Something has always puzzled me about Ernest Hemingway's suicide. Why did Mary Hemingway not hide the keys to the basement storage room where Hemingway kept his gun collection? Was it simply because she believed that "no wife has the right to deprive her husband of his possessions." Or is there truth to the longstanding charge that Mary actually willed her husband's suicide?
In a 2004 interview, Valerie Hemingway said of Mary Hemingway: "She kept asking me those first two or three years after he died, like, 'Why did he do it? Why did he do it? Why could we not have prevented it? How was it that we missed...?' The thing was that I couldn't and never did say to her was that he had told me outright that he intended to kill himself." Ernest Hemingway was clearly suicidal in the final years of his life. He had tried twice to kill himself with guns in his Ketchum house. Mary's questions of "Why could we not have prevented it? How was it that we missed...?" are the questions of a woman in denial. The red flag of Hemingway's suicide was impossible to miss.
Whether Mary Hemingway wanted her husband to die remains to be seen. She certainly made it easier for the act to take place. But "willing" someone to kill himself? That was Ernest's choice. Throughout his life, he had seen first-hand how things were taken from others — his father was robbed of his masculinity, his comrades in war were robbed of their lives. On that July 2 morning, Hemingway made certain that no one would rob him of the death he had chosen for himself.
Posted on June 18, 2006 | Thirteen comments
Mary was not powerful enough to keep him alive. Depression, alcoholism, bi-polar took him out. I believe back then they didn't have the knowledge of how to treat the illness. I am saddened to think he was that unhappy. He is my favorite author.
Did Ernest's rejection of the Christian faith contribute to his decision to take his life? My study of great authors has revealed an significant rise in destructive living and suicide among those who called themselves atheists. Perhaps Hemingway's contempt for religion, as demonstrated in calling his mother narrow minded, contributed to the losing of his own.
"Depression, alcoholism, bi-polar took him out. I believe back then they didn't have the knowledge of how to treat the illness."
These kinds of comments sicken me. Hemingway rightly said that the ECT treatments took away his business.
"THEY" do NOT have any method today to "treat illness.
Hemingway died because HE decided to do it, not because an abstract thing called "bipolar" killed him. Please understand that people are people not bipolar things.
If he was "treated" as they do today, he would have been lobotomized by pharmaceutical drugs and there would have been no novels for you all to read.
They-We have had the ability to help the emotionally ill for decades. perhaps centuries.
Reaching out with human contact to the human being with various psychosocial therapies can and does work. Trying to control people like they were dogs or machines does not work.
Because of the mass propaganda by the drug industry humanity has gone the opposite way down the long road to ignorance death and destruction of the human psyche.
The methods of change are so simple, but someone has to start by believing that people can change, wanting them to change and then actually helping them to change.
Hemingway died because he lived in a society that lives in total ignorance about the care and nurturing of it's own soul. It is the ignorant psychological social climate of yesterday and today that killed Hemingway, as he was abandoned by a humanity that lives in a sea of self-made ignorance and self-deception. He was very specifically killed because the social set to which he came in contact with had a complete ignorance as to what constitute psychological and emotional growth.
It is obvious why the billon dollar pharmaceutical industry has propagated lies and ignorance upon the masses, but the masses need to ask themselves why they are so willing to abandon their own selves and their own directions for their lives and for their fellow human beings.
These kinds of comments sicken me. Hemingway rightly said that the ECT treatments took away his business.
"THEY" do NOT have any method today to "treat illness.
Hemingway died because HE decided to do it, not because an abstract thing called "bipolar" killed him. Please understand that people are people not bipolar things.
If he was "treated" as they do today, he would have been lobotomized by pharmaceutical drugs and there would have been no novels for you all to read.
They-We have had the ability to help the emotionally ill for decades. perhaps centuries.
Reaching out with human contact to the human being with various psychosocial therapies can and does work. Trying to control people like they were dogs or machines does not work.
Because of the mass propaganda by the drug industry humanity has gone the opposite way down the long road to ignorance death and destruction of the human psyche.
The methods of change are so simple, but someone has to start by believing that people can change, wanting them to change and then actually helping them to change.
Hemingway died because he lived in a society that lives in total ignorance about the care and nurturing of it's own soul. It is the ignorant psychological social climate of yesterday and today that killed Hemingway, as he was abandoned by a humanity that lives in a sea of self-made ignorance and self-deception. He was very specifically killed because the social set to which he came in contact with had a complete ignorance as to what constitute psychological and emotional growth.
It is obvious why the billon dollar pharmaceutical industry has propagated lies and ignorance upon the masses, but the masses need to ask themselves why they are so willing to abandon their own selves and their own directions for their lives and for their fellow human beings.
The real question is - why does anyone take his or her own life? Be it famous or just the person standing next to you. My own feelings about EHs reasons have been expressed here in detail by others. Facts show us that people who suffer from depression, and chemical abuse are much more likely to try and succeed in killing themselves.
Add that with EHs troubled state of memory loss, shock treatments at Mayo, and his physical breakdown, loss of his beloved home in Cuba - you are looking at someone with great pride in his writing, love of physical activities, and complete action in daily life.
Importantly, his talk of suicide was not reduced to AFTER his return from Mayo, EH talked of killing himself way before that, and his move to Ketchum, ID.
I generally think the man felt he had nothing left. And the deed was done
Add that with EHs troubled state of memory loss, shock treatments at Mayo, and his physical breakdown, loss of his beloved home in Cuba - you are looking at someone with great pride in his writing, love of physical activities, and complete action in daily life.
Importantly, his talk of suicide was not reduced to AFTER his return from Mayo, EH talked of killing himself way before that, and his move to Ketchum, ID.
I generally think the man felt he had nothing left. And the deed was done
People who don't suffer from mental illness or know what it's like to want to die, will NEVER get it. They will never understand what it's like to want to die, to want to decide for yourself, your own ending. If you're lucky enough not to be tormented by demons each day, please shut the hell up, or really listen to us, because the torment in our own heads is far greater than that added by insensitive individuals. We're hard enough on ourselves, do we need to be hard on each other?
To say that Hemingway was anti-Christian or an atheist somehow because of his comments on his mother's Christian Scientist perspective is to show absolutely no familiarity with Hemingway. He was an intensely Catholic man. His biggest concern regarding his premeditated suicide was what would become of his soul. He thought Suicide was the greatest of all sins. After many discussions with his priest about the subject, he felt relieved to find out that Despair was the greatest of sins.
Catholicism permeates his worksespecially The Sun Also Rises (a novel about a fisher king on pilgrimage), Across the River and into the Trees (probably his most misunderstood novel because of people's unwillingness to explore the iceberg style that he had mastered at this point in his career), The Old Man and the Sea (this one is common knowledge), A Farewell to Arms (where, along with the count, the priest is the book's most shining exemplar), The Garden of Eden (where he explores the consequences of all seven deadly sins), Now I Lay Me (where the narrator prays for every person he can think of as he avoids falling asleep at night for fear of his soul leaving his body and where he gives up saying the Lord's Prayer at night because he cannot remember the last linethe line only Catholics use), Big Two-Hearted River, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (where the ascension of the soul after death is described in no uncertain terms), among others.
If you understand neither Hemingway nor suicide, it would be preferrable if you did what so many of Hemingway's exemplars have done:
Say nothing.
Catholicism permeates his worksespecially The Sun Also Rises (a novel about a fisher king on pilgrimage), Across the River and into the Trees (probably his most misunderstood novel because of people's unwillingness to explore the iceberg style that he had mastered at this point in his career), The Old Man and the Sea (this one is common knowledge), A Farewell to Arms (where, along with the count, the priest is the book's most shining exemplar), The Garden of Eden (where he explores the consequences of all seven deadly sins), Now I Lay Me (where the narrator prays for every person he can think of as he avoids falling asleep at night for fear of his soul leaving his body and where he gives up saying the Lord's Prayer at night because he cannot remember the last linethe line only Catholics use), Big Two-Hearted River, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (where the ascension of the soul after death is described in no uncertain terms), among others.
If you understand neither Hemingway nor suicide, it would be preferrable if you did what so many of Hemingway's exemplars have done:
Say nothing.
I think he just hit the wall. Health trouble, depression, treatment, he didn't know what was coming next week as none of us do when we get older. Maybe he felt with his talent it was just time to exit stage left. Love the writing. His life must have been excruciating.
Suicide ran in Hemingway's family. His father committed suicide, so did one of his sisters and his youngest brother, one of his grandaughters too. There is much we do not know yet about inherited genes. Maybe someday we will. Nonetheless, it will always remain a tragedy
Kevin is correct; Ernest Hemingway, while rejecting his mother's brand of Christianity which he deemed hypocrtical, did convert to Catholicism when he married Pauline Pfeiffer. He was not an atheist. Jeff's assertion is ridiculous and he obviously has an agenda; I would like to see him substantiate his statement and if he cannot, he should retract his statement.
And yes, she felt that suddenly hiding the keys would only humiliate and discourage Ernest even more. For the same reason she picked the Mayo clinic on the advice of experts because it was both a psychiatric as well as a medical facility and Ernest could be sent there on the pretext that he was being treated for his many health issues. This would also keep the press from writing about his mental health. This was out of concern for his dignity which too many people forget is such a core element of our sense of self.
You only have to see the set-up of where the gun cabinet actually was in the basement to know that it was not that easy to get to anyway. Also he might well have found any number of friends, acquaintances in Ketchum who did not know the situation who might have given the great man a gun or again he might just have found another way.
You only had to bear witness to Mary talking about his death, as I did, to know how much she still missed him and to know that she would never have done anything knowingly to speed the process to such a violent end. And yes, she freely admitted to denial, because as she said it was the only way to cope.