A story of love and loss

Every September when Suicide Prevention Awareness Month rolls around, I wonder if this will be the year I share my own story of loss to suicide. And every year I say no, it’s not time yet, and tuck that pain and loss back into the deepest trench of my heart where it has been for 37 years.

Then three days ago I awoke from a dream in tears. In my dream I was in a church, sharing my story at long last, explaining how it felt to lose a loved one to suicide while a nondescript person held a microphone in front of me. Before I could finish the speech, though, the person took the microphone away.

Tears turned to anguished sobs as I struggled to make sense of the disturbing dream. Some divine intervention was in play here, nudging me closer to sharing this profound experience.

It’s time.

My first husband, Josef, a gifted musician from Salzburg, Austria, committed suicide in late September 1979 after struggling for several months with exposure to toxic epoxy paint that seemed to chemically rearrange his brain and spark some kind of mental illness.

He was 26. I was 23. We’d been married a little over two years.

My family rallied around me, to a point. If there is one drawback to being raised with stoic Scandinavian heritage, it is that we’re taught not to show much emotion. We don’t dwell on things; we put them behind us and move on.

“She’s a strong girl. She’ll get through this,” my parents told their friends and neighbors. “She’s a survivor. She’s so strong.”

Was I?

In the late 1970s, it wasn’t in vogue to get counseling for such a loss. If there were support groups for grief I didn’t know of such help.

I did what everyone expected me to do. I put it behind me and moved on, but here I am decades later and the pain still feels very real.

I applaud the efforts of local groups that work to bring awareness to suicide and its aftermath for survivors. These days there are awareness walks, grief support groups and much more discussion about suicide. That’s a good thing.

If there is one take-away from my own experience, it is that those who suffer the loss of a loved one to suicide should feel free to talk about that person and that profound loss.

When Josef died, my family literally never mentioned him again.

It was as if he had never existed, even though he’d been such a big part of our lives. I needed to laugh and smile about things he’d said. I needed to remember the good times. I needed more than the headstone in our church cemetery, the only tangible evidence he lived and died.

It’s time now to tell my story, and his.

I met Josef — “Joe” was his American nickname; “Sepp” was his Austrian moniker — in a castle on a mountaintop in Salzburg. It was 1975 and we were both attending a folk music show staged at the castle. I was with my college roommate (we had summer jobs at a Salzburg hotel) and he was with one of his brothers.

We were sitting at the same table when he leaned over and quietly yodeled into my ear during an intermission. Then he did it again. This guy was full of the dickens.

I didn’t speak much German; he didn’t speak much English, but somehow we clicked. He was as charismatic and entertaining as they come. Joe walked me home from the Festung Hohensalzburg Castle that night and we sang songs the entire way, which was several miles, oblivious to the outside world. We harmonized to “Hey, Jude,” and he taught me a German favorite, “Muss I Denn.”

The summer was a storybook romance as we explored the nooks and crannies of Salzburg, climbed mountains and fell in love. I returned the next summer and spent a school year there studying German.

We got married in my small country church in Minnesota in July 1977. Joe embraced America with gusto, and quickly made his mark in music circles. In addition to being a gifted singer and yodeler, he was a master at playing a Hohner six-sided harmonica and also played the spoons.

When Garrison Keillor and his “Prairie Home Companion” radio show presented one of their traveling shows at Concordia College in nearby Moorhead, Minnesota, Joe auditioned and easily secured a guest performance slot on the show.

Joe made his living as a painter, a trade he’d studied in Austria. It was during a job painting a swimming pool with epoxy paint that something shifted. The paint fumes — there were no protective masks or other gear offered in those days — made him hallucinate as he was driving home, he confided.

His exposure to the paint caused some kind of cognitive damage, at least that’s what I believe. His personality changed, he became morose, depressed and struggled to get back to his old self. We went from doctor to doctor, trying to find out what was wrong. Nothing helped.

I despaired. My last words to him were in German: “Ich weiss nicht wie es weiter geht.” Translated, it means I don’t know how things can continue like this. Those words have haunted me.

Joe went missing on a glorious autumn day in September. I remember making the call to my parents and collapsing into their arms as they came to help search for him. I had confided to them about Joe’s struggles, and we feared the worst.

As my father and I drove around that next day looking for him, I recall driving by the most beautiful maple tree, brilliantly bedecked in orange foliage. How could beauty still exist when I was in such pain?

I found him by myself during an evening drive the next day, in a wooded area.

The next weeks were a blur. A funeral, flowers, sympathy cards, crying, and then nothing. I went back to my job at the Detroit Lakes newspaper, trying to act normal but aching inside.

I remember at one point simply staring into space and wondering where a voice as beautiful as Joe’s goes after death. I can still hear him singing and yodeling yet today.

Not many people know about Joe. I can count on one hand the people I’ve confided in since moving to the Flathead 25 years ago. I never even told one of my best friends here about Joe until very recently.

One of the closest things to therapy for me was an interview I did with Annie von Trapp 14 years ago as she and her husband were contemplating a singing career for their four children, the great-grandchildren of the famous Salzburg von Trapp family singers featured in “The Sound of Music.”

As we started talking about the song “Edelweiss,” a “Sound of Music” classic and a tune the von Trapp children had performed many times, I felt compelled to tell her that early in our courtship Joe had given me an edelweiss blossom that I had kept all these years.

Edelweiss is an Austrian flower that grows only high in the Alps, where mountain climbers had to risk their lives to gather them. Because of this act of courage, the flower symbolizes a deep love for the recipient — a love that’s more important than the giver’s own life, according to a story shared by the children’s grandmother.

As I shared Joe’s story with her, Annie von Trapp was the listening ear I’d needed for so many years. We cried together, and she invited me to their home. I brought my dried and pressed edelweiss flower to show her children. A year ago when I interviewed the von Trapp children, now young adults and on their own, they remembered my visit and the edelweiss.

Annie would stop by periodically through the years to fill me in on the children’s worldwide music tours. She’d encourage me to tell Joe’s story to others, and suggested a true-life piece for Guidepost magazine. No, I said. I’m not ready.

I’ve never mustered the courage until now to share such an intimate part of my life. And it is with the complete love of my current husband of 34 years that I’m able to do so.

Suicide changes those left behind in a profound way, but it’s only by remembering those we’ve lost — and sharing what they meant to us — that we can truly begin to heal.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.