Family portrait 1970 -Penn Trail
This must have been towards the end of our parents' marriage, taken at Penn Trail on the Loxahatchee. Pictures of this time make me sad. It was such a sad time.
We don't look as crazy as a lot of families looked in 1970.
*
Hugh brought my father a plastic cup of water. “You O.K., Lou?”
“Fine,” my father answered.
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough, and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one that I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?
“I don’t know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?
NOW WE ARE FIVE
A big family, at the beach.
BY DAVID SEDARIS
Family portrait 1970 -Penn Trail
This must have been towards the end of our parents' marriage, taken at Penn Trail on the Loxahatchee. Pictures of this time make me sad. It was such a sad time.
We don't look as crazy as a lot of families looked in 1970.
*
Hugh brought my father a plastic cup of water. “You O.K., Lou?”
“Fine,” my father answered.
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough, and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one that I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?
“I don’t know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?
NOW WE ARE FIVE
A big family, at the beach.
BY DAVID SEDARIS