This is a crazy coincidence... while I spent the last weeks reading about Sylvia Plath and finished her biography just a few hours ago, I totally by accident stumbled upon this tragic headline...
Sylvia with Nicholas in 1962
"Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s son commits suicide"
Nicholas Farrar Hughes, the son of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, killed himself on March 16 at his home in Alaska, four decades after his mother and father’s lover took their own lives. He was 47.
His sister, Frieda Hughes, announced his death, by hanging, over the weekend. Friends and family said he had long struggled with depression.
Mr. Hughes was a fisheries biologist who studied stream fish and spent much of his time trekking across Alaska on field studies. Shielded from stories about his mother’s suicide until he was a teenager, Mr. Hughes had lived an academic life largely outside the public eye.
source: New York Times
Frieda and Nicholas at the unveiling of the Blue Plaque, Chalcot Square, London on July 28, 2000
Sylvia Plath commited suicide in Feburary 11, 1963, follwed 6 years later by her rival and Hughes' lover Assia Wevill in March 23, 1969, who killed herself in the same way along with her and Hughes' daughter Shura. Hughes died in October 28, 1998 of a heart attack, while undergoing treatment for colon cancer.
On April 3, Linda Gray Sexton, the daughter of the confessional poet Anne Sexton who also killed herself, contributed a very interesting Op-Ed A Tortured Inheritance in the New York Times.
An undated photograph of the teenage Nick
This is sad. I'm not sure, if Hughes' suicide is really a result of his mother's death in 1963, like the The First Post claims in this stupid article Sylvia Plath and the child she killed, but what scares me a lot is the fact that apparently depression runs or can run in the family (in Paul Alexander's "The Rought Magic. A Biography oF Sylvia Plath" it reads that in the Plath family, Sylvia's grandmother, and two aunts suffered from depression) and can become so unbearable that two people in one family can commit suicide to escape it.
It's really strange how some nightmares can become even worse... Let's hope all the best for Frieda's future.
Nicholas with Frieda and their stepmother attending Ted Hughes's funeral in 1998
To learn more about Dr. Nicholas Hughes, vistit the School of Fishieries & Ocean Sciences website.
Always yours, A.
No comments:
Post a Comment