The Suicide Club
by John Francis McGondel, copyright 2005

Prologue: 2005- Francis checked beside his bed to make sure everything was ready for the night. Yes, the nine millimeter Glock was on the nightstand, and the jar of strawberry jam was beside it. He had a distinct fondness for the jam. Between them and Francis was his medication. All three had to be in their proper places in order for him to sleep . . .

From the desk of Dr. Raoul Lipschitz:

The subject is a fifty years old male, who has constant thoughts of suicide, which thoughts have been and still are exacerbated by the sudden deaths of close friends and people he had looked up to. Below is a brief history, at the end of which will be a follow up theory as to probable causation: Death was not a stranger to Francis, as he came from a large Irish American family. Some of his earliest memories included wakes and funerals in the Massachusetts cities of Woburn, Charlestown, and South Boston. By the time his paternal grandfather died, in 1964, he was already familiar with the Irish process of dealing with death. Little did he realize that death would become as familiar to him as life.

After his paternal grandfather died, his paternal grandmother died an excruciating death from cancer. Actually, the cancer didn’t kill her, the treatment did. Francis was tortured by memories of her body, burned red from the radiation therapy. Then, his maternal grandmother died from a heart attack, alone in her tiny stucco home in Wilmington, Mass. They found her cold and stiff on the kitchen floor, still clutching her rosary beads in her clenched fist. Francis began thinking about death a lot, pondering it to the point of obsession. But more was to come, and his pondering would evolve into a psycho-emotional syndrome of despair and forlornness.

Charles McMahon taught Francis to swim at the Woburn Boy’s Club. Charlie was a nice guy, and worked well with the kids. Francis liked Charlie a lot, because Charlie did not treat Francis like a little kid. They enjoyed a unique friendship, considering their age differences. Charlie was the last American killed during the Vietnam War. The irony of it to Francis was that Charlie was killed as US troops were pulling out and evacuating. To Francis, it was another emotional scar and a senseless death.

Francis was 21 years old in 1975, he had several friends, one of whom was named Joe Dell. Joe was a very troubled young man, and Francis took him into his life to help him. They became close friends, and confided in each other. Joe had had a friend named Dougie Breer, who was in the passenger seat beside Joe when Joe’s car failed to negotiate a turn in Burlington, Mass one night. The car hit a big tree stump, and was totaled. Dougie died instantly. When the police showed up, they found Joe Dell groaning in the bushes twenty feet away from the wreck. He had been thrown through the window, head first. They rushed him to the hospital, where his kidney was removed, due to it having been skewered and smashed when the gear shifter penetrated his abdomen.

Joe was discharged a week later, and sent home to finish recuperating. However, the next day his mother received a call from the hospital, telling her not to allow Joe to move, and that an ambulance was on the way over. It seems that what with worrying so much about the kidney, they had managed to overlook the fact that Joe’s neck had been broken in three places. By then it was too late to fix without some very complicated and dangerous surgery, which Joe elected to forego due to lack of insurance. He was finally released, after which he met Francis.

Joe was in a permanently depressed state of mind. He was devastated by Dougie’s death already, but Dougie’s parents blamed Joe for the death and started legal proceedings against him. Joe sank deeper into disconsolation. When Francis spoke with him, Joe told Francis that he missed Dougie and did not deserve to live. Joe started drinking more heavily, and got increasingly more into using drugs -- anything to make the bad thoughts go away. He hated himself and embraced an almost totally self-destructive lifestyle. Joe had to take anti-seizure medication, because every now and then, while he was just walking along the road, he would have a seizure and fall to the ground sideways, sometimes almost getting run over. The seizures were exacerbated by Joe's drinking and drug use, and Francis tried very hard to help Joe, but it was obvious that Joe wanted to die. Then came the blizzard of 1978, and Joe dropped some pot off to Francis, and walked away. Francis would never see Joe alive again.

Francis found out a few days later that Joe had died during the blizzard, from slipping in the shower and banging his head on the bathtub. Joe had apparently drunk himself into a seizure, and that was that. He got what he wanted: freedom from his emotional pain.

John Swain was another friend of Francis. John was a very troubled young man, and spoke to Francis often about suicide. One day, John’s body was found in the woods beside a local pond, a single gunshot wound to his head. He had placed the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Nice guy that he was, he had gone out to do it in the woods, so as not to further traumatize his family. Francis mourned, having understood the pain that John could not deal with.

Francis had a cousin, Michael Keating. Michael had a lot of pent up aggression, and was a very self-destructive individual. He drank heavily and was constantly trying to impress people by getting into needless fights. He and Francis spoke often, and attended adolescent parties together. Francis tried to tell Michael that if he kept pushing the envelope, he would run out of envelope. Michael told him, “So what? What’s the difference if I die today or next week or in twenty years? Nobody will know who I was in a hundred years from now. Dying means the end of pain.” Francis was never to forget those words. Michael was speeding down a highway in Massachusetts, his sister and her friend in the car. The convertible he was driving slammed a guardrail and flipped and tumbled. Three more closed caskets of teenagers.

David Burrell was nicknamed Bonga, because of his wiry, frizzy hair. Bonga was also a good friend of Francis. Bonga also had what would later be termed a deathwish. He got heavily into drugs to masquerade his pain. Bonga’s pain seemed to derive from his inability to accept the fact of his own mortality. He dwelled upon death frequently, almost constantly. Francis and he had many long philosophical discussions, trying to wrap their brains around the concept of death. Bonga was not one to believe in an afterlife, and eventually, when his distress became completely unbearable, he got very high on barbiturates and walked straight down a set of Boston subway tracks toward an oncoming train. The conductor saw him and tried to brake, but it was too late. The conductor, when interviewed by the police, said that Bonga had stood there in the middle of the tracks, smiling and giving the train the finger even as it hit him.

Francis pondered these deaths.

Steven Lundgren had been nicknamed Spunky since elementary school. Francis had gone to school with him, and knew him to be a nice enough guy, albeit a bit wild. Spunky got into drugs early in life, and probably should have died years before he did. But then he seemed to clean up his act a bit, and mostly just drank. He was a typical example of a depressed individual who self-medicated with alcohol. He, like Francis, had seen far too many friends die at early ages, and was resigned to two things. The first was that he was convinced that he too would die young. And second, he was sure that if it didn’t happen any other way, it would happen by his own hand. Francis remembered trying to talk him into a better place, a more positive mindset, to no avail. Spunky was found in the woods behind his mother’s house. He had hanged himself on his favorite climbing tree.

When Francis was hanging around the local housing projects with his friends, there were these three inseparable buddies. Two brothers named Billy and Chris Lindsey, and Barney Farncoft. All three were wild in the streets. They dealt drugs, ripped off out-of-town drug buyers who came to the projects looking for dope, and generally tortured the police. Francis tried talking to them on more than one occasion, to no avail. They did not believe that anything existed after death, and thus there was no reason to not indulge themselves to the maximum. Jail did not bother them, indeed they flourished there every time they were sent. Francis tried to talk sense to them, but instead was almost swayed by the simplicity of their philosophy of nihilism. One night the three were in a car, racing down a local road, a road that they had traveled countless times. The car did not negotiate a turn; in fact the car never turned or even applied its brakes -- no tire marks on the road whatsoever. The car hit a tree and all three died instantly. Everyone was bewildered as to how they could not have known enough to take the turn slowly. But Francis alone knew why: They didn’t make the turn because they didn’t want to. They had decided that they had had enough.

Years went by, and Francis attended more funerals. He raised a family and moved to New Hampshire to try to get away from the suicide scene in Massachusetts. He kept in touch with only a few old friends, like Paul Sorenson, Raymond (Rucka) Keating. And Paul’s brother Neil. In 2003, Francis sat for three days with his dying father in a hospital room. He held his father, whom he had promised would not be alone when he died. He watched the nurses and doctors prescribe more and more morphine, until his father’s heart… just… stopped. Francis shaved him, as was his family’s way. His father had always been his closest friend.

Over the years, Francis had several personal heroes, people in the entertainment industry whom he admired and looked up to. One was a guitarist named Jimi Hendrix. Another was a singer named Janis Joplin. Then there were the actors John Belushi and John Candy, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, James Dean, Hunter Thompson, and Ken Kesey. Francis observed, as one by one they each died. He saw friends who came back from the Vietnam War, who could not deal with the post traumatic stress that piggy-backed home with them. That was when he claims that he figured out that the underlying cause of the many deaths he had observed or been aware of was a form of depression which led to a sense that nothing really mattered in this world.

There were two brothers in Woburn, Mass., whom Francis occasionally hung out with. The two brothers were very close. One weekend they got their hands on a bottle of five hundred valiums. They spent the weekend eating the valium and drinking alcohol. On Monday morning, one of the brothers was found dead in a closet, from an overdose. The other brother blamed himself and was distraught with grief and guilt. Francis tried to speak to him, to get through to him, to no avail. Finally, one night while a bunch of people were parked in the housing project parking lot, the other brother pulled out a forty-five automatic, and said “Hey everyone, goodbye.” He then put the gun beside his temple and pulled the trigger. Francis remembers seeing the head explode in a shower of red, and was watching an eyeball spinning around for what seemed like hours, on the hood of a car.

Francis had developed a close friendship with a professor he had in college (Francis started attending college when he was 43 years old). She was named Cornelius Brous, his psychology teacher for the following several years. They became colleagues, and had warm, fond, but not romantic, feelings for each other. Francis sensed a distinct deep sadness in her, and tried to help her to deal with whatever it was from earlier in her life that had affected her in such a negative fashion. She would only let him scratch the surface, and would not let him in any further. Whatever it was must have traumatized her to the core. She would not talk about religion, or about what she thought might happen after death. The subject always got quickly changed, and the conversation redirected. She was obviously depressed, and Francis wondered whether she earned her Doctorate in Psychology in order to understand and help herself. The year after his father died, Francis visited Dr. Brous in a hospice, where she was quickly dying from uterine cancer. There were tears in both their eyes when they were bidding goodbye to each other. He told her he would see her on the other side, where they would co-teach some more classes. She smiled and nodded. Three days later she was dead. No funeral, as she was cremated. Francis was wearing down. He was about to turn fifty, and had seen far too much death and despair.

Raymond Joseph Keating (no relation to Francis’ cousin Michael Keating), was a huge man. Francis was like his older brother, having known him since Raymond, who was called Rucka, was eighteen years old. He worked out in the gym constantly, and could bench an unbelievable six-hundred pounds. Francis knew Rucka to be a funny guy with a well developed sense of humor. Then he developed Diabetes, and had to use a needle every day. He still lifted weights, and since he was already using a needle daily, started using steroids also. These made him depressed and unruly. He would speak to Francis about how there was no God and no real reason to live. His “friends” got him to use drugs like coke and speed. He turned to heavy drink. Then he had to have a good portion of his leg cut off because of the diabetes. This further alienated and depressed him. He ended up on serious painkillers, oxycontins. He spiraled downhill until Francis finally had to cut him loose, as he became too unpredictable. On Christmas Eve, 2004, seven months after Francis said his last goodbye to his dying psychology professor, Rucka was found dead.

Francis had turned fifty on Dec eleventh, 2004. Two days before New Years day 2005, Paul Sorenson was found dead. Francis and Paul had been friends since 1973. Paul was a bit of a flower child, but had many instances of rage when he drank a lot. He had uncontrollable desires and a tremendous amount of pent up hostility. A born again Christian who tried hard to believe in an afterlife, but who confided to Francis that he was convinced that there was just nothingness after death. One time, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, he got into a drunken argument with his wife, who had just told him that his son was not his. The police showed up, and Paul came roaring drunkenly out the front door with two guns. The cops had no choice but to return fire. Paul ended up shot three times. In the hospital they removed one kidney, his spleen, half of his Pancreas, his gall-bladder, and some bowel parts. Paul recuperated but was never the same. He finally succeeded in driving his body to death during the 2004/5 holidays.

Opinion: Francis tries hard to cope with the many deaths he has been faced with, and the emotional distress that it causes him. He still loves strawberry jam. He believes that when the time is right, the last thing he will taste will be the strawberry jam smeared around the barrel of his nine-millimeter Glock. But for now, he wonders who from the Suicide Club will be the next to go. There are only four left: Paul’s brother Neil, John S., Bob W., and Francis. Francis is trying very hard to try to be the last. He has a hope, however dim, that by speaking with people, he can help them through their depression and despair. He tells them to seek medical attention; he participates in round-table discussions that are similar to group therapy or encounter sessions. Some of these seem to work for a while. He has hopes of helping the other three before it is too late, but deep down he senses that it is already too late.

And always, he keeps the Glock within reach, in case he awakens and is in such an extreme state of panic and disillusionment that he feels the need to cancel himself out then and there. But to reach the Glock, he must reach past his medicine first, thus giving him a chance to take a pill and come down from his disconsolation. However, he has reported that the medication seems to be taking longer to work, and is less effective when it does work.

Prognosis: It seems inevitable that Francis will be found dead as the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, and that there will be strawberry jam smeared across, and in, his mouth and skull cavity.

Recommendation: Different, stronger medicine. Confinement to a locked-down ward in a psychological facility. However, this should be done suddenly and without his knowledge, as it is reasonable to expect that should he find out about it in advance, he will definitely suicide.

Dr. Raoul Lipschitz, M.D., Psychiatry.