Content Warnings: suicide, suicidal ideation, self-harm
I don’t know if, in the beginning, it was that they promised me anything, or if I imagined they promised me something. At the very least, I think it was suggested. I’m pretty sure, in the beginning, it was them that suggested they were blocking something important, an important place, cushioned and elemental, and if I moved toward them, and through them, I could reach that place where everything was quiet and good. It started off as a suggestion but I’m pretty sure it was real.
There used to be dozens of them. They used to follow me around, my mesmerizing birds of prey. All I wanted to do was watch them float above me in the wind. Now only this one is left. A more intimate, elegant relationship, sure. I used to wonder where the others went. “Oh, here and there,” my suicide claimed. “Oh there, and there, and there.” I wrote everything down, even the nonsense and the lies. Sometimes my suicides lied but not always, not usually, not as much as you’d think.
The writing in my journal is flat and gray and repetitive to read. The best parts, in my opinion, are when I remember to write about my daughter. Last night I wrote how R. told me she wanted to be closer to me. We were lying in her bed on top of unicorn sheets and I was reading to her. She was already wrapped around me, her arms around my chest, her legs around my legs.
“I want to be closer,” she demanded.
“How?” I asked.
She squeezed her legs tighter around me. I’m glad I wrote that interaction down. I’d already forgotten she had done this and it’s only been a day.
The line between thinking of killing one’s self and actually doing it is thin and made of sand. The distance between that line and where I am standing can be measured in inches, or miles, or seconds depending on the year—
“Enough of that,” says my suicide. “Come here. I said, come here.”
I began collecting books about suicide three years ago. These are often books of nonfiction written by psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and suicide survivors, though I also collect writing by writers who committed suicide. I also collect lists, like the names of famous people who committed suicide and how they died. I collect the names of children of famous people who committed suicide. I am not supposed to use the phrase committed suicide, that is not what one says anymore. The more acceptable term: died by suicide. I miss the agency, anger, and violence of the earlier terminology but I’ll play along. I collect poems about suicide and plays about suicide. There is a haunting play by Sarah Kane, 4:48 psychosis, the last thing she wrote before she died by suicide: I sing without hope on the boundary. I collect mentions of suicide in fiction, in movies, in plays. I also collect photographs of famous people who have killed themselves. By “collect,” I mean I save them to a private Pinterest board. This may seem distasteful to you if you do not spend most of your day thinking about suicide. If you did spend most of your day considering suicide, as I do, you might find, as I do, such a collection to be necessary and comforting. I’m particularly interested, for reasons that are obvious to me, in mothers who have killed themselves. Looking into those mothers’ eyes makes me feel less alone. I think these women are trying to tell me something. Everything will be okay. Everything will not be okay. Define okay.
I met my first suicide when I turned 10. It was a whispery thing, silver and small. At that age it is difficult to know what exactly to do with one’s suicide. This was before the Internet, back when children thought swallowing a handful of Advil or two handfuls would do them in. So really it was more of a wish, twisted and silver, that I wore fastened around my pre-pubescent neck.
“Is the end of a life like the end of a story?”
“What a weird question,” my suicide tells me.
“Like, after I die, does everything around me stop too?”
“How very egocentric. But also possible.”
“Or how about this: if this whole thing for the past 40 years, my entire life, was just a story, then after my story-life ends, what comes next could be the real part, right? The part I’ve been waiting for. Where there is a lot less pain.”
“That’s certainly possible as well.”
“Or else do I get to go back to the beginning and relive the good parts?” My suicide raises its snow-white eyebrows as if doubting I have any good parts to replay. “I would like to go back to this one afternoon when I was 23, and my boyfriend and I walked to a Minneapolis lake. I fell asleep on his shoulder in the grass. He took a picture of me sleeping. Everything was fine that afternoon. I had only seen two therapists up until that point.”
“What are you so worried about anyway?” asks my suicide.
Suicides, mine at least, are more helpful than you probably think. They are more comfortable and hopeful than you may think, always pointing out possibilities when one seems to be at a dead end.
“I’m worried it will hurt.”
My suicide shakes its head. “You've gone through childbirth,” it chuckles. “Twice! And these past three years, I have seen you in such pain. It’ll be like a flu shot, one final vaccination. It will hurt a little, then it's over.”
“I'm scared of it hurting a little.”
“You don't have to worry about the pain.”
“Some people don’t like you, you know. Some people think you are full of bad influence and lies.”
My suicide shrugs. We are whispering, my forehead almost touching its aromatic forehead. Suicides often smell delicious, like cedar and bitter cherry; mine is no exception.
“What matters is what you think,” it says to me. “What do you think?”
Most of what I know about suicide methods I’ve learned from online forums and websites, where suicidal techniques are discussed with nonchalance, like discussing what we’re planning to cook for dinner. I read any message I can find about low suspension hanging, whose challenges strike me as technical, especially if one fears corporeal suffering and non-fatal brain damage.
I want to be dead, for everybody’s sake, but while even little kids can hang themselves, it’s proving to be way more of a challenge than I’d ever imagined.
With hanging, the goal is to apply pressure to the carotid artery on the side of your neck, allowing for a relatively easy fade to black, instead of having the rope crush your windpipe, causing prolonged suffocation. There is a lot of talk about pain on these forums—not the emotional clear-cutting of depression but acute physical pain—and how to minimize such pain, and how long such pain will last.
Painless attempts are the reason for why there are more failed attempts than successful ones in my opinion … I expect with this to experience a lot of discomfort for sure!! but the amount of time it will last until loss of consciousness occurs does seem bearable.
Others write miserably about surviving their suicide attempts. They write about being stuck in a hospital they don’t want to be in and in a life they don’t want to be in.
i tried my wrist again and i did it the right way and it hurts like hell they rush you to the hospital and literally piece your veins back together then they tie you the bed so you don't try it again and then you get 6 months of outpatient counseling and you are left with really bad scars I have them on both wrists going both ways across and down.
Some people have no memory of the days after a failed attempt or the weeks. Others talk about how supposedly painless methods are, in fact, full of pain. Often these forums and sites feel like support groups for people who can’t figure out how to successfully kill themselves.
I recently tried to exit using the helium method. I couldn't stand it and yanked the bag off. The gas was NOT 'innocuous and odorless' as the Humphrys/Final Exit crowd had led me to believe. It felt like inhaling poison gas. Made me nauseous, headachy, and there was a terrifying feeling of falling through space. Now I am suffering, not from fear of death, but from fear of the ways of getting there.
One woman drives her car into a tree and ends up in wheelchair. One woman slits the tendons and the nerve of her left wrist and now has a useless, numbed hand. One man can’t remember three months of his life. Another young man attempts to hang himself in the basement one morning. His attempt fails. He walks upstairs and heads off to school; nobody notices what he had tried to do. One woman places a plastic cover on her couch before she overdoses on a tricyclic anti-depressant so the couch won’t get stained if she vomits. One woman remembers first trying to kill herself at age 8. One woman grows an oleander plant then attempts to fatally poison herself with the leaves, adding them to spaghetti sauce and seeping the oleander as tea, but she throws up every time. Note: my oleander is a very young plant. Perhaps a full-grown plant is more potent. Rarely, if ever, are the reasons for the suicide discussed. By this point, those reasons don’t matter. I like how Anne Sexton puts it: But suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.
My second suicide appeared on the front porch during my senior year. It stood on the other side of the screen door, straight-backed, stiff posturing, waiting to be let in. My first suicide was still around but I had grown used to it, to its abstract chattering beneath my bed. My second suicide was more startling. It would not fit under my bed, first of all, as it stood taller than me. Also, it made a fist when it knocked. Also, it wore clusters of tan-pink promises in its hair. “Oh, do I have something you want,” it promised so I unlatched the door and invited it inside. The hallways of my childhood mind have always been darkly carpeted, chaotic, and wood-paneled. My second suicide didn’t care. It held my hand. We set every hallway on fire.
Considering suicide is exhausting. All the planning this entails, all the decision making about which method, when, where, how. There is always noise in my head, a constant corrosive lecture that feels physical, like someone picking away, layer by layer, at the delicate membranes that are supposed to be protecting my spinal cord and brain. And everything around me looks warped but, at the same time, boring. Everything looks defective and out of reach. Deciding not to kill myself is equally exhausting. Afterwards, I feel like I have the flu. I can sleep for days if I let myself. My dreams are stupid and adolescent and burnt.
My current suicide and I have shared numerous memories over the years. “Remember that time when I kept telling you to turn the wheel and crash your car into a tree?” it asks me in a nostalgic tone. “A tree or a lamppost, we couldn’t decide. Remember? Remember that time when we stood together on the 26th floor, and I was trying to tell you don’t think about the big picture, think instead about taking one ordinary step forward? Remember when we read for hours about the Japanese detergent method, and you said it was so weird how people who intended to die still cared about the safety of the first responders?”
My body won’t move. I am lying on my back in bed and I can’t move. My mind is stuck as well. It won’t stop repeating itself, not words but a droning pitch, a flawed frequency. I will have to be on high alert all the time now. I will have to be stranded, alone, on a tidal island all the time, and the tide is coming in. I will have to be kidnapped, tripped, and thrown into a lightless cellar all the time. This is what my life feels like, I was about to write but that isn’t true. This is my unallegorical reality, it is unbearable, dark matter under my fingernails, my feet in stirrups, blindfolded, a hunter’s moon on the loose, how tired I am of every single moment being a new moment, the historical models around me fracture, I am masked, diluted, drilled, sunk—
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! You go on thinking that way,” my suicide says to me, its pockets bulging irrationally with the naked bodies of baby rabbits. “Let’s throw logic to the wind! What a neat idea.”
I left for college in Minnesota. Maybe this wasn’t the best decision. The entire state smelled like animal husbandry. I have always thought I should have loved leaving the ruins of my childhood behind but there is something safe even in hazardous places or maybe it is that there is something familiar. Everybody needs an anchor, and anchors do not necessarily need to be kind or good. I did not understand what exactly my suicides were back then but I knew they weren’t anchors. Mornings they piled onto the windowsill of my dorm room, tilting their heads this way and that. Evenings they ran their fingernails along my arms, leaving behind long fat red scratches. Those marks on my skin felt warm and wet and—if I’m being honest here—generative, like an afterbirth. I met my third suicide on top of a collegiate hill while staring into the night woods that encircled the entire campus, a bottle of pills and a razor blade in my pocket. “How many of you are there going to be?” I asked. My third suicide wiggled its fingers and its broken toes.
“I’m here to help you live and choose life,” says my new therapist. Is she #8? #9? #10? I’ve lost count. She writes on an index card a list of distraction techniques and community resources: What to do when I am feeling suicidal. My current suicide kneels beside me on the couch and reads my safety plan back to me in a derisive voice. I had planned on calling this particular suicide ugly but I would be doing that only to make you feel more at ease. My suicide is illuminated, and caring, and it worries about me.
The therapist explains her philosophy about in-patient care: best to learn how to handle one’s suicides in the real world rather than in a locked ward. “But first,” she says, “I need to know you’re safe.”
My suicide rolls its eyes and gives me a knowing wink.
“Are you thinking of hurting yourself right now? Can you promise me you won’t kill yourself when you leave?”
I promise.
Cross my heart and hope to die.
I wouldn’t believe anything I’ve said.
“Good girl,” says my suicide.
Somehow I know this one will be my last. Very little feels real anymore. With a flick of a wrist, a leaning into a rope, I can make everything in front of me disappear.
“Such powerful thinking,” my suicide murmurs. “Please, continue this line of thought.”
I can look at a fall day, blue sky, hills of red maples and yellow elms, I can look at my children curled on their sides in their beds, asleep and dreaming of animals, and think I don’t need any of this, none of this moves me. What I still need to figure out: how much exit pain can I handle and for how long. 20 seconds? 2 minutes? 7 minutes? How does one determine such a number? My children are worthy of worship but they exist in a different orbit and some days—most?— I am willing to throw all of it away.
“You’re almost there,” says my suicide, cheering me on.
There is the chance my suicide is full of tricks, that when the time comes, it will leave me stranded, and dying, and alone on the bathroom floor. That it will let me end, and end painfully. But I believe otherwise. I believe my suicide will stay with me and protect me from fear. When I hold my suicide’s hand, there are no dead ends. There is, at most, one direction.
At the appropriate time, my last suicide will lift me up and cradle me, every part of me, not leaving those less desirable or less understood parts behind. It will take all of me and carry me to a different place. It will carry me through a thick black curtain of stars which will, in an act of mercy, burn away my memory, pain streaming off me ingaseous tendrils. It will place its hand upon my forehead, soothing me. I believe my suicides have always had my best interests at heart, that they want to prevent my future suffering, not prolong it. Would it help other people to be less scared for me if they knew this is where I’m going? Not to some pit of fire or a thorny wall of impalementsbut to a place with no more dark valleys, no more days—
“This is your depression talking,” announces my therapist as if this is some big reveal, but I have always known what is talking to me.
A brief clinical history of a progressive mental disorder in nature
Stage 1: My suicides circled above me like an assortment of insects. The suicides I already met, the ones I had yet to meet. They were nothing to worry about. They were the size of distant planets. They were as loud as dust. If I opened my eyes, they dove into my eyes. They dove into my mouth. I swallowed several. They tasted like air, like wings. Then a stiff wind blew from the west, my suicides scattered, and I thought, okay, maybe this will soon be over—
Stage 2: My suicides circled me like starlings, so fancy and invasive in their winter plumage. How they liked to mimic others. They mimicked better-liked animals. They mimicked the people I love. They dropped the children I once thought were my children into other women’s houses. They shit on the driveway. No problem, I hosed down the driveway. I hosed down the driveway dutifully. It was embarrassing. I thought they would migrate. Hadn’t I read somewhere that suicides migrated according to the seasons? My daughter collected their dropped feathers. “Don’t touch those,” I snapped.
Stage 3: My suicides circled high above me like scavengers on hot thermals. They spiraled above me like iridescent vultures, the kind with hollow bones. I wasn’t worried. Everybody gets vultures now and again, I imagined. One such suicide flapped away from the pack and descended toward me. I had to drop everything I was doing to watch it descend. Its eyes were rimmed with incense, its wings stained like the rose window of a cathedral, blue and green and violet. The closer it flew to me, the larger and more mythical it became. More dragon than vulture actually. I had to drop everyone I was holding onto to watch it land. It hit the kids’ swing set hard, immediately shedding its complex wings like it would never need to fly anywhere again, its body wide and slippery and majestic. The ghosts of who I used to be gathered around me. “You have the power to summon that?” asked my ghosts, so impressed. The pile of my suicide’s wings was like a pile of diaphanous silk fabrics into which I burrowed to take a short sleep. My suicide breathed onto my house a hurricane of heat and fire and wind. There probably wasn’t enough time to save everybody. Oh well. Something is always burning down in a depression.
My second year of college I found a boyfriend. It was a welcome intermission from my common mood disorder. We copulated in my basement dorm room on a daily schedule. Every time after he said he loved me. Each I love you was a strand of rope binding me to this place. I was trying to want my life. I wanted to be tied down so I could feel stable and safe. My suicides were jealous and also patient. They flocked around the lightbulbs of my room like patient ivory moths. We moved to the Twin Cities. Let’s see a therapist together, my boyfriend suggested. I’m skipping over some parts. Suffice to say in confessional writing, as in relationships, you must make your significant other give you everything you want, or else you will air them out in public. The therapist was licensed. Sex was supposed to be fun for everyone. If it wasn’t fun, we learned, something must be wrong with me. The therapist gave us exercises to do in bed; I allowed my boyfriend to do the exercises to me. There were multiple explosions, each of them internal.
We ended up married. We ended up with a child.We ended up with two children. I cannot remember why we decided to have children. I love my children but I can’t remember why we had them. On second thought, this whole thing couldn’t have been an intermission. My suicides were up to something the entire time, I’m sure of it. They were gathering above me in the sky, no longer a trio, now a flock. I thought I had a functional roof over my head so it didn’t matter. The home inspector had told us the roof would need replacement in the near future. It’s not like we were blindsided by the structural deficiencies of our relationship, but the issue was said not to be urgent. More and more of them landed on the roof while my children cried in my arms or out of my arms, it didn’t matter. This was the era in which my suicides came rapidly: daily, hourly. At night I heard them landing on the roof, light-footed and precise, and when there was no more room on the roof, they landed on each other’s shoulders. Maybe if my husband was a different person he would have shooed them away. Maybe if I was a different person I could have shot every one of them in the head. The roof collapsed and my new suicides came charging in. How they adored me. It was like a party or a wake. There was a guestbook but none of them signed. And those ropes I mentioned earlier that tied me to here were cut. The facts I knew about my life were hooded then drowned. My suicides removed a rosy-bosomed future from my hands. You won’t be needing this anymore, they told me softly, wiping my face softlywith their soft hems. The last time I saw my heart, it was a semi-precious shard stuck between their teeth. Oh, being a mother, a wife, is so much fun, I read on the Internet.
“Come on, let's do it!” exclaims my suicide.
“There's no rope in the house anymore.”
My therapist had told my husband to remove the rope.
“Come on, let's go out and buy some rope!”
“The stores are closed.”
“You aren't thinking creatively.”
“My house is a safe house.”
“From who?”
“From ropes.”
“Use a belt.”
“That isn't how I practiced.”
“Jesus, this is boring.”
“This house is a house of love.”
“Pardon me, whose?”
“Tomorrow is another day.”
“It's not. It's the same day.”
“I need to go to bed.”
“No, you don’t.”
I frantically recall what I’m expected to do: run lift weights write bake look at photographs of my daughter dial the phone. I do none of that. I study my suicide instead. The only obstacles in the way are my flimsy checklist and the occasional flicker of my daughter wearing a red cloak and twirling at the edge of my vision. My suicide looks comfortable and homely. It is wearing one of my father’s old flannels, buffalo plaid, buttoned to its chin. It is blocking out the sun. I never liked the sun anyway. Its eyes contain the expression I have always wanted to see in another person’s eyes: I will love you forever and ever no matter—
Can one fall in love with one’s suicide?
“What a good idea,” my suicide says in its best domestic voice. “Let’s try it.”
The last night of last October, a woman brings half a dozen birds of prey to a nature center for a Halloween event that isn’t meant to be frightening. There are illuminated trails, and hundreds of carved pumpkins, and a magician, and a fortune teller, and the bird rehabilitator who presents twice that evening. In her presentations no one but her is allowed to touch the birds. An owl perches on the edge of her gloved hand. “This owl,” she lectures, “can hear when your heart is beating and hear when your heart stops.” Later, before the magic show at the pavilion, somebody’s daughter goes missing. The magician announces this into his microphone, that there is a missing girl out there in the dark wearing a red raincoat. We all think about the lake. There are times when I wonder what sort of person chooses to live. The magician begins his show. What else is he supposed to do, never begin his show? He begins his show by pulling blue and red and yellow scarves out of a bag that previously was empty. I don’t know what happens to the girl. Let’s assume she is found. People applaud. At the end of the evening, the fortune teller under the striped tent tells my daughter that she possesses special powers. Of course she does. Once R. asked me, “How do you die by hanging?” I was an expert on the subject by then; it was hard to know where to begin. I told her a little of what I understood. She said, “Well, if your feet are on the ground, you would be okay.” “Not exactly,” I said. “Even if your feet are on the ground, if you are leaning forward, you can block the blood flow to your brain, if the knot is done right.” “And if you’re scared of heights?” my daughter asked. I didn’t know what her question meant. In my agitated mind I pictured the balcony in Miami, or the New York rooftop garden, or the cliff beside the Canadian waterfall, places where I had considered jumping.
She tells me, before bed, “Never leave me, Mommy.”
I keep a document in Evernote where I organize my notes about ways to kill myself. Much of it is about hanging (where to position the knot, what kind of rope, what kind of knot, common mistakes, how much might it hurt, how to make it hurt less), though I also have notes and tips about slitting one’s wrists, fatal overdosing, carbon monoxide, suicide via charcoal burning, gunshots, death by freezing, drowning, and helium paired with an oven bag. I have always been thorough in my research, no matter the topic. My suicide and I read through this document together when my mind gets stuck. Lately my mind has been stuck on images. I’m hanging from every doorway I see. I’m in the bathtub, hacking away at my wrists, trying to get past the veins to the artery below. I can’t tell if I’m seeing the future or the present or an alternate storyline or my actual storyline. I’m running into the woods and burying myself in the snow. “So many good ideas,” my suicide murmurs, using the voice of a close friend who cares about me.
My therapist suggests I get rid of the Evernote file. “Do you understand why it’s a good idea to get rid of a file like that?” she asks. “I understand why someone on the outside would think that way,” I say. Our compromise: I will print the file out, place it in an envelope, and hand the envelope to my husband, who will keep it safe for me. Then I will delete the file. Then I will make a new file. I will call the new file “document to look at when feeling down depressed suicidal.” In it I will put hopeful mantras, and a link to a Mavis Staples and Wilco video, and a list of 25 non-suicidal activities. “Why are you doing this?” my suicide asks, hurt and disappointed. I don’t know. I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. That is such a cop-out move for a narrator to make. Figure it out. My therapist suggests I’m not wholly committed to killing myself.
The ropes have found their way back into the basement. I find three ropes coiled in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet. Other ropes I find in a storage bin. There is a rope in my closet again. My suicide is keeping it there for me in case of emergency. I should write a joke about a person with both anxiety and depression who wants to kill themselves but can’t because they’re unable to make a single fucking decision. Every day feels like an emergency: yoga video walk outside go to sleep read with kids gratitude journal picture a protective sphere deep breathing picture the Rockies write bake exercise the world needs you you deserve to give yourself one more try—my suicide breathes beside me, pretending its breath is actually my breath—there’s a difference between wanting to kill yourself and wanting to kill the part of you that wants to kill yourself try and have one good moment with each kid each day remembering the graph of mood things will get better it really does get better it’s a thought don’t listen don’t—the air around me is panicking and violent—
“You are in so much pain,” says my therapist. “You don’t have to be in so much pain.” Funny, this is the same thing my suicide says to me every nightas it tugs my hair with its finely granular hand, keeping me awake.
“Look. Have you thought about medication?” asks my therapist during our next session.
“I don’t want to become a different person,” I say.
My suicide is hovering today outside the window of my therapist’s office. It taps on the glass with its stiletto nails and waves.
“Medication will not make you a different person,” says my therapist.
My suicide taps on the window again.
“I’ve read some essays on the Internet where writers say medication made them into different people, the type of people who don’t write,” I say.
My suicide taps on the window again.
“Well, I know some writers who take medication and keep writing,” says my therapist.
My suicide pounds on the window with both hands. It pounds on the window with its head. It pounds and it pounds and it pounds and it pounds until it breaks the window open. I suppose some people might be walking around this continent content, their lives enough to keep them here, grounded, but there are others prone to floating off who need additionalreasons to stay. Each reason is a rope wrapped around my waist or my arm or around my ankles or my chest. I no longer have my husband’s golden-looking ropes of promise and stability, those ropes are gone, my children ate them, my suicides ate them, but my optimistic therapist, despite the mess, the sprayed glass, keeps tossing me new anchors. “Try this one,” she says. “Or how about this, or this, or this, or this.” She is determined. She has a lot of ideas and a lot of ropes. If depression is a cut or a series of cuts, then the opposite is rope like hers, heavy, old fashioned, fibrous, mooring me with a sailor’s knot to a silver—
“What a stupid metaphor,” my suicide complains, “bearing in mind your fascination with rope as a means to end your life.” To prove its point, my suicidelopes through the house in a manic burst of energy, draping ropes over every doorway, actual rope, not metaphorical, the minimum breaking strength many times my body weight. Why do we own so many ropes anyway? Something to do with camping. Let me tell you more about my daughter. Sometimes R. appears to me as a source of light. Sometimes, when I stand in that light, which is crafted out of her love, I know nothing can harm her, and nothing can harm me. Though she is seven, I have seen her as an adult, grown up and shining and saying to me, “In the future, it’s better and calmer, and you’re okay here.” She comes back from wherever she is in the future to tell me this. R. tells me, “Eventually it’s going to be better. There’s a place in the future where it gets better. It’s a nicer calmer place. But you have to get through this part first. If you get through it, then we can get to know each other when I’m older.”
If you think it inappropriate for a mother to ask her daughter to hold onto an anchor that keeps her here, of course you’re right. Even worse for a mother to ask her child to become an anchor herself. But that’s what I did, what I continue to do. An irritated editor once asked why people sometime glow in my stories. What does that even mean? Can I be more realistic please? But I am being realistic and serious when I say this: some people are made of light or are filled with light. Some people shine. Once my daughter appeared to me as a source of light that shined brighter than the sun until even my suicides were blinded temporarily—
“Anyway,” continues my suicide, “now that you’re done with your love flight of adoration fancy, it’s not even like you’d be giving up. It’s more the passing on of your narrative. Let other people tell stories about you!”
Part of me is always crying. I think I might cry forever. I think I might punch my arm through the bedroom window then rub my neck against the broken glass. In my mind this has already happened. I’ve already watched it happening multiple times, a bleeding loop set on a bloody repeat. All I need to do is catch the present up with a future that’s already gone.
My suicide shakes its head. “I’m sorry. Nobody should have to live like that. Come here,” it says, opening its arms, “I said, come here.”
There is barely enough room to breathe.
There is barely enough room for me to turn my head.
My suicide is penning my farewell letters. One of them is sincere. One of them is cryptic. This one is truncated and angry, scrawled on torn paper, directed to my husband and meant to be recited out loud. My suicide insists we rehearse the scene; it will stage direct. I’m supposed to pretend I’m in the parking lot of our fourth and final marriage therapist, a woman who divined the future by eviscerating relationships then discussing the entrails.
“I hate that fucking parking lot,” I say.
“I know,” my suicide says. “I know. But you won’t have to stand here for long. Now pretend your husband is walking towards you across the remains of your marriage.”
I pretend my husband is walking toward me across the remains of our marriage.
“Good. Now you pull a pistol from your purse.”
“Where am I supposed to get a pistol?” They don’t sell guns on Amazon. I’ve checked. And my depression-addled brain can’t seem to grasp the steps needed to procure a gun legally or illegally in this state.
My suicide shrugs, unconcerned. “We’ll figure that out later. For now, repeat after me: Now you can go and fuck somebody this afternoon and then, guess what, you’ll be free to fall in love with them. And guess what, they’re going to be perfect, and I bet they will never disappoint you about anything, and they will never change.”
I repeat those words. Then I press the future pistol to my temple. “Like this?” I ask. My suicide nudges the muzzle left. Its hands are clean and smell like lemon. My husband begins running toward me in this pre-enactment. He is not running fast enough. It will be nice, my suicide assures me, to watch my husband run toward me for once, panic all over his face. As panic looks a little like love, doesn’t it? Close enough. That will be the last image I see. I’m not supposed to listen when my suicide gets like this, so practical, so full of helpful ideas, and supplies, and a time, and a day. I have a suicide safety plan. I am supposed to be exercising. I am supposed to be calling my sister. I am supposed to be baking a cake.When my husband tries to talk to me, his questions feel like an abrasive—
“Do you really want to keep telling this story?” my suicide asks me.
It digs its fingers into my sore shoulders.
Its hands move to my neck and it caresses my neck.
My therapist keeps bringing up antidepressants.
My suicide keeps bringing up the long list of side effects. It reads me every 1-star review.
My primary care physician asks me if I know that diet, meditation, and positive thinking can cure depression.
A friend sends me a link to an anti-psychiatry web site: Among the side effects of antidepressants are sexual dysfunction in up to three-quarters of people, long-term weight gain, insomnia, nausea, and diarrhea. About one in five show withdrawal symptoms when they try to quit. And perhaps more tragically, they may make people more likely to become depressed in the future. People are more likely to become depressed again after treatment by antidepressants than after treatment by other means—including placebo—.
“Whatever! None of this matters. I will never go away for good, no matter what you do or don’t do,” my suicide promises me again and again and again. Do you understand what a comfort this is, to have something or someone promise they will never leave you? There are so many possibilities. I can enter a pond with stones in my pockets. I can leave behind my car and my phone and lose myself in a forest. I can buy a gun but first I need to figure out what kind of gun and how to buy a gun. I can drive my car into a tree. I can drive my car into the side of a building. I can jump off a bridge! I can swallow cyanide which is supposed to be both painful and hard to get, or I can travel to Mexico to buy pentobarbital!"
We decide to change the colors of certain rooms. The hallway will turn pale gray. My son’s room will transform into emerald green. My daughter’s room, an upbeat teal. She sleeps with me in the master bedroom because of the fumes. My son sleeps on the futon in the living room, my husband sleeps in the attic.
At 3 a.m. R. wakes me. “Mommy, I don’t have my pillow anymore,” she says. I tell her we can share a pillow the rest of the night. R. tries stretching her arms around my back but I’m too big to hold like that. She says, “Mommy, I want to cuddle with you.” She asks me to turn toward her. She wraps her arms around my arms. I can’t tell if I’m holding onto her or is she holding onto me. We sleep facing each other. It is lovely other than I can’t sleep. I realize no adult is beautiful anymore, not like a child is. I ask my daughter to lie on my shoulder. We do that for a while, then we lay side by side, then my suicide asks me what in the world is this building towards, come on, come on, why am I still at this point after so many thousands of words? If I’m going, I should write my children a letter before I go. I should make them a book of photographs showing every time I held them close, so they will have proof that I held them under a variety of circumstances. I should make preparations to come back as a ghost so they won’t forget me.
My suicide prods me with its elbow and calls me a worrywart. “You’re not the only woman who can be a mother to your children! Do you know what happens after you’re gone? Your husband remarries and your kids like that other woman just fine.”
Leaning over the bed, my suicide pulls the comforter up over my daughter’s sleeping body and rests its hand on her warm cheek.
“See. Anyone can do this.”
My suicide accompanies me to my son’s music concert because this is what mothers and their suicides do in the spring. I am covered in my most exquisite pain for the occasion. It doesn’t matter anymore where such pain is coming from. It hasn’t mattered for a while. The pain separated long ago from the cause. What matters is that my suicide lifts my pain from me and holds the form of my pain in its hands. No one else has been able to do that. My pain is a pile of muscle that pulses like another heart but whose heart? The concert begins and ends. There are refreshments. We skip the refreshments and head home early. It is a relief to be alone with my suicide in the upstairs bathroom. “You feel like you need to be done now. I understand,” says my suicide. “Why would anyone want to stay here?” I used to hold my newborn son in front of this mirror, the tap turned on. Running water used to calm him. That was years ago. I try to think of a reason why anyone would want to stay. Even my daughter isn’t enough today. Or, rather, she is enough but the aftereffect of so many waxy tomorrows and yesterdays and todays weighs more. “Trust me, this is the happy ending,” whispers my suicide, who has the warm almond eyes of my sister who I haven’t seen for years. “This. I will never, ever leave you.”
All the shelves in my house have gone empty. All the books have gone buried. My suicide buried them in the yard. “You don’t need them anymore,” my suicide says. I don’t need them anymore. I don’t know where my husband is. I don’t know where my children are. “You are making this much harder than it needs to be,” says my suicide with such compassion, speaking in the low voice of my mother now, the voice of someone who used to hold me. I am tired of trying to love my life and the people in my life. “I understand. Every ending is a new beginning,” my suicide promises. “Every door closing means another door is opening.” I don’t know how to end this story or end my life. “I think you do,” says my suicide, smoothing my hair. “Now shush. Shush.” The thing about depression: it is a closing in, a narrowing of perspective, until the entire world is a distorted autobiography reflecting back images I don’t even recognize, or else it’s the only thing I recognize anymore—
My suicide places its reddened fingers on my red lips.It wears my pain around its neck like a fancy variegated cloak that pivots in the stillness.
No, wait. My suicides—
They’re all here. They all want to touch me. They want to touch me because I’m important to them. They are waiting in a long, crushed velvetline to touch me. They’re here like old memories, or—no. This room is the memory. This house, each room, my family, like an old memory, the oldest kind, the kind I used to read about in books. Anything I think feels like a little cut or—no, not little, a gaping cut or maybe more like a burn. I can’t take my brain anymore. “To end something,” each of my suicides say in unison, “all you need to do is stop talking.”
We are standing together on a path, the one made from crushed gravel. The path is about to end. Where the path ends, the wildflowers start growing.
And on, and on—
The world is as real as a dream.
And in the dream, I held half a pill in my hand.
“Why are you holding half a pill in your hand?” asks my suicide, returned to the singular, my suicide and me standing together in the antiseptic kitchen in the ticking house.
I shrug.
I think my mind is broken.
“Everybody’s mind is broken in one way or another. No reason to start taking medication,” my suicide assures me.
I don’t believe that. I don’t believe everyone’s mind is broken. Mine wasn’t always.
“But isn’t there that quote you like,” my suicide reminds me, “about how a cracked mind is so nice because it lets in light, a special fancy-pants light that not everybody gets to witness, so you get to see the world in this special light and, wow, those shadows crawling toward—"
I can’t remember the quote right now.
Can we stay focused?
“Will you go away if I swallow this?” I ask.
“Do you want me to go away?”
I don’t know what I want.
I want to stop thinking.
My suicide shrugs. “It's only a single pill. Or not even. Half a pill isn’t going to solve your problems.”
Though for the first time I can remember, it will not look me in the eye.
“Do you know where we would have gone together?” I ask. “Would it have been a better place, like I thought? Can you describe it to me? Was I right about the stars and the soft curtain?”
But before my suicide can answer, I swallow the chalky half oval.
Over the next four months, as my doctor experiments to find the right combination of meds, I swallow a variety of pills. An entire oval blue pill. One and half oval blue pills. I fall asleep at my desk. One and half oval blue pills and a round white pill. Two oval blue pills and a round white pill and an expensive orange pill. Let’s add monthly check-ins with the psychiatrist to the already existing schedule of weekly individual therapy. Let’s add weekly family therapy sessions too. Let’s add weekly Dialectical Behavior Therapy group sessions too. Let’s add physical therapy too, why not, let’s make recovery my full-time employer, until finally—finally!—this combined work: the therapy, the drugs, the mindfulness, must be the correct mix because, guess what, everything is great, and my doctor tells me the ending of my story can now be whatever I want it to be! There are red flowers in the trees in the ending now. Trust me, there are red fruits in the front yard in the end. “You will never be able to write while medicated, not as yourself,” my suicide promises. There are rainbows in the green lawn. Doesn’t this sound nice? My suicide’s promises are blue-red ribbons that it threads through its fingers, and not the tacky kind of polyester ribbon uses for gift wrapping either. These ribbons look like my veins. My doctor increases the dosage. There are white birds in the grey clouds and a heavy silent present in my left pocket. “Aren’t you going to open it?” asks my suicide. Let’s up the dosage again. “Don’t worry, this happens from time to time,” my doctor says. There are my children rolling over the gray pesticide on the green lawn. There, in the end, is my husband stretching in the brown garage. “See, it’s not that bad,” says my husband. There are red cardinals singing in the green trees. There are green trees growing in the ends of the brown garage. There are red flowers growing in the end of the ochre kitchen. There is a set of silverware sinking in the retention pond. “You are only putting off the inevitable,” my suicide reminds me. Up the dosage again. There are ants tunneling through edges of the angel cake. There is a sharp silver razor waiting on my wooden nightstand. These days when I get upset, it feels like I am screaming but screaming underwater and far away. So I can’t hear myself scream and it probably doesn’t matter. There are children sinking in the culvert. There is a nebula in the basement. Trust me. There are wide grins in the light fixtures and love is ablaze beneath the fire pit.
I don’t understand why I’m still alive. I guess there are some things you and I will never understand, my suicide once told me, as if predicting the future as it laughed and laughed, tossing its glossy flaming hair behind its emotional shoulders. It said it would never leave me. I didn’t want it to leave me. I don’t want. My suicide’s hair smells like a warm prairie, which was the landscape of my childhood. I remember how gently it leaned toward me and touched my neck, how it laid its fingers on my pulse and began to count.