November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  In the following days Merryl began to attend to the loose ends Carl’s death had unwound. While her brother searched parking lots across Boston for the Chevy Citation that Carl and Merryl had bought two years earlier, Merryl called the police in New York City, where Carl’s belongings had been stored in a vault. To claim them she had to go over a list of what he had had with him when he died: car keys, watch, wallet, glasses, wedding ring. Merryl called her friends, many of whom she hadn’t spoken to in months, preoccupied with Carl’s depression. “Hi! Where ya been?” they’d exclaim. “You don’t understand,” Merryl would say. “Carl committed suicide.” There was never a question in Merryl’s mind whether to tell people Carl’s death was a suicide. “Nobody had ever been ashamed of Carl when he was alive, and there was nothing to be ashamed of when he was dead,” she says. “It was just sad and tragic.” At one point her brother said he was going to tell his tenants Carl died of a heart attack. “If you want to do that, okay,” Merryl said, “but if you’re doing it to protect me, forget it.”

  By Saturday, Merryl and her parents were alone. It was Carl and Merryl’s sixth wedding anniversary. In the afternoon her father drove her to the cemetery. For over an hour while Mr. Maleska sat in the car, parked a little ways off, watching with tears in his eyes, Merryl lay on Carl’s flower-strewn grave, weeping into the newly turned-up earth.

  Sunday evening Merryl read from a book of poetry by Emily Dickinson. Her parents were pleased. They thought maybe she was getting better.

  Monday, Merryl woke up and remembered: Carl was gone, and her life would never be the same. “I felt as if I had been pulled off the track,” she says. “It was the busiest time of year at work, and everything was on a schedule. That very morning I was supposed to send certain books I’d edited to the typesetter. I thought of my colleagues at the office working so hard, and here I was lying in bed. The office seemed a million miles away. It seemed part of another life. Two weeks before, my work had consumed me, and now I didn’t care if those books ever saw the light of day. And it hit me that this was the way it would be. I would never be interested in work again. I would never be interested in anything again. Nothing mattered and nothing ever would. I would never get out of this bed.”

  The bed she lay in was a rollaway sofa in her father’s study. Designed for privacy, the study was an ideal haven for grieving. Merryl would spend most of the next four months in this room, which she had always loved but which she now came to think of as her “torture chamber.” She would become intimate with its every detail, staring at her father’s books on the shelves until she had memorized a dozen titles without realizing it. Most of her time was spent lying in bed, crying. She cried so much that her mother quickly learned Kleenex wouldn’t suffice. It just wasn’t strong enough. Instead, Mrs. Maleska made sure a fresh roll of paper towels lay on the floor near Merryl’s bed. When Merryl wasn’t crying, she screamed, sometimes for as long as an hour, until she was sure her head would burst. At first, when Merryl’s parents heard her screams, they came running. Sometimes her mother brought Merryl a cup of tea to soothe her ragged throat. But it soon became clear that the screams were a necessary part of Merryl’s life, and with the television on and the door shut—which Merryl insisted on—her parents could sit in the living room on the far side of the house and hear only muffled sounds. “They knew I was screaming, and I knew that they knew,” says Merryl. “And I knew it hurt them. But I didn’t want them sitting in the next room, waiting for me to stop.”

  For months Merryl kept the blinds drawn in her room. She couldn’t stand seeing the sun. And if she opened the blinds, she would see the gazebo where she and Carl had exchanged their wedding vows six years before and the water where they had sailed and swum so often. At night, fearing the dark, Merryl slept with the light on. Soon, day seemed like night and night like day. In her dim cocoon, time became one vast, formless mass to Merryl, unchanging save one thing: night or day, the digital clock on the corner of the bookshelf across the room seemed to print its luminous numbers in her head.

  Merryl left the house only for frequent visits to Carl’s grave, driven by her father. Sometimes she sat at the kitchen table while her parents had dinner. Merryl rarely ate, although her mother kept fixing her meals, just in case. Afterward she and her mother lingered at the kitchen table for hours, talking about Carl. Merryl went over every detail of that last week; everything she had done seemed to Merryl to be a reason why Carl had killed himself. Every second of that week held a missed opportunity, a moment she could have stepped in and done something to keep him alive. Why hadn’t she called fifteen minutes earlier that last day? If she had stayed home from work that day, would Carl be alive now? Why hadn’t she stayed home all week? Why hadn’t she grabbed the phone when Carl’s therapist called? Why hadn’t she made him understand how desperate Carl was? Why hadn’t she understood when Carl had talked about suicide? How could she have been so blind? Why hadn’t she hospitalized Carl? Why had she argued with him? Why hadn’t she been more supportive? Why hadn’t she loved him more?

  Her mother listened, patiently pointing out the many ways Merryl had supported Carl. Mrs. Maleska was a quiet, thoughtful woman—Merryl had always joked that she had married someone like her mother. The Maleskas had loved Carl like a son and had been shattered by his suicide. Mrs. Maleska did not know whether her cancer would let her live five months or five years, but she listened to her daughter, comforting, questioning, persistently offering evidence of Merryl’s love for Carl. They would dissect a single moment for hours before Merryl was convinced she had acted responsibly, but then Merryl would dredge up some fresh evidence and they would go over it again, then settle it again—and then reexamine it from yet another angle. Mother and daughter sat at the kitchen table into the night, Merryl’s fingers tying and untying the frayed strands on the belt of her pink chenille bathrobe.

  Merryl’s father often listened from the next room and occasionally joined them. He said little, though what he said was always helpful. But he didn’t understand why Merryl needed to talk it through so many times. Eighteen months later when his wife died, he told Merryl that now he understood why she had been unable to let her grief rest.

  Every night after talking with her parents, Merryl swallowed a capsule of Xanax, a mild tranquilizer, to help her sleep. But every night at four she would wake up and find herself thinking about Carl. She tried to imagine what he must have felt like in those last days, starting with the six hours between the time she had said “Congratulations” to him on the phone and the time the landlord had seen him drive away. When had he made his decision? When had he gotten up from his desk? Her imagination traced him from their house in Brookline to the Greyhound station, followed him on the bus to New York, and watched him walking the streets looking for a hotel with exposed pipes. And she pictured that final, sad, unfamiliar room. What had he been thinking of? What had he looked like when he was hanging? Merryl replayed that journey hundreds of times and found hundreds of ways to change the ending: she got home before Carl left and was able to soothe him; she raced to the Greyhound station and intercepted him; she ran down Broadway, saw his silhouette in the hotel window, and rushed inside to cut the rope just in time. And for an hour in the middle of the night Carl was alive again, and everything was all right. But by dawn the real story came back to her, and it always had the same ending—Carl hanging from a pipe in New York and Merryl in bed on Cape Cod, alone.

  Gradually, Merryl’s thoughts moved back in time from that final week, poring over her relationship with Carl like a piece of fine cloth, holding it up to the light and looking for frayed seams and holes in the fabric. She examined every job interview Carl had had; if only he had gotten this one; why hadn’t he tried for that one? Had she pushed him too hard? Had she been too soft? Why had they moved to Boston? Why hadn’t they stayed in Chicago? Every second of their shared life was suddenly reflected through the fact of Carl’s suicide. Merryl could spend an entire day in bed mulling over somethin
g she had said or done two, four, six years ago, a remark or a touch she had all but forgotten but now seemed critical: the time she’d yelled at him one Thanksgiving morning when he had brought home the wrong bread crumbs; the time she’d blamed him for having their apartment exterminated while the kitchenware was uncovered. Maybe if she had been gentler or kinder to him at that distant moment, he would still be alive. “I haunted myself with how I had not been a good enough wife for six years,” she said. “I haunted myself with the feeling that maybe at bottom I just wasn’t right for him, that maybe I had just reinforced the failure in him.” Eventually, she wondered whether anything in their relationship had been real and good and true.

  For every reason Merryl found to hate herself, for every clue she uncovered to reinforce her guilt over Carl’s death, her parents, Carl’s parents, her friends, and her therapist constantly reassured her that it wasn’t her fault, that she had done everything possible. The head of Merryl’s bed was lined with cards that friends and relatives had sent, which she read and reread as evidence that she wasn’t all bad. She also kept the cards she had given Carl by her bed. “I couldn’t bear reading the cards he’d written me that told me how much he loved me,” she says. “They made me feel guilty that maybe I hadn’t done enough, that I didn’t love him enough back. So I would read the cards I’d given him that said how much I loved him, and that would comfort me.” She kept only one card from Carl at her fingertips, the one he had written on her birthday; she read it over and over to herself, often on her daily trips to his grave. Carl had left no suicide note, and Merryl felt that this card was a kind of good-bye. But she still found reasons to disbelieve its grateful message. And even if she managed to let herself off the hook for a second, it didn’t matter—Carl was still dead.

  Though Merryl raked herself over the coals in her conscious life, her unconscious was less ruthless. She never had nightmares about Carl though she dreamed of him often. In her dreams he was gentle and comforting. “He was always telling me in a loving sort of way, ‘I had to do it, it was the only way.’” One night Merryl dreamed that because suicide survivors go through such torment, their loved ones were permitted to come back to life for two months each year, and the survivor could pick the dates. Merryl chose to have Carl returned to her every weekend so the joy of his presence would be spread out.

  But each morning returned her to square one. “Mornings were the worst,” says Merryl. “When I woke up, it would all come right back. And I would go into thought whirls about why and how and who he was and what I’d done. Each morning I was brought up against the fact that nothing would change.” At ten or eleven Merryl’s mother would bring her coffee, and they would start going over it again. “I wanted to talk endlessly about Carl, about what had happened, about the events, about why, why, why,” says Merryl. “If I wasn’t doing it out loud, I was doing it in my head. I was never not doing it. I thought if I just talked enough, I’d find the reason and get rid of the pain.” About three weeks after the funeral Merryl decided the answer was to check into a hospital. “All I thought was that I have to keep talking this through, and at the hospital I’d get round-the-clock therapy. I had this dream that the hospital would be my salvation—I’d check in, do intensive therapy for six months, and it would be over.”

  On a hot, sticky Fourth of July weekend Merryl and her mother drove to Boston to visit several hospitals her therapist had recommended. It was the first time Merryl had ventured farther than Carl’s grave. Merryl had never been inside a psychiatric hospital, and she was shaken. “All I saw were men in pajamas, vacant-looking people watching TV in the afternoon.” Her guide at the first hospital, a pleasant young man, told her she would spend her first month on a locked ward like this one. When Merryl asked about therapy, he told her that each patient received three hours a week. The rest of the time constituted “milieu therapy”; merely mixing with these people was considered therapeutic. And there was basket weaving. Merryl was not too numb to be appalled.

  At the next hospital the admissions officer advised against hospitalization, telling Merryl she was grieving, which is not necessarily depression, though they may feel the same. “If you check in,” he said, “they’ll treat you like a patient and you may start feeling like a patient, and then you may become a patient.” He talked about grief cycles, anniversary reactions, and other things Merryl had never heard of. “I know it will be tough,” she told him, “but I just want to do it and get it over with.”

  At the third hospital Merryl fell apart. “The interviewer was younger than I was, and she was sunburned and smiling and had clearly come back from a happy holiday weekend,” recalls Merryl. “She kept asking questions—‘Now, how did he die?’ ‘What did you do after you got the news?’—as if she were reading from a checklist. I kept thinking, ‘This is a nightmare. Why should this girl be doing it? Carl should be having this kind of job.’ And I couldn’t speak a word.” Finally, unable to make herself talk, Merryl called her therapist, who calmed her down enough to enable her to get back to Cape Cod to her own bed where she could scream as much as she wanted.

  Merryl thought constantly about killing herself or, more accurately, about wanting to die. She had always loved the ocean, but now she thought of it only as a place to drown herself. She even picked out a particular rock, near the marsh behind the house, that she could tie around her neck so she would sink to the bottom. In bed Merryl held a pillow over her face until she felt light-headed, trying to feel the way Carl must have felt when he was hanging. But she always came up, gasping for air. She took fistfuls of the Percodan pills prescribed for her mother’s cancer and spread them on her pillow. “I sort of taunted myself. I thought, ‘What would it take to make me take them?’ I would try to make myself feel as desperate as he was. I put them near my mouth, but I never swallowed any. I wanted to be dead, but I couldn’t kill myself.”

  One month after Carl’s death Merryl returned to work at Houghton Mifflin, two half-days a week. She was put on “short-term disability,” a modified work schedule for employees who have had a serious accident or illness. Merryl didn’t do much more than stare at the galleys that awaited editing on her desk. “I just sort of punched things through,” she says. “I couldn’t concentrate for more than fifteen minutes at a time without a break or a breakdown.” Almost anything set her off: a conversation across the hall about a movie she and Carl had planned to see; a casual reference to self-confidence or assertiveness; a passage in a book she was editing that mentioned children; a colleague’s conversations with an author named Carl; the sight of the woman who had baked the baby blocks cake. Once, her supervisor, referring to an author from Idaho, joked, “God, the places good people have to wind up these days.” Merryl burst into tears. Idaho had been on the list of states she had been unwilling to move to.

  Merryl spent much of the time crying at her desk. She avoided people’s eyes as she shuffled down the halls so she wouldn’t have to say hello. She walked with tiny steps, huddled over. At one point she was mistaken for a fifty-year-old. She lost twenty-five pounds in the first two months after Carl’s death, and in her stomach she felt a constant ache. “A knot,” she says. “A churning in my stomach and lungs, the way you feel before an important interview or exam. Except it didn’t go away. Sometimes I would get a real pain in my heart as if all the heart muscles were clenched very tightly. I always felt I was building up to scream, cry, or gag. A wall of nausea separated me from the people around me. I could see people move and smile, but they were in another world. If I had a conversation with someone, I could see he or she was making normal human gestures, but when I tried to react, I felt muffled. I was standing there talking but with the knowledge that something was wrong, all wrong.”

  Two months after Carl’s death, Merryl made a list of what she believed were her options. She carried it with her wherever she went. The list read:

  suicide

  a hospital

  just refusing to move from bed—having them take me aw
ay

  going to the apt, lying on mattress, taking enough pills to be unconscious, away from the world indefinitely

  quitting job, moving to another city

  getting a different kind of job

  going on in these endless cycles of working/not working, staying in the city/staying at my parents’ home—horrible, horrible

  IV

  THE O’ER-FRAUGHT HEART

  ALTHOUGH SHE DID NOT REALIZE IT, Merryl Maleska’s eating and sleeping difficulties, her screaming, her stomach pains, her depression, even her suicidal thoughts, were all normal responses to an abnormal situation. Behavior that has brought many mourners to psychiatrists with the fear that they are “going crazy” is considered within the standard range of grief reactions: “seeing” the dead person, “hearing” his key in the lock, calling out his name, dialing his office number and expecting him to answer. “Although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment,” wrote Freud. “We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful.” To Freud, grief’s purpose was clear: “Mourning has a quite specific physical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivors’ memories and hopes from the dead.”

  Described like this, it sounds as clean and quick as a tonsillectomy, but in fact mourning has proved to be one of life’s most painful, lengthy, and complex procedures. A study by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found that Americans who lose a family member experience significant disturbance in their way of life for at least one year and as many as three. Of widows and widowers, up to 20 percent remain clinically depressed a year after the death of their spouse. The death of a family member may increase a survivor’s smoking, drinking, and drug use as well as the chance of serious physical and mental illness. Men who have lost a spouse or a parent are more likely to die from accidents, heart disease, some infectious illnesses, and suicide. For women, who are more apt to seek support, the loss of a loved one is less likely to increase mortality, though there is evidence that death rates from cirrhosis of the liver and from suicide may rise.