“They think, ‘I will get attention in a world where I am feeling not attended'. What becomes magical is that they are dead; they will never feel attended,” Berman said.

An article I read brought this point home. The handful of people who survived the leap from the Golden Gate Bridge told interviewers that as soon as their feet left the bridge, they regretted the act.

My second assumption, that “the economy,” had somehow triggered Roy’s act, was not specific or concrete enough. When it comes to understanding suicide (or maybe anything), specificity is important. “If we can figure out that which five or six pathways lead to suicide, we can interrupt the pathway,” explained Berman.

Detailed studies of individual cases, or “psychological autopsies,” might help researchers draw conclusions about causes, but autopsies have not been done in large enough volume. So correlations are the best we can do, but they need to be as specific as possible. Suicide is not strongly correlated to the economy, but to unemployment. In the modern era, for every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate, there has typically been an increase of about 1 percent in the number of suicides, according to Steve Stack, a professor at Wayne State University.

Men still, more than women, define their self-worth by how much money they make and their occupations. That partly goes to explain why the suicide rate is three times higher among men than women.

“Failure in the primary adult male role (economic success) is more visible and obvious than failure in the primary adult female role, which is diffuse (success in relationships). Males are more likely to feel like failures in their primary role and therefore are more likely to suicide,” Stack noted in a paper he wrote in 2000.

Before the Great Depression, my great-grandfather was on an upward trajectory. After Georgetown, he served in World War I on the Black Hawk, which laid mines in the North Sea. He married, earned a law degree, and went to work as an attorney in the D.C. courts. He and his wife, one of the first credentialed nutritionists, had one daughter, my grandmother.

In 1929 that upwardly mobile life came crashing down. He first lost his legal practice, and then his marriage. My great-grandmother went to live in a series of boarding houses, Roy moved back in with his mother, and my grandmother was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Elizabeth.

By this point, I’d gone way too far not to keep going. I tacked a trip to Elizabeth on to my business travel to New York, and Aunt Laurie, the youngest of Roy’s three grandchildren, agreed to come.

I figured the local newspaper would have covered the suicide in more detail than the Times, so one of our first stops was the library built in Andrew Carnegie in the early 1900s to serve those who were “industrious and ambitious; not those who need everything done for them, but those who, being most anxious and able to help themselves, deserve and will be benefited by help from others.”