Suicide doubles with sleep deprivation

Suicide doubles with sleep deprivation

My father did not sleep much at all as I remember.  He had worked a night shift frequently at the shipyard.   We all drank quite a bit of tea.   After the loss of his vision, he began to sleep even less.   He would lay down for a few hours and then get up and smoke a cigarette, drink a beer and then go lay down.  Sometimes he would play the stereo, until my mother fussed with him about it.

I thought for years he was mentally ill until recently when I began to recognize his behavior as an acting out of some of what had been previously going on in our family.   I now think they were projections.   I do not recollect anyone wanting to cut someone’s throat but I did find a piece of dialogue in which I heard, “I’ll cut your head off and watch it roll down the street”.   We all did view western films in which cowboys and Indians all fought and did some of that stuff, though I never recollect any such actions as specific as my father committed on that night in October of 1967, when he pulled my mother from the bed and put the kitchen butcher knife to her throat, then less than an hour later he had no recollection whatsoever of the event.  He had been to Blount’s and purchased a bottle of moonshine, which of course I realize now is like Sake.  The only artists I know about in my family were Blake, Davis and of course the Halls and the card company but they were not originally artists.

He had been a WWII veteran and was in the Pacific in the battles at Okinawa and Iwo Jima aboard an LST.   I am sure he suffered a degree of PTSD but I think it was from bombing and kamikaze pilots around the ship from which his landing craft was launched.   I clearly recollect him talking about seeing the dead bodies of his comrades floating in the water and he had associated this with my Aunt hitting a pig with her automobile while they were  in route somewhere, at which time he had an emotional breakdown while divulging to her his experience.   My father’s sleep deprivation persisted until his self inflicted death in 1974.   I might add that years later I clipped a cow  in the lower jaw with my automobile  that had gotten onto the highway while going to my aunt’s house with my brother who was only about 12 at the time.

During my military enlistment I suffered a similar lack of sleep as one might endure in a war.   I probably got less than 10 hours of sleep over the course of 6 months of basic training.  Three of my relatives were in the Army, an Uncle and two grandfathers and I also had numerous relatives in previous wars.   I recognize numerous movies that dramatize my experience of their lives.