The Elephant

The suicide rate of veterans aged 18 to 34 steadily increased from 2006 to 2016, with a jump of more than 10 percent from 2015 to2016. That translates into 45 deaths per 100,000 veterans, the highest of any age group.

From Military Times: In 2016, the most recent data available, the suicide rate for veterans was 1.5 times greater than for Americans who never served in the military. About 20 veterans a day across the country take their own lives, and veterans accounted for 14 percent of all adult suicide deaths in the U.S. in 2016, even though only 8 percent of the country’s population has served in the military.

One summer years ago I hung around a row of graves in one particular part of Pine Forest Cemetery in Lauderdale County. I was between semesters of teaching, and when depression hit me, that’s where I’d go.

That sounds a lot more morbid than it really was, although, yeah, it WAS a little morbid, I guess. I had a reason, such as it was, for being there: My younger brother, with whom I’d been very close both in age and in terms of our relationship, had died unexpectedly. And even knowing “he” wasn’t there (his actual self), still, it brought some peace to me to sit on the ground and think about him.

My parents eventually ended up reposing next to his grave, but that was years down the road. In the meantime, I sat and thought about Jack and looked around at the other graves nearby, wondering idly about some of them.

Long before those days, I’d been told that some of my forebears were laid to rest at Pine Forest, and as it turned out, not far from my brother’s grave; so I read their statistics and noticed that my great-great-grandfather William “Billy” Skinner had died on Christmas Day in 1885 (if you can believe things on grave markers, which is sometimes not the case).

That brought to mind something a relative had mentioned in passing, a bit of information I’d stuffed into my head and had more or less forgotten: “Billy Skinner committed suicide.”

This is a harder-than-usual post to write because of the topic I’m covering. When occasionally you hear of somebody taking his own life, inevitably you also eventually hear, “I just don’t understand how someone could do that.”

I do.

I’m not going to try to explore today an average person’s depths or sources of depression; but as I wrote at the first of this post, there IS one area I’m looking at, and that is the soldier’s life when he comes home. 

I’ve mentioned before that my father was about ten years old when his grandfather Andrew Jackson Alawine died: he lived down the road from him, knew him well, recalled what happened around the time he died, and told me when I was a teenager. (I refer you to my 6th post of my other family blog, in which I shared what he recounted to me.)

https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html 

My father said his grandfather Andrew never had discussed the time he served in the Civil War, and yet in those last days of his life—after his wife Lucretia died—he relived some of the battles and was out of his head.

My daughters’ grandfather Edwin Thead never told his children or grandchildren anything much about the time he spent in Europe towards the end of World War II. It was a brief period of service for him, but he just wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen.

Like Andrew Jackson Alawine, Billy Skinner had served in the Civil War, as the records below show.

Two of his brothers—Calvin J. and Marion F.—had also served, and Calvin had died on May 22, 1862 in Danville, VA. Billy was “paroled” (i.e., surrendered) at Vicksburg in July 1863. He’d married Susan Kelly in 1854. When she died in about 1872 or so, family tradition says he himself carved her headstone from wood. Being a master carpenter, he would’ve been able to do that.

He married Maggie Petty Mayo Sweeney, my great-great-grandmother, sometime around 1874. Their large extended family included half-siblings and step-siblings; they lived in Kemper County by then, apparently fairly prosperous, as Billy was listed a “mechanic in wood shop” (more than simply “carpenter”) on the 1880 census.

And yet…in 1885 he committed suicide, at a usually joyous time of year.

And then there is this:

(Thanks to Jan Boyles Wilson of Colorado.)

Just to help you recall who this person was: His father James and James’s brother Alexander were in South Alabama and South Mississippi in the early 1840’s. Several of Alex’s sons served in the Civil War, as did James’s. You can review all that history in this post.

http://theadsnotthreads.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-civil-war-and-theads.html

On Alex’s side, two sons—George W. and Columbus (“Lum”)—came home to carry on the Thead name. George lived to be a good old age, but Lum apparently died around 1869 or 1870, shortly after he returned from his own service, during which he spent time in a prison camp known for hard conditions. Lum had been discharged earlier, in 1862, because of “incipient consumption” (i.e., tuberculosis), but he rejoined and was captured, as the above post shows.

On the first-cousin side of the Thead family, over in Clarke County, Mississippi, James’s son Hamilton “Hamp” returned scarred from the Civil War—not so much physically as emotionally. His brothers William Alexander and John (and maybe another brother, Richmond) had died in the war. All three men had been in the same 13th Mississippi Regiment, so it’s possible Hamp was near them when they died. A record shows that he himself was listed as a “good and brave” soldier, but then he also “suffered a prisoner to escape” and served some kind of time in the equivalent of military jail.

He raised a family in Mississippi after the War. And then he committed suicide. He was buried on a hill overlooking the Buccatunna Creek, at the back of his property.

And the newspaper said, “The cause of his rash act is a mystery.”

Today we’d call it PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It doesn’t just affect the military, but we associated it more with soldiers.

There’s no way to make this post light-hearted; I would never even try. Perhaps, instead, looking back at these men who didn’t have the diagnosis of “PTSD” and suffered, sometimes for years, men whose families maybe only knew they were dealing with inner demons unimaginable to the everybody else—perhaps we just need to bear in mind that they have indeed “seen the elephant” where we have not.

Ælfwine