Night Falls Fast

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Prior to his transfer, a medical board comprising three military physicians was convened. Their final report, written in the impersonal, if necessary, language of medicine and the military, brought to an end Drew’s plans for the future: his commission was denied; he lost his slot in flight school; he would be neither an officer nor a pilot. “This examinee does not meet the medical standards for commissioning due to a mental disorder with psychotic features,” wrote the board. The command surgeon agreed, concluding, “I strongly recommend medical disenrollment in this cadet.” Drew’s active military service was over. His struggle with mental illness was not.

  Drew was hospitalized at Andrews for an additional three weeks. The admitting physician, who concurred with the earlier diagnosis of bipolar manic-depressive illness, observed that Drew was still slightly paranoid, anxious, and “trying very hard to make sense of what had happened to him.” He noted, as well, Drew’s perfectionism (a characteristic mentioned by many who knew him) and the fact that Drew felt guilty about the problems he was causing his family by being ill.

  Notes made by the physicians and nurses who treated him throughout his hospitalization make it clear that Drew was struggling to put back together the pieces of his life, struggling to piece together the beginnings of a future. He discussed the possibility of obtaining a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering, becoming a teacher, or perhaps, he suggested in a less optimistic mood, working at the beach. He didn’t know; it was too early to say. He was desperately concerned about paying off the educational debt he felt he had to the Air Force. But his immediate goal was to understand his illness and the medication he was taking to treat it.

  Drew’s hospitalization at Andrews was difficult, in part because the devastating consequences of his illness were beginning to sink in, in part because it is readily apparent from his medical history that he had a severe form of manic-depressive illness. On his second day at the hospital, one of the nurses found him deeply depressed, rocking in a fetal position. He appeared anxious and stated that he was scared, felt he was being tortured, and was going to die. He was placed on fifteen-minute checks, which ensured that a member of the nursing staff would monitor his safety and whereabouts. His moods cycled rapidly and violently. A few days later, he stated to the other members in his group therapy session that he had the solutions to all of the world’s problems, but within a few hours he was tearful and frightened that he could not control his racing thoughts.

  Drew’s condition gradually improved, and early in July he was given a two-day weekend pass to visit his parents. When he came back to the hospital, he was angry and agitated at having to return to the ward; he thrashed his arms about and shouted to the staff, “No! I’m not staying! No!”

  Thirty minutes later one of the nurses found him lying in bed, where he stated, awfully, “I’m all right. It was just so hard to come back.”

  Within a few hours, Drew was again agitated. The nurse observed that his face was flushed and that he was pacing back and forth in the hallway. Within fifteen minutes he escaped from the hospital—an escape made easier, no doubt, by his survival training at the Air Force Academy—and was on his way to his parents’ home in Delaware. He crawled in through a back window; his parents found him the next morning, sleeping in his own bed.

  His mother called the hospital to notify it that Drew had been found and that he was extremely upset by a telephone call he had received. A fellow patient from his days on the psychiatric ward in Fitzsimons Army Medical Center had attempted suicide and been rehospitalized. Under the circumstances, Drew’s parents thought it would be better for him to receive his psychiatric treatment closer to home.

  Drew arrived home in early July 1994, and his parents arranged for him to get private psychiatric care and counseling. Psychologically shaky for a while, he continued to be preoccupied with guilt because he had been forced to leave the Air Force. He made slow but reasonably steady progress, however, and by midsummer he was feeling better, exercising again, and playing tennis. He had a brief recurrence of his delusions and a short-lived period of sleeplessness, but he was definitely better. In November he began seeing a new psychiatrist, who added an antipsychotic medication to the lithium that Drew already was taking. Both Drew and his doctor noted a dramatic improvement in Drew’s mood and thinking, as did his parents.

  From late 1994 to August 1995, Drew’s mood remained stable and he experienced no psychotic symptoms. He worked at a bank twenty hours a week, was physically active, and talked about going to graduate school. Although he occasionally expressed a desire to stop taking his medications, in the hope that he might someday be able to fly airplanes on a civilian basis, he continued to take his drugs as prescribed.

  But Drew’s anger about the stigma he felt about having manic-depressive illness was intense, and he felt unable to discuss it with his friends or new acquaintances. “It’s the last thing I want to talk about, but it generally comes up when meeting new people or out with friends at bars and parties,” he confided to his psychiatrist. He limited his drinking to one or two beers and found that he was questioned about why he didn’t drink more. Often asked about why he was no longer in the Air Force, he was too embarrassed to tell the truth and was forced to invent alternative explanations.

  Friends were aware that Drew did not want to talk about his problems. One, who went to high school with Drew and described him, as many did, as “Mr. Everything,” remarked, “He was still funny and willing to have a good time. I had no idea what he was dealing with inside his head.” Another close friend, who is still “looking for explanations I don’t even understand,” described a change in Drew after his return from the Academy. Drew, he said, had been a loving person, “with a passion for life”; now something had gone wrong; Drew didn’t want to talk about it; he “kept a lot of secrets.” Still, Drew and his friends were a close-knit, active group. Together they listened to the music of U2, went to rock concerts and the beach, played tennis and volleyball and basketball, yelled exuberantly at ice hockey games, and went to parties in hopes of meeting new women.

  Drew remained deeply troubled, however, and utterly convinced that he had disappointed those who mattered most to him. “I never saw bitterness from Drew,” says his mother, “only disappointment and regret. He felt he had let everyone down, including the younger cadets, his friends and the Air Force. He was troubled that he could not repay the education he had received. He had a difficult time explaining why he was living at home. He felt he had followed all the rules of the Air Force and still this didn’t work out for him. He felt shame at being sick.” Like many with manic-depressive illness, Drew had conflicted feelings about his disease. “We told him of all the people who had coped with bipolar disorder and done well,” his mother explained, but “he never heard it.”

  In November 1995 Drew stopped taking his medications and quit his job. For a brief time, it looked as though things might work out. He and two others went to the University of Connecticut to visit a friend, and one of them commented, “Drew was great—meeting people, breaking the hearts of several girls, and generally being Drew.” But this same friend also noted, “That was the last time I saw Drew happy.”

  Drew deteriorated rapidly. “It was during this time that I found out what Drew was really going through,” wrote a friend. “We’d talk for hours about his Jesus sightings, UFO theories, or whatever else he was experiencing. Through all his depressive episodes, he still maintained a sense of humor.” Another friend commented on Drew’s desire for privacy: “He came back from the Air Force broken, I suppose. He was able to hide it pretty well. All I know is that somehow his wings were clipped, and that I shouldn’t bring it up—he didn’t want to talk about it. It’s as if he just didn’t want to worry anyone.”

  Drew’s losing battle with manic-depressive illness was profoundly disturbing to the friends who had known, loved, and admired him for so many years. He had been their leader, a person of strong character, an individual of great kindness: he was, said
one of them, a person who had “a sweet nature and downright gorgeous looks—a friend we all hope to be, a man who women dream of, and a man who men admire, respect, and almost always befriended.” To be privy to such a person’s struggle for sanity was almost unbearably difficult and distressing to his friends.

  Drew was lucky in these friends, and they in him; their reactions to his sickness are therefore all the more heartbreaking. One who was particularly close to Drew wrote:

  I remember trying to talk to him, but conversations were frightening and confusing. He often talked in circles or made no sense or described that his friends were plotting against him. He described to me in horrid detail what ran through his mind and most of it I choose not to repeat. I simply do not know if there is a way to repeat the awful details, and somehow I feel it is my duty still to protect his honor and his name. He would do the same for me.

  After he was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and I began to try to understand the horror in his mind, I knew he might never be the same. But I did not dream he would commit suicide. It simply did not seem possible. For months after he was hospitalized, his family and Drew told no one but family and me. We wanted to protect him, and perhaps we thought he would get better, and we would never have to speak of it. But Drew did not get better, and the more time dragged on, the more I knew he might never recover.

  Drew took his lithium on and off, but I think he never really wanted to believe he needed it. He never wanted to admit it to himself. I think he thought he could recover. But as the months dragged on, I realized that this illness had stolen a part of Drew’s soul. It took from him part of his personality and his love of life. I remember when he was hospitalized in D.C. and I went to visit him. His mom left to get dinner, and he laid his head in my lap, curled up in the fetal position. I saw with my eyes the man’s face I knew as Drew, but my ears heard another creature. Something else seemed to live in his shell. Someone other than Drew brought words to his lips or created his awkward, disturbing actions. As he rubbed his head, as though to bring his thoughts to some sort of sanity, I looked at him and wondered where my friend had disappeared to. This monster had taken over. He was gaunt and had not shaved in weeks. His skin was sallow and his cheeks sunken; each movement appeared painful. I did not know this person he had become. The more he talked the more my fear for him grew. I went home that evening and cried for two hours straight. Never had I looked horror in the face as I had that evening.

  By December, Drew’s condition plummeted. He was increasingly depressed, and he kept more and more to himself. The packages he received for Christmas remained wrapped in his room, and he went out with friends only after much inducement and prodding. Temporary solace was to be found in music and in the long baths that he took in a desperate attempt to curb his agitation.

  By early January 1996, Drew was almost totally withdrawn from everyone. Finally, he was catatonic in his bed. He was taken by ambulance to a local hospital, where he was admitted on an emergency, involuntary basis. At the time of admission he was mute, his eyes were closed, and he was lying inert on a stretcher. The doctors gave him an antipsychotic drug, which worked rapidly. Indeed, it worked rapidly enough that the next day he escaped from the locked ward and made his way home through one of the worst snowstorms on record. He was taken back to the hospital, where he stayed for another ten days. During this time his physician noted that Drew showed “some improvement,” although he was “continuing to struggle with coming to grips with seeing himself as an individual with an illness.”

  Drew’s medical chart paints an unremittingly grim picture. He described himself as “hopeless” to the admitting nurse. His employment history was recorded simply as “unemployed—was working in a bank. Graduated from Air Force Academy.” In just over a year and a half, a young man of great promise had gone from a world of academics and athletics, officers and gentlemen, to “unemployed” and “hopeless.” Manic-depression had taken no hostages.

  Drew was asked during the hospitalization to describe an ideal scenario for his life, once he recovered. He emphasized that he wanted no pity and no medicine. The items he endorsed on a standard psychological test were deeply despairing in nature: “I am so sad or unhappy that I can’t stand it,” he checked off on the test form; “I feel I have nothing to look forward to.” He also endorsed the statement “As I look back on my life, all I can see is a lot of failures” and, most distressingly, “I have thoughts of killing myself, but I would not carry them out.”

  Drew was discharged to outpatient care five days before he committed suicide. No one knows what he was thinking or feeling during that time, but he did leave behind scattered notes and journal entries. In them, as his mother put it, “you can see him slipping away.” The writings are enigmatic, idiosyncratic, flailing; they are at times cohesive, but more often than not the confounding presence of psychosis makes itself felt.

  He records unusual dreams, coincidences, and events; there is a sense of a mind trying desperately just to hold on. He mentions falling stars and eagle dreams, dreams of Hell, hurricanes, lightning, jets, death. His instructions to himself compel him to relax, pray, tone down, focus, find peace. He is frightened that his “old beliefs” will come back, and he laments, “I asked God to help me. I didn’t deserve his help. Because I cursed God before I asked him for help.”

  His writings are filled with the sense of a world that is lost, a self that is lost, and a hope that has been entirely abandoned. He is guilt-stricken for the pain he feels he has brought upon others, especially his family, and he enumerates at length the problems he must confront: he must pay off his debts, he has lost his girlfriend, he must take medication, he must see doctors. He is convinced that “everyone will label me as having [an] illness until the day I die,” yet he also states, “No one knows the special experiences I have had—so they won’t hear what I tell them ever.”

  The final entry in his journal reflects this pervasive ambivalence toward his disease: “Sick or not?—Medicine reduce[s] symptoms but [I] want [to] be happy.”

  In his copy of Moral Issues in Philosophy, an assigned textbook Drew was reading when he first became ill at the Air Force Academy, different colors of ink accentuate, underline, and emphasize various phrases and ideas. He repeatedly circled and underlined the sentence “There is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived” and underscored yet another sentence, “It is cruel to allow a human being to linger for months in the last stages of agony.” Chillingly, the last phrase Drew underlined was “[there is a] moral duty to terminate the life of an insane person who is suffering from a painful and incurable disease.”

  But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be an affliction, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.

  —WISDOM, 3:1–9, read at Drew’s memorial service

  A few days before Drew’s death, two of his closest friends visited him. They did not know that it was to be for the last time. Only recently released from the hospital, Drew was, one of them observed, “unshaven, in black from head to toe, and very sullen. I’m not sure if he had made up his mind by then or not. All I can tell you is that he didn’t laugh or smile. As [we] left that night, Drew matter-of-factly said, ‘I love you guys.’ It was quite strange, and I didn’t know how to respond. Sensing this, he just said again, ‘I really love you guys,’ and shut the door. As far as I know, that’s the last thing he said to anyone.”

  On January 27, Drew Sopirak left his parents’ home in Wilmington and drove to a gun store. The state of Delaware required no waiting period to purchase handguns; the clerk sold him a .38-caliber revolver straightaway. A few hours later, Drew shot and killed himself. The police notified Drew’s parents that his body had been found inside his jeep at the entrance to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He was about forty minutes from home.

  “We had been on that turnpike so many t
imes,” said Drew’s mother. “Both our families live in the Pittsburgh area. That road would have taken him to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins and his brother at Penn State. He just never got on it. He must have run out of hope there.”

  The family was left to do the unimaginable: identify Drew’s body at the morgue, notify other family members and friends, plan a funeral and memorial service, mourn him, miss him.

  Drew’s parents and younger brother received an extraordinary number of condolence letters from Drew’s high school friends and teachers, his fellow cadets and instructors at the Air Force Academy, and parents of friends. In reading through them it is striking how many of the letters are in the form of thank-you letters: thank-yous for his life, his presence, his warmth; appreciation of his vitality, friendship, and influence.

  “I cannot begin to tell you how sad it makes me to know the world is without one of its great participants,” wrote one friend. He continued, “Ovid once wrote, ‘Welcome this pain, for some day it will be useful to you.’ I don’t know how true that is for you concerning your loss, but I know that each time I remember Drew I hurt. What a wonderful gift you gave all of us in Drew. Thank you.”

  Another said simply, “May your consolation be that he was truly loved in this life.” One of Drew’s teachers, an instructor in aeronautical engineering at the Air Force Academy, wrote, “I never really understood his illness and he never used it as an excuse. I don’t remember the names of most of the hundreds of students I had in my class but a few do stand out. Drew was a stand out guy. Drew made a difference. Drew mattered. I am proud to have known him.”

  Consolations were of help, but ultimately it was left to Drew’s family and friends to attempt to understand why he had done such an incomprehensible, final thing. One friend tried: