On this day in 1928, Dr. Clarence Hemingway spent the morning at his office, then entered his home in Oak Park, Illinois, for lunch. He burned personal papers in the basement furnace. Then he walked up the stairs to his second-floor bedroom and in the semi-darkness cast by the drawn shades, sat on the marital bed.

In the next room, his 13-year-old son, Leicester, was laying in bed with a cold when he heard the gunshot. He knocked at the bedroom door and called, “Daddy!” Inside, in the semi-darkness, his father lay on the bed, breathing hoarsely. When Leicester put his hand behind his father’s head, he felt the warm blood on his palm. Seriously ill with diabetes and heart disease, suffering losses from bad investments in Florida real estate and depressed, he had shot himself behind his right ear with his father’s .32 Smith and Wesson revolver.

Ernest, then in Trenton, New Jersey, on his way back to his Key West home, received a telegram bearing the news. In shock, he traveled to Oak Park to oversee the funeral and financial arrangements. Then, he returned home, determined not to let his father’s death distract him from finishing “A Farewell to Arms.”

“I was very fond of him and feel like hell about it,” he wrote his editor, Max Perkins, but “realize of course that thing for me to do is not worry but get to work ? finish my book properly so I can help them out with the proceeds. What makes me feel the worst is my father is the one I cared about.”

Clarence’s suicide would haunt Hemingway for the rest of his life. While the family stuck to the story that health and financial issues were behind his death, the unspoken worry was that insanity was responsible. Hemingway refused to discuss the possibility, although soon after admitted “I’ll probably go the same way.” Instead, he chose to blame others: first his uncle, for giving his father bad investment advice and refusing to help with a loan, then his mother, Grace, a hatred that would grow more virulent.

“I hated my mother as soon as I knew the score and loved my father until he embarrassed me with his cowardice,” he wrote in 1948. “My mother is an all time all american bitch and she would make a pack mule shoot himself; let alone poor bloody father.”

Over time, he would reinforce that view of his parents with a stunning callousness. He told Ezra Pound that he would have paid his father if he had postponed his suicide until after “Arms” was finished. “The suicide of my father,” he once said, “is the best story I never wrote.” And in “The Green Hills of Africa,” he wrote ? and later removed before publication: “My father was a coward. He shot himself without necessity.”

This desire to cast his father as a coward, to contrast with his own “grace under pressure,” became a dominant theme in Hemingway’s writing. He portrayed what he saw as his father’s weak character in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” and “Fathers and Sons.” In “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Hemingway places the story in Robert Jordan’s history: “He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have. Because if he wasn’t a coward he would have stood up to that woman and not let her bully him. . . . He understood his father and he forgave him everything and he pitied him but he was ashamed of him.”

With today’s memoirs happily discussing the most bizarre malfunctions of the brain, it’s easy to forget that mental illness carried an enormous stigma. Hemingway was not alone in thinking this way. After stabbing his wife during a drunken argument in 1960, Norman Mailer begged a judge not to send him to a mental hospital, because “for the rest of my life, my work will be considered as the work of a man with a disordered mind.”

But dark forces might also have been at work in Hemingway’s mind. Psychiatrist Christopher Martin theorized in 2006 that by the end of Hemingway’s life, he suffered from “bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence, traumatic brain injury, and probably borderline and narcissistic personality traits.” Some of this was caused by his heavy drinking, others by numerous concussions he suffered (including two plane crashes in Africa). Martin also noted that, as a child, his mother dressed him like a girl and called him her “Fweettee.” His father was a disciplinarian who beat his son with a razor strop. At times, Ernest would hide in a backyard shed and aim a loaded shotgun at his father’s head. One wonders if Clarence’s suicide had burdened his son with a lifelong death wish.

Ironically, some doctors believe that it wasn’t mental illness, but a hereditary disease caused by excess iron in the blood, called hemochromatosis, that was responsible for the health problems the Hemingways suffered.

In any event, self-murder ran through the Hemingway family like a dark, red line. Three of the doctor’s six children — Ernest, Ursula and Leicester, who had found his father’s body — killed themselves. Ernest’s granddaughter Margaux Hemingway would kill herself as well at age 41.