I never met my great-grandfather, although I've seen pictures of him. The one I treasure most is a family photo, similar to those images on an Ancestry.com commercial, where he is sitting with his wife and older daughters. (The sons would arrive later.) He's wearing a hat and a solemn expression, but you get the impression that he's content with the life he'd created since emigrating from Italy a few years before.
You would be wrong, though. Some years after that photo was taken, this patriarch of five daughters and three sons took his own life. He went to the basement of their home in West Philadelphia, found his daughter's jump rope, and hanged himself. My grandmother Mamie was the one who found him, and felt guilty for the rest of her life, since she was the one who'd thrown her sister's rope down the basement steps while cleaning.
No one knows why he did it. He was a man in his middle years with a loving wife and beautiful children, a respectable job, and the immigrant's pride. The impact of the suicide had a ripple effect on later generations, from my grandmother to her daughter Lucy and to me, the great-granddaughter who looks at his photo and shakes her head in sorrow.
