MY MOM KILLED HERSELF BY MIXING PILLS WITH ALCOHOL. THE IMPACT SUICIDE LEAVES ON THE FAMILY, A PERSO

My mom died more than 20 years ago when I was 16 and she was 49. She killed herself by mixing sleeping pills with alcohol. I remember the night with utter clarity.

My younger sister and I had returned home after playing evening basketball with friends. My father was reading the paper, my mother was in bed. I went to the bedside to see if she was resting or asleep for the night, and noticed that her breathing was strained and thick. I shook her shoulders, ordered her to wake up, slapped her cheeks. When she couldn't be roused, I called for my dad.

Minutes later the house filled with police, firefighters and an emergency medical crew. Hooked to a respirator, strapped to a stretcher, mom was zipped off by ambulance, with my father following in his car. He asked my sister and me if we wanted to accompany him, but nervous and unsure of exactly what to do, we decided to remain at home.

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If she dies, I said to him as he rushed out the door, don't call, just come home. Hours had passed when his headlights flickered through my bedroom window, well past midnight. Instantly I knew. The last contact I had with my mother was seconds before the ambulance arrived at our house, when I'd hastily combed her hair, buttoned her pajama top and dabbed perfume behind her ears.

The night passed in a strange hush, marked more by an aching quiet that by panic. My mother's best friend arrived, full of strokes and hugs. My dad launched a series of telephone calls to relatives and friends. I still recall his gentle tone. In spite of all the lamps and lights being turned on, the phone ringing, I remember a dark, dark house. My mom had lost her fight.

We were stunned more than shocked, startled rather than surprised. For years, my mother had fought black moods and returning despair. I remember her talking with me about wanting to die, weeping as she whispered her frightened thoughts. She had tried to kill herself more than once, but never with serious physical consequence.

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That night, I knew she had crossed the line from what was mumbled, circled, toyed with, dreaded, to what was real. In the days that followed, I remember feeling like a character in a novel or play as I searched unsuccessfully for a suicide note, a message. To this day, there's an uneasiness among family members when contemplating the details of that night; each of us has had to build our own way to understand.

No death is easy. But suicide leaves a particular kind of discomfort. Distant acquaintances as well as loved ones feel compelled to solve the puzzle, searching for an explanation of what went wrong. Suicide notes are combed, analyzed, read between the lines. When, like my mother, the person leaves no note, an acute and hollow frustration remains. Lingering in people's faces, in the air of rooms where she once sat, in the twisting of each mind, is the same question: Is there anything I could have done to prevent this death?

This quest for understanding becomes all the more powerful when the public life of the person who killed herself appears above-board, well-polished, successful or privileged. It just doesn't figure, people say. It's not plausible. I remember the calls from PTA members, long-lost relatives, distant colleagues. Even people closer to my mother expressed shock and surprise. We just don't get it, they said; she had it all.

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Working Her Way Through College

Mary Alice Darby had curly red hair, blue eyes and pale, freckly skin. She was raised in a middle-class, hard-working Irish Catholic family in a small steel town near Pittsburgh. She made straight A's at her Catholic high school and desperately wanted to go to college. But her tough traditional father, my Grandpa Darby, put his foot down. He would help send his two sons to college; for his daughters he offered assistance for teacher's training or for secretarial school.

Undaunted, my mom sent her high school transcripts to her congressman, along with a letter declaring her passion for politics. The representative arranged a scholarship to cover tuition at the University of Pittsburgh. Other expenses she earned herself; she loved to remind her three kids how she worked her way through college in a ladies' shoe store.

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Once on campus, she decided that political science wasn't as people-oriented as she'd hoped and chose a joint major in sociology and psychology, earning her PhD in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She had moved west to join a close friend in graduate school, and would interrupt her education to join the Navy, becoming an ensign while serving as a psychologist at U.S. Navy hospitals during World War II.

At Berkeley she married a fellow student, Stephen Rauch, my father, a Russian Jew from Minneapolis. Both sets of parents, religious purists in their own way, had to adjust. My father was never particularly religious, and my mom had begun distancing herself from the Catholic Church. My parents did joint doctoral dissertation research while starting a family and building a house of mostly windows on the edge of the city near Berkeley. By all accounts, they still were deeply in love when she died.

As a family, we regularly camped and adventured, exploring the outdoors as far as Mexico, Canada and Alaska. At home, we kept sheep, goats, chickens, rabbits, monkeys, a burro, cats, dogs, goldfish and hamsters. Students from the local elementary school took field trips to our backyard.

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Among some neighbors in our relatively conservative community, my family was considered wild. After all, in the '50s and '60s many people considered psychologists and their offspring weird. As children, my brother, sister and I only had two serious rules: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, and don't complain about things unless they are legitimate concerns. There were occasional spankings and groundings and being sent off to our rooms; but mostly, problems were hashed out in heated discussion. If we were wild, we were gleefully wild. It was a family of fun and whimsy.

From the outside looking in, I can understand why people couldn't fathom my mother's decline. Until very near her death, the exterior she presented was unblemished. She enjoyed her work, had plenty of friends, led Blue Birds and Boy Scouts, baked bread and kept our cookie jar crammed with homemade treats. She wore bright red lipstick and stylish suits, backpacked on weekends, played bridge with the neighbors and argued politics with anyone she could bait. She was sassy and independent -- but critical of what was then called women's lib. "It's not a matter of being a man or being a woman; people can do whatever they set their mind to if they try hard enough," she would proclaim.

She was a tremendously emotional woman, crying as often as she laughed. She could be as moved by an elementary school choir recital as by a faraway war. I remember sometimes being embarassed by her quick tears. She also was known for flashes of cold reserve, sudden distance. Some people found her hard to deal with. She appeared to be engaged in life, energized, mostly content. When she cared about a person, an event, an issue, she reached for it, fully engrossed. Not the public image of a suicide.

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All the while, there were subtle signals of distress. My mother came from a family of heavy social drinkers. I think she began to have a drinking problem by the time I was 10. Her drinking progressed as my childhood evolved into adolescence. She and my father, both clinical psychologists, never said the word alcoholism, never really grasped alcoholism as a disease. It was less understood and much less discussed in those days. And there was her pride, and perhaps his, which got in the way of her seeking treatment. She denied needing help. And like many alcoholics, she did a marvelous job of hiding her drinking from outsiders, from the family, from herself. There were alibis: She didn't feel well, she had a headache, she was tired and needed to nap. For a long time she could guard her troubled moments.

For several years, family life was little-changed. We spent a year on sabbatical leave in New Zealand, where both parents worked full-time in Auckland. My father, a professor, taught psychology at the University of Auckland; my mother saw clients at the university's counseling center. We explored the South Pacific on camping and hiking trips and made oodles of Kiwi friends.

But mom's "naps" continued, in New Zealand and after returning to California. Soon she was spending entire weekends in bed. Appointments were canceled, we kids cooked dinner, dad buried himself in work, and it became an embarrassment to have friends over after school. Around the 10th grade, I arrived home from school one afternoon to find my mom in the front seat of her car, engine running, a hose extending from the tailpipe to the front passenger seat. But the car windows were open and she was conscious. I led her to her bed.

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I can't remember if I called my dad. It's hard to explain how used to these horrors one can become; how easily those directly involved become numb. It was not that we didn't know what was going on. With and without my mom, when she was alert and when she wasn't, my family talked at length about what was happening, each incident. In search of solutions, we yelled, argued and wept.

But then mom would brighten up. She'd tell us it was over, she was fine, everything would be okay. She'd smile and click off in her high heels. Weeks would pass smoothly, even months. All we really knew how to do was believe her, to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Eventually, my mother's colleagues and supervisors asked her to stop working, which she reluctantly did. Still, most outsiders, including distant family, had little sense of the unraveling that was taking place.

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One year before killing herself, my mother spent three weeks at a treatment clinic. It followed my father's prompting her to do so. She was resistant, but decided to give it a chance. It was the first time the word alcoholic was openly used in the family. She was sober from leaving the clinic until one week before her death. She began teaching again, a college night class in psychology.

Then, on one weekend, mom drank. The next weekend, she was gone.

As an adult, I've found that people who didn't know me at the time of my mother's death tend to be more edgy talking about it than I am. There is a hush that comes with suicide, an awkwardness, a creepiness that I understand but don't feel.

I try to put people at ease. I try to help them understand that, even with the rocky times, my childhood felt more normal that strange, more full than empty. The demons flickered and stung, but they didn't obscure family life or love.

My mother's death has colored my life most intensely, not by how she died, but simply by the fact that she is gone. Missing her becomes less urgent with time, but not less profound. I often crave her opinions and advice; I've felt the lack of maternal influence through the years. Sometimes I try to guess how she would have responded to something I find trying or tricky. The results are hazy, mere guesses. I didn't know my mother adult to adult, and this is an enormous gap.

I've always looked at my mom's death as a complex collision of unknowns. Was she depressed, and if so, did depression cause her drinking, or did drinking make her depressed?

If my mom was so happy, why did she drink? If she was so bright and perceptive about human behavior, why couldn't she stop drinking? If she loved us so much, how could she decide to leave? After becoming sober, what, on that weekend so long ago, made her take a first sip? If my sister and I hadn't been playing basketball, if my brother hadn't been at a friend's house, if my dad hadn't been buried in the paper, could we have stopped her? Could we have helped?

The answer is no. I knew then, as I know more clearly now, that my mother was fighting a battle deeply within herself. It would surface periodically and she would reach out to my father, one of her children, a friend, a therapist. I remember her describing a nagging fear of living, a nebulous dread, trying to make sense of it aloud. But always, she retreated. She drew back to a place where she said it was too difficult to articulate her thoughts, where she said she couldn't explain. Back to her private battleground. It was intensely personal, wrapped in contradictions and confusion, far from my reach. The inner workings of a person, the mysteries of the soul and psyche and personality, may exist in a private orbit, hidden, not in sync with the external world.

Did I Get the Gene?

The existence of a genetic propensity for alcoholism, depression and suicide is widely accepted by medical professionals. Many children from families with these destructive patterns live with questions and concerns. Did I get the gene? When will it take control? Though I accept the predisposition theories, I don't turn to them to rule my life, rest my case, make my peace. Layers of life experience help determine how genes for behavior express themselves; they coat and color the biology of us all. I have no doubt that genes played an underlying role in some of my mother's experiences; but her battles, her joys and losses, her spirit weren't simply a creation of chromosomes.

A few years before her death, my mother took me to the memorial service of a former patient of hers who had committed suicide. My mother said she felt uncomfortable going alone. What I remember best is the copy of this woman's suicide letter, passed out to the mourners. It began, "Some of us walk to the beat of a different drummer . . . "

Mostly, I've stopped scanning the past to add together the pieces of my mother's life in a sensible pattern. In a strange, reassuring way she becomes more whole as I grow older.

I'm fond of her complexities, as sad as they can be. I don't view her as a perfect woman or as a failure. I don't need to use this kind of scale. She was dynamic. And she has my complete respect.

If my mom's suicide provides a lesson, it is perhaps this: One can make peace with a lack of explanation and find resolve in never really knowing why. Days after my mother died, in a painful moment, my brother held my and my sister's hands. "We have to remember that she'll always be here, in our memories, in each of us," he said. And she is.

Writer Kate Darby Rauch lives in Berkeley, Calif.

People contemplating suicide often give warning signals. If seen, professional help should be sought.

Statements suggesting a desire to die or an obsession with death.

Sudden changes in behavior that would suggest depression, loss of appetite, sleeplessness, apathy.

Withdrawal from family and friends; reluctance to attend work or school.

Disposal of property.

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