New York often feels like a small city to me. But Cape Town, South Africa, where my family spends a couple of months a year, is a small city. It’s small enough that if you see a particular car drive by you – say, a Volvo wagon – you might look to see if your friend who has the same silver wagon is in the driver’s seat.

So last week, when a well-known Cape Town woman killed herself, her suicide was the only topic of conversation. Glenda Solomon dropped her two boys, ages 8 and 6, off at school Monday morning and then went home and shot herself.

Our children had group swimming lessons together last year, and our boys attended different branches of the same school. In a small city like this, it feels like everyone knew her.

“You never really know what’s going on inside someone’s home or mind or marriage. You might wonder, you might even ask if someone is okay. But then what?” one friend mused. “Everyone is so busy with their own children and marriages and jobs. And while women are good at connecting with each other and forming friendships, there’s a lot of pressure to make sure things appear to be rosy, when in fact they’re not. Motherhood can be depressing.”

Women are twice as likely to experience depression as men. And married women have higher rates of depression than single women – men, on the other hand, are less likely to be depressed if they are married. But what is most disquieting is that depression occurs in women most frequently during their childbearing years. Of course, postpartum depression plays a role in this. But Glenda Solomon’s suicide is a reminder that even the most unlikely candidates can get depressed.

“Severely depressed people can’t see alternatives,” a local psychologist said. “People can’t understand how a mother with two children could kill herself, but when someone is severely depressed, she can’t see any other way to end the suffering.”

In America, more people die from suicide each year than they do from homicide. According to the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign, for every two victims of homicide, there are three deaths from suicide. And while this statistic is at first blush startling, it certainly rings true to me. I can think of several people who have killed themselves, and not one who was murdered.

And yet in many ways, suicide is one of the few remaining taboo subjects. The community here was so shaken that for days, everyone who knew her kept replaying their last encounters with her, trying to see if they had missed the warning signs. But even though we’ve spent the last week talking frequently of Glenda Solomon, we have often done so in hushed tones.

“The last time I saw her was at the kids’ swimming races a few weeks ago,” a mother with children in the same grade said. “I waved and said hello, and she waved back, but you could see she just wanted to get the greeting done and over with. Normally she was so upbeat and friendly and happy to chat.”

“I saw her having coffee with her husband and I went over and said hello, and asked her how she was and she said, ‘Well … okay,'” another mother in Glenda’s child’s school said. “I could see she wasn’t okay.”

“It could have been any one of us,” one friend after another said.

Even in New York, where it couldn’t be more comfortable to mention one’s therapist, analyst, Zoloft, or Celexa, serious mental illness – bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia, severe depression – is still an uncomfortable subject.

Many features of life in Cape Town are different from life in New York. But in both cities, parents spend a great amount of energy maintaining a flawless facade. Not just for their children, or for their children’s teachers, but for each other.

We accept the fact that we don’t really ever know what is going on inside someone else’s head or marriage. We accept a certain amount of dishonesty. To surmise that a family’s perfect facade isn’t, well, perfect seems tantamount to gossip. And perhaps with casual acquaintances it is.

But among our closest friends, should we accept the facade? Don’t we have an obligation to each other to work a little harder at discussing the truth? To make sure that along with the social pressure to maintain the pretense of perfection, we allow room for imperfection? For failure? For bad days, bad months, and even, sometimes, bad years?

Parents in New York feel pressure from so many sources. There’s the financial pressure and the social pressure, not to mention the internal pressure to do a good enough job raising our children. Occasionally we need to remind ourselves that there are alternatives to keeping up the facade – and that letting them down doesn’t mean that the world will fall apart.

sarasberman@aol.com