The family was having a good old time when dad decided to bring things down to earth by reading the family tree. He had a late-life interest in genealogy, suddenly becoming best friends with distant cousins he had never mentioned and opening up like old friends to relatives he had never heard of before. I guess that kind of behavior falls into some kind of pattern, or predictable path. The family tree, all of this on his side, is littered with suicides, alcohol poisoning, and deaths of questionable circumstance. Only rarely was suicide acknowledged as such in those days, or at least in his family situations, so the circumstances had to have been without question. Dad himself took his own life in the end, continuing what I guess you could call the “tradition”.