My Mother’s Suicide: The Secret My Father Kept for 20 Years

My world, the one I’ve known for two decades, imploded tonight. I’m 20, living far from home, and until a few hours ago, my mother’s story was a tragic, straightforward tale. She took her own life in 2006, when I was a mere two-month-old infant. For as long as I can remember, her passing was attributed to a sudden, violent onset of schizophrenia, a cruel twist of fate that snatched her away too soon. We mourned, we remembered, and we lived with the shadow of that illness, believing it was the sole reason for our irreparable loss. But the truth, it seems, is far more monstrous.

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