Thanks dad, for giving me precious life.

I’ve been brooding for a long, long time. Virtually all of my life, it seems. But not gloomy brooding. It’s about 90 percent upbeat meditation. Positive brooding. Take, for instance, a letter I wrote to my dad on the 50th anniversary of his suicide. The letter was dated April 3, 1999.

Dear dad:

I suppose it’s appropriate to ‘brood’ today. It’s 50 years ago tonight that you committed suicide. You walked down to the basement and hung yourself. If you had lived, you’d be 88 now.

Maybe it’s coincidental that I picked up Friday’s New York Times and turned to the obit page, where I was drawn to the obituary of Harold Greenwald, a psychotherapist, who died at 88, having been born in the same year as you dad, in 1910.

“What he (Greenwald) founded was the opposite of psychoanalysis, which is what he started in,” said Albert Ellis, the Manhattan psychologist who developed rational emotive behavior therapy. “He (Greenwald) said you make a decision to upset yourself. You don’t get upset because of something that happened in your childhood.”

I’m thinking how those words ring true for me, dad. I don’t think I ever got real upset over your suicide. Oh, maybe at the time it happened I had trouble reconciling it. But after a few years, I got over it. And I’ve rarely thought about it remorsefully because I got on with life. And for me, life always has been the pursuit of happiness.

It's obvious as I get older that one doesn’t have to choose to become upset, especially over events that one can't control. The sad thing is that for a while brother Bruce and sister Babs would get upset over your suicide. They may still have trouble today coming to grips with it.

At our rare family gatherings, Bruce and Babs invariably raise the subject of your suicide. I don’t. I’m more inclined to talk about what we are doing with our lives and our plans for the future. Upbeat subjects. And funny things.

Inevitably, Bruce and Babs steer the discussion to the past and to sadness and anguish and the ‘what ifs.’ Gloomy stuff. On the other hand, I look at the silver lining in your suicide. I tell myself, dad, that maybe it was a heroic act. You were a habitual gambler. Unhappy. With life in general. There was strife and conflict between you and mother. It was really a marriage of convenience, wasn’t it? Let’s be honest. Not a marriage nurtured by love.

When you were gone, things settled down. Yes, things got better for us in some meaningful ways. Mother, of course, went on to another marriage, maybe the 33 happiest years of her life. Maybe this sounds a little harsh, dad, but in a way you did us a favor by cashing in your chips when you did. In that sense, I’m able to look at you today as my hero.

And dad, like Greenwald says, I have a choice. No matter what happened in my childhood. I can choose to be upset. Or happy. I was 13 when you took your life. That’s over and done with. Now, I’ve learned to give life sort of a romantic twist. I actually take so-called ‘bad’ experiences and events and find ways to construe them as ultimately leading to good – to genuine happiness.

You know, dad, mother laments over the loss of her mother to bone disease. Mother was only 7 at the time. And then she lost her father, to pneumonia. Mother was 18. And she needed security, I guess. She told me it was a marriage of convenience.

I reflect, dad, that if the two of you hadn’t hitched up, and mother had waited for true love, I wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t have experienced life. Indeed, I’m thankful to you for marrying mom. In her time of need.

So, dad, I’m saluting you on this, the 50th anniversary of your exit from this earthly world. You did me the greatest favor imaginable before you left. You gave me precious life. --Jim