Nervous//Disease
Writer-ish Prompt #192: Write about a family secret.
This is one again, self admittedly, more than a 10 minute piece. But I think the subject was worthy of it. Also, a content warning for discussion of suicide.
My great-grandmother, Frances Slabek Kastellec, was born on December 2nd, 1892 in what was then known as Yugoslavia. 34 years later, on her birthday, she jumped to her death from the Detroit-Superior bridge in Cleveland. 100 years passed and our family, through an unexpected piece of ancestry research, learned these facts via a scanned copy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. To paraphrase my father's recounting, it was quite a spectacular suicide - spectacular enough to be front page news.
Part of the spectacle, of course, is what she left behind: her husband and two sons, including my grandfather, affectionally known to us as Poppo. After a seemingly normal day (though perhaps a lackluster birthday - who knows), she returned the children to school for their afternoon, and wrote two things down. First, and most simply, her name on a piece of paper, placed within her purse, clutched to herself even in death; a small courtesy, perhaps, to make it easy to identify her body. Secondly, a note left beyond for her husband: "I am going down to the bridge and jump off. Take good care of the boys. I went to church this morning and I hope everything will be all right. I will never get well and I might as well end it now". As the paper reported, she had been ill with a "nervous disease" for several months, and her husband had advised her to stay in bed on her birthday. Poppo was sent to Michigan to be raised by his father's parents, and the nature of her death was not discussed with his own son or those who came after.
Isn't it just fascinating? A secret that was so buried it is difficult to even consider it one, for is it really a secret when no one has the knowledge to withhold? That wasn't always the case, of course, but neither my grandfather nor his wife remain on this earth; perhaps they thought the secret died with them, assuming my grandmother was aware of what must have left an inedible mark on Poppo.
A century later and I wonder if Frances knew she chose a bridge that, at the time of it's building, was the largest steel and concrete reinforced bridge in the world. A grand setting to be sure. I wonder why she jumped not into the Cuyahoga river over which the bridge traversed, but onto Center Street, narrowly missing hitting a truck. Was it because there was a police officer, the one who provided these details, whom she feared would stop her? Was she afraid of the cold, December depths? I wonder if the officer told his family about the woman who leapt, about his helpfulness to stop her - did our family secret propagate another?
The true secret is the answers to the questions. Her true cause of death no longer holds power by nature of being a matter of fact, as indisputable as the (also unearthed) death certificate. The autograph she held implies a desire to be known, and yet here I remain, adrift in wonderings about the woman she was, the grandparent she could have been, and traces she left amongst us.
