Desne A. Crossley: My Cousin’s Suicide

The first lesson in keeping secrets came in 1962, when I was eight. We lived in a black neighborhood in Chicago, a city deeply segregated then. My mother made a priority of teaching me what honesty could portend in a mean world fraught with hazards. Honesty could be at odds with personal, familial, and community safety. Her philosophy and truth were her own. What mattered were our connections to one another, not what society might think. Her unique gift was her ability to love all kinds of people, to see us as acceptable and valuable, despite our flaws. Mom said, “I love you, but I’m teaching you to function in a world that not only doesn’t love you, but may be hostile toward you, as well.”

That year we met a young woman, “Kipper,” through her roommate, an acquaintance of my mother’s. Kip was tall, five-feet eleven-inches, big-boned, three-hundred twenty-five pounds, with a pretty babyface, gorgeous creamy skin, and curly black hair. She and her roommate lived in an old brown brick building, in a small apartment with almost no furniture. What I remember is that the roommates’ dark hardwood floors gleamed with polish and care. Kipper worked long hours for a physician in private practice and ate a single daily meal after getting home around 10 p.m.

She was almost twelve years my senior, but treated me, a kid, as an equal from day-one. Her first of several nicknames for me was “Leroy.” I was delighted to have a special name, just between us. She whistled beautifully and would sing “Twinkle-Twinkle Little Star,” both melody and words, backwards. “Are, what you wonder how I star, little twinkle-twinkle sky, in the diamond like a high, so world, the, above you, what wonder how I star, little twinkle-twinkle.…” She performed it for me as two stanzas—whistled regular melody, then sung backwards. I spit laughter the first time I heard it. There was no one like her.

My family moved to California in the summer of 1966 for my father’s work. We were three-thousand miles from Chicago when I overheard my mother talking long-distance with Kipper. Something bad had happened to her physician-employer, something about a lawsuit; and she was let go without a net. In 1967, at the age of twenty-four, she relocated to Palo Alto to live at our house and start a new life. I was thirteen and an only child. She would be the sister I never had. 

In our foyer, at the foot of the stairs, she had called up to me, “Leroy, I’m here! Baby, come down!”

Excited, I raced down, my head lowered to make sure I did not miss a step. I raised my eyes to meet hers. Looking back was a stranger weighing only one-hundred twenty-seven pounds, dressed in a fitted black suit with a pencil skirt. Her arms were outstretched. The voice was Kipper’s, but the body belonged to Twiggy. Stunned, I turned without pausing and ran away, back to the second floor.

Who was that, acting like she knew me?

This was not the reunion we envisioned, and I had hurt her feelings, thankfully only momentarily. It would not take long before Mom and Kip schooled me on the impact of crash dieting, and we were back to the way we were in Chicago, only closer. While I had missed her first couple of decades on the planet, I still think of us as having grown up together.

Kipper wasted no time with this fresh start at life and landed a secretarial job easily. She had worn one of my mother’s smartly tailored, knit boucle’ dresses. Her resume and letters of recommendation were kept spotless and ready in a slim leather portfolio. Mom and I waited for her in the car in the company parking lot. The building was low, modern and undistinguished—part of a sprawling suburban industrial complex. In what seemed like a short time, she reappeared, the portfolio extended with a victorious wave, her face beaming.

The new boss was an important division manager. Kipper’s work ethic, precision, and range were impeccable. Everyone loved her. The boss was so impressed, he promoted her three times in six months. After a couple of years, she got her own place ten minutes away from us; a furnished “garden” apartment that included a balcony overlooking lush greenery with a graceful fountain centerpiece. I thought she had moved to heaven; still, most evenings she ate dinner at our house.

Men always fell for her. She did not even try. One of my mother’s friends from Nashville had a son, Keith, about Kipper’s age, who visited our family while vacationing along the west coast. Keith had it bad. He had only been near Kip for a few hours at our house and was smitten. When she did not answer the phone days later, he was beside himself. A total fool. He went to her apartment. When she did not respond, he did something I thought only happened in the movies: he found a way to climb onto her balcony and peer in. She was across her bed dressed for housecleaning—and unconscious—her hands in pink dishwashing gloves; on the carpeted floor near the bed were a roll of paper towels, a bucket, window squeegee, and a bottle of ammonia. It looked as though she had been cleaning her sliding glass doors in the middle of the night. Keith called my parents and an ambulance.

At the hospital, medical staff asked my mother a lot of pointed questions. They said Kipper had overdosed on sleeping pills and could be arrested for attempted murder. I heard this report from Mom when I was a teenager—when I had no idea that attempted suicide could get someone put away as a criminal.

My mother was quick and convincing in her response and pressed these officials, “Who—who—would commit suicide and die washing the windows of a rented apartment? It just doesn’t make sense. It has to be a mistake. She works so damned hard, she probably needed to sleep fast before another hard day doing the work of her three male colleagues!”

Despite this assertion, my mother was fully aware of Kipper’s relentless depression and penchant for self-harm. I, on the other hand, was young and dumb about such things. Mom said nothing to them about Kipper’s mother Evelyn, who was popular in their Chicago neighborhood. She was not a beauty, but projected glamour and a fun-loving nature. She wore false eyelashes all the time, and I remember her in a couture A-line dress with a psychedelic paisley print of turquoise, purple, pink, and white. She was phony and distant, and she and Kip had a difficult relationship they tried to hide. Now with decades of hindsight, I recall the look on my easy-going father’s face. He liked almost everybody, but seemed to recoil the few times he and Evelyn had to sit across from one another in our living room when she visited from Chicago.

Nothing was said about Kipper’s father Bill’s death. When she was a teenager, Bill took medication for a bad heart. Kip was on the phone with a school friend. Her father called out for her. She could hear him, but youthful self-involvement delayed her from ending the chatter promptly. She arrived at his bedside to find the pills splayed on the floor. He must have dropped the bottle and died reaching, half out of bed. She would never forgive herself. She whittled the whole incident down to these words: “I let my father die because I couldn’t get off the phone.”

Nothing was said about Kipper having been enrolled in college at the tender age of fifteen, to study architecture, of all things, at the University of Chicago. She also was engaged to be married, with the wedding to be held in Paris. What mother would agree to her kid getting married at fifteen—and to such exaggerated fanfare? Was Evelyn slyly shedding parenthood? The night before the wedding, Kip discovered her fiancé having sex with her friend and returned to Chicago. In time, she would drop out of the University with only six hours of coursework to go, something I never understood.

There were other incidents leading up to her breakout to California, beyond the fraught childhood and lost job with the Chicago physician in trouble with the law. There was a car accident with multiple fatalities and the time that she, a pedestrian, was hit by a Chicago city bus skidding uncontrollably across snow-covered ice. These, too, went unmentioned. Kipper’s intellect, workaholism, and crazy-wonderful humor held people to a manageable distance. Meanwhile, my mother was aware that she anxiously overthought why she continued to survive mishaps, rejection, and tragedy.

Within a day following vacationing Keith’s heroics and Kipper’s “accident,” police and medical staff finally released her into the guardianship of my parents, now “blood relatives.” My mother had lied on legal documents. I was never, ever, to call Kipper anything but “my cousin.” Our family unit was hard to articulate to outsiders, so I said as little as possible. Mom became Kip’s de facto mother; Kip even called her “Mommy” sometimes, a child’s name for her that I had already outgrown. Meanwhile, Kipper referred to Evelyn as “Mother,” a title like calling someone Doctor. My father was a beloved uncle. I was a cousin, sometimes a sister.

It was hard for me in adolescence to heed my mother’s earlier lesson, committing for real to secrecy and a familial thread of dishonesty. However, I knew my parents to be good citizens. They were compassionate, generous, responsible, accountable, accessible and helpful to others, trustworthy, and deeply loving. Our family’s present secret in white suburbia would insulate Kipper, and I naively believed that under Mom’s magic care and love, my cousin would heal and become whole.

***

Kipper was very close to a divorced guy at work who was sweet and smart; Donald’s laugh was shy and silly. One morning in the wee hours, they burst into our house, deliriously giddy, shaking us out of our beds and proclaiming their decision to elope. It was exciting and romantic, but, in the end, they did not follow through. Kipper and Donald would remain close forever.

Even in the heady exuberance of love, Kip suffered from deep bouts of depression. She had two psychiatrists and lied to both. These professionals were confused, not realizing they were being manipulated by this lovely young woman. This two-on-one path to recovery was a mystery to me. Had this strategy been mandated by the police or medical staff following one of Kipper’s four accidents? Struggling for clarity, the psychiatrists asked Kipper if they could meet with my mother. My cousin agreed, but would have known that her aunt would tell these experts the truth as she understood it. They were grateful and very impressed. They asked where my mother had trained. Mom just laughed and confessed to having dropped out of college in the 1940’s, sure her racist dean was out to murder her spirit. Both psychiatrists diagnosed Kip as suffering from “treatment-resistant clinical depression.”

Over the following years, Kip barely mentioned “Mother.” I did my best to minimize the reality of the woman and had Evelyn filed in my mind under “bad mother”—distant, a vague abstraction. I was a young adult with my first apartment when Evelyn passed away. It embarrasses me now that I don’t remember the specifics of her death in Chicago. What I do remember clearly is Kipper’s pain. She was despondent in the extreme within a couple of months, her words gushing like vomit. 

“I can’t believe how bad I feel!” she cried. “I hated her, tried to forget her, did all I could to kill my memories of that phony witch, now she’s all I can think about! Now, there’s no chance whatsoever to fix things, make anything right. What am I supposed to do with this pain? Isn’t a tsunami of grief like I’m feeling now supposed to be for somebody I actuallyloved? I’m drowning!” 

It seems unbelievable in 2025, how out of touch we were about unresolved trauma. But back in the late 1970’s, I listened carefully when she wanted to talk and told her how much I loved her. I should have figured out something more helpful to do, but couldn’t.

In late 1986, I relocated to the East. My parents had relocated again for my father’s work, to a small town north of Sacramento. I visited them for Thanksgiving. Kipper and her current best friend Claire announced during dinner that they were a couple. “Coming out” as a lesbian seemed to ease my cousin’s depression at first. Claire was loyal, sturdy, and had a sunny-sounding voice. She was a wonderful partner, with traumas of her own from World War II that she refused to let destroy her. Their love, however, was no cure. Lesbianism was often something to hide then, but, in Kipper’s case, it blanketed darker secrets. They lived together at Claire’s house and worked for the same company for years. They seemed happy. In many ways, life appeared smooth, manageable.

In 1996, my mother would be diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer. I flew out to California five times that year. Kipper drove from the Bay Area, three hours one-way, regularly, to visit her aunt and uncle. She was working outrageously long hours, as usual. She, Claire, my father, and I were all scared out of our minds.

One of the times we were together alone that year, Kip and I were at a supermarket chatting by the meat counter, ticket in hand, awaiting our turn. She confided, giggling nervously, that she was in love—with someone other than Claire. The new love, Paula, was passionate, fiery, and interested in politics. Nothing like Claire. The sex was unbelievable. Paula and Claire knew of each other, but the three could not go on like this. Kipper’s new guilt intensified the chronic, clinical depression she was already battling.

Looking me straight in the eye, Kipper said, “I keep thinking… maybe I should end it all….”

Damn. We were in public, and I heard this. Fearing I might take too long to snuff this idea, I blurted out, in what I hoped was a whisper, “What?! I can’t believe that you are talking about offing yourself when you can’t wait to jump in the sack again with your new love! Those two things just don’t go together. You’ve got to help me out here. Who does that?”

Kipper grabbed me by my arm and burst out laughing. “I knew you’d make me feel better, Leroy. There’s nobody like you, Lee. You’re crazy!” The butcher, finally available to take our order, was thankfully expressionless. And again, tragedy was forestalled.

My mother died that year in November. Kipper, Dad, and I were by her side at the hospital as she was in the “death rattles.” She sounded like she was drowning, but was not letting go. Kip whispered to me to tell Mom that it was OK to leave, that we would be all right. I clamped a hand over my mouth to muffle a sob. Kip patted my back reassuringly, then leaned into Mom’s ear to say what I could not. My mother was dead in less than a minute. All she needed was permission.

I returned to my life and work in December, with just enough time to prepare for my father who would join me in Massachusetts for a month. He was set on purchasing a house in the area for us to share.

I tried to put on the brakes: “Daddy, the grief counselor says people shouldn’t make really big decisions in the first year or two after a loved one dies…”

My father interrupted firmly, “—Honey. Your mother and I have been clear for a long time that whoever outlived the other would live with you.”

With me? I screamed silently. In Mom’s version, the plan was to live near me. “Oh,” was all I could manage aloud. 

My father doggedly kept moving, as if constant activity could kill grief. I felt overwhelmed as phases of loss and change rolled over me like a tank. I phoned Kipper, but it was difficult to reach her. A couple of months could go by without her calling me. I did not know what to think, then remembered my mother saying with a sigh, “Kipper can handle only one close friend at a time. Everybody else will just have to wait for the novelty to wear off. Then it will be like she never left.”

When I finally reached her, she confided she had been depressed and trying to hide it. “I just didn’t want to bring you down, too, Lee. I just can’t talk about it, knowing that you and ‘Unc’ are in the thick of your own pain.” She promised to call more often.

I was exhausted and needed a break. Work was hectic with travel and dysfunctional management. I was still grieving, with year-two sometimes feeling sadder than 1996-1997. I was living with Dad who also was grieving. And, for two short weeks, I had been seeing someone new. Airlines were having late summer discounts in 1998, and Kipper encouraged me to fly cheap to California and use her place as my hub while spending time with various friends in the Bay Area. I was excited; respite would come soon. All I had to do was hang on a little longer.

The day I arrived, I learned Kipper had checked herself into a hospital a couple of days before, feeling suicidal. My mother, her emotional anchor for some thirty years, was gone. At least my cousin was making the effort to care for herself. I was alarmed, but also relieved. Kip had just started an outpatient program at the hospital from nine-to-four, but would be at home otherwise. We spent much of my “vacation” talking about death. She had even picked out music for her funeral—some interminable classical dirge she wanted to share with me. One evening into the wee hours, we talked for eight hours nonstop. I was only too aware that I was not my mother, the only one who could reach God on Kipper’s behalf to make everything all right, for a while.

At this time, Kipper lived in an apartment on her own again, no longer at the house she shared with Claire. Kip needed to pull herself together and make some hard decisions. She and I were in her compact new study. Even if only a temporary refuge, everything was perfectly in place, the room smelling of furniture polish. She talked about Claire and Paula, who were waiting anxiously. Whom would she choose?

“I feel totally unworthy to choose, Lee.”

“Do you realize how crazy that sounds, Kip? You’ve got two women, both head over heels for you, who know about each other, and they’re waiting for you? Think about the way you talk about them. These women are ‘salt and pepper shakers.’ Together, they make the woman of your dreams. Separately, neither is enough.”

My assessment hit home—I could see it in Kipper’s eyes—, but demon suicide still hovered like a vulture. “It’s not about these women, can’t you see? Why can’t you just choose you for a change? When are you going to be enough?”

“I don’t know how to choose myself!” Despairing, Kip crumpled on the new ottoman in front of her desk. I was perched on the edge of a matching overstuffed chair, searching unsuccessfully for magic words to stop the internal bleeding.

What she said next was devastating. “I just don’t believe I belong on the planet. There. I said it. I shouldn’t be here.”

I was stumped and, finally, asked, “Don’t you believe that God can save you?”

“I’m not sure,” she replied tentatively. “I’ve been attending a weekly Bible study for a month now… the people are nice, but it’s not doing much…” A painful silence followed.

Horrified and impotent, I had no words. These are the wrong people for you, I thought, but was afraid to probe, in case my own experiential biases with organized religion up until now led me to the edge of a cliff. 

Kipper left the room. I phoned Ken, the man I had been seeing two weeks, long distance. Trying to emulate my mother and help keep my cousin safe from suicide was way over my head. I was drained and powerless. Maybe a jolt of romance would help. Maybe Ken would not be judgmental and run. Was it too early to share this weight, such uncomfortable family baggage?

I spilled my sorrow and internal panic to him, anxiously apologizing for doing so. He did not flinch. His voice was loving, supportive. He shared family hurts of his own. Demons lurked among his generations too.

“Baby, you can call me anytime you want, as often as you want,” he assured me.

I looked up from the phone to see Kipper in the doorway, her arm stretched casually along its frame. She was smiling mischievously, as though suicide was the furthest thing from her mind, and mouthed that my own new love was the One. I doubt that outsiders would believe that hours of tearful, desperate prevention talk could be so easily pushed aside. But that is the way it was with her.

After nights of continuous talking and daily outpatient therapy, Kip seemed less set on ending her life. She encouraged me to visit California friends, as had been the plan. I did and would consider the August trip a good one. Kipper soon returned to Claire, then in November, left her again.

The veneer of stability did not last. Her wise, beloved aunt was gone. She pushed Claire, who knew her too well, out of her day-to-day. Paula, however, had not known enough to question her. Kipper would successfully commit suicide on her birthday four months after our visit. Her strategy was perfect: a variation, a riff, on the former ruse of window washing and sleeping pills. 

Convincingly, Kipper had whined to Paula, “I have so, so much of this damned work to do that what I need to do, now, is hunker down in a hotel room and burn the midnight oil without interruption.” 

Claire called me on Wednesday to say that Kipper had not shown up to work. Her desk was festive with freshly cut flowers, small, wrapped gifts from coworkers, and even a silly bouquet of helium-filled balloons. Her chair was strangely empty. People stood around nervously. Somebody called Paula, then the police. 

Claire phoned me again, this time trembling and almost choking, her words catching in her throat. “They found her in her hotel room. She is dead. Dead.” 

According to the police, Kipper’s cause of death was overdose by prescription meds, hoarded apparently over several months.

Claire was beside herself. “I don’t know who I am! I could have stopped her if she hadn’t left me!” She was silent before adding hysterically, “Who am I supposed to be now?”

“You are the grieving widow,” I replied quietly. “You might have interfered, so she had to leave you.” These words sounded inadequate to me, but to Claire, they were welcomed salve.

She could reclaim an identity that energized her with purpose and practical next steps. As per Kipper’s will, Claire cremated her body. A tiny clutch of us gathered at the beach. It was sunny and windy that day, and I squinted as the salt spray misted my face. My father’s voice wobbled with sorrow as he delivered the eulogy. He held his arms out to mourners who included Paula and Donald. Both looked quietly distraught and consumed. My father, now a solitary parent, waved his hand toward the sparkling water, and tried to make his love carry us. At the close of our drawing together, Dad and Claire flung Kipper’s ashes into the rolling Pacific Ocean that she loved. I imagined her floating to God, despite what she did, refusing to believe she had committed the unforgivable sin—contempt for God.

Separately, we held a formal memorial in a rented hall. Claire had me take boxes of family photos and create large montages of every stage of life. The painstaking activity was healing because, at last, it became obvious to me that Kipper had been haunted—hunted—since childhood. The hall was full of people, including decades of Kip’s stunned colleagues. Claire’s elegant program stated Kipper died following a long illness. Most had no idea what happened to this hard-working jokester, but seemed soothed by the implication that her early death may not have been a surprise to her inner circle. People were kind enough not to press for details.

I lost my cousin, my sister, in 1999 on her fifth try to quiet her demons. On her birthday, I hear her whistle, then sing “Twinkle-Twinkle Little Star.”

Author’s note: Most names have been changed.

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Copyright 2025 Desne A. Crossley

Desne A. Crossley lives in Boquete, Republica de Panama. She was Associate Director of Major Gifts at Harvard Law School from 2012-2022.