. And I rather think that if my Grandfather’s chronic pain was that severe, that it would merit more than a conjecture. By all accounts, and by the evidence of the personalities left behind in his children, my grandfather was jovial and self-effacing, but no more stoic than was common for the men of his generation. He was also very aware of the fact that he was descended from proud Yankee stock, the same family that had produced Frederick Law Olmsted, the veritable founder of landscape architecture and co-designer of Central Park, among many other projects in a prolific career. My grandfather was not someone who would have been unaware of the social stigma of suicide, not someone who didn’t take his responsibilities as father and provider and pillar of the community very seriously.
Unlike so many other Americans, he also did not economically suffer in the Depression. He was employed throughout as an engineer on the George Washington Bridge. He had 4 children, a loving wife, and a maid. In 1942, his two oldest sons were in the military, but not yet in combat. Both survived the war. Given the atmosphere of the times, it would strike me as a far greater source of grief if they had not signed up than if they had.
When it comes to suicides of unknown cause, I think that survivors tend to project their own lives’ pitfalls when attempting to explain it. My father was an alcoholic, and my mother wondered if her father-in-law (who died years before she met my Dad), was a drinker. If he was, he was an extremely secret one; my Uncle doesn’t remember seeing him drunk once.
When I asked my father why he thought his father killed himself, he answered (drunk): "Because he was a failure." But my grandfather was no such thing, in fact he invented some sort of prefabricated concrete panels used in highway building. My father, who had an extremely modest career by any measure, was projecting his appraisal of his own life.
This is all the more poignant because the suicide occurred when my father was 14. He was summoned out of his class at prep school and told by the headmaster that his father was dead. I am unclear as to how he discovered it was by his own hand. I do know that my father dropped out of prep school, getting his GED years later. With the GI bill, he went to a couple of years of college at Rutger’s, but never got a degree. This haunted his professional life in later years, when it no longer sufficed to be white and well-spoken to work one’s way up the corporate ladder. It is unquestionable that had he had his father to guide him, he would have had a completely different life.
According to my Uncle, there was some doubt as to whether my grandfather was cheated on the patent rights to his invention. But this discontent did not even translate into a legal proceeding. It’s hard to imagine his frustration, if any, boiling over to suicide. As far as I understand human nature, if one wants to spite one’s enemies by killing oneself, that cause is made pointedly clear to the world.
My father had a second brother, Peter, whose opinion about his father’s death I never asked. This is because Peter is probably the angriest man I know. He might have been redeemed by the love of a good woman, but his first wife, Louise, was killed in a car accident in 1962. His second wife, whom he married in a few years later, he literally drove to drink. (She later divorced him and got sober, thank God.) I don’t think any of Peter’s three children even speak to him anymore.
Peter was a navigator in World War II, flying 50 missions over Italy and Rumania in 1943. He wrote a memoir about it, that he sent to me years ago, when I solidified my reputation as the writer of my generation of Olmsteds. In it, Peter describes being at a base in Texas where he was training with the Air Force. He was sent home on emergency leave upon hearing of his father’s death. He recounts reading his father’s obituary in a newspaper on the local bus taking him from Penn Station to Harrington Park, New Jersey. In it, he discovered the manner and method of his father's death.
The account is chilling only in that it is completely devoid of emotion (as is the entire memoir—an amazing feat considering he survived the most dramatic situations imaginable). I read the passage about his reaching home and going to the funeral with anticipation. There was one reference to it being a difficult time for his mother. Apart from that, absolutely no questioning of the cause of the suicide, no discussion of the impact on him, his brothers and his little sister. It is completely bloodless.
In later life, Uncle Peter referred to his mother as "the General." She was certainly an indomitable woman, I know not if this preceded her husband’s death or was in reaction to it. I do know that she mellowed later in life, at least as a grandmother. She was never gooey, but she was certainly affectionate. I have wonderful memories of she and her only daughter, Aunt Nancy, coming over from the apartment they shared in Reston, Virginia to our home in Rockville, Maryland for Sunday dinner. Afterwards we would eat fruit chewies and watch Get Smart and Hogan’s Heroes. It was like a Rockwell painting.
In 1969, Grandma broke a hip, and she died of a heart attack 6 months later. I remember her funeral, which was so decorous and Episcopalian that it would appear as a first result if one were to google for "Restrained displays of WASP grief."
I doubt that had Grandma survived into my adulthood, she would have been forthcoming about what she may have known or suspected about her husband’s death. I am quite sure it was a complete mystery to Nancy, although it undoubtedly marked her terribly. She was adopted at 3, and certainly had a psychic scar from a babyhood we knew nothing about but could not have been, by definition, a happy one. Then the only father she knew disappeared when she was 6. At 19, Poor Nancy fell in love with an older married man who led her on cruelly for several years until it was exposed that he never intended to get a divorce, in fact, he’d never even filed, much less separated from his clueless wife.
Nancy never got over it. She never even dated again, and when her Mother died and her treasured in-laws (us) had to move to New York, she wilted, rudderless. She died at 37, just 5 years after Grandma’s death. Officially the cause of death was pancreatitis, but I think it was a broken heart.
I have been so intrigued by the mystery of my grandfather’s death that it was one of the questions I posed to a psychic I consulted a few years ago (a very reputable one as these things go, not someone with a storefront). Wary of giving her too much information from which she could make an educated guess, I merely gave her his birthday. Almost immediately something startling occurred. She flinched as if hit by something that flew at her face. It was not something someone could fake. It was very much as if a hose has struck her eye.
Dumbfounded, I could not speak for a minute. Then I told her the specifics of the situation, and asked point blank if she had any sense of why he killed himself. She answered without hesitation: "grief." I asked her if it was of a physical or spiritual nature. She replied:"spiritual. Spiritual."
Of course I am no more immune than anyone to the syndrome of projecting my experience when positing a cause for my grandfather’s death. The encounter with the psychic sealed my theory that my grandfather may have been homosexual. I think he was in love with someone, perhaps someone he worked with who had been sent to fight. I think he received a telegram that this person was killed.
This love may never have been expressed or acted upon. But it is not hard to imagine that such a dolorous secret may have been enough to cause him to see no hope for happiness in his life as it was presently constituted. One simply does not abandon a seemingly prosperous career and healthy family for no reason.
I imagine the police informing my grandmother of her husband's death. I see her looking at the telegram that was delivered with his effects in the car. I see her crumpling it up, perhaps burning it. If she hadn’t known what was wrong in their marriage, she knew something was not right. Now she knew what that something was. It must have been devastating. Now two people would never know the gratification of love and passion in their life. My grandmother never dated, or remarried.
She certainly would have kept it a secret from her sons and daughter. What I find so extraordinary is that they never seemed to have discussed it among themselves. My father and his two brothers got together once or twice late in life, and got drunk. My Uncle Donn, who is known for non-stop talking, asserted to me that they never spoke of it.
And yet it was an act that unquestionably defined their lives. Whatever the answer to the question of why my grandfather killed himself, there is no doubt that the love of his family was not enough to keep him from taking such an irrevocable step.
It is no mystery that such a legacy cannot but have haunted its inheritors.
MCO 2004
