Baffling Suicides

I know people don’t like it much when I write about suicide, and I admit to a morbid fascination with the topic, perhaps because of my own problems with ideation. But I recently read about a group suicide that’s so puzzling, I can’t stop thinking about it. The case is closed now because there are no answers. From the L.A. Times:

Some time in early May, the exact date unknown, Margo and Grace, both 21; Fransuhi Kesisoglu, 72; and Manas, 58, committed suicide with Vicodin, sleeping pills and antidepressants, they said. Only Margrit did not have drugs in her system. As Manas lay unconscious from the overdose, she shot him in the chest. Then she put the gun into her mouth and fired.

That’s a mother, father, grandmother and two twin daughters. No, they weren’t part of a cult; they weren’t religious at all, in fact. Nor was there significant economic trouble the whole family was subject to, nor was anyone sick. It makes no sense. For other family members who struggle to understand, there are no answers:

“There’s just nothing there,” said Orange County Sheriff’s Det. Dan Salcedo, who has been trying to decipher the case since late May. “I’d like to find something, have something, some possible reason to give the family some closure.

“If there were any problems,” he said, “they certainly kept it to themselves.”

There was, however, one odd detail: the twin girls.

Margo and Grace were inseparable. Through elementary, middle and high school they dressed identically — in dark-colored turtlenecks with long sleeves and dark pants. Fellow students at Bernice Ayer Middle School said they were quiet, polite, sweet, smart — and strange. The girls told acquaintances they would be together for the rest of their lives.

Sometimes Manas would join them at school for lunch. In the afternoon, he often arrived 20 minutes before classes let out and waited to pick them up, students recalled.

When they were psych interns at a hospital for pre-med rotations, now in college, they still dressed identically, which I don’t think is the norm for adult twins.

Dr. Kai MacDonald compared them to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the indistinguishable characters in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

“It’s funny that certain people are so conjoined,” MacDonald said. “I guess I would consider them as something of a unit.”

But strange behavior — and not that strange, even — doesn’t explain why a whole family would decide to commit suicide. I’ve read every article I can find, and nothing else jumps out at me. And why do I care so much? I don’t know. It’s just that knowing the agony of the suicidal impulse, I can’t imagine what these five people were going through. The “house of horrors” model doesn’t apply to a home with corpses, but to a home with five people all thinking about wanting to die.

liz | 11:42 AM | suicide