Years ago, when my mom and I were at my grandma’s house, I had spent a little while at the church cemetery on the same square mile. At least half the people there are related to me in one way or another, but on this particular day, I noticed the headstone of a young man who had died in the early 1930s at the age of 22.
He had a little bit of an unusual name, paired with a name that I knew was related to me, so I ended up mentioning him to my mom when I got back along with the line, “I wonder what happened to him”.
Surprisingly enough, she seemed to know. “He got his wisdom teeth removed and shot himself because of the pain.”
WHAT? He shot himself after getting teeth removed? Now, mind you, I had wisdom teeth that came in and probably would have killed me if I hadn’t had them removed (as far as they were in, I had already become deaf in one ear and could barely move my jaw) so I knew what wisdom tooth pain could be like. But after the removal of the teeth? Wouldn’t it stand to reason that the worst of the pain was over, no matter how bad wisdom tooth operations of the day were?
The official obituary for this young man just mentioned that he had had the dental procedure done, and died later in the day as a result of the stress and strain of the ordeal. The newspaper stories tell a little bit more of the reality of the situation, but the death certificate was absolutely grotesque, not just recording the gunshot wound as the cause of death, but how the bullet passed through his body and it is fairly graphic as to what damage it did in its wake.
In reading contemporaneous news stories, one other detail came to light. This young man, by all accounts, was very bright, loved a lot of the farm work, and had even been nationally recognized in competition related to animals and such. Apparently, about two years before his death, he had fallen from a “trapeze” and hit his head hard enough that he was unconscious for a few minutes before regaining consciousness. Reports were that he was never the same afterwards, and even back then, this was taken into account that at the time of his suicide, his reasoning was almost certainly already impaired.
That being said, it’s still a sad, sad story. However, it seems like these days, there are a lot of times when people are just ready to give up.
Breath of Hallelujah 
Quite a story! I wonder if he had a reaction to some medication that increased his pain rather than dulling it.
There are always interesting stories lurking in cemeteries. It’s nice in this case that you could get the full story — or as much as any human knows. Memory eternal!
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One of the taglines that Familysearch.org (run by the Mormons) uses for the site is “Every person deserves to be remembered”. There’s something quite powerful in that. We proclaim “Memory Eternal”, but it’s interesting how the Mormons have made genealogy/family history part of what their church does. Even before the advent of the internet, they were going all around the world making copies and microfilm of town records and church books in the most obscure of places. I understand this is primarily for the purpose of “spirit baptism”, but I don’t know, most of our Orthodox churches don’t even have any sort of organized archive apart from what the priests might have access to.
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