The Valedictorian of Being Dead

by Heather B. Armstrong

  I have tried to be very careful about dating and relationships around my children, and once in the summer of 2015 while vacationing in Southern California with a large group of friends Leta sensed that I had become attracted to a certain bachelor I’d just met. She noticed him touching my arm and I spent the next hour alone with her on a twin bed at a condo overlooking the Palm Desert assuring her that I wasn’t going to fall in love with a man and leave her. She was terrified that I’d get into a relationship with someone who didn’t live in Utah and move. And leave her. She was afraid that I’d up and leave her and Marlo. Where she conjured up this notion we will never know, but her reaction was visceral and almost primal. I’d always known to be careful about introducing the men in my life to my children—I dated the jealous man for over eighteen months before he met my kids—but this response from her made me even more cautious.

  However, when I set up my Match.com account and began looking at profiles, I stumbled across one that I had to share with Leta, only because I knew that we could laugh about it together. Someone set up a profile and in every picture he was standing on his head. He was on top of a famous mountain, standing on his head. He was in the middle of a lake on a paddleboard, standing on his head. He was in the crowd at a baseball game, a hot dog in each hand, standing on his head. He was in a dark cave surrounded by human skulls, standing on his head. I suppose he thought women would find this witty, or I guess we were supposed to be impressed by his head-standing skills. But if you show me a picture of yourself in an awkward pose surrounded by human skulls, on purpose, I am not ever going to take my clothes off in front of you.

  I went on so many first dates, I’m not sure I can even count that high, and only a handful of times went on a second date. I once agreed to a second date even though I was in no way attracted to the man. But he had a great job. A man with a stable job! What would that be like to date someone who could help pay the bills? He was a pediatric psychologist, so I knew he could afford groceries. On that second date, after I had rearranged my life in order to leave my house—finishing up homework with both kids, overseeing piano practice, hiring a babysitter, making sure the babysitter knew Marlo’s bedtime routine, making sure I’d prepared a meal for both kids, tying up all loose ends with work, making sure the dog had been fed and let outside, all while taking a dreaded shower and spending the time to style my hair and apply makeup—that pediatric psychologist told me over a table of steaming Indian food that I was using my children as an excuse to make men think I was unattainable.

  I know it sounds like I’m complaining, and that’s because I am. I have my kids all day every day, week in and week out, and in order to go on a date with a man I had to navigate the reality of this. Yet, every single man I went on a date with either didn’t have children or shared custody with his ex. He could simply shower and walk out the door. I grappled with the inevitable resentment I felt at this glaring, blinding disparity. The pediatric psychologist and I had had to reschedule the second date because Marlo had gotten sick hours before, and apparently he thought I had made up that inconvenience to manipulate him. Yes, I am one to avoid conflict like the plague and will endure a lot of bullshit because of the PTSD of being cornered against a wall. But I let down my guard, set down my fork, and leaned closer to him to say, “I took a fucking shower for you.” And then I got up and walked out. I walked away from a bowl of aloo gobi, a plate of chana masala, and two giant samosas, if you can imagine.

  I went on so many dates with men who talked about their carefree lives or complained endlessly about their exes. And never once did a guy offer to pay for a meal or a drink. Not once. My resentment built with each weak cocktail and soy latte, and I really did believe I was going to live the rest of my life alone. The tedious maneuvers of this ongoing ritual, despite seeing someone novel every week—and not one offering even a whiff of romance—left me feeling completely alone.

  And so, when someone did actually engage in the tiniest amount of flirting—before our first date he asked me about my job and shared that he taught kayaking lessons at a local college, and I was so desperate I convinced myself he was flirting—I jumped at the idea that we might go beyond a second date. And we did. We went on a third and fourth and fifth date, and because he was really attractive and nicer than Mr. Rogers, I ignored the fact that we did not agree on any political matter. I ignored the fact that he did not vote in the presidential election. I ignored the fact that I was vegan and he routinely hunted deer. I ignored the fact that he described in detail the fifteen different guns he had stockpiled in his basement. I also ignored the fact that he did not ever want to be intimate with me. I shoehorned myself into that relationship and suppressed my very essence merely because he had asked me about my job. He ran his own business and loved his son, and so I resisted reaching out to touch him lovingly because, even after six weeks, he had never initiated physical contact. But I could make it work, I thought. I convinced myself that I could live like that. Because what man would ever flirt with me again? This had to work, and if it didn’t, I would be alone forever. Add this to the list of things you should know about people who suffer from depression: we are lonely and we fear that this loneliness is our destiny. We despise this loneliness—we certainly don’t want to feel alone and are not choosing to feel alone—but we feel it desperately, wholly, all-consumingly. We think we will be alone forever.

  After a Mexican dinner one night during the week of Christmas—a week I’d been dreading because my children would be with their father and I would be spending the holiday without them—he and I returned to my empty house. When he plopped himself on my couch, perched his feet on my coffee table, and clasped his hands behind his head with a sigh of relaxation, I suddenly realized, Oh my God, we are not ever going to be intimate. He is not sexually attracted to me. How can I possibly live like this? Do I want to be in a relationship with someone who does not find me attractive? Can I live with that? And the pressure of trying to hold it all together, my children 2,200 miles across the country and waking up on Christmas morning without me—my God, that pain—it made me sit on the opposite side of the couch and put my head in my hands. I couldn’t hold back the pain any longer and it started to pour out of my eyes. He immediately pulled his feet off of the table and put his hands into his lap, sitting upright. Instead of saying anything, he just shook his head, and that reaction made me cry even harder.

  Finally he broke his silence. “Do you have something to tell me?” he asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders almost unnoticeably. “I don’t know,” I muttered. And then, without any thought or reason, I said, “Maybe you should leave.” It wasn’t what I wanted to say; it just came out of my mouth involuntarily.

  He stood up, walked over to me, and stood a foot away. “Is that what you really want?” he asked.

  I couldn’t form words at that point: the pain and the confusion and the fear of being alone were compressing my chest. I felt like someone had taken a vise and was using it to crush my lungs.

  He walked past me, grabbed his coat from the back of the couch, and headed toward the front door. When I heard his steps on the Spanish tiles in the hallway leading to the foyer, I rushed to him and grabbed his arm just as he reached the door.

  “Please don’t leave,” I cried. “Please. That’s not what I want.” Here I was pleading with a man who did not know me, the real me, who could never understand the depth of my plea and why my heart and my body and my brain were in such conflict. “Please,” I begged once more.

  He shook his head, gently pulled my hand away from his arm, and walked out the door without saying a word. When he closed the door behind him, I immediately fell to the floor in a heap. I pulled my arms over my head and rocked back and forth on my knees, and then I started howling. Wild, aching howls erupted from my body interspersed with screaming.

  “I don’t want to feel this way anymore!” I yelled. I was alone again, alone forever. “Make it stop, please make it stop, please make it stop!” I
pleaded over and over again. I felt an eerie darkness, a cold and dangerous darkness, start to wrap itself around me as if it were going to reach up and strangle me. I was terrified. Scared of that darkness and of the thoughts thunderously clouding my head. Somehow I crawled around the corner of the foyer over those cold Spanish tiles to the phone on the edge of the countertop in the kitchen and dialed my mother’s phone number. She picked up as a howl escaped my throat.

  “Heather, where are you?” she asked, the fear in her voice matching the fear that had enveloped me.

  “Please make it stop!” I wailed.

  “Make what stop? Make what stop, Heather?”

  “I don’t want to feel this way anymore!”

  “What happened?” she pleaded. “Tell me what happened.”

  “It doesn’t matter what happened; I will always feel this way and I just want to be dead.”

  “Heather—”

  “If I am dead, I won’t feel this way anymore!”

  “We are getting in the car right now and we are coming to be with—”

  “Please make it stop!”

  “Do not put down the phone, Heather. Listen to me. Listen. To. Me. Do not put down the phone—”

  “I will never stop feeling this way, Mom. Please make it stop.”

  “You are going to talk to me until I get to your front door and you are going to let me in, okay? Do you understand me?” She didn’t sound threatening or judgmental. She sounded like a commander laying out a battle plan. “Talk to me. Where are you in the house?”

  “I’m in the kitchen. On the floor.”

  “What part of the kitchen?”

  “I’m next to the pantry.”

  This small talk continued for the entire forty-minute drive from her house to mine, and then I heard the knock at my front door both in the house and through the phone. I walked to the foyer, and when I opened the door we both had phones pressed to our ears. I hung up and dropped my hand to my side and just fell into her chest like a two-year-old needing her mother.

  “Please make it stop,” I mumbled one last time. My stepfather walked in and passed us as he headed upstairs to my bedroom.

  “Rob is going to turn your bed down and I am going to walk you up there and stay with you until you fall asleep, okay?”

  “You know I don’t ever make my bed, Mom. There is nothing to turn down.” Somehow, in the midst of all that pain, the warmth of her chest had given me the strength to inject some small bit of levity into one of the scariest moments of my life.

  “Do not argue with me, young lady,” she shot back. “We brought clothes and are going to sleep in your guest room, okay?” I nodded and she reached for my hand and led me to my bed. Since I had actually dressed up for this date, I excused myself to my bathroom, yanked off my pants and shirt, and grabbed my bathrobe. When I walked back into my bedroom, she was sitting at the foot of the giant king-sized bed where I slept alone every night. She patted the mattress next to her, an indication that I should not argue and that I needed to get some sleep. She was right: I needed to sleep off this darkness.

  I walked over, sat down, and grabbed my giant bag of pills. After getting each one out for the night and swallowing them, I climbed underneath my covers. My mother pulled my duvet up to my neck and tucked it up under my ears.

  “Tomorrow we are going to call your psychiatrist—”

  “Mom, no. You know we can’t.”

  “Do not argue with me. I am going to dial his number for you and stand next to you while you make an appointment. If you don’t make the appointment, I will. We will do this together. We will make this stop.”

  “But what if—”

  “But nothing. We will call him tomorrow morning. Now get some rest.” She reached up and stroked my hair along my forehead down to my shoulder just like I do with Leta when she is feeling anxious or uneasy. I always wanted to be the mom that my mom was to me.

  The meds kicked in immediately—they always did—which was another reason I had not wanted to call my psychiatrist. My meds still helped me fall asleep. I didn’t want that to change.

  The following morning I lingered in my anxiety a little longer than usual. Since the girls were spending the week with their father, I didn’t have to perform the morning routine. When I finally made it downstairs in a dirty T-shirt and yoga pants, my mother was standing in the kitchen, holding my landline. I was about to protest when she held up her hand.

  “I don’t think his office is open just yet. It’s not even eight o’clock,” I said.

  “You can leave a message and tell them to call you back.”

  I pulled out my iPhone to look up his office phone number, and then I took the landline out of my mother’s hand.

  I slowly dialed Dr. Bushnell’s office. I don’t know why the movement of my fingers held such gravity. I had purposefully not called him because I believed that in doing so Jon would find out. Something about getting Dr. Bushnell’s help—the help I so clearly needed—meant that Jon would know I was this depressed. The idea that he might use this against me was terrifying.

  After I dialed the last number, I held the phone to my ear and heard his line immediately go to voicemail. The rush of relief made my entire body heave.

  “Hey, Stacy. This is Heather Armstrong. I know I haven’t seen Dr. Bushnell in a while, but I need a refill on my Valium and they told me I needed to call you guys about it. If you could give me a call back, I’d really appreciate it.”

  I was not lying. This was all true. I had three days’ worth of Valium left—a critical component of the cocktail of medication that treated my insomnia—and my pharmacy had told me that they’d tried to call my doctor for a refill and were given strict orders that I needed to call him myself. We know why now, but at the time I was, like, Does no one understand? Making time to see a doctor on top of having to do one more goddamn load of laundry was just too much.

  Stacy called back within the hour and informed me that Dr. Bushnell was traveling until the end of January, so we scheduled that fateful appointment for February on Leta’s birthday. She kindly called in a prescription for enough pills to get me through the month, and then ended with “He really, really wants to see you.”

  And see me he did. Thank God he saw me.

  TWELVE

  DEAR FAMILY AND FRIENDS

  AFTER I WOKE UP from being dead for the fourth time, berated that innocent nurse for my dry eyes, and argued for more than ten minutes about why it was 1979, my parents drove me home. We stopped at the Asian market two blocks away to pick up some poop tea. I still hadn’t gone to the restroom. In addition to my dry eyes, I was starting to have stomach cramps. My grandmother, Geneva Boone—we called her Granny Boone—had lived with my mother and my stepfather in the ten years leading up to her death, and she drank poop tea every single night of those ten years. She’d grown up during the Depression and kept empty butter and sour cream containers underneath her bed. She washed out ziplock bags and reused them dozens of times. I knew this was a common habit of people who had endured the poverty of those years, but it had never dawned on me that perhaps they endured crippling constipation from having little to no nutritious food.

  The treatment had gone so late that we didn’t pull into my driveway until after 5:00 p.m., but my mother said that this would be perfect timing. I’d drink the tea with some food like Granny did every night and by the following morning everything would be working again. She assured me of this—everything would be working again—and as she boiled some water on the stove she turned to me and said, “Let it steep for about an hour even though it says only two minutes on the box. The box doesn’t know what it’s talking about. I’m going to go start a load of laundry.”

  She and my stepfather still helped out twice a week like Mel had asked them to do. The kids were finishing up homework with the babysitter, so I had about fifteen minutes to go to my room and be alone. That’s all I wanted at that moment. Something about the emptiness of my stomach, the simultaneous
hunger and lack of hunger, made me want to curl up and hide my head under a pillow, even if it was for just fifteen minutes. I didn’t want to eat anything. I just wanted to be with myself in the quiet, comforting darkness of my bedroom.

  In the eighteen months that I’d burrowed into this hole, I hadn’t ever come close to hurting myself. I hadn’t ever tried to take my own life. There, I finally said the words out loud. Take my own life. Suicide. I had not thought about ways that I would do it if the pain ever became too unbearable. I had during previous depressive episodes thought about the means and the tools I’d use. Even though these eighteen months had been the worst of my life, I knew that my children needed me despite the overwhelming and nauseating belief that they would be better off without me. My responsibility to them, especially given how close we had grown as a family unit of three, barricaded my brain from ever wandering into thoughts of pills or razors or Google searches about how to buy a gun in Utah. And I was very well aware of this roadblock. I knew that I would not ever attempt to take my life, although I wanted nothing more than to be dead. The irony was not lost on me. And because I knew, I never once thought to write a note. A note. “Hey family, your mother/daughter/sister is dead, but here’s this piece of paper to remember her by! It’s got some words on it. Be nice to each other as you fight over all her clothes.”

  As I lay in my bed with my head buried under my pillow, I thought about this idea of a note. I had not ever read a suicide note, maybe because I did not want to be confronted with the reflection of myself in the words of someone who’d ended their own life. And not because I am judgmental about that—how could I be? I know the pain; I understand the pain. I had lived the pain every second of every hour of every day for over eighteen months. That is why I cannot and will not ever accuse someone who has killed themselves of being selfish. Is it tragic? Absolutely. It is tragic that the human brain can convince someone to believe that the world would be a better and brighter place without their soul inside it. That is the lie of a suicidal ideation: that our beautiful bodies and minds and gifts to this world are instead a scourge upon it. How were we ever so stupid to believe that we had the right to take up space?