I drove myself to the hospital when everything was calm. It was late afternoon and the air was filled with an orange cast. I’d see the occasional specks of dust in the sunbeams dropping down between the buildings. The car freshener tree would tilt in a slow, even arc with each turn I made. It was exceptionally beautiful when I turned more than ninety degrees into rotary-style intersections. The plastic packaging crinkled just so, making a sweet harmony to the melody of the keys tapping my thigh.
It was as if the universe was putting on a play for me, matching the calmness of the chaos in my chest.
Before I left my house, I had showered and removed all my jewelry. I packed a bag with a few days’ worth of clothing, a phone charger, and the bottles of medication I had been taking. I was both aware and unaware of what I was doing and why. That calmness had settled deep into my bones. It seemed that it was this or death and so I had chosen this, a voluntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital.
It would not be my first time in such a place. I’m a long-time consumer of mental health services, from locked units, to day programs, and residentials. But I thought that was behind me. I had lived my entire adult life—18 years, without gracing the doorstep of any place like those. But, in my limited clarity of mind, I can see that there were cracks all along. Anger, anxiety, grief, deep depression, and ecstatic happiness, seemingly all beyond the range of normalcy, were constant companions. I—and those around me—had just adapted to them.
But this was different. There was no raging current, no nonstop flow of tears. Just a silent acceptance of the inevitability: this or death. I was perfectly happy to accept either. It had started as it often did, with a desire to, essentially, go to sleep. The trappings of that kind of death, such as a garden hose and a running car, were scary to me, but acceptable to achieve the goal. I did not want to experience pain, just ending.
Then my thoughts drifted to assisted suicide. A nice draft of lethal medications in an apartment in Switzerland. That was certainly the way to go. But before long, I started fantasizing about hanging. About experiencing pain. I thought about the extension cord behind the television. I thought about how easy it would be to set it up over the front door and just take that step off the stairs. I could see my vision tunneling as my lungs struggled to pull oxygen through my narrowed throat. I wanted that pain.
I don’t know what it is in my makeup that brings me to this moment.
Even now, I don’t know how I managed to choose the hospital over the cord. I had vague concern for my family and the people who would have to find me and deal with my corpse. But those thoughts were like the sunbeams between the buildings, beautiful, but brief and interrupted by dust.
I know now that I have triggers that cause these feelings and thoughts: illness and death in my circle, specifically, seem to be big contributors. I wish I could say that I write this from a place of healing and health, but I still feel that eerie calmness in my chest, ready to cover everything in a thick blanket of indifference.
I’ve wanted to write about this for a long time, but the words never seemed right. I think that words will never be right, but as the year draws to a close, the time to share is now. I thought I would be happy to see 2019 pass. I figured I’d make a few wisecracks about how it was the worst year ever and so on. It seems that most people dump on the year about to finish. Maybe there is catharsis in this. But all I can think about is how I exist now. I will (probably?) exist in 2020. But I’ll have left a good friend behind. I get to exist, but he doesn’t. 2019 is the last year he’ll ever know.
Suicide rates have increased significantly in the U.S. over the past several years. I don’t know what these people were experiencing, if that calmness took them the way it takes me. But I do know that I get to exist, and they don’t. Maybe I have some kind of weird survivor’s guilt. I don’t want to start a new year because it means leaving so much—and so many—behind. I wish I had a nice, positive way to wrap this up. To say that there is hope and help, but I really do not have the key. I don’t know why I get to continue while other, arguably better, people do not.
But maybe reading this will provide some insight, at least to the people I know and love who have seen or heard only bits of what happened last summer. I have no choice but to welcome 2020 and hope I remain able to hold that calmness at bay.
I can say that I used the chat and text functions of the suicide hotline several times over the last year. It worked as well as it can in that it stopped me from following through with my plans in the moment. I can’t speak to the telephone option. It took a long time for me to reach someone through the online chat, but the text function was much faster. The responses are canned, but maybe it can provide just enough distraction to get through a few minutes. So, here is that information: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/