Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Sylvia Plath's Son Commits Suicide - does suicide run in the family?

Nicholas’s eyes “Became wet jewels/ The hardest substance of the purest pain/ As I fed him in his high white chair.”

Shielded from stories about his mother’s suicide until he was a teenager, Mr. Hughes had lived an academic life largely outside the public eye.

NVDL: I believe one thing more than any other predisposes us to suicide/depression - that is leading a theoretical/hypothetical life. In other words, living life as a spectator or commentator, rather than participating in it. If you're alive, be alive, and be grateful. Don't waste time ruminating on its side-effects.
clipped from www.nytimes.com

Nicholas Hughes, the son of the poet and novelist Sylvia Plath and the British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, killed himself at his home in Alaska, nearly a half-century after his mother and stepmother took their own lives, according to a statement from his sister.

After a stay at a mental institution, Ms. Plath went on to study poetry at Cambridge University, where she met Ted Hughes, who was on his way to world fame as a poet. The two were married in 1956, and had two children — Nicholas and Frieda — but separated in 1962 after Mr. Hughes began an affair with another woman, Assia Wevill. Ms. Plath killed herself at the age of 30 by sticking her head in an oven in her London home on Feb. 11, 1963, as Nicholas and Frieda slept nearby.

Six years later, Ms. Wevill, who had helped raise Nicholas and Frieda after Ms. Plath’s death, killed herself and her 4-year-old daughter, Shura. Ms. Wevill styled the murder-suicide in the same manner, using a gas stove.

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