Dear Cat:

You write beautifully. My first thought: I don’t think your daughter needs to know that her father committed suicide (suicide by cop is the term, isn’t it?), not now and not later. I don’t see that she needs to know how he died because I don’t see any possible advantage to her knowing, and I only see disadvantage in it.

Regarding the man you love, you wrote: “He’d always been the one to call it quits before”- not that you should have called it quit, but seeing the bigger picture, people do tend to repeat, and so, it is likely that he would have called it quit once again, if you didn’t.

I was wondering, did you call it quit following a disagreement with him, an argument, a conflict?

anita