Suicide's not painless.
It brings on nasty changes

Never kill yourself if you have kids.
Ernest Hemingway's father's worst legacy

By Charles Brown

Some sobering facts about suicide in Canada: one in 25 Canadians will attempt suicide during their lifetime; every year about 4,000 Canadians die by their own hand; more females attempt it but more males are successful; it's the second leading cause of death for males between 15 and 24; between 1981 and 1997, 65,371 died by suicide compared to 11,783 from AIDS and 10,989 as a result of homicide. About 80% of those who kill themselves suffer from a recognizable psychiatric disorder. When combined with alcohol or drug abuse, as it often is, the risk of suicide increases.

It's now clear that heredity is also a significant marker for suicide. When a relative takes his or her own life the survivors seldom fully recover from the shock. The evidence also suggests those in succeeding generations are more likely to kill themselves. The family of writer and suicide Ernest Hemingway, whose father Clarence shot himself in the head, is a textbook case.

"I don't want to say you 'taint' your future generations, but it's real close to that," says Carl Bell, professor of psychiatry and public health at the University of Illinois in Chicago. "No matter how much pain you think you've caused your loved ones, it's nothing compared with the pain your suicide will cause," Bell affirms.

The latest casualty was Gregory Hemingway, 69, the youngest of Ernest Hemingway's three sons, who was found dead on last October in a private cell at the Miami-Dade Women's Detention Center. According to the last of his four wives he had been diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder and sometimes skipped his medication. He also clearly had gender issues, given the place of death. He left seven children, some of who, recent research suggests, will inherit a propensity to suicide.

Though major depressive disorders can have a genetic component, not everyone with such a predisposition is fated to an end as sad as Gregory Hemingway's. Life experience also plays a part.

The keynote sentence of Gregory's memoirs, published in 1976, was: "I never got over a sense of responsibility for my father's death." Ernest Hemingway -- depressive, alcoholic and ill -- killed himself on July 2, 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho.

"The pathological sequelae following a suicide are tremendous, and that's separate from the biological vulnerability," says Harvard's Douglas Jacobs, a suicide expert in clinical practice. The "not uncommon" view of survivors is: "How could that person have done it to me?" and "If I were good enough, he wouldn't have done it," the psychiatrist says in a phone interview. "They're walking around with a confluence of both anger and rejection."

The suicide of Ernest's father, Clarence Hemingway -- depressive and diabetic -- caught the author amid revisions to his second novel, A Farewell to Arms. In a letter to his editor at Scribner's, Max Perkins, he wrote: "I was very fond of him and feel like hell about it." Fictional characters are not authors' exact counterparts, but "Nick Adams" -- the protagonist of many of Hemingway's best short stories -- is as close to being his creator's alter ego as one encounters in serious literature. Hemingway did later "write it." That is, he dealt with his father's suicide in his writing. But he never "got rid of it."

"When I work with clients whose parents have killed themselves, they almost never really recover," says Georgetown psychotherapist Annette Annechild. "The prognosis is bad. Not that they'll kill themselves, but they almost never get over it."

Why?

"The biggest thing we give our children is the optimism to believe that life's worth living," Annechild said. "When a parent kills himself, it's like saying: 'I couldn't figure it out. It's not worth it. And, more important, you're not worth it. Your love wasn't worth staying for "In addition to whatever genetic component is handed down, the abandonment "is just a hideous legacy for people," she says.

Three of Clarence Hemingway's six children took their own lives. Ursula, suffering from cancer and depression, died of a drug overdose in 1966. In 1982, Leicester, a diabetic faced with the loss of his legs, shot himself in the head -- as had his father and famous brother.

In 1996 model Margaux Hemingway grand-daughter of Ernest died from a drug overdose.