Mother commits suicide at same spot as her only daughter

[luckyjimm]

It's not the first time I've read of a parent committing suicide soon after their only child kills themselves:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7002179.stm

For me it's about the saddest story imaginable. I think this is because, like everyone else, I'm in a family, and I know what it's like to be loved by my parents, how much they have given for me, and how much they have sacrificed for me and my brother. And also I know the happiness (and sadness) parents get from their children's lives.

It is an intensely stupid and selfish act for this girl to have killed herself over some little tiff with her boyfriend. In a sense, her life is not hers to take. As an only child, she killed three people when she killed herself.

When I think of whatever abnormality of mind made this girl kill herself, I just think she was very foolish to lack the vision to see her short-term unhappiness was utterly inconsequential in the broader sweep of her life. Maybe that's what being young is about: not realising that your current happiness or sadness won't last forever.

But when I think of her mother's death, it strikes me as unbelievably poignant and tragic. She killed herself because she felt she had nothing left to live for. Quite differently from her daughter, she judged that, yes, her life had lost its purpose and would not get better. In losing her only child, she lost her own future. The family's narrative was over - growing old with her husband, tending the garden, watching television, perhaps bingo or bridge would be all she had to look forward to. She'd never dance at her daughter's wedding. In an act of impetuousness her daughter had killed her own mother's hope for the future.

Perhaps this story is so upsetting because it is small scale. I can't relate to a thousand made homeless by an earthquake. But the death of a family strikes me hard.