Old People, Suicide and the Seashore

Today, April 27, at noon, I took Uma for a walk down on the riverfront of the Delaware River. There is a nice brick promenade and a pier beside the river. It is a beautiful, sunny, crisp day, fresh and perfect. We looked over the river, then went down the pier which had illustrated posters fastened to the railings. I couldn't read them so I asked a young woman who was walking there what they said. She told me they were suicide prevention posters made by school children. She read, in her sweet soft young voice, one which had to do with the intrinsic value of each human being. I thought how sad that school children had to think about suicide but we have such a lot of it in our electroic age.

We have had two suicides in our family, both ancestors, one of whom I knew as a child, my Great-aunt Ella, my Grandmother Mabel's twin. They were fraternal twins, so they didn't look alike at all. Grandmom Mabel was plump and robust, blue eyes sharp, and freshly permed brown hair, a vivid and vigorous woman. Heer twin suffered dementia and was small and frail and gray, a ghostly person.

In the 1950's Ocean City, where my Grandmother Mabel lived, on 6th and Asbury Avenue, was a place of healing. There was a huge religious sanitorium called the Tabernacle near 6th Street with beautifully manicured lawn and gardens. Many of the old houses were rentals for recuperation and also boarding houses for the aged.

Periodically my Grandmother Mabel's brother, Yock, would come to live with her when his wife, Alma, threw him out. At least that is what I remember from what some grown up said at the time. Alma ran one of those boarding houses for the aged. Yock worked in the post office.

I could easily imagine Yock getting thrown out by a no-nonsense boarding house landlady. Uncle Yock was a prankster and a tease - a sly one. As the mother's walked by on family dinners, he would reach out from behind his newspaper or his true crime magazines and pinch their backsides. They would turn in anger and said "Oh Yock, stop that!" He would just quietly laugh to himself and say "fat bunny," It was surreptitious but entirely vissible to us children.

Uncle Yock's favorite magazine was Argosy and the covers I recall sported scantilay clad women pressed against a tree while being menaced by a bear, or a shadowy male criminal figure. Often vacationers would buy and write out postcards, maybe on the beach, and put on the stamps but forget to add the adddrsses, probably going to look for their address book back at the rental apartment. These would go accidentally into the mail which was, in the days, sorted by hand. My Uncle Yock would put our address in Philadelphia on those postcards so that all summer we got "Wish you were here" postcards from total strangers. This amused me enormously and made me a lifetime postcard collector and an art postcard creator!

When I was married and traveling in Europe, I sent my Grandmother Mabel postcards from every major city or site we visited. She saved them and when I came home she gave them to me tied in a pink ribbon. She also gave to me her journal in a green marbled copy book from one fateful summer whe she and Yock had driven to Indianapolis, Indiana to pick up their sister Ella. Ella had been mugged and injured outside her church adn suffered a serious brain injury (dementia). The rescue turned out not be successful. Ella was delusional and felt as though she had been kidnapped, was being poisoned, and she lived in a constant state of paranoia and anxiety.

As recounted in my Grandmother's diary, one day when Grandmom Mabel had left for work, she came home and couldn't find her sister. She looked all over and sent her brother to look upstairs. Ella had hanged herelf from a rafter in the attic. This tramatic and tragic event was more than my grandmother could handle without having some place to put it. This journal she gave to me.

Our other suicide I discovered when I was doing family history and ecame acquainted with Great Grandfather, William Collins Garwood, who had married the daughter of Major Peter T. Cheeseman of Turnersville, a prominent mill owner. William had been the local school teacher boarding with the Major and married his daughter, Rachel. Rachel bore two children and died young. William raised the children on his own and worked as a storekeeper, andtax assessor. His two Granddaughters, Lavinia and Sarah, were my mother's biological mother, and adoptive mother. William at some point, went into a severe depression became alcoholic and shot himself. I found this out when I visited my Uncle Joseph Lyons, Lavinia Lyons' son and my mother's cousin. He gave me a picute of William C.Garwood to copy and he told me what had happened to William. My mother remembered him from her days in the "Friendless Children's Home" in Camden where she and her two sisters were taken when their mother, Sarah, died young from the Influenza epidemic. Life is hard and I can empathize with the despair that can make someone decide it is easy to leave it than to try to survive. Fortunately, through the luck of genetics and so far, fairly good health and independence, I am happy to carry on.

Happy Trails, wrightj45@yahoo.com