A Life Shadowed by Depression and Suicide

March 23, 2009 at 9:42 am (Books, Death)

Tormented novelist Sylvia Plath explored the themes of suicide in her 1963 novel “The Bell Jar,” which follows an ambitious college student who attempts to kill herself after suffering a nervous breakdown while interning at a New York City magazine. The novel is a refelction of Plath’s own experiences of suffering depression while working at Mademoiselle as a college student.

Plath went on to study poetry at Cambridge University, after a stay at a mental institution. It was at Cambrisge that she met Ted Hughes, famed poet laureate, and the two were married in 1956. The couple had two children — Nicholas and Freida — but separated in 1962 after Mr. Hughes began an affair with another woman, Assia Wevill. Wevill later married Hughes and helped raise Nicholas and Freida after Plath took her own life at the age of 30 by sticking her head in an oven in her London home on Feb. 11, 1963, as the young children slept nearby.

Some six years later, Wevill killed herself and her four year old daughter, Shura, styling the murder-suicide in the same manner as Plath’s own death, using a gas stove.

And now, nearly a half-century after his mother and stepmother took their own lives, Nicholas Hughes, an evolutionary biologist who studied stream fish and spent much of his time trekking across Alaska on field studies, hanged himself in his Alaskan home, March 16th 2009.

Sheilded from stories about his mother’s suicide till well into his teens, Hughes lived an academic life largely out of the public eye. Though, friends and family said he long struggled with depression.

A life darkened by the shadows depression and suicide, it leaves one to wonder if such is hereditary or a family curse. Can one inherit a gene bent for suicide? Is depression a catching symptom like the common cold? Though he remained in silence about the suicides, and had protected his children from the details of their mother’s death, in at least one poem, Ted Hughes indicates that Nicholas, only one at the time of her death, was pained even as a small child, recalling in one stanza how Nicholas’s eyes “Became wet jewels/ The hardest substance of the purest pain/ As I fed him in his high white chair.” Is this the ravings of a poet waxing romantic, or were these but the beginning signs that Nicholas’s mother’s depression had left her body and found her son?

Link: NYTimes–Son of Sylvia Plath Commits Suicide