PD: Ursuline finance director found dead

I had missed this terribly sad news. In case you have too...

Ursuline finance director found dead
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/articl...p=all&tc=pgall

Husband of Sonoma County supervisor dies

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/apps/p...W=600&border=0
PD File
Peter Kingston.

By MARY CALLAHAN, BRETT WILKISON & MARTIN ESPINOZA
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Published: Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 7:40 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 7:23 a.m.

Peter Kingston, director of finance and operations at Ursuline High School and husband of Sonoma County Supervisor Shirlee Zane, was found dead at his Santa Rosa home Tuesday.

Sheriff Steve Freitas said the death was an apparent suicide.

Zane had just finished an afternoon meeting of the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday and was not at home when her husband was found by a family member shortly before 5 p.m., Freitas said.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Efren Carrillo announced Kingston’s death at the annual Sonoma County State of the County breakfast at the Doubletree Hotel in Rohnert Park on Wednesday morning. He asked “everyone here to take a moment to keep Shirlee, her family and friends in their thoughts and prayers as they go through this very difficult moment.”

The Cambridge University-educated Kingston, 56, was a former businessman who was in charge of finances for Ursuline, a Catholic school for girls. The school announced in the fall that it did not have the financial resources to stay open and would close at the end of this academic year.

Sister Joanne Abrams, one of three nuns who oversee the school and its board of trustees, said staff and faculty at Ursuline were “devastated” by the news.

“My heart is broken,” Abrams said. “He was such a nice guy, warm, gentle. I just can’t believe it.”

She said Ursuline Principal Julie Carver met with counselors Wednesday morning and discussed how to relay the news to faculty and students.

Abrams said the last time she met with Kingston was about a month ago. Like many others in the Ursuline community, Kingston took the news of the school closure “very hard,” she said.

“We kept assuring him that it certainly wasn’t his doing — the declining enrollment and the economy,” she said.

Ursuline relied on $1.2 million from the founding Ursuline Order just to finish the year.

Abrams said auditors hired to look at Ursuline’s books had “commended Peter for the work he was doing.”

Kingston, a native of England, was previously married to Kristina Mailliard, with whom he had two children, Jamie and Gwenny. Mailliard died of breast cancer in 2001 at age 48.

She and Kingston once owned a small Santa Cruz natural beverage producer called Mrs. Wiggles Rocket Juice Co., which they built into a national product line by pioneering the use of supplements to enhance products’ nutritional value.

They moved the company to Santa Rosa in 1985 and sold it in 1998 to J.M. Smucker Corp.

Kingston and Zane were married in June, 2004. Zane, who had been head of the Council on Aging of Sonoma County, was elected to her first term as District 3 supervisor in 2008, representing most of Santa Rosa and Rohnert Park.

Combined, they have three adult children.

Mike Truesdell, president of Cardinal Newman High School, the Catholic school for boys, informed student families by e-mail Wednesday that counselors were being made available to students on both campuses.

County spokesman Jim Leddy said the county did not have any comment about Zane’s immediate plans.

“We’re asking people to give her privacy,” Leddy said.

Zane’s aide, Jessica Diaz, said the supervisor’s office would be releasing additional details when appropriate.

“All of us here at the county are grieving for Supervisor Zane, as I’m sure are many people in the public,” Freitas said.

Emergency personnel responded to the couple’s home on McDonald Avenue and law enforcement officials arrived soon after after a family member reported finding Kingston’s body hanging from a tree in the backyard, Freitas said.

An autopsy was conducted Wednesday morning and a final determination on cause of death will accompany a toxicology report, due in two to four weeks, the sheriff said. No note from Kingston was found by investigators.

I second the sentiment about NOT hiding suicide away. As politically incorrect as it is to say this... it takes an immense amount of courage to end one's life, preceded in equal measure by the vast psychological, spiritual and physical pain that drives one into making that final decision.

I often find it curious how people react to suicide; how they think (if only) they could have done something, or their disbelief over how the act was out of character with the person or the event that triggered the suicide. But the contemplation of suicide doesn't occur to those in pain out of an urge, a whim, or an impulse. It happens out of a long courtship with the thought for many years, until the thought of the act becomes so familiar that it no longer resembles a place a fear, but a place of self-deliverance to peace, sanity and rest. The trigger event is merely the last straw.

Not all of us are fortunate to have been born with stable moods, or the environment to have a stable mood nurtured. Depression can be inherent or acquired. Not all of us will have the tools to cope, or even choose to use the tools to teach ourselves how to cope, and even then, for the chronically depressed everyday can be an invisible excruciating struggle.

Society doesn't want to become introspective about suicide, yet there remains a thinly veiled morbid and shameful fascination with an act we have all contemplated, but never undertaken. Our cultural paradigm teaches us not to process suicide in shades of morals, values and ethics. Instead, we're inculcated to view it as an act of abomination, a weakness, a sin, illegal, and insane. But if people can pull back and see the big picture long enough to visit a very uncomfortable place within themselves, then perhaps they might be able to imagine what it's like to live in a chronic state of hopelessness.

Need help with your imagination? Then envision the most stressful, traumatic, painful and depressive event in your life, and then imagine that the pain and hopelessness from that painful event NEVER moves through you, but instead, it resides and dwells for years over. Contrary believers will say suicide is a cop out, weak, insensitive, selfish. But then we have to be careful when we judge others by our perceptual yardstick. I suggest we open a can of philosophy for the rest of that thought.

My heart goes out to Peter Kingston for having to be alone when his life ended, and for the personal pain he must have endured to deliver himself there. And to Shirlee Zane and all of her family and friends and the family and friends of Peter Kingston; I give my deepest condolences for your loss. May you all feel the sweet and blessed-ed warmth of tender well-wishes I'm sending your way.

Books about suicide. I hope this can be of help for those who wish to understand...

https://www.amazon.com/Night-Falls-F.../dp/0375701478

https://www.amazon.com/Savage-God-St.../dp/0393306577

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Posted in reply to the post by tacitus:

Chris Smith told of Shirlee Zane saying at the memorial for her husband that (paraphrased) it's important to talk about suicide and not hide it away. This woman's courage and clearheadedness in the midst of personal loss inspires.

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A new book about suicide, by a survivor:


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Wednesday, January 26, 2011 (SF Chronicle)
'Half in Love,' by Linda Gray Sexton: review
Christina Eng, Special to The Chronicle

Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide By Linda Gray Sexton
(Counterpoint; 320 pages; $25)
In 1994, when she was 40, Linda Gray Sexton published "Searching for Mercy
Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton." The memoir, heartfelt
and forthright, helped Sexton come to terms with her mother's life. It
looks, in particular, at how being a parent herself changed the way she
viewed her tumultuous childhood.
Sexton's latest work, "Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide,"
helps her come to terms, she writes, with the death of her mother, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who killed herself, after multiple attempts,
in 1974. "I needed to confront and disentangle myself from the strong
tentacles [of] her suicide" Equally introspective, it takes its title from
a phrase in John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale": "Darkling I listen; and
for many a time/ I have been half in love with easeful Death,/ Called him
soft names in many a mused rhyme."
Though it deals with the two women's descents into depression, years apart
from each other, and with bipolar disorders, the book is not all doom and
despair. On the contrary, it is conciliatory and, fortunately for us,
ultimately hopeful.
Sexton spent the decades since her mother's suicide trying hard to cope.
She had just turned 21. "In September, I began my senior year at Harvard
College. In early October, I picked out a coffin."
Named her mother's literary executor, a task she had been both thrilled
with and dismayed by, she went through notes, letters and memorabilia, and
helped establish her archives at the University of Texas in Austin. She
fielded speaking invitations.
"I read her poetry from podiums as if it were mine," Sexton writes, "or,
at least, as if I were some sort of expert on the subject .... And, after
graduation, I studied poetry at the Radcliffe Institute as had she - but
not in the kind of fellowship she had won, only in workshops for which I
had to pay a fee." She acknowledges her unique position with
self-awareness that the reader comes to appreciate.
Managing her mother's professional affairs, she effectively kept Anne
Sexton's memory alive. But she also wanted to emerge from her mother's
great shadow, create a separate identity and develop a voice of her own.
Her novels include "Rituals" and "Points of Light."
Sexton had far more difficulty escaping her mother's personal legacy, and
her family's tragic history of mental illness and suicide. She devotes
significant chunks of the narrative to her own downward spiral that began
in the late 1990s, after she had moved from the East Coast to Northern
California. These chapters could have been entirely discouraging but,
thankfully, are not.
As she turned 45, Sexton writes, "the same age my mother had been when she
died," she fell into a state of serious depression. There were days the
author struggled to get out of bed. She didn't see the point.
Though she realized it would devastate her young boys, the way her
mother's death had devastated her sister, Joy, and her, and though she did
not want to abandon her children, the way she believed her mother had
abandoned them, Sexton tried a number of times to commit suicide. She
details her subsequent stays in psychiatric hospitals with honesty and
courage.
What she endured offered her insight, too, on how her mother must have
felt years ago in psychiatric hospitals. Sexton's shame and helplessness
give way eventually and admirably to redemption and forgiveness.
By facing what her mother faced, Sexton got to understand her better. And
by surviving the ordeal, she got to "put my mother's legacy behind me,
that old dance partnered with a death wish."
That Sexton was able to recover is a testament to her strength and the
support she received from friends, family and doctors. She credits her
sons, her first and second husbands and her therapist. That she thrives
now ought to inspire others who also often feel deepening senses of
sadness and heroically fight demons of their own every day.

Christina Eng is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. E-mail her
at [email protected]. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2011 SF Chronicle



Another great book about severe depression (and addiction to his over-prescribed meds for it) is "Darkness Visible" by William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice, among other great books.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by tacitus:

Chris Smith told of Shirlee Zane saying at the memorial for her husband that (paraphrased) it's important to talk about suicide and not hide it away. This woman's courage and clearheadedness in the midst of personal loss inspires.

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