I recently came across this article, which I wrote in 1994 after the publication of my book, Awakening from the Deep Sleep.

In my book, I had decided to include a story about my journey as a man. One story was about my grandfather, Izzy, who had committed suicide in 1970. Ever since then, for almost 25 years, the suicide had been kept a secret. My parents spread the story that my grandfather had died of a heart attack.

As a family therapist, I realized that keeping the secret was detrimental to me and to the family. I decided to go public with the family secret. I submitted the story to the Detroit Free Press, our local newspaper, which I had delivered many years before.

A week after submission on a Friday morning. I received a call from the features editor at the paper. He liked my piece very much and was planning to publish it on Monday. I said ‘great’, and then went into a panic. I had not told my parents or my family that my piece would run in the local newspaper.

Here’s my conversation with the editor:

Editor: Yes, we like it very much. It will be the lead column.

Rob: That’s great. But first, I need to check with my family.

Editor: This is a little unusual.

Rob: I know, but I’ll get right back to you.

Editor: Yes, but I need to know in a few hours.

As soon as I got off the phone, I called my mother.

Rob: Hi Mom, how are you?

Mom: (the health report commences for several minutes)!

Rob: Mom, do you remember the piece I wrote in my book about Grandpa? Now they’re going to feature it on Monday in the Detroit Free Press.

Mom:  Robbie’ in the Free Press? I don’t know about that. People don’t know that Grandpa was a gambler and that he committed suicide.

Rob: Well, Mom, if you don’t want me to, I won’t. Don’t worry about it.

At that moment, I felt deflated, and I realized once again I’d acted just as I had 30 years earlier in my family. Despite all the surface changes and the Ph.D. after my name, I still felt like the little only child in the family who tried to keep everyone happy, especially my highly anxious and depressed mother.

Dejected, I went home from my office and told my wife and my sons that my mother had blocked the article from running. As I talked about it, my tears began to flow. I realized that writing about my grandfather had been a way of resolving my grief. It was not to exploit my grandfather or to spite my parents. No, this was a tribute to the man I loved and missed so terribly.

I knew that publishing a piece was what I needed to do for me and for Izzy. What it was going to do to the rest of the family, I could not predict, but I felt strongly that I needed to proceed with the publication.

I called the editor back and told him to go with it.

Then, I got scared all over again.  I knew there were several people I needed to call before Monday. I feared that my family members were going to be terribly upset with my decision.  After many years of trying to understand my family,  I knew there was going to be hell to pay for my decision.

The first call I made was to my aunt, a private and proud woman who I knew was still angry at my grandfather. I figured she would be disappointed in me. Wrong!

“I haven’t kept this a secret and don’t think it should be kept quiet. I am proud of you and fully support you in publishing this.”

– Aunt Alice

Next were my mother’s cousins, who I figured had already guessed about the suicide. Wrong again. They were shocked, and they had no idea that he had taken his own life.

Next, my cousin, Patti, is in Arizona. The wayward member of the family who I knew was also close to my grandfather. The cousin whom I always seemed to be reaching out to but rarely heard from on her own. What to expect from her, I did not know.

Patti: “Robbie, the piece you wrote was beautiful. I loved grandpa the same way you did. I remember all the wonderful things he’d do with me. Robbie, as we’re talking on the line, I have the feeling he’s listening in.”

Rob: “Patti, it’s so eerie that you said that. I feel the same way too.”

Patti: “Robbie, I think you’re the greatest. Don’t be so upset that you called your mother for her permission. That’s what I love about you – your kindness, your concern for others.”

Rob: “Thank you, Patti. I never knew you felt that way. I love you, too.”

Finally, the potentially most difficult conversation, the one with my mother.

Rob: “Mom, I’ve decided to go ahead with publishing the piece on grandpa.”

Mom: Silence

Rob: “Mom, what do you think?”

Mom: “Robbie, I’m shocked. How could you do this? For all these years, I’ve told everybody that grandpa is a great man. What are people going to think? I know what I’ll do … I’ll just tell them, this is YOUR story.

Rob: “Mom. I’m not doing this to hurt you. If that’s what you want to tell people, fine. But I’ve made the decision, I’m going to have it published.”

Suddenly, I understood my mother and my family much better. While she loved her father, she had related to him very differently than I did. His gambling, depression, and suicidal talk had been powerful sources of fear and shame for her, her sister, and my grandmother. To them, gambling had almost destroyed their lives. It had been a real and dreadful source of shame and fear that had controlled how they saw the world and lived their lives.

For years, I thought I had understood my mother, my grandfather, and our family system. But publishing that piece made me see the limits of my understanding. The maintenance of the secret had blocked my view.

Publishing the piece brought us closer together. Revealing the secret was like lifting a veil that had kept us in perpetual semi-darkness. We had become so used to it, that we had forgotten what the world looked like in natural light.

Here is the story that was published:

The Pawn Ticket

I had been putting off cleaning the garage for several months. One day after tripping over the accumulated junk, I decided to confront the unsightly mix of tangled extension cords,  dust-covered garden tools, screws, nails, old bikes, and many spiders. As I was cleaning the mess, I became intrigued by an old metal box filled with items long forgotten.

I paused to examine the contents of a rusted gray metal box. I was unprepared for what I discovered. It was an old electric sander with a manila tag from the pawn shop where my grandfather had worked most of his life until it was burned down in the Detroit riots of 1967.

In his beautiful handwriting, I could still make out the words, “Henry Washington, June 5, 1958”. I knew the meaning of the tag: it was the date by which Mr. Washington had to pay back his loan from the pawn shop in order to retrieve his sander.

I guessed what had happened. When  Mr. Washington did not claim it on time, the sander was put up for sale. My grandfather had bought it at a cut-rate price. Then, like many other ragtag things, Izzie brought it home along with old radios, alarm clocks, hair dryers, and electric drills and toasters. The sander had been sitting in our basement in the metal box for over 30 years. Gazing at that pawn ticket, I realized I had not seen anything in my grandfather’s beautiful handwriting since his death in 1970.

The sight of the ticket in his handwriting brought back many memories. I remember as a child, living with my parents and grandparents in a small suburban home on Meadowlark in Oak Park. Every night I would wait for Grandpa Izzie to come home from the pawnshop. He would often bring home an array of unclaimed items. I always thought of them as his special gifts to me. Holding that ticket, I felt the rush of memories. That small manila tag, still reeking of the smell of tobacco was the only memento I had of Izzie.

During the Detroit riots of 1967, the pawnshop was burned down. Less dramatically but just as inevitably, Izzie, out of work for the first time in his life, became depressed. Just like the city of Detroit, Izzie began rapidly deteriorating. With little money and the loss of income, he rekindled his old habit of gambling.  The gambling money came from the sale of diamonds which had been loaned to him on consignment. Instead of paying back the loans, he gambled away the money. His drinking increased. In 1969, when I returned home from New York City, where I had moved after college, he looked terrible. He spent most of his time in his room, drinking and playing solitaire. He became more forlorn when his girlfriend refused to see him anymore. “Bad guys” were hounding him for the money he had borrowed.

It was then he began to once again make suicide threats. He had always been a manic depressive and had made suicide threats on and off for many years. He even made a plan for how he would do it. After years of making the threats, my mother and her sister did not know what to do. They sent him to a family doctor, who had no suggestions on how to help Izzie.

I was finishing a day of teaching school in New York City when I received a call from my father. Izzie’s final threat was not idle. He had killed himself by swallowing jeweler’s acid, just as he had threatened many times before.

In 1999, I showed my wife and kids that tag, I felt myself fighting back the tears. In a way, I wished they would finally flow. Due to the mixed feelings associated with his suicide, I had never been able to cry over the loss of my grandfather. He had been an extremely important person in my life. He introduced me to baseball and the Detroit Tigers. Every Sunday, he would take me and my cousins to Town Drugs, where we could buy any candy bar we wanted. Food was part of our bond. Frequently we’d go out to breakfast at the local Coney Island joint. On special occasions, he would take me to Saunders to enjoy their specialty: hot fudge cream puff. I think my love of sweets goes back to those times with Izzie.

The tragedy of his death had been made more complicated by my family’s decision to keep the cause of death a secret. At his age, they figured why dishonor his memory? No one would doubt the family story that this heavy smoker had had a heart attack. Little did I understand that keeping the suicide a secret would block me from adequately mourning the grandfather I had loved so dearly. My friends knew my grandfather had died, but out of loyalty to my family, I could share with no one my anguish over the manner of his death.

In the years immediately following his death, my feelings about Izzie alternated between guilt and anger. As an only child growing up in a house of adults, my specialty had been to keep everyone cheerful, especially this alternately morose and exuberant man. At the end, I had failed to cheer him up. It seemed perfectly natural for me to major in psychology in college. As a psych student, moreover, I believed I should have recognized the warning signs of suicide and been able to prevent it. Maybe if I had not left Detroit for New York City, he wouldn’t have become so depressed. Maybe I should have invited him to visit me in New York City. Maybe I should’ve called him more. The list of “shoulds” constantly ran through my mind. I missed him deeply but was reluctant to talk to anybody about him because I was told to keep the suicide secret.

Today every time I watch or listen to baseball, I am reminded of Izzie. As a child, he would often take me to a Tigers game. Izzie was such a big baseball fan, that he always seemed to have a portable radio stuck in his ear. He loved it listening to Ernie Harwell, the voice of the Tigers. Izzie liked to call the Tigers the Pussycats in those days of constant fifth-place finishes.

Izzie had always been my number-one fan. Often I had heard him say, “Robbie, you’re going to be a great man someday.” With his encouragement I had made two important decisions in 1970: to apply to graduate school and to ask my girlfriend, Pat, to marry me. How sad and disappointed I felt that he had not lived long enough to learn about my acceptance at Harvard. He took his life only a few months before our wedding. It went through my mind that if he had really cared about me, he would not have taken his life.

As the years went by, sorrow emerged as the dominant emotion. I missed him. I ached at the memory of him waking me up in the morning by imitating a bugler or driving me and my friends to high school in his ’61 Chevy Nova. “Who’s kicking me in the amplifier?” he’d ask the laughing teenagers in the backseat.

I was sad, too, that my own sons never had a chance to meet Izzie. They would have enjoyed this slight, handsome man who made bad jokes, spoke his own foreign tongue especially designed for his grandchildren, and who would pile all the kids in the neighborhood into his small car to take us to an afternoon Tigers game.

As I showed my sons the pawn ticket, I was pleased that they, too, have had wonderful relationships with their own grandfathers. This thought helped me to realize that I wasn’t to blame, and Izzie wasn’t to be punished for taking his own life. Now, I can understand how tortuous his undiagnosed manic depression must have been. The most painful facet of Izzie’s death — missing him — was simply a function of his passing away. Suicide and heart attacks have equal status there.

I detached the tag and gently cleaned off the dust. I realized that maybe a pawn ticket might be an appropriate memory of this man. In some ways, he had pawned his own life away.

In many ways, I owe a debt to him as well. He has contributed much to who I am today: to the development of my playful side; to my courage to take risks; and to my love of baseball. Now, I am determined not to allow his manner of death to obliterate the spirit of the man. To me, he has always been a hero, a dapper guy in a Fedora and a natty sport coat with his shoes brightly shined. As I placed the ticket in my wallet, I vowed never to stow his memory away again. I realized that his final act of suicide did not diminish the wonderful man that Izzie was.