When I arrived at my sister’s house a half hour later, the kids ran in before me. My face was swollen from all of that stupid, hysterical crying, and when I walked in the door I immediately went into a sitting room to the left of the entryway. I set my purse down next to a desk and then plopped myself on the floor beside it. A cacophony of voices filled the house: siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandchildren, my father and stepmother. I knew everyone was feasting on a buffet of potluck dishes, despite no sounds of cutlery hitting plates. Hillbilly to the core, we use plastic knives and forks, paper plates, and red Solo cups. Everyone would take home leftovers wrapped in tinfoil.
Suddenly my mother rounded the corner. “There you are,” she said as she finished chewing a piece of food. She was wiping her hands with a paper towel. “I saw Leta and Marlo come in; they said you were right behind them.” Seeing her face and hearing her voice instigated that thing that happens between a mother and her children, that safe feeling wherein all the pent-up emotion from a horrible day at school—all the emotion you’ve hidden from classmates and teachers and coaches—all comes suddenly rushing to the surface.
I pulled my legs in to my chest and rested my head on my knees to cry. “I got pulled over for running a stop sign,” I wept, with a bit of a laugh thrown in. I then lifted my head to look at her. “And it’s fine, you know, he was perfectly lovely. He didn’t even give me a ticket and complimented the kids, but look at me! I’m a mess!”
She walked over to me to rest her hand on my head. “Heather, anyone would be—”
“But I’m still like this! I mean, I’ve gone under twice now, and for what? What am I doing? Why am I risking this if it isn’t going to work?”
“You’re only two treatments in, honey. We have to give this—”
“Give this what? I’m stealing hours of your life away from you to do this, and I still can’t handle anything. I can’t get over the hurdle. I still can’t handle anything. This isn’t fair to you!”
“Remember what I told you,” she said, and then reached down to cradle my chin in her hand. “We are doing this. We are doing whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Two treatments down, eight to go. We have nothing else to do this month other than be there when you wake up. Do you hear me?”
I nodded and then the hillbilly took over and I wiped my face on the sleeve of my jacket. “I just don’t want to feel like this anymore. That’s it. That’s all I want.” I just wanted to be able to handle things. To be free of the malaise I felt at the idea of tackling anything. Anything. It could be something as insignificant as ironing a shirt or unloading the dishwasher. Sometimes the idea of having to lace up a pair of boots was too much. And it wasn’t just the effort of it, although that was a large part of it. It was also the why of it. Why lace up these boots when I didn’t want to leave the house in the first place? Why iron this shirt when I didn’t want to get dressed? If no one else could smell the coffee-stained T-shirt I’d been wearing for three days in a row, what was the problem?
But the significant things—remaining calm when your seven-year-old is banging her head on the keys of the piano, a plumbing problem arises with the kitchen sink, a deadline looms, you’re getting pulled over for running a stop sign—these things might as well be at the top of a 120-story building when the elevator is broken. And so are your legs. Depression extinguishes our purpose in life—the purpose of anything in our lives—making it quite literally impossible to handle anything. Every day and hour and minute is an obstacle course of things we are supposed to handle; most people do so without any effort, but we can’t even see around the first corner. And so we collapse. Or we sleep for days on end. Or we yell at people who don’t deserve it. Some of us drink ourselves into a stupor. Others scream into a pillow or crawl into a corner to rock back and forth. Some of us retreat to a closet to call their mother and say, “Please, let me be dead.”
NINE
THE LIE OF A SUICIDAL IDEATION
THE FOLLOWING MORNING I drove my kids to school on an empty stomach. The clinic had called to let me know that I’d need to come in for the third treatment that afternoon at 1:00 p.m. I would have my final glass of water before leaving the house, before approaching that stop sign and bringing the car to a full stop for ten seconds.
“Mom, you can go. There are no cars coming,” Leta said, looking at me like only a seventh grader can.
“Yes, I am aware,” I shot back. “But if you will recall, yesterday we had a little run-in with law enforcement, and I’d rather not repeat that.”
I pulled out into the intersection and continued on the route we took to her school every morning. A few minutes passed before she asked, “So, are Grandmommy and Grandpa Rob coming over today? I mean, to help you?”
She knew more than Marlo knew, but she didn’t know any of the details. She knew that my mother and stepfather were taking me to a clinic every other day “to help with my anxiety,” and she knew that they stayed after they brought me home so that I could take a short nap. She did not know that they both watched me fall swiftly under the grip of propofol anesthesia into the abyss where I would remain for over fifteen minutes. She didn’t know about the needle, the breathing tube, the Zofran, or the lidocaine. She didn’t know about the recovery room or the crazy shit that would come out of my mouth in the drunken minutes after I awoke. She didn’t know about Greg or Chris or Molly or Dr. Tadler or Dr. Mickey. She didn’t know about the wire affixed to my forehead with Velcro. She didn’t need to know these things, and not just because she might slip and say something to her father. She just needed to know that I wanted to get better and that I was trying to get better, because the one thing she did know was that I was unhappy. Although she did not know the extent of my unhappiness, she could see the hopelessness etched into every line of my face.
When I pulled up along the curb where parents drop off their seventh- and eighth-grade kids, she strapped her backpack to her right shoulder and then dramatically turned to face me.
“Good luck today,” she said.
“Thank you, honey,” I said, and reached over to pull her into an embrace over the center console of the car. “Everything will be fine.”
I repeated that line again and again—“Everything will be fine . . . Everything will be fine . . . Everything will be fine”—after filling out the questionnaire and receiving my identity bracelet from Greg. My answers were the same as they had been when I filled it out the previous Friday, and I lingered probably a little too long on number 5, the bullet point assessing my level of sadness. That word is not one I had ever used to describe my mental health in the previous year. “Hopeless,” “anxious,” “irritable,” “angry,” “panicked,” “depressed”—all of these dominated my vocabulary when I talked to my mother or my therapist. But up until I’d seen that specific question the first time, I don’t think I had linked the word “sad” to what I had been experiencing. Yet it so perfectly summarized how I felt about being alive: I was sad.
My mother was talking to me about a few of our family members and the conversations she’d had with them the previous day at the farewell party, and I was mostly paying attention. Spending this much time with her made me realize that as she has gotten older her manic energy expresses itself less in a constant need to move and more through a constant need to talk. She talked endlessly, breathlessly, sometimes weaving her way through three stories at once. Often I would look over at my stepfather during these rambling narratives to see him gleefully staring off into the distance because he’d been relieved for once of having to be her audience.
She was saying something about my nephew, but I got distracted by a few of the ECT patients sitting in the waiting room with us. Some of them were acting and talking like the stereotypes we imagine when we think of electroconvulsive therapy. Some were clearly disoriented; one looked like he hadn’t slept in months. One woman’s hands were trembling so badly that she could barely hold the pen to fill out her paperwork. I probably looked exactly like all t
hree of them rolled into one.
We shared the waiting room with the final ECT patients of the day. On one occasion I would come in for my treatment after the clinic had completed twenty-two ECT appointments. They have that procedure down to a minute-by-minute precision and know how long it will take each person to complete a round. My treatment, however, was a little less polished, and understandably so. I was only the third person to qualify for and agree to participate in the study. I would not know for several weeks that every technician and nurse and doctor and anesthesiologist helping me was donating their time. They stayed a few hours after the last ECT appointment without extra compensation. The ultimate goal of this study, Dr. Mickey explained to my mother when I was under anesthesia for my second treatment, was to provide proof that an anesthetic can offer the benefits of ECT without the side effects of ECT. The most debilitating of these are short-term or permanent memory loss and migraines. Because my psychiatrist had assembled an incredible team, none of them hesitated when asked if they’d volunteer to help Dr. Mickey.
We waited for over an hour that day due to some delays with the ECT patients going before me, and my stomach grumbled so loudly, it sounded like a scene in a cartoon. It almost drowned out my mother’s talking—conversation that, let’s be honest, I didn’t mind at all. It was a distraction from everything: the hunger and the thirst, the needle, the drugs and the tubes and the vials, the sadness, and the worry that all of this might be a huge waste of everyone’s time.
When she reached a natural pause in her monologue, I asked, “I don’t want to change the subject, but can you help me make sure to remind them about the fentanyl?”
“Of course,” she said. “I’m sure they have it written down somewhere, but I’ll say something.”
“And . . . can you help me talk to them about . . . it’s been six days now. Six days. This isn’t normal.”
“Six days . . . since?” She was confused.
“Six days since I last . . . you know . . .” I opened my eyes as wide as I could and wobbled my head around. I really hate talking about my bathroom habits with anyone, even my mother. I spent so many years of my life invested in the pattern and consistency of my children’s bowel movements and have written tomes about the subject on my website. And because of that I don’t ever want to waste another minute discussing the topic.
“Hm . . .” My mother pursed her lips. “It could be that you’re having to go so long without eating anything. You’re having to skip one or two meals every other day.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I am still eating food. And I haven’t felt a single urge in six days. I just don’t feel normal that way.”
“Let’s ask Dr. Mickey if anything they’re giving you might be causing this.” I was so glad to have her there, to have her voice—however talkative—and her advocacy. She made me feel safe. The few friends I’d told about the treatment knew that I’d taken a huge leap of faith in agreeing to do it, and whenever any of them uttered a “Whoa . . .” I’d say, “My mom will be there. I’ll be okay.”
When they finally called me in for prep, I didn’t recognize the phlebotomist. I was starving and my tongue kept getting stuck to the roof of my mouth from the dehydration. I took my seat across the room from a giant television. The first time I sat in that room a loop of landscapes in Hawaii played. I recognized a specific beach I’d visited in Maui, a girls’ trip I’d taken three years before to support my friend whose fiancé had committed suicide just days after proposing. The day it happened, my stylist was finishing up my routine haircut when I got the phone call from a mutual friend. They’d found his body in the trunk of his car. It was parked at a train station. He had climbed inside it and taken his life. Those were the straightforward details, but the why of it all was so confusing to her. To everyone. That night I bought enough Thai food to feed the group of friends who would gather at her house to comfort and talk and just be there for her. When I walked in she got up from her seat, walked over to me, and collapsed into my arms. I held her for several minutes and stroked her hair. She then pulled me by my right arm to take me to her bedroom, where we could talk alone. She knew and I knew that I was perhaps the only one there who could give her some insight into the why of it all. She knew I’d once been that desperate.
She talked about the conflict he’d been feeling about leaving the religion he’d known and practiced his entire life. She talked about the conflict he’d been feeling about extracting himself from a loveless marriage and his constant worry over what that might do to his three kids. She talked about his depression, how he seemed to be managing it. How could he do this to her? How could he do this to his three kids? How? Why? How could he do this to them?
I let her talk and wail and sob. Her eyes were almost swollen shut from the crying. And then I held her hands and said, “I know you and everyone else think that he did this, this something, to you, to his kids. But I will tell you right now that in order for him to make the decision to get into that trunk and do what he did, he had to have been deceived. The depression had deluded him into thinking that all of you would be better off without him. The depression convinced him of that. The depression made him believe that he was relieving all of you from the burden of himself. The depression did this. He did not do this.”
Some friends tried to console her with the notion that he’d been selfish, that he’d betrayed her and the love they had for each other. Months later she would tell me that what I had offered her that night in her room was one of the things that had given her a glimmer of peace. And yet, there I sat, waiting to have a 22-gauge needle inserted into my arm, watching images of rain forests and flowers loop on the enormous TV across the room, thoroughly convinced that everyone in my life would be better off without me. It was a truth my addled brain could not refute.
This was the friend I had called one night two months prior to starting treatment when I found myself in my bathtub wondering if I could will myself to remain underneath the water. My phone was on the floor next to the tub and with wet fingers I texted, “I think you should probably come over here. I shouldn’t be alone.” And then I felt terrible for having put that pressure on her and fired off another text immediately. “Actually, I’m fine. Don’t come over.”
My phone starting ringing before I set it back on the floor, and when I saw her name I hesitated only briefly.
“Hey,” I answered.
“I am coming over right now, goddamnit,” she howled into her phone. “And you better open that fucking door.” She knew she could use that language with me, and she was using it half jokingly, half “Do not make me call the cops on you.” Ten minutes later after I’d toweled off and slipped on a T-shirt and yoga pants that I found on the floor next to my bed, I let her in and grabbed her. She nodded in my neck as I cried, and then she led me back to my bed. I climbed in first and then she climbed in behind me and whispered as she stroked my hair, “I’m staying all night. I’ll be here all night.” Early the following morning she got up, mentioned a meeting she had to get to, and told me how much she loved me. I am so glad I opened that door.
* * *
I didn’t really have the desire to get to know this third phlebotomist, and she wasn’t trying to interact with me as I sat staring at the screen. She was older than Molly, with shoulder-length hair, and she wore a stiff white coat. As she prepared all the materials, the mood in the room felt sterile and cold. She ran through the list of my medications rather quickly, and I didn’t tell her about my urinary tract and its unique shape. I didn’t tell her that wanting to be dead destroys one’s sex drive and that I couldn’t remember what it felt like to want to be intimate with someone. That the thought of having to wash my hair was reason enough not to go on a date.
And then she stood up from her seat at the computer, snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, and picked up the needle. I showed her the yellowing bruises on my right arm from the previous two treatments and asked if she could try my left arm. She walked around to the other si
de of my body, affixed a rubber tourniquet to my upper arm, and asked me to make a fist. I flexed my hand several times and my super-veins bulged like giant blue pipes underneath my skin. I turned my head when I saw her make a movement toward my arm, and then my entire body seized with the jab of it, like she’d hacked into my arm with a saw. I tried not to groan, but then she jabbed at a vein again, and again I could feel the pain shoot up into the back of my jaw. I took several quick, sharp breaths and closed my eyes. She apologized, said she couldn’t get the needle all the way in and would need to try it one more time. I clenched my right hand around my thigh to brace for it, but nothing could have prepared me for that third attempt. I involuntarily let out a moan and tried to hide it with my breath. My entire left arm was on fire.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she mused. “I can get the needle into the vein; I just can’t get it as far in as it’s supposed to be. Let me go find my colleague.” She swiftly exited the room, and I immediately threw back my head and groaned at the ceiling. This loosened the grip between the roof of my mouth and my tongue, and I thought about how amazing a swig of apple juice would feel in my throat. After a few minutes she returned with another woman in a white coat, someone I’d seen before walking through the halls of the clinic. She picked up my left arm and examined my veins, turning my arm from left to right.
“Have you tried the other arm?” she asked
“You used my right arm the last two times!” I interjected, panicky from the thought of having the needle aimed at my bruises. I picked up my arm to show her the injection sites.
The Valedictorian of Being Dead Page 8