Haunted by a word, a family battles medical examiner’s office
David M. Haverty wishes he could forget about his father’s death certificate, filed away in the Belmont town clerk’s office. He wants to see it as a meaningless piece of paper. Why let that one word, put there by a medical examiner, undermine his father’s legacy?
Yet in the seven years since his father died at the age of 82, that blue certificate has haunted him, his four younger siblings, and, particularly, their mother. All the joyous birthdays, weddings, and graduations since Dad died have not reduced the sting of the word: suicide.
It is a word they associate with metallic coldness, a reminder of the MBTA commuter train that whipped by and struck their father, an avid walker, one winter morning at the Brighton Street crossing in Belmont.
It is also a word suggesting total certainty about one man’s inner world when, the family says, none exists.
Yes, their father had that week started a low-dose of antidepressants for anxiety and low mood, but he also wasn’t wearing his hearing aid that morning and may not have heard the train.
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