Forty-one years ago, just a week after my dad killed himself, his best buddy arrived on our doorstep to repossess a portrait he’d painted of my father.  Howard handed me a toy football, took the painting from the wall, and walked out of our lives.  In 2006, after years of searching for Howard and the [...]

Men grieve differently.  I know that.  But still I was surprised when I found myself acting like a typical guy following my sister-in-law’s 2008 suicide.  A few months after I joined a writing class in the winter of 2010, I wrote a third-person story about that experience–about a man who hacks down a row of [...]

The Defense of Marriage Act, which requires the federal government to recognize only marriages between one man and one woman, is indefensible is so many ways.  However, the consequent lack of health insurance among gay couple dependents—and the resulting diminished access to affordable mental health care and inevitable increased number of suicides—makes DOMA unconscionable.

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It never occurred to me that my father might have killed me, too.  At least not until my Uncle Richie explained how relieved he was that my father hadn’t taken my brother and me with him when he ended his life.  I was reminded of what my uncle said when I read a stunning “

When my sister-in-law killed herself two-and-a-half years ago, I felt desperately alone.  The shock waves of her death blew me back in time to my father’s suicide four decades prior and knocked me off my feet.  I was a mess and so desperate not to be alone with my emotions that despite my aversion for [...]