CathNews New Zealand

I never owned a Kate Spade fashion accessory, but I once almost crossed paths with Anthony Bourdain.

What unites them in my mind (besides their celebrity status) is their death by suicide and the fact that they both left not only grieving friends and partners behind but also a child.

Kate’s daughter is 13. Anthony’s is 11.

Commenting in The New York Post (June 6, 2018) on the death of Kate Spade, Bethany Mandel says simply: “While Spade assured her daughter ‘it had nothing to do with you,’ it will have everything to do with Frances for the rest of her life.”

As the seventy-something stepdaughter of a man who ended his life when I was 18, I second her testimony.

My stepfather, a progressive civil liberties attorney in St. Louis in the 1940s and 1950s, married my widowed mother in 1955, the year before I graduated from eighth grade.

I hated him, not because of who he was but because of who he was not—my beloved father, who had died tragically by drowning at the age of 42.

Devoted to my father’s memory, I could not adjust to this new member of our family.

Yet, as time passed and our life settled into new routines, I grudgingly accepted him.

He was unhappy in ways that I did not understand, given that I was more concerned with myself than anyone else.

He tried to commit suicide when I was in my mid-teens by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in his downtown office then sleepily calling my mother.

She rushed to his rescue, taking my older brother with her.

They got him to the nearest hospital, where he had his stomach pumped.

It was my older brother who confided this story to me sometime later, as my mother did not want to talk about it.

Two weeks after my graduation from high school, he died at home in his sleep.

He and my mother had quarreled in the middle of the night, and she had slammed out of their bedroom to sleep in the guest room across the hall.

From my own room, I heard them shouting at each other and also heard my mother’s exit.

Later in the night, I was awakened by the sound of ragged breathing: a rough, snoring-like sound, which seemed abnormal.

I was frightened, but didn’t know what to do. I wanted to believe that there was nothing wrong.

In the morning, when my stepfather did not come downstairs for breakfast, my mom went to check on him.

This is when I heard her scream; she was hysterical and insisted that I go look.

I did not approach his body lying on the bed but observed his stillness and pallor from the doorway.

The family physician came to our house and pronounced my stepfather dead of a heart attack.

I never believed this.

I knew of his dependence on sleeping pills and amphetamines (which were generously prescribed in those days) and privately concluded that he had died of a combination of alcohol (he’d been out late drinking with a law school buddy) and sleeping pills.

My mother subscribed to the heart attack theory of his death, and I was unable to share my doubts and fears with my two brothers.

A half-century later, after my mother herself passed away, my brothers and I (all now in our 60s) shared our theories about how our stepfather died.

We agreed that it was an overdose.

He was depressed, his marriage to our mother was failing, and he was known to take a lot of prescription drugs.

It is possible that he did not intend to die that night, but he did—leaving us to deal with the consequences.

I can’t speak for my brothers (themselves now deceased), but I can tell you how my stepfather’s death affected me. Continue reading

• Madelon Sprengnether is a poet, memoirist and literary critic and Regents Professor Emerita of the University of Minnesota.

 

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