"Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down..."

"... into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, 'failure, failure, failure...' I love you so much ... I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you ... My going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed ... Sometimes think of the fun we had all thru the years ..." 

That is the suicide note of Helen Palmer, the first wife of Theodore Geisel AKA Dr. Seuss. Here's her Wikipedia page. She was born in Brooklyn, he was born in Massachusetts, she went to Wellesley, he went to Dartmouth, and they both went to Oxford, where they met. 

She later stated, "Ted's notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals. So I set to work diverting him; here was a man who could draw such pictures; he should be earning a living doing that."...

For about a decade following World War II, Ted worked to feed a booming children's book market... [relying] heavily on the encouragement and editorial input of Helen. In fact, throughout much of his career, he relied on her support. After realising that her husband was having an affair, Helen committed suicide in 1967 with an overdose of barbiturates after a series of illnesses spanning 13 years. ...

About Helen's death, Ted's niece Peggy commented: "Whatever Helen did, she did it out of absolute love for Ted." Secretary Julie Olfe called Helen's death "her last and greatest gift to him." Eight months later, in June 1968, Ted married Audrey Dimond, with whom he had been having an affair before Helen's death.

That links to a 2000 article in the NYT: 

Audrey Dimond was married with two children when she fell in love with Ted Geisel. Mr. Geisel, 18 years her senior, was also married. In the wake of their affair, Mr. Geisel's wife, Helen, committed suicide, causing, as Mrs. Geisel puts it, ''a rather large ripple in the community of La Jolla.''

Mrs. Dimond divorced her husband to marry Mr. Geisel, 64, and when she did, her daughters, 9 and 14, were sent away to school.

''They wouldn't have been happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them. He's the man who said of children, 'You have 'em and I'll entertain 'em.' Ted's a hard man to break down, but this is who he was. He lived his whole life without children and he was very happy without children. I've never been very maternal. There were too many other things I wanted to do. My life with him was what I wanted my life to be.''

Did you know and remember this story? I didn't. Had I read it in the NYT back in 2000? I must have, but it was shocking news to me when I encountered it as I was poking around on Geisel's Wikipedia page this morning after blogging about the current to-do over the man. 

ADDED: Palmer was herself a children's book author. This is her most famous book:

Knowing what happened to her, it's hard not to imagine her answer to the question: Commit suicide! 

And it's hard not to think of the super-greedy boy as Geisel. Some people thought the book was actually written by Geisel, and Snopes took the trouble to debunk a rumor which it states as: "Dr. Seuss once wrote a children's book since banned due to its references to suicide and violence."

The Snopes piece is long and interesting, going beyond getting the authorship straight and delving into why the book could be understood to have a violence problem: 

Some of the prose in Do You Know What I’m Going to Do Next Saturday? does sound a little odd if read without the context provided by its accompanying photographs, a feature the creator of the “Banned Book” page capitalized upon. For instance, at one point the child narrator declares:

Did you ever beat more than one kid at a time?

Well, I’m going to beat five kids at a time.

And then I’m going to beat their fathers, too.

The photos show a boy playing tennis with kids and volleyball with men.

Likewise, the following lines are a little difficult to fathom when considered in isolation:

I’ll dump water on Sam.

I’ll make him take a walk.

I’ll make Sam walk about a hundred miles.

The photos show kids hiking and playing. 

Even the innocuous can sound ominous when taken out of context:

I’ll run around and yell and yell.

Next Saturday I’ll yell my head off.

I’ll blow horns. I’ll blow and blow.

Next Saturday I’ll blow my head off.

No one is going to stop me next Saturday.

In the photo, the kid is playing a tuba, but you can see you don't want to hear your child say "Next Saturday I’ll blow my head off"!

You Know What I’m Going to Do Next Saturday? was never “banned,” and nothing about it was really the least bit unwholesome....

Yeah, well, actually it is. The whole point is that there are double meanings and the photo is always the good meaning, but you can still figure out the dangerous meaning. That's why it's funny. And once you know the author killed herself, aren't you ready to keep it out of the hands of your little darlings?

"The decision to buy a handgun for the first time is typically motivated by self-protection. But..."

"... it also raises the purchasers’ risk of deliberately shooting themselves by ninefold on average, with the danger most acute in the weeks after purchase, scientists reported on Wednesday. The risk remains elevated for years, they said," the NYT reports.

Thanks, scientists, but did you exclude the people who bought guns because they'd already formed an intention to shoot themselves? Or maybe it's just the NYT that wrote it that way, making it sound as though there are a lot of people who buy a handgun for self-defense and then somehow — once they've got that handgun — embark for the first time into suicidal ideation.

Of course, it's easy to see that people who have a gun are more likely to shoot themselves than people who don't have a gun, but they're talking about first-time handgun owners. So the comparison is first-time handgun owners and longterm handgun owners? NO!

The study tracked nearly 700,000 first-time handgun buyers, year by year, and compared them with similar non-owners, breaking out risk by gender. Men who bought a gun for the first time were eight times as likely to kill themselves by gunshot in the subsequent 12 years than non-owners; women were 35 times as likely to do so.

Well, the non-owners number would be extremely small, so 8 times that and even 35 times doesn't sound so big.

Toward the end of the article, there's a reference to "so-called reverse causation." That's the situation that I mentioned, above, that the handgun was bought for the purpose of suicide, but the researchers had no way to tell the difference between these people and those who bought the handgun for self-protection (and the protection of others).

I got the feeling the article was written to inspire readers not to arm themselves lest the gun would change them into a person who'd commit suicide. This is the message that if you don't want to die, don't arm yourself because you'll be arming your most-likely murderer: YOU!