Stanley Uris's suicide

On the evening of May 28th, 1985, Stanley Uris, a thirty-eight-year-old accountant living in a comfortable Atlanta suburb with his wife Patricia, received a telephone call that would end his life within the hour. The call was from Mike Hanlon, the librarian in Derry, Maine, who had begun contacting the members of the Losers' Club to fulfill a blood oath made twenty-seven years earlier. Stanley's reaction was immediate and devastating: he listened, said little, hung up, and told his wife it was "no one," then announced he was going to take a bath—an act so unusual for that hour that Patricia later recalled it as the first sign that something was terribly wrong.

The Call and Its Immediate Aftermath

Stanley was sitting in the den with Patricia, watching the game show Family Feud, when the phone rang. He answered it with a professional "Hello—Uris residence" and listened for several minutes. His wife saw a frown line appear between his eyebrows, then a brief smile as he recognized the caller: "You ... you! Well, I'll be goddamned! Mike!" But the smile faded as he listened further, and his face settled into an analytic expression. He asked once, "Are you sure, Mike?" and then, after a long pause, said, "All right, I understand. Yes, I ... Yes. Yes, everything. I have the picture." He promised to consider coming, but his voice had become flat and distant. When he hung up, Patricia asked who it was, and Stanley replied, "No one, really. I think I'll take a bath." He left the room without further explanation, and Patricia, absorbed in her show, did not follow him.

The Bath and the Suicide

Stanley went upstairs, ran a bath, and locked the bathroom door—three actions that Patricia later identified as unprecedented in their married life. He never took baths in the early evening; he showered in the morning and sometimes soaked late at night with a magazine and a beer, but never at seven o'clock. He never closed the bathroom door fully unless using the toilet, and he had never locked it against her at all. When Patricia finally went upstairs with a can of beer, she found the door shut tight. She knocked, then hammered, then shouted his name. The only response was the steady, deliberate sound of dripping water: plink ... pause. Plink ... pause.

Panic rising, Patricia retrieved the spare key from the kitchen cupboard. When she unlocked the door and pushed it open, she found Stanley dead in the tub. The water was bright pink with blood. He lay with his back propped against the rear of the tub, his head rolled so far back that his short black hair brushed the skin between his shoulder blades. His mouth hung open, and his expression was one of "abysmal, frozen horror." He had used a package of Gillette Platinum Plus razor blades to slit his inner forearms from wrist to elbow, then crossed each cut just below the Bracelets of Fortune, making a pair of bloody capital T's. The exposed tendons and ligaments looked to Patricia "like cuts of cheap beef." On the blue tiles above the tub, Stanley had dipped his right forefinger in his own blood and written a single word in two huge, staggering letters. A zigzagging bloody fingermark fell away from the second letter, made as his hand fell into the tub. Patricia stared at her husband's dead, sparkling eyes and began to scream.

The Context of Stanley's Life and Death

Stanley Uris had built a life of order and success. He married Patricia Blum in 1972, and they moved to Georgia, where he started an accounting business that grew steadily. By 1983 their income had entered the "fabled land of SIX FIGURES." They lived in a fine house set tastefully back behind low yew hedges, drove a Volvo and a Mercedes, and belonged to the country club. Yet beneath this surface lay a persistent shadow: they could not have children. Medical tests showed both were fertile, but Patricia never conceived. Stanley had bad dreams, and sometimes he would wake up thrashing and moaning, unable to remember what he had dreamed. Once, when Patricia asked him about choosing a job in Georgia, he had said, "The turtle couldn't help us," in a voice that was not his own. He had no explanation for the phrase.

Stanley had also rediscovered a childhood friend through his books: William Denbrough, who had become a successful novelist writing horror stories. Stanley worked his way through almost all of Denbrough's novels, and Patricia noticed that the books both delighted and depressed him. She picked up one of the earlier novels and put it down after three chapters, finding it "full of monsters" and "almost pornographic" in its violence. Stanley talked about writing to Denbrough but never did. The books stirred memories he could not fully access.

The Promise and the Breaking Point

Mike Hanlon's call reminded Stanley of the promise they had all made in the summer of 1958: that if It ever started again, they would return to Derry and finish the job. Stanley had been the one to cut their palms with a sliver of Coke bottle, binding them in a blood oath. But he had also been the one who, even as a child, had said he could stand to be scared but hated being dirty. The horror of what they had faced—the dead boys in the Standpipe, the leper, the mummy, the werewolf, the final confrontation with the Spider—had offended his sense of order in a way that fear alone could not. As an adult, he had built a life of meticulous control, but the call shattered that control. He saw his choices as only two: stay alive and get dirty, or die clean. He chose death.

Patricia later told her mother that Stanley had seemed "off" all evening, and that the books by William Denbrough had upset him more than she realized. She found the last of Denbrough's novels on the night of the bath. The book was a horror story, and she thought it had "bad feelings and hurt" in it. Stanley had felt as if he'd rediscovered a childhood chum, but the stories made him feel bad, too. When Mike Hanlon called, the buried memories surfaced with lethal force. Stanley Uris, who had been the most ordered and perhaps the most vulnerable of the Losers, could not face the return of the nightmare. He took his own life rather than go back to Derry.

Consequences

Patricia Uris's screams brought the police, and the news of Stanley's suicide reached Mike Hanlon, who then had to inform the other Losers when they gathered in Derry. Bill Denbrough, upon hearing the news, said, "He was an ordered person. The kind of person who has to have his books divided up into fiction and nonfiction on his shelves ... and then wants to have each section in alphabetical order. I can remember something he said once ... He said he could stand to be scared, but he hated being dirty. That seemed to me the essence of Stan. Maybe it was just too much, when Mike called. He saw his choices as being only two: stay alive and get dirty or die clean. Maybe people really don't change as much as we think." Stanley's death broke the circle of seven, leaving the remaining Losers to face It with a diminished number and a deepened sense of loss. His suicide note, if he left one, was never mentioned; the only message he left was the single word written in blood on the bathroom tiles.