I’ve dealt with a fair number of deaths in my life. My grandmother broke her hip when she was 77 and never recovered. My grandfather finally “went home,” as he liked to say, at the ripe old age of 91. My mom died at the unripe age of 51 after a prolonged battle with breast cancer, and my father, who never took good care of himself, died of complications after a heart attack two years later. He was 60. Assorted aunts and uncles have also passed away over the years, but none of these deaths came as a particular surprise. And of course, none of them compared to the sudden devastation of losing my son, Rob, who took his own life in 2019.
Over the years, however, I’ve had the misfortune of being staggered by the deaths of two close friends. The first was on 9/11, when Bob Speisman, my mentor at Cashbox Magazine and nemesis on the basketball court, died on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. This story is about the second.
A few years after separating from my ex, I was on a second date with a woman who I’d only go out on a handful of more dates with. After a romantic dinner in the Village, we went to a party that two of her friends were throwing nearby. It was a beautiful summer evening; her friends owned a penthouse apartment with a roof deck, and everybody there was very chill.
I remember drunkenly roaming around from one group of people (they all worked for Microsoft) to another (the requisite magazine folks) when I overheard a woman say something about Shelter Island.
“I have a good friend who has a place on Shelter Island,” I said, interrupting her conversation. “Her name is Rynn Williams!”
“You knew Rynn?” she asked.
No sooner were those words out of her mouth than I felt sick to my stomach. She gently explained that Rynn had died by suicide about two years earlier, leaving behind three young children, after leading a complicated and tumultuous life.
The troubled person this woman was describing was nothing like the person I had known. Rynn and I worked together at a trade magazine for the children’s apparel business almost 25 years ago and we became fast friends. She was young, beautiful, sarcastic, and a budding poet. Need I say more? We just clicked in that way that some people do, as if we had known each other from another lifetime.
I Assumed She Was Happy and Doing Well
I remember going out for long lunches with her and sharing the gory details of our lives over Chinese food. I had just recovered from a bout of testicular cancer and she relentlessly made “ball” jokes that made me love her even more. She’d talk about how much she loved Stephen, whom she would soon marry. We had our entire lives completely mapped out in front of us.
So much so, that we wound up losing touch a few years afterward. I can’t even recall how or why, other than the usual way things like this seem to go, but I had always assumed she was happy and doing well.
When I got home from the party that evening, I immediately googled Rynn’s name to see if I could find more information about her death. I clicked on a link to her obituary on the Times website. The first thing that struck me was that she was 47 years old when she died. I also learned that she had become a fairly prominent poet and wrote a well-received book. That was pretty much it.
This led me to email Stephen, who (I read in the obit) had since remarried and taken their children to live with him and his wife. Stephen is a writer and it was easy to track him down. I knew I’d be intruding on his life and yet felt compelled to ask the obvious question: What happened?
The next day, I received this email:
Hi Larry,
I felt a shock to get your letter. I’m on vacation in Vermont—a short weekend with my wife away from our kids. Woke up and read this and started crying.
Rynn committed suicide two years ago. She took a variety of pills in the bathtub of her home in Windsor Terrace. I have puzzled over her death ever since. All I know is that Rynn was deeply troubled. She had various demons eating at her—addictions, primarily, and an eating disorder that had subsided when we married but returned and plagued her all these years.
She and I had three children together, Bolivia, Violet, and Beckett, and when Beck was two Rynn fell in love with someone and we divorced. (Of course, there was more to the divorce than just another person in the relationship—we weren’t getting along.) After that, we split custody of the kids, week by week, and both moved to Brooklyn. She had a succession of partners and apartments, and in the end, was in a nice house her mother bought for her, with two dogs.
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Her body was found July 15, 2009. The kids live with me, my wife, and my stepdaughter in Carroll Gardens. We have a good home for them (the dogs came, too), but of course, this has been a devastating experience for all of us. We are close with Rynn’s parents.
Anyway, I hope this helps.
My best,
Stephen
“You Knew Her at Her Best”
I thanked Stephen for his quick and thoughtful reply and suggested that maybe we could get together for a beer sometime. The beer turned into coffee and sometime became almost a year later.
Even though it had been decades since we last met, we both instantly recognized each other and fell into an easygoing conversation. Stephen is far more eloquent than I will ever be, and he graciously launched into the details of Rynn’s death. He said that I was the second person that week he had gotten together with to talk about it.
I told him how much I had loved and adored Rynn and he remembered us being good friends. “You knew her at her best,” he said while sipping coffee. But just like the woman at the party, he went on to describe her eventual unraveling.
The thing about Rynn’s suicide that I couldn’t get my head around—and the thing that made me seek out Stephen in the first place—was that she had left behind three young children. No matter how bad things were, I just couldn’t imagine how she could do that to them. But after hearing Stephen talk about her years of struggle with various forms of mental illness, I got my answer. It all made a kind of heartbreaking sense.
Making sense of my son’s suicide would take a lot longer. I can’t say I didn’t see it coming—Rob suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism—but it’s only now, almost six years after his death, that I’ve found that measure of peace.
