by Mark Lukach
Our teacher often stopped in the middle of an exercise to watch us, point, and laugh. I didn’t mind her laughing at me, because I was laughing at myself, too, a surfer from the neighborhood at a gym class where he clearly didn’t belong. Our teacher coughed out commands that we couldn’t understand and we had to do our best to pantomime along with her. She sometimes wore a T-shirt that proclaimed, “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.” Everyone in the class adored her, especially me.
The aerobics class was perfect. I smiled throughout and felt the glow of endorphins as I sweated into the bright red carpet below.
But as much as I loved it, I couldn’t watch Giulia. In aerobics class, her slowness was most on display, as if she had to move underwater while the rest of us got to dance free and light like children reveling in a sprinkler on a hot summer day.
At night, I started a mantra that we said to each other before falling asleep.
I’m getting better.
You’re getting better.
We’re getting better.
I realized, of course, that Giulia might not get better. She could get worse, or plateau, and forever be a shadow of herself, trapped in a medicated fog. But I refused those options.
Along with the aerobics, I kept up my night running. Sometimes I went during the evening, while Giulia prepared dinner. During one especially glorious sunset, I pounded through the sand and noticed that someone had written a message: When it is done we will walk where the road meets the sun. I liked it. The promise of walking where the road meets the sun felt like an offering of redemption and grace. I wanted to be there.
As I kept running, I forced myself to imagine Giulia’s suicide. I had been in therapy since the first week of Giulia’s hospitalization, and my therapist had long encouraged me to address the very real possibility of it. Not as a nightmare or a hallucination, but as a possible outcome. Giulia might still do it.
My feet were light on the sand, the air crisp and cool, and I saw it. Park the Vespa, bring the key—who are we kidding, Giulia would never leave the key and risk the Vespa getting stolen—walk shoulder to shoulder with the tourists along the sidewalk. No note, because she had tried and failed to write a note before. Stop to take a photo of a couple who ask for it. Get out far enough to the middle of the bridge so it was high enough to ensure fatality. Wait for a lull in nearby pedestrians and then up and over the railing, clumsily. Both feet on the last remaining beam, hands holding on to the railing behind. Pause long enough to look down and embrace the finality, but not long enough to have someone run up and stop her. And then off. Out. Free.
The impact is instantly fatal for almost all who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge—only a few have survived, most famously a teen who realized midfall that he didn’t want to die and tried his best to brace his fall with the angle at which he hit the water. He broke a lot of bones but did not die. Many bodies are recovered, but not all. After impact, Giulia’s life and breath would be ripped out of her by the coldness of the San Francisco Bay. Immediate, painless death.
But Giulia would not be done. Not quite. She would still be in my life, in both her presence and her absence. Her clothes, her possessions, her hair in the drain of the shower, even her smell on the blanket she wrapped herself in every night.
Her absence would be everywhere. I would miss her in everything. I would tell people about her and keep her alive in my stories.
She would not be done.
Her body, whether discovered or not, would join the land and the water and return to the elements, from dust you are and to dust you will return. Nothing dissolves into nothing.
We are never done, I realized as I ran through my grief, the grief for an imagined suicide that I was doing everything I could to prevent but had to accept regardless. When it is done we will walk where the road meets the sun. It was always done, and never done. We were already in the sun.
I stopped running a few blocks from my home as part of my usual cooldown. I usually dreaded these last few blocks, the threshold across which my adrenaline and endorphins wore off and the reality of caregiving for a suicidal wife returned. But tonight, I was completely at peace as I walked the last few blocks home and then up the stairs to my front door. I slept deeply that night and woke up the next morning at ease. I was neither anxious about the future nor resigned to Giulia’s demise. I was alive in the present, and Giulia was alive in the present, which was all I could ask for.
Over spring break, we took an impromptu visit to Tokyo, to see my parents. My siblings and I had grown up in Tokyo, the blond gaijin who were cast to be in TV commercials and on soap operas. We had an amazing childhood in Tokyo, with its clean and safe subway system that allowed us to be independent years before American kids are able to get themselves around. As long as I had known Giulia, I had told her stories about our lives in Japan, and this was going to be her first time there.
My parents were thrilled to host us. The rest of my siblings and their spouses had been in Japan for Christmas while we stayed in New York, and my mom mostly repeated their itinerary with us.
We took the train out to Kamakura, a charming beach town famous for the Daibutsu, a gigantic statue of the Buddha. Kamakura had been the favorite destination of my siblings, and my parents were excited that Giulia and I were going to see it.
We left midmorning and arrived at Kamakura in time for lunch; we ate curry rice that warmed my belly and made me feel ten years old again. We found our way through the pleasant Zen gardens under a clear blue sky, a perfect chill in the air. We came across a large prayer wall, which held up dozens of prayer offerings written on wooden cards. Giulia stopped, pointed, and smiled.
Hanging in the middle was a prayer card that my family had written three months prior. The English writing stared out at us among the Japanese characters.
12–31–09
For our sister Giulia,
That she may recover with good health—mind, body, and spirit.
Lukach Family
Giulia beamed and posed for pictures, proudly holding up her prayer card, and I saw that prayers never end, either.
We continued along to a cave where pilgrims had been coming for centuries. You could see the markings of countless visitors in the walls and in the floors. Discovering the prayer card, in this sacred space, was too much for me. I grabbed Giulia and held her for a long, long time. The world spun around us, just like how our wedding guests had formed a circle and danced around us on that blissful night. I felt the embrace of the many people who had been in the cave before us, and the many who would come after us, and all the strangers we had never met, as if they were lifting us up and holding us on high so that we could gaze out over the world and stand together and realize that we were here now, in the gift of this present moment, and yes, life was hard at times, but doesn’t it feel good to be alive?
Back in San Francisco, we returned to our routines. I worked. Giulia went to IOP, and took care of the dog, and attended art classes in Golden Gate Park. After work one afternoon, I scooped up Giulia and Goose and we drove down the coast to Montara, our favorite beach, for a hike.
We took a new route up a steep incline of Montara Mountain to a spectacular vista over the ocean. The trail up was slippery with loose gravel, and Giulia was tentative while getting to the summit of our little peak. We sat on the top, wind in our hair, Goose resting in my lap.
I foolishly hadn’t factored her stiffness and sluggishness into our plans, and the walk down felt even more steep and dangerous than it had on the way up. Giulia nervously shuffled along the path, her feet occasionally slipping out beneath her.
“Are you okay, honey?” I called back up the trail to her.
“I’m okay. Scared, though.”
“What are you scared of?”
“I’m scared that I might fall.”
My mind flashed to a conversation I had recently had with Sienna, a friend of ours who had battled her own demons throughout her teens and twenties. Sienna used to sneak out of her ho
use in the middle of the night when she lived in Santa Cruz and go swimming naked in the ocean, because she wanted to drown herself. But as the cold of the ocean overtook her, and the fear of sharks crept into her mind, her survival instinct always kicked in, and she sprinted back to the beach and climbed back into bed, wondering why she wanted to kill herself in the first place.
This might be Giulia’s chance to scare herself back into living.
“Explain this to me, Giulia. You’re scared you’re going to fall, right?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re scared because you might get hurt, or even worse, you could slide down and even go over a cliff and die. And you’re scared of that.”
“I guess so,” she said, only barely convinced.
“Don’t you see what that means?”
Giulia didn’t respond.
“Giulia, you want to live! Think about it. You’re scared to fall because you’re scared to die. That means you don’t want to die. You want to live!”
She flashed an embarrassed, sheepish smile.
“I guess so,” she admitted.
“Come on, no ‘I guess so.’ You know so. You want to live. Look at this place. We are on top of the world, and there is so much to live for, and you want to live for it!” I was bellowing, my voice echoing down to the beach below.
Her foot slipped, and her arms shot out to balance herself.
“Look! Scared! Scared to fall! My wife wants to live!”
She giggled at my buffoonery, my teasing of her suicidal feelings. We had cried about them for so long. It felt good to laugh at them.
“Giulia, this is your chance. Tell the world that you’re alive. Celebrate in it. Be alive, and feel it.”
“I’m alive,” Giulia softly muttered.
“Bullshit! Scream it! This is your moment, Giulia. You want to live! Scream it to the world . . . you’re alive! Fuck the illness. Fuck suicide. Fuck psychosis. Fuck the pills. You, Giulia, are alive. You are making it, one day at a time, one step at a time, you are making it.”
I hadn’t experienced the depths of depression on my own to understand that each breath Giulia took was a cry out for life. She didn’t need to say anything to convince herself that she was fighting. But selfishly, I needed her words, as a validation that all the love and time I was pouring into her was making a difference. Still too young, inexperienced, and solipsistic, I hadn’t realized that to give true love, you can’t expect anything in return. I had been giving so much since the onset of her psychosis and feared that we might never return to a two-way affair of reciprocal care. What if she never got better? I wasn’t ready for that. I needed to hear that she wanted to live for herself as much as for me.
“I’m alive,” she called out with a little more vigor, but she could see in my face that I needed to hear it even louder.
She stopped and planted her feet firmly into the ground. She mustered all of her sadness and hatred for herself and her illness and focused it in her fists and her gut. She held her head high and screamed.
“I’m aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!”
Her eyes were wide and lucid, her fists balled up, her whole being a rejection of death as she called into the beautiful world.
“I’m aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!” she shouted again, even louder.
“I’m aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!” The third and final call was the longest.
We stood in silence and watched the glittering ocean, the swooping birds, the waving grass. She looked at me with tremendous pride and satisfaction.
“I’m alive, Mark. I’m alive.”
five
April 2010
“Mark, if I kill myself, will you promise me that you will find a new wife so that you can still be happy?”
I sighed and leaned back into the couch next to Giulia, but I didn’t respond. I didn’t have an answer for her. I muted the television that we had been watching, and the flickering glow of the screen remained in our otherwise darkened living room.
I looked at her, into her anguished brown eyes, and held her hand, and said nothing.
I was tired from work, tired from worry, tired from spending so much time trying to convince Giulia why it was worth staying alive, tired from the frequent requests for updates from her parents, and my parents, and her doctors, so tired that I was getting angry at always feeling fatigued. I couldn’t handle another conversation about suicide. There had been so many of them over the eight months since she had been hospitalized, and I didn’t have anything left to get me through another agonizing night of convincing her why it was worth staying alive. My reserves of patience and compassion were grossly overtaxed, and all that was left in their absence was resentment.
With nothing to say, I sat in silence. Slowly, Giulia began to say more. “I can’t ever come back from what I went through in the psych ward,” she said nervously, a mantra I had heard hundreds of times and rebutted a hundred times. But this time I didn’t say anything. I merely listened. I hated what I heard, but I also knew that at this moment she was safe, and we were together.
In the gaps between Giulia’s sentences, I realized how rarely I let Giulia speak about what she was feeling. I treated her depression like a fire, and I was the extinguisher. I had to act quickly every time the feelings surfaced, lest the warning sparks grow into a destructive inferno. This was especially true when we were around others. I didn’t want to put anyone through the awkwardness of her unexpected suicidal outbursts, so when we were with friends, which was rare, I mostly spoke on her behalf.
My first instinct when she was psychotic was to love her psychosis away. I took a similar strategy toward her depression. For the past eight months, I had tried to talk her out of her suicidality. Exhaustion finally beat me down into shutting up and listening to her.
“I hate myself so much, and I want to die,” she said after a silence.
I said nothing. Her despair hung heavily in the room.
“God abandoned me,” she said.
Again, I said nothing.
“I wish I had never been born,” she said.
More silence.
And then she left me stunned.
“Thank you for listening to me,” she said, grabbing my hands, pulling them up to her lips to kiss. “It’s so nice to talk to you.”
I realized then why people call suicide hotlines. The person on the other end of the line wasn’t a therapist, wasn’t going to prescribe medicine, wasn’t going to try to convince the caller to feel differently, wasn’t going to love the caller the way a family member would. The person on the other end of the line was going to listen without judgment or fear, an invaluable gift that the suicidal rarely receive.
She surprised me further by leaning in to kiss my lips. We still kissed on occasion, but only when I kissed her. This was the first time that she had kissed me since the hospital.
“Thank you, Mark,” she said again. “I feel a lot better.” She stood up from the couch. “Come on,” she said, extending her hand. “Let’s go make some dinner.”
I squirmed in the high-backed felt chair. Giulia was in the chair next to me. IOP had finished for the day, and I had been called in for a family meeting. We sat in a big room with a few dozen chairs, a room where Giulia came three times a week for her group therapy. It was like all of the other rooms of all the other hospitals and outpatient programs: lifeless, white walls, no personality, no hope. Giulia’s mental health team walked into the room.
Her doctor jumped right to the point. “We’re not satisfied with the progression of Giulia’s depression,” he said. “She has been here for eight months. Most patients are in IOP for only a few weeks.”
“What, are you saying this is her fault or something?” I asked defensively. My patience for following doctor’s orders was also wearing thin. I had done everything they had said, yet we were still here.
“No, no, no, not at all,” the doctor said. “This is not about fault. It’s just that the path
we’ve taken, to try different medications, doesn’t seem to be working.”
“Well, what else is there?” Giulia asked. “Can I stop the medication entirely?”
“No,” the doctor said. “This isn’t about stopping the medication, either.” He was now the one squirming, fidgeting with the pamphlet that I noticed was in his hands.
“Well, what is it?” I said.
“We would like you to consider ECT.” The doctor extended the pamphlet for Giulia to take.
“What the hell is ECT?” I asked.
No one answered. I scooted closer to Giulia and looked down at the pamphlet. Electroconvulsive therapy, it blared across the top in bright blue letters.
“Electroconvulsive therapy?” I said, practically shouting. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
I had horrifying visions of electrical nodes glued to Giulia’s skull, the flip of a switch, her body convulsing against leather straps.
“It’s not what you think it is,” the doctor said, standing up to demonstrate authority. “A lot has changed since One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Patients barely even feel it. They say that their memory is a bit foggy for a few days, but that’s it. It’s a painless procedure, and it works like hitting the reset button.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Giulia said cautiously. “A reset button sounds pretty good to me.”
I skimmed through the pamphlet. The procedure essentially induced a seizure, and while the science wasn’t clear why it worked, it had a very high success rate for patients who battled chronic depression.
“Look, it’s a big thing to consider,” the doctor said. “We don’t need to make a decision now. I just wanted to put the idea out there. But I do want to make an immediate change. I think it’s time to take Giulia off Risperdal.”