“In July 1999, the little girl who had seen her mother’s credit card scissored became a tenured law professor with all the associated stature and job security.”
This blog is authored by the daughter of a suicide – a man who, like Vermont Law School’s Cheryl Hanna, had one of the world’s great jobs (he was a branch chief at NIH who did cancer research) as well as family happiness (Hanna told an interviewer “I was sort of getting to that point in life where it probably wasn’t going to happen… Now I have this crazy family. I thought I was just going to have a career.”) – and University Diaries has from its beginning discussed both particular university suicides and the larger national problem of suicide (most recently Robin Williams’ death has had people thinking about it).
In this nicely written brief review of Hanna’s sad and traumatic youth, and then her socially committed, successful academic career, UD senses the same complex mix of painful early years and strikingly successful adult years that characterized her father’s life. There’s also the same strange onset of a total determination to die (her husband describes “the rapid onset and severity of Hanna’s depression”) on the part of a person everyone recalls as – in the words of a colleague – “a vibrant, enthusiastic person who was fun to be around.”
“People seemed to run out of their own being,” Philip Roth writes in one of his novels, as his character tries to figure out why even people with what look like great lives kill themselves. It is an odd thought – that just as each of us is given a physical life of a certain length, so each of us has a — call it a spiritual allotment…