It doesn’t take much to end up back at that place, emotionally. I don’t think I really understood that until last night. It doesn’t have to be your situation. It doesn’t have to be connected to you at all. All you have to do is hear the story and voila - you’re back in that horrible, terrible place you never wanted to see or examine again, if you could help it.
A life unexamined may be a bad thing, but a suicide attempt unexamined might not be so bad. So long as it’s not your attempted suicide.
The story I heard last night was relayed by someone who hadn’t attempted. We are the people on the outside, the ones that the attempt was performed against, if that’s a concept that has legs.
The ones who went through 24 hours of sheer and unadulterated hell, calling borders, calling credit card companies, yelling at officers, crying in hot and leaky tears that never quite stopped, all the while still trying to smile at a confused toddler. Sitting with a roomful of people who could do nothing other than wait and try to invent new and wild CSI style methods of triangulating and tracking a missing person. Ceaselessly calling a cell phone that never did get answered, until some random stranger with a badge picked it up with the question, “Are you the ex?”
Or, in her case, the one who sat beside the bathtub, holding a head and hoping that the person housed in the body was still going to be there when the paramedics arrived. Someone who ended up responsible for someone else’s life, in the middle of the night, on a hunch. A responsibility that should never be put on someone else.
I know I’ve never talked about what happened with my ex in any detail. Even with friends and family, I’ve never really talked about that time in any detail. My mother, bless her soul, was there. She saw what it was. She doesn’t need to ask. My girlfriend with the fuzzy halo of hair happened to stop beside us on our way to the airport once we knew he was okay and saw the immediate after-effects. As she has said, more than once since that point, “I never want to see that look on your face again.”
The instant of horror when you realize that this isn’t some dramatic after-school special, or a lame made-for-TV-movie. When you get a call and someone tells you that there’s been a suicide note. When you understand that this is not a drill. That someone has indeed, taken a leap towards death. The surge of adrenaline, the receding of blood from your extremities, the pounding of your heart that’s all you can hear. Running down to the basement, pounding on your mother’s door to say, in numb tones “there’s a suicide note.”
Talking to your mother-in-law on one phone and the police on the other - simultaneously. Avoiding the phone as other calls pour in, telling you what you already know - that there’s been a note.
The pounding of footsteps when you walk in from outside, giving you an almost relief, before you realize that it’s just someone else who’s realized that there is a crisis. Who, when you hug them, matches your heartbeat in that pounding rhythm of fear.
Facing other family members as they travel in to hold vigil with you. Feeling responsible, feeling guilty, feeling broken. But unable to put the burden down for even a second. Having that thread of fear and dread running through you. Not sleeping. Not eating. Not functioning, except for those numb, repeated calls to a cell phone that never gets answered. Can’t leave messages anymore, there’s no point. All the bargaining and pleading have gone away, leaving just the compulsion to call.
Then there are the results. The fact that anyone you care about having a bad day creates a whisper in your ear. Creates a worry. A worry which, if not addressed, becomes a scream in the back of your head. Because you know exactly what’s possible. You know that the surreal can become the real and that it will wash the colour out of the rest of your life for a long time afterwards. That the world can turn on a dime and that people can, in fact, depart without the cause of sickness or accident. That people can simply choose to depart.
