Her final visit with grandmother turns tragic

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t was going to be a difficult trip. Rebecca Crenshaw was flying home to San Diego to say goodbye to her grandmother, Suzanne Bradbury.

Cancer wasn’t a stranger to the family. In 1991, at age 74, Suzanne’s father was diagnosed with small-cell carcinoma. In a matter of months, the aggressive form of lung cancer had spread and taken his life.

So when Suzanne was diagnosed in 2017 with the same type of cancer and at the same age as her father, the family knew her time was limited.

The brain lesions affected her the most. She had constant nausea and had become so unsteady that she had trouble writing.

“Around Nov. 1, I got a call from my mom. She told me I needed to come out to see grandma. I knew what that meant,” Rebecca said.

Before boarding the plane from Houston, Rebecca received another call from her mom. It was bad news. The cancer had spread to multiple organs, and surgery was no longer an option.

“On the flight over I prepared myself, knowing that this would probably be the last time I was going to be able to see my grandma before she passed,” Rebecca said.

And she was right. But in no way was she prepared for what would actually happen.

‘A bad day’

Rebecca was surprised to see her grandma still awake when she arrived at her home late on Nov. 7.

“Right away I could tell she was not well. She always had this presence when she walked into a room like, I’m in charge and I know it. But the woman I saw was frail and tiny,” Rebecca said.

Extreme nausea kept Suzanne from getting any sleep that night, and the next day wasn’t much better. 

“I tried to spark up some kind of conversation with her, but she really wasn’t having it. Mostly, we just sat in silence,” Rebecca recalled.

Later in the day Rebecca’s mother left the house to pick up her son from school, and her grandfather went to a meeting.

Rebecca had made plans to grab dinner with a friend that evening. So she went upstairs to ask her grandma if she could use her car.

“She said, ‘Of course. My car is yours while you’re in town.’”

But that was the extent of their conversation. 

“I could tell she didn’t want me in her room. So I said that I was going to leave once grandpa got home,” Rebecca said. “I told her that if she needed anything, she could text me and I would come home. That last part made her angry. I could see it in her face.

“She looked straight ahead, avoiding my eyes, and said, ‘Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to you.’”

Holding back tears — Suzanne had this rule that when it came to her diagnosis, family was not allowed to cry in front of her — Rebecca ran from the room and went downstairs, where she called her twin sister.

“I cried to her on the phone. I didn’t understand why grandma couldn’t just let me help her. I loved her, and I just wanted to help,” Rebecca said. “I spent the next 45 minutes feeling sorry for myself because my grandma was ‘mean’ to me.”

Just after 5 p.m., Rebecca was washing dishes when her grandpa came home and started helping her with the drying.

“He asked how she was doing, and I told him what she had said to me,” Rebecca said. “He gave me a hug and said, ‘She has good days and bad days. Today just happens to be a bad day.’”

Less than a minute later, they heard the shot.

Worst fear realized

After a frantic search of the house, Rebecca’s grandma was nowhere to be found. 

“Grandpa thought maybe what we heard was the front door slamming. Maybe she went to her friend’s house down the street, and we just didn’t see her go out the door,” Rebecca said.

When he returned from the neighbor’s home, Rebecca asked him to check upstairs again while she searched further downstairs.

“I found nothing, and returned to the front door. As I did, grandpa yelled, ‘Rebecca, call 911!’”

He had discovered his wife in the master bathroom.

“When I got there, I saw him kneeling by the bathtub. He was rubbing my grandma’s back, saying her name and trying to get her to respond,” Rebecca said.

It was too late. Suzanne had shot herself in the head. The gun was beside her in the tub.

Remembering grandma

Instead of a funeral, the family decided to hold a celebration of life.

“Grandma had started saying, ‘I’ve been to way too many funerals lately.’ So my mom knew she wouldn’t have wanted everybody to gather around and mourn her,” Rebecca said. “Instead, we had a margarita punch bowl and just a little celebration of life.”

Dealing with the suicide has been quite challenging for Rebecca. But she realizes why her grandmother did it.

“It wasn’t that she was battling depression her entire life or anything like that. She had watched her dad die, and that was very painful for her. So in the end, she didn’t want that for the rest of us. She couldn’t live the life that she wanted. Her body wouldn’t allow her to. So she figured at that point, there’s nothing else for me here. All I’m going to do is cause everybody else, including myself, more pain if I stay.”

There was no suicide note, but her grandmother did leave a message of sorts. She had always worn a necklace that Rebecca’s mom had given to her. It featured the name Suzanne, which also is the name of Rebecca’s mom.

“She never took it off. But afterwards, when my mom was going through her things in her room, she discovered that grandma had placed it right there on the bedside,” Rebecca said. “I guess that was her note to us. She was sort of passing the torch.”

Reminders

To help keep her grandmother’s memory close — and to ward off that haunting vision of her in the bathtub — Rebecca got a tattoo on the inside of her right arm showing a hummingbird in flight with pink wings. Underneath the image are the words, “Your wings were ready. My heart was not.”

“My grandma had a huge window in the front of her house, and she hung a hummingbird feeder there. She had a couch right under the window, and she would just sit and watch them come and feed,” Rebecca said. “Her favorite color was pink, so that’s why I chose pink for the wings.”

Dealing with the memory of the suicide is a daily challenge for Rebecca. She joined several online suicide support groups to help her cope, and to help others who have experienced similar tragedies.

“Especially with younger people who have lost someone to suicide, they feel like they have no one to reach out to. In some cases, they end up taking their own lives,” Rebecca said. “One of the major things I’m aiming toward is that there’s no further loss of life after somebody commits suicide.”

Rebecca also started a blog, The Real Aftermath of Suicide. It’s a place where she is very open about her experiences and feelings related to her grandmother’s death.

“I realized early on that if I didn’t talk about it, if I didn’t find some kind of release like writing — even if nobody reads it — that this was just going to get worse as time went on. It’s allowed me to keep it manageable,” Rebecca said.

“This is something I’m going to have to deal with for the rest of my life. The tattoo helps, but I’ll never be able to get that image out of my head of seeing my grandma in the bathtub. With time, it’s going to become a little bit easier. But I’ll still have those days where it hits me like a brick wall. That’s when you just have to go throw plates against a wall or something.”

AUDIO EXTRA: Rebecca Crenshaw is open, honest about grandmother’s suicide