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Salvatore's Suicide

30-Sep-03 -- The balcony did not give.  He jumped and he did not die on the cobblestone.  As he lay there he held his mother's hand.  She had screamed and ran down the stairs to get him, but then he slipped into a coma and died on the operating table later on last night.

This is how the story has been told to me.  I can't imagine what my poor family in Italy is going through.  We are a huge clan.  My 21 year old first cousin (not 22 yet as I first thought), Salvatore Rotella, jumped from a third floor balcony of the ancient building (maybe 1,000 years old) in which he lived in a very historical district of Catanzaro, the capitol of Calabria, in southern Italy.  I have pictures of my daughter on the stoop of the building and my grandmother currently resides on the ground floor, right inside from where his body landed.

He left a letter, beautifully written, which apparently was found BEFORE he killed himself.  It spoke of his lovely mother who he described watching while she slept.  He wished his father would treat her better for the sake of his young brother.  Because of the nature of the letter, he was under close watch, but apparently not close enough.

His parents had been having marital problems for years and his mother had also been exhibiting mental distress, possibly nervous breakdowns and also threats of suicide, which may have planted the idea of suicide as being an escape for Salvatore.  In my aunt's case she had a history of being upset by the life choices she made.  Most profoundly, she had been engaged to a man before her husband (Salvatore's father) who had maimed himself severely (losing an arm and a leg on opposite sides of his body) while she watched from the balcony.  Her fiancé at the time was looking up at her and then crashed.  In addition to being maimed, he also supposedly suffered amnesia, but some speculate that perhaps he did not want to burden her for life with his maimed body.  In any event, the relationship did end after the tragedy.

Despite all this, he is still very handsome and obviously was the love of her life.  Rossana has a very strong personality but apparently "settled" for her very artistic husband who she does not hesitate to go around calling a "finocchio."  This word means "faggot" in Italian.  Literally it means fennel, which if one has ever seen fennel in its full form, resembles the shape of a penis and testicles.  His behavior, coupled with the fact that he is apparently inattentive to her sexually, has caused her to spread this rumor about her own husband.  She seems resigned and ashamed of what she did by marrying him.  

Indeed, on more than one occasion I had seen the look of heartbreak on my aunt's face when this maimed man, who is quite attractive otherwise, would come to the same part of the beach that we were at and hobble into the water for a swim without any prostheses.  She would always stare at him and admire him from afar but they would never acknowledge each other.  Meanwhile the "runt" husband of my aunt would wander around flamboyantly and she would look at him with disgust.  The children of her marriage (there are three spread apart over fifteen years), including Salvatore, were never really disciplined.  Salvatore had a good disposition, however.  I have not yet gotten to really know his brother who is only seven now and was only a toddler when I was last there, but Solange, their sister, does have a prima donna complex for sure and was very fond of flipping me off in front of my grandmother who did not understand the gesture as the gesture of choice in Italy is more like the American "hang loose". 

My aunt had seemed to be doing better mental-health-wise recently as she was redirecting her career as a bookkeeper and going back to school for something.  Her husband had been frustrated by being the only adult in the household with a job (the economy in their area is not good to start with as most people are overeducated) and the ancient home they lived in was constantly in need of renovation and upkeep.  I am sure that after years of neglecting to be disciplined and the stress in his parents' marriage, combined with the chain smoking of his parents, which could have only served to have raised blood pressure, there was no shortage of arguments among the five, except perhaps for seven year old Eros.

I have some good memories with Salvatore.  He was full of life and always asked questions about America.  He practiced his English and loved the sounds of the words as they were so foreign to him.  He was very close with our cousin Ciccio, who was about his age.  I think the comfort of our aunt's home was a respite from the chaos at his house.  Because he stayed with our Aunt Silvana so much I got to see him a lot more than many of my other cousins (I am the first of 27 first cousins).

I always cry my eyes out when I leave my family in Italy because one never knows who will not be there when I get back.  Of course that thought was not a concern of mine with my younger relatives until now.  The only thing I cried about losing with them was seeing them grow up as each year because I tend to get some of them mixed up as they grow up so quickly.

Whenever I hear of someone committing suicide I do wonder if that person had issues with his or her sexuality as that is one of the only shameful things in our homophobic world that we know we cannot change in our lifetime's, even if our behavior does.  Apparently in the last years of his short life he contemplated being a priest and the night he jumped he had planned to move to Rome with his (male) friend but they ended up not getting on the bus because they did not have reservations.  He was out of work and not in a relationship and apparently had not been with a girlfriend for some time.

There is no gay community in Catanzaro and Rome is where the gay people typically go to flourish in Italy.  Indeed, the man who introduced my parents to each other -- a guy named Umberto -- acted as a translator since my parents did not speak each other's language at first, was one of the outcasts who ended up moving to Rome.  He probably died of AIDS in the early 1980's (he would have been in his 40's) as his cause of death was not talked about much while his mother and my grandmother are very close.  He was estranged from his mother for many years and perhaps most importantly he had been teased for being effeminate by his peers. 

Salvatore's sexuality might be too speculative but I'm trying to have an open mind about what happened.  Apparently he was not into drugs or really using alcohol as that is not a common thing in Italian culture as a means of escape and I would have known about it as that was one of the first questions asked.  He had exhibited some strange behavior in the last year or two, getting into trouble with the law for petty theft, taking his father's car without asking sometimes and eventually trashing it only to be lucky enough for the insurance to pick up the tab.  However, probably most telling about this tragedy was my grandmother finding him trying to asphyxiate himself with gas in a storage room on her floor of the building.  I'm not sure how close he got to succeeding, but it did take my grandmother instinctively knowing the smell of gas was not a good sign to stop it from happening then.

Salvatore was loved and he had a huge network of people on which he could have called on, including his family in America like me.  I can't imagine that he thought he had nowhere to turn, but part of me wonders if I had been more openly gay and if his sexuality was an issue, if he would have inquired.  Apparently his immediate family had been seeking therapy and he was purportedly on and off some prescription medication.  Perhaps it was not strong enough.  He was obviously intent on ending his life when his mother turned her back for one moment to get a cigarette.

My mother, as she is slowly outing me to the family in Italy as she did with her friends in California, had "confessed" to Salvatore's mother (her sister) that I was gay.  This was done, my mother told me, to make Rossana feel better about her own family's emotional turmoil, not that it would be any solace to her now.  It seems my mother uses my sexuality as a confessional tool when it's convenient or efficient for getting others to spill their guts about themselves.  I don't mind as I am not closeted and think the more people who know that there are gay people out there, the more internalized homophobia will be a thing of the past, including among whatever gay or lesbian cousins I have (which statistically there must be some).  While I love my mother to death, I think deep down there is a secret happiness that she will always be the woman in my life and not have any competition from a female spouse as my male lovers were always very socially compatible with her.  Of course the only other woman in my life is my daughter, but that is not a threat to my mother like a wife would be.

So in the interim, mental illness is the only reasonable conclusion that I can think of to allow him to have taken such a drastic measure.  I have read that violence in suicides is more common among males when they kill themselves.  Now I have documented suicides on both sides of my family (my father's aunt killed herself after her second divorce was finalized despite having two young children) and I have heard that the propensity to be suicidal tends to be hereditary, however unscientific that might be. 

Suicide under these circumstances (because I know there are some that are reasonable such as chronic pain with a fatal illness) is selfish and I am angry at Salvatore, even if mental illness of whatever nature was a monkey on his back or a demon within him. 

1-Oct-03 Update -- My cousin's eyes were donated as we found out in an article that I copied onto his web page at Trupa.com/sal.  English translation of the article should be forthcoming.  The article does not use the word suicide, but it implies it.