No matter how hard we try, we can't outrun the past. Indeed, it's not always clear how our choices -- and the choices of our parents -- will affect us later in life. For Nicholas Hughes, 47 and a fisheries biologist in Alaska, the events that shaped his early life would have tragic consequences that ended with his suicide by hanging on March 16, 2009.

Hughes was the youngest son of celebrated poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. He was just a year old when Plath committed suicide by asphyxiation, inhaling the toxic fumes from her gas stove while he and his older sister slept in the next room. Six years later his father's second wife, Assia Wevill would make the same choice, taking Hughes' young half-sister with her into death.

Though his sister, Frieda Hughes, would go on to be a poet and painter of some acclaim, Nicholas chose science over the arts, gaining a masters degree from Oxford University and his doctorate from the University of Alaska where he eventually became professor of fisheries and ocean sciences. Though he battled lifelong depression he was, by all accounts, very skilled in his field and passionate about the creatures that he studied. His personal life, however, seems to have been one of solitude. Hughes never married and had no children. Though he remained close with his father he never discussed his mother, neither her life nor her death.

For his part Ted Hughes was very careful in the children's early years to protect them from the details of Plath's suicide. He even went so far as to burn the last volume of her journals, though he received wide criticism for this. He finally broke his silence in 1998 with the publication of "Birthday Letters," a collection of poems about his life with Plath. In a 1998 letter, written shortly before his own death from cancer, Hughes told his son "What I've been hiding all my life, from myself and everybody else, is not terrible at all. Though you didn't want to read it... But I tell you all this with a hope that it will let you understand a lot of things. ... Don't laugh it off. In 1963 you were hit even harder than me. But you will have to deal with it, just as I have had to."

Sadly, it seems that Nicholas Hughes chose to deal with it in the only way he felt that he could. He will be mourned and remembered by friends and family, not as the son of such a famous and troubled couple, but as brilliant scientist and good man in his own right.