“Slow suicide”

“Slow suicide” is Bob Manitow’s stark description of Joanne Doss’s withdrawal from life, not a medical finding that resolves what caused her illness. The phrase gives a simple, morally charged explanation to a long decline that baffled doctors and devastated Joanne’s family, while exposing how uncertainty can invite competing—and consequential—accounts of illness.

The phrase and its setting

Stacy Doss first encountered the phrase indirectly: listening from the bathroom beside the kitchen, she overheard Bob Manitow speaking with Judge Manitow about Joanne. Bob insisted, “Trust me, Judy, there's nothing physically wrong with her—it's slow suicide.” Stacy was furious at what she heard, taking it as a cruel dismissal of her mother. Later, however, the absence of a medical explanation unsettled that certainty. She began to wonder whether Joanne had even been sick, while still knowing that the questions about her mother’s departure could never be answered.

The phrase compresses two different claims into one. “Nothing physically wrong” treats the lack of an identified cause as evidence against bodily illness; “slow suicide” recasts Joanne’s prolonged withdrawal as a form of self-destruction. That interpretation may name the visible pattern of retreat, but it also makes a claim about intention that the medical tests themselves could not establish.

The decline behind the judgment

Richard Doss described Joanne’s change as gradual. Fatigue came first, followed by joint pain, headaches, skin sensitivity, and increasing disengagement from him, their children, and ordinary activities. Joanne stopped socializing, declined business dinners, and left behind tennis, golf, and exercise. She spent more and more time in bed, saying her pain had worsened. Richard initially assumed she needed rest; when the deterioration continued, he began taking her to doctors.

Her appetite persisted even as other parts of her life receded. Richard said she ate sweets and greasy foods and arranged grocery deliveries while he was at work. In less than a year, he recounted, her weight rose from 110 pounds to 210. He described the change as making his athletic wife seem like a stranger, while also saying he felt it would be cruel to take away the food that appeared to sustain her. His account supplies the circumstances behind the image of a life narrowing, but it remains his retrospective account of Joanne’s behavior and of his own response to it.

Medical uncertainty and competing explanations

The phrase is sharpened by the scale of the search for a physical cause. Richard recalled dozens of doctors and tests including CAT scans, MRIs, toxicologic and serologic testing, and two lumbar punctures; he said one neurologist was “fishing around.” A file later showed reports from fifteen doctors, including blood work, urinalysis, X-rays, CAT scans, PET scans, MRIs, and the lumbar punctures. Its operative word was “negative.” The breadth of the investigation makes the uncertainty concrete, but negative results do not by themselves prove that Joanne had no illness.

Bob Manitow’s later account converted that uncertainty into a confident psychological explanation. He described Joanne as psychologically troubled, said she had chosen to withdraw from life and eat herself to death, and characterized her condition as depression. He also argued that she should have received psychiatric care and that, had Richard listened and had her committed, medication might have kept her alive. He blamed Joanne for refusing help, Richard for not securing it, and the doctor who assisted her death for completing the process. These are Bob’s judgments, not conclusions established by the test results.

Family consequence and significance

For Stacy, the phrase becomes part of the unresolved struggle to understand her mother’s death: first an accusation that made her angry, then a possibility she could not simply dismiss when the doctors had found no cause. The same words that offer Bob a decisive explanation leave open the central questions of what Joanne experienced and what her choices meant. “Slow suicide” therefore functions both as an interpretation of Joanne’s decline and as evidence of the family’s competing efforts to explain it; it does not settle the medical uncertainty it seems to name.