Never Regret the Pain
by Sel Yackley
Prologue: I had no idea which direction our lives would go when I married Frank. As reporters, we were happy to be witnessing history while eking out a living. We were attracted to each other because we were opposites. He was quiet, private, and mysterious. I was bubbly, sociable, and an open book. Frank’s indecisiveness and contradictions were exciting challenges for me. I was adventurous and adaptable – having left my native land of Turkey at age 16 and integrated into the American society. I had chosen journalism as a career even though English was my second language. Above all, like most other young women in the 1960s, I wanted a good marriage and children. I was ready to support my husband’s career ambitions whatever the cost.
Little did I know Frank’s ambitions would take us to such heights! He was destined to become a well-known public figure, an admired prosecutor, and a highly respected judge. He would also fall into the depths of despair as he suffered manic depression in his mid-40s. He opposed capital punishment but followed the law instead of his convictions by sentencing a murderer to death, thus unraveling his life as well as ours.
This is my true story, but in certain instances, for my own reasons, I have changed the names of some characters. This book is about loving and living with a bipolar husband and dealing with the circumstances of his death. It is about how my three children and I struggled and coped, took our fate in stride, pulled closer together, and eagerly accepted support from friends.
I hope my story inspires and sustains families in similar pain, educates the public about bipolar illness, and promotes more research for better treatment of mental illness. Recognized as brain diseases perhaps even caused by a viral infection, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders are treatable just like other chronic ailments.
The earlier one gets help, the more likely a better outcome.
Chapter 1: I heard my name blaring from the loud speaker at O’Hare Airport’s international terminal and ran to the ticket counter, questions crashing in my head. What could have happened? Who besides Frank knows which airline I’m taking?
I had completed every detail at home before leaving for my flight to Turkey to spend three weeks vacation with my children and parents. As was their custom every summer, John 16, Ayla 14, and Joe 12 were visiting their grandparents and my sister, Nil, who traveled from Germany to join them for six weeks every summer. The sun, the sea, and my mother’s comforting arms would surely lift my spirits and prepare me for the uncertainty of our future as a family.
While waiting for the boarding call, I had reflected on all that happened during the past four months and was grateful that the children were spared the anguish of watching the mounting difficulties between their father and me. I took comfort knowing they were on the Sea of Marmara in the warmth of their grandparents’ and their Aunt Nil’s love. The Yackley children always enjoyed being submerged in Turkish culture and language. While they were happily ensconced for the summer, I toiled away in my public relations work and tried to avoid thinking about my now chaotic 20-year-long marriage.
Frank had called to wish me a good trip this morning. He was in a decent mood and said he was seeing the psychiatrist before going to work. He promised to take care of our cat and keep an eye on our house in Ottawa, Illinois - even pick the peaches as they ripened on the tree in our back yard.
Breathless, I arrived at the ticket counter and was told by an agent to call our family friend Peg Breslin. I ran to the pay phone. Peg answered on the first ring and in a somber, but calm, voice said, “I'm afraid there has been a terrible accident. Frank has been shot."
Stunned, I gripped the receiver, unable to speak.
“Sel, Sel, are you there?” Peg shouted.
“Yes, I am here,” I whispered. “Tell me, is he alive?"
"I’m afraid not,” she answered. The sheriff discovered his body at the shooting range about an hour ago."
Shaking, I spoke my first thought: "He killed himself, didn’t he?”
"They’re investigating all that,“ she said. “My husband is on his way to the airport to bring you home. We were lucky Carolyn Andrews overheard you tell the van driver you were flying KLM when she took you to the shuttle stop."
I held my hand on my throat to keep from sobbing. Dazed, I went to fetch my bags from the young woman with whom I had carried on an animated conversation during the previous hour. She looked at me with a curious expression.
“I need to go back home,” I said with a thick tongue that made it difficult for me to talk. I finally mumbled: “My husband has been shot.” The shock on her face was probably mirroring mine as I began to realize the enormity of the tragedy I was about to face.
Within How could I break the news to our children? I was to bring them back to Ottawa so they could jump into their dad’s arms after several months' absence. Frank often said he could not live without the children. Now, the children had to live without him.
The sudden death of their athletic, brilliant father was inconceivable, and his suicide added an awful dimension to our loss. There were countless questions that needed to be answered.
Had we failed him or had he betrayed us?
How could we face the people of this small town where everyone knew and respected him?
How could I comfort, love, and support my children when I was so shaken?
How could I be a mother and a father to them with no family here, no support?
Where would I turn?
Despite my jumbled thoughts, I explained my situation to the concerned KLM agents as they led me to a desk with a telephone in the back office. I first called my brother-in-law in Germany who tracked down my sister and told her to expect my call. Then I dialed a series of numbers and waited anxiously for the connection to Erdek, Turkey where it was almost midnight. I prayed that my sister, not one of the children, would answer the phone. Nil considered my children like her own and took an active part in their lives.
“Hello,” I said. From the tone of my voice, Nil knew something terrible had happened. I sobbed as I told her I would not be on the flight that night and that Frank was dead.
“I am sure it was suicide,” I said. “Please break the news gently to the children. Tell them I love them and I will call back in an hour.”
The next hour at the KLM desk, calling Frank’s family and friends seemed to last a lifetime. I first talked to Betty Yackley, Frank’s sister-in-law, a psychologist who had known him since Frank was 13 years old.
“Oh. No. No. No.,” she screamed into the mouthpiece. When she heard my sobs, she apologized and offered to call Frank’s three sisters and brother. She said she would leave Naperville, Illinois (Frank’s hometown) right away and get to Ottawa before I would get there.
“I’m staying with you as long as you need me,” she added.
Next, I called Frank’s cousin, his namesake, and his long-time friend, Larry Lorenz, the best man in our wedding. Each call sucked the wind out of my lungs and depleted the tears from my eyes.
More than ever, I wished I were in Erdek - hugging and kissing and crying with the children. I shuddered when I thought about how they would react to this devastating news. I wondered if they would want to fly home right away or if they would need some time to adjust and mourn.
With a broken heart I called back and talked to each one. I told them that Frank was found dead in the shooting range and that I thought it was suicide. Each expressed concern about my state of mind and tried to comfort me.
"You decide," I told them. "Shall I delay the funeral two or three days so you can get back here? Or shall I go ahead with the burial, fly to Turkey to be with you for a few weeks and then have a memorial service when we return?"
With a vote of two to one, they chose the second option. Joe, the youngest, was outvoted.
Driving back to Ottawa, John Breslin and I tried to make sense of what had happened that day. We knew Frank had an aversion to firearms. “Guns scare me. I don’t like being anywhere near them,” he had told us over and over again.
This death was so sudden, so unthinkable that our small town of Ottawa came to a standstill. In a matter of seconds, the Circuit Court had lost one of its most popular judges, and I had become a widow.
I returned to find my two-story, spacious brick home brightly lit and full of friends who hugged me, cried with me, and tried to comfort me with food, wine and tranquilizers. Neighbors walked in and out. Betty and I talked late into the night since sleep escaped me and early the next morning she drove me to the funeral home so I could pick a casket.
The bullet had gone through the right temple, shattered Frank’s brilliant brain, and tore through his big brown eyes. Very little was left of his handsome face. The funeral director, a close friend, spent 24 hours restructuring his head to make it look as if he were sleeping peacefully.
The undertaker remembered Frank's love of sports and literature, so he placed a basketball and a book of poems by A. E. Housman in his casket. I decided against a wake, knowing it would be too hard for me to sustain composure without our children at my side.
Because Frank was a private man, I ordered his casket closed. Peg took care of the funeral arrangements at St. Columba Church, and her husband John, a law-school classmate, handled the financial essentials, such as the paperwork on life insurance, social security, and pension plans.
At first, there had been confusion about the cause of death. The sheriff and the coroner wanted to rule out foul play, but were puzzled about the bullet’s point of entry. Having witnessed Frank sign arrest warrants and other legal documents with his left hand, they did not realize he was ambidextrous until friends told them Frank ate, shot baskets, and threw a football with his right hand. That’s when the cause of death was ruled to be from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Blood tests showed no sign of drugs in his system.
Everyone learned the truth from banner headlines in LaSalle County newspapers, but they knew nothing about his devastating illness, especially since he had tried not let it affect his performance on the bench.
I could not sleep, eat, think, concentrate, or talk coherently during the two days between Frank’s death and the funeral. I was angry. I was sad. I was lost. I felt like a ghost.
What would I do now?
How would the children cope?
I knew I wanted to keep Frank’s memory alive and his legacy intact. I had to be strong for my children and dignified for the community.
Still in shock, Frank’s older brother and three sisters drove to Ottawa from Naperville on that hot, humid August Wednesday in 1986. Sitting by his casket, we cried, prayed, and reminisced about Frank’s childhood and college days. We spoke of the early years of our marriage, family reunions and his exceptional career.
My heart was heavy with grief and my muscles ached from fatigue as I approached the casket to bid farewell to the love of my life, to my man of contradictions: a brilliant scholar with little self-confidence: tough prosecutor but compassionate judge; a good husband who reveled in solitude; the athlete, the poet, the storyteller and the loving father.
An Ottawa Daily Times photographer volunteered to take pictures of Frank in his casket so the children could see their Dad one last time to help accept the finality of it all. Looking at the photographs of the funeral service would also reinforce the fact that Frank was much loved and respected.
"This may help bring closure,” people said. I knew better. In our hearts and our minds there would always be a void. We were at the threshold of an unfamiliar beginning of a life without him.
Fellow circuit judges were pallbearers. The standing-room-only church service had the largest attendance of any funeral in recent La Salle County history. Even though Frank had left the Catholic Church, the priest knew him and delivered a beautiful eulogy.
The powerful voices of the choir accompanied by the organ pierced me to the core as they sang “Let There Be Peace on Earth” and “Ave Maria.” Dressed in black, sobbing like a child, I was overwhelmed with contradictory emotions: anger, relief, gratitude, and loneliness. I was 46-years-old with three children under the age of 17; being a widow was never in my plans. Frank took such good care of himself physically that I teased him about outliving me. I had hoped to throw a surprise 50th birthday party for him that fall and dreamed of a 25th wedding anniversary bash organized by our children in five years.
The procession to the cemetery consisted of 200 cars. I was in a fog from exhaustion, lack of sleep, and mental anguish as the warm summer rain mixed with my tears. I watched as the casket was lowered into the ground and choked as dirt and flowers were thrown over it. At age 49, Frank's final resting place was under a cherry tree with branches spreading out in all directions.
“Loveliest of Trees”
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Frank was obsessed with A. E. Housman, a British poet whose philosophy centered on pessimism and defeat. Frank often recited his poetry and praised him for writing “with such compelling grace that he made darkness seem desirable.”
The cherry tree under which we buried Frank was in the well-tended Oakwood Cemetery, a few steps from the grave of a neighbor’s son, Tim Vegrzyn. Shy, quiet and studious, Tim often played basketball with Frank. On a hot and humid morning in May of 1984, Tim left his parents’ home distraught about a breakup with a girlfriend, but happy about passing his CPA exam and accepting an accounting position. Frank suspected foul play when police discovered Tim’s body in a forest preserve near our home and thought he might have to preside over a murder trial.
A deep sadness came over him once the cause of death was ruled suicide.
“Tim had so much to live for. Why did he take such a desperate step?" he asked.
At Frank’s funeral Ron Kurz, a successful accountant and neighbor uttered a similar question. “Why would such an intelligent and accomplished person take his own life?” he asked his wife Ina. Paradoxically, two years later, Ron hooked up a hose to his car’s exhaust pipe and placed the nozzle inside his running car where he sat and ended his life.
When I think of Frank, Tim, Ron, and others who have taken their lives I am reminded of a quote by the Roman philosopher Seneca:
“Death is the release from all pain and complete cessation, beyond which our suffering cannot extend. It (death) will return us to that condition of tranquility which we had enjoyed before we were born. Should anyone mourn the deceased, then he must also mourn the unborn.”
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