The record does not ease you into it.
It simply states that on April 8, 1925, William B. Lapham—a Civil War veteran and my great-great-great-uncle—took his own life.

The line appears on a scanned image of his death certificate, found in the Ancestry archives. Even behind a screen, it carries the faint blur and shadow of the original record.

William B. Lapham was born in 1838 in Greenfield Township, the son of Benjamin Lapham and Samantha Broadway. Before the war, he had already gone north, living in Marquette and working as a teamster—likely hauling for the logging camps or the iron mines that were beginning to define the Upper Peninsula.

In June of 1861, he made his way to Adrian and enlisted at the Lenawee County Courthouse, joining Company I of the 4th Michigan Infantry. He likely drilled on the open grounds of what is now Adrian College—a place I would come to know well more than a century later.

The 4th Michigan saw some of the war’s most brutal fighting—Bull Run, the Peninsula Campaign, Antietam, Fredericksburg. William was there for much of it, but not for all. In February of 1863, less than two years after he enlisted, he was discharged for disability.

The records do not tell us exactly what happened to him. But the pension files, the affidavits, and the fragments left behind begin to fill in the outline. William suffered from chronic illness—persistent gastrointestinal disease, what we would now recognize as chronic diarrhea—and complications that followed him for the rest of his life. In affidavits filed years later, there are references to a lung condition as well, including episodes of coughing up blood. By 1891, his condition had worsened enough to warrant an increase in his pension.

This was not something that healed. This was something he carried.

After the war, he and his first wife ran a boarding house near South Haven and started their family. For reasons we can only guess at, William and Emeline moved west to Nebraska, where he returned to the work he knew as the son of a farmer—familiar labor that may have offered some measure of pride and stability.

The illness followed him.

Neighbors in Boone County, Nebraska, would later testify on his behalf, describing his condition in practical, matter-of-fact terms. Their affidavits were sent on to a Detroit attorney, part of the long process of proving, again and again, that the war had not finished with him.

The effects of his illness lasted more than 60 years.

That is what makes the final record so difficult to read. Not only the manner of his death, but the distance between the beginning and the end. Whatever happened to him did not end in 1863 when he left the army. It stretched across decades—through work, movement, and persistent illness—until it reached its conclusion in 1925.

The death certificate offers a brief explanation: “Laceration of the throat: suicide due to long-term illness.”

We have a better vocabulary for some of this now. We speak of trauma, of invisible wounds, of the ways war can settle into the body and the mind and remain there long after the fighting stops. We have better treatments for chronic gastrointestinal conditions and lung disease. But William B. Lapham would not have had those words or those cures. He would have had only the experience of it—the daily reality of a body that no longer worked as it once had, and whatever burden he carried that was never written down.

It is tempting to see his story as distant, belonging to another century. But the pattern feels familiar. Across generations—from the Civil War through the world wars and into Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—we continue to recognize the same truth, even as we struggle to fully name it.

Soldiers come home, but they do not always leave the war behind.

The record tells us how William’s life concluded. The rest—the years in between—ask us to look more closely, and to consider what it means to survive something that never entirely lets go.

I am a retired journalism professor, having taught 14 years at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan and currently an adjunct professor in English at Siena Heights University. Prior to that, I spent 20 years working as a reporter and editor for The Saline Reporter and Milan News-Leader, small newspapers which were purchased in 1995 by Heritage Newspapers. Those papers were shuttered permanently in the mid-2010s. I also free-lanced for The Daily Telegram and currently am a regular contributor to The Tecumseh Herald and Homefront publications. I am an alumna of Siena Heights University, where I earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1980 and the University of Toledo, where I received my master's degree in 1982.

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Death by his own hand