CAUTIONARY TALES FOUND IN PARENTS' SUICIDES AFTER CHILDREN'S

Two very different stories came out this week about parents who lost a child to suicide, and later, the parents themselves died by suicide.

In one -- a news report about a mother who never came back from her grief and killed herself nine months after her son died -- the mother's sister says,

"She talked about suicide every day since Mikey died. We took her to counseling and grief groups but she did not want to get better ... She wanted to be with Mikey."

In the other -- a first-person reflection about a father who broke down mentally and killed himself several years after his daughter died -- his other daughter writes,

Perhaps everyone has a breaking point. An incident or event that cannot be overcome, a moment in time that can never be erased. Most of us might get through life without encountering it, but my father was not so fortunate.

In the report about Sheila Kearney Graham, the mother whose son died by suicide, there is tragedy heaped upon tragedy, for eighth-grader Michael Graham shot himself with a gun owned by his father, and his father is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to a weapons possession charge.

The mother's sister, Maureen Hutchins, depicts her nephew as a "'a handsome, happy kid'" and "said it made no sense to anyone in the family why Michael Graham took his own life."

After Michael died, Maureen brought her sister from New York to California to live with her, and she had moved into her own place this summer. But it appears that Sheila never recovered from her son's death and -- in spite of the support and help she received -- was determined to kill herself.

"My sister died when Mikey died. She swore she wanted to kill herself but I told her to give it time and that it would get better. She promised she wouldn't kill herself for six months," Hutchins said.

In the story about the father whose daughter died by suicide, novelist Jessie Cole has written intimately about the aftermath of her sister Zoe's suicide, how it "pushed [her] father to the edge" and, in the end, contributed to his death:

No, the causes were not natural. He had reached his breaking point and tumbled into the abyss.

Jessie's depiction of her father's descent into madness is stark and clear:

After my sister's death my family was in tatters. We were like fish swallowing air. Silence enveloped us. But in time my father's muted grief turned wild and the tangled threads of his control snagged and tore apart.

At every turn, the story captures how Jessie's father's unravelling psyche is affected by his daughter's suicide, as he surreptitiously spreads her ashes in the back yard, sees her "reincarnation" in a teenage girl who is one of his patients (he is a psychiatrist), and tells a shop clerk that "she's come back to me ... She was just on ... a protracted holiday."

Jessie uncovers the devastation of suicide through the sorrow of her beleaguered family as they face loss after loss, and she concludes -- as so many survivors do -- that she must be watchful and take responsibility for her own well being:

What is my breaking point, and will my life take me there? If the line between sane and crazy is fine enough to step over, how can I know when I've taken that step? And who, apart from me, is patrolling the perimeters?