Night Falls Fast Read online

I do not often say this, but after seeing his suffering for so long, I can see how suicide cured Drew’s pain. I am not angry for his decision as I am not sure I would have had the strength to continue as long as Drew did. Many did not know his suffering, and he let few close enough to see it. But those of us who loved him and saw his pain do not fault him for leaving this life behind. Still I hate his illness and still I wish I could hear, if just for one last time, his jeep roar up to my house with U2 blaring and see him jump out suntanned and gorgeous and wanting to go for a ride in the valley.

  I will never be the same. As I said before, none of us who know him ever will. But I know I have been blessed to have known a soul such as Drew. This is a gift few are given.

  Drew’s family, whose warmth and understanding of him would have been, in a fairer world, more than sufficient to keep him alive, could not compete with a relentless and ruinous disease. Their funeral notes for Drew end with a perceptive, straightforward statement of fact: “On January 27, 1996 Drew took his life. He had stopped taking his medication. His illness moved faster than his acceptance of it.”

  The Christmas before Drew graduated from the Academy, he had placed a small gift for his parents under the Christmas tree; it was the last package to be unwrapped. Inside the box they found a pair of lieutenant’s epaulets, which he asked them to pin on his shoulders when he received his officer’s commission in six months’ time. All the cadets in his squadron received their commissions and epaulets in June. All except Drew.

  His parents remedied this by placing the unworn epaulets in his hands the day that they buried him.

  And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,

  Bear you on the breath of dawn,

  Make you to shine like the sun,

  And hold you in the palm of His hand.

  You need not fear the terror of the night.

  The February day of Drew’s memorial service at the Air Force Academy was a beautiful, breezy, and sunny one. The flags at the Academy flew at half-mast, and the chapel was filled with young men and women in uniform. They stood, as one, for the opening hymn, “On Eagle’s Wings,” and listened to their fellow officers and cadets read passages from the Old and New Testaments. The chaplain spoke of Drew’s leadership and of how he had been a role model for so many in his class. With obvious emotion, he remarked, “I don’t think we know how much pain, how much turmoil, how much anguish Drew experienced as a result of his illness.”

  Five cadets and officers—sad, young, sober, stricken—went, in turn, to the pulpit to deliver their remembrances. One second lieutenant, a close friend of Drew’s, was painfully eloquent: “This chapel,” he said, “means a lot to my life. Six years ago I walked in those doors scared as a new basic. A year and a half ago, I walked out of those doors happy as a newly married man. Today, I return to this place sad, as I must say good-bye to a friend.”

  The young officer paused, his sadness palpable. Then he ended his eulogy with an Air Force pilots’ toast that he, Drew, and their fellow cadets had made the night they received their class rings from the Academy. Proposed at the time to the legendary flier and commander of the U.S. air forces in World War I, General Billy Mitchell, the lieutenant now used it to bid farewell to his friend:

  As we soar among them there,

  We’re sure to hear his plea,

  To take care my friend,

  Watch your six,

  And do one more roll …

  Just for me.

  The congregation rose for the final hymn. “We will run and not grow weary,” they sang, “For our God will be our strength, / And we will fly like the eagle, / We will rise again.” One by one the young men and women in blue left the jagged triangular chapel.

  Their leaving is the last thing you see on the home videotape; there is a terrible sadness in it, even more than you had reckoned on. The only thing that goes through your mind is what you heard a military chaplain say, many years ago:

  “I do not know why young men have to die. You would think it would break the heart of God.”

  II

  Just Hope Has Gone

  —PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY—

  Hope now,—not health, nor cheerfulness,

  Since they can come and go again,

  As often one brief hour witnesses,—

  Just hope has gone forever.

  —EDWARD THOMAS

  Poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was twenty-nine years old when he wrote to his wife: “I sat thinking about ways of killing myself. My revolver has only one bullet left. I couldn’t hang myself: and though I imagined myself cutting my throat with a razor on Wheatham I had not the energy to go. Then I went out and thought what effects my suicide would have. I don’t think I mind them.… These thoughts have come to me at least once a week for three or four years now and frequently during the last seven—”

  CHAPTER 3

  Take Off the Amber, Put Out the Lamp

  —THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SUICIDE—

  It is time to take off the amber

  Time to change the words,

  Time to put out the lamp

  Above the door …

  —MARINA TSVETAEVA

  The young boy scrawled a note and pinned it to his shirt. Then he walked to the far side of the family Christmas tree and hanged himself from a ceiling beam. The note was short—“Merry Christmas”—and his parents never forgot or understood it.

  EACH WAY to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of a life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete.

  We are left with little, as friends or family, as clinicians or scientists: only last bits of conversations; memories of perfectly normal and now suspect behaviors; an occasional note or journal entry; recollections of our own dealings with the dead, fragments we distort through guilt or anger or terrible loss. We are left to make sense of a young boy’s Christmas note; a mother of three, whose computer screen reads, “I love you. I’m sorry. Study Hard”; a successful businessman who jumps in front of a subway train; a brilliant graduate student who kills himself with cyanide from his laboratory; a promising fifteen-year-old African-American boy who provokes his own death by aiming a toy gun at a police officer.

  There are sharp limits on our understanding: final signs and messages are subject to a score of readings; and life, once jugulated, cannot be put back in. No matter how much we may wish to reassemble the suicide’s psychological world, any light we gain is indirect and insufficient: the privacy of the mind is an impermeable barrier. Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. And most will have yet better grounds to stay alive, thus complicating everything.

  Suicide is not entirely a private act, however; nor is it completely idiosyncratic or unpredictable. We have ways of understanding the psychological underpinnings of suicide, and while they may not provide the final clarity we would like, they give us grounds for a beginning.

  Suicide notes—an obvious starting point—often promise more than they deliver. It would seem that nothing could be closer to the truth of suicide than notes and letters left behind by those who kill themselves, but this is not the case; our expectations of how we think people should feel and act facing their own deaths are greater than the reality of what they do and why they do it. Suicide authority Ed Shneidman, for example, in commenting on the disappointing banality of many suicide notes, lets slip his hope, a common one, that the last recorded moments of life will afford a deep or tragic view of dying: “Suicide notes,” he writes, “often seem like parodies of the postcards sent home from the Grand Canyon, the catacombs or the pyramids—essentially pro forma, not at all reflecting the grandeur of the scene being described or the depth of human emotion that one might expect to be engendered by the situation.”

  But of course one could argue that most people who decide to take their own
lives have lost their ability to feel things grandly or deeply, to reflect profoundly or originally, to see the world other than monochromatically. Giving words to ultimate, dark, and interior acts is difficult enough for those with keen minds in active gear; for those depressed, confused, hopeless, and mentally constricted, eloquence is unlikely to be much in evidence. When eloquence or pithy insights do find their way into suicide notes, they are quoted repeatedly, precisely because of their singular view into the suicidal mind. These notes may be forceful, riveting, or mordantly amusing, but they tend not to be typical.

  In fact, few people leave suicide notes. Perhaps one in four does, and it is unclear if these notes represent the emotional states, motivations, and experiences of those who leave behind no written record.

  Four thousand years ago, an Egyptian wrote out his despair onto papyrus in the form of a narrative and four short-versed poems. This document, now in the Berlin Museum, is thought by British psychiatrist Chris Thomas to be the first suicide note extant, and he believes it reflects the ruminations of a deeply depressed, probably psychotic mind. In the second of the four poems the ancient writer gives vent to his misery in the images of his time:

  Lo, my name is abhorred,

  Lo, more than the odour of carrion

  On summer days when the sky is hot.

  Lo, my name is abhorred,

  Lo, more than the odour of crocodiles,

  More than sitting under the bank of crocodiles.

  Lo, my name is abhorred,

  Lo, more than a woman

  Against whom a lie is told her husband.

  Later, he moves from the pain of his existence to the attractions of death:

  Death is before me today

  As the odour of myrrh,

  As when one sitteth under the sail on a windy day.

  Death is before me today

  As the odour of lotus flowers,

  As when one sitteth on the shore of drunkenness.

  Death is before me today

  As a man longs to see his house

  When he has spent years in captivity.

  Suicide notes have been written since, in ink, paint, pencil, crayon, or blood. French artist Jules Pascin, for instance, slit his wrists, wrote a brief note in blood—“Lucy, pardonnez-moi”—and then hanged himself. Russian poet Sergei Esenin, who was just thirty when he hanged himself from the heating pipes in the ceiling of his room—a room left in total disarray, with things thrown about and bits of torn-up manuscripts strewn everywhere—wrote an entire poem in his own blood the day before he killed himself:

  Goodbye, my friend, goodbye.

  My dear, you are in my heart.

  Predestined separation

  Promises a future meeting.

  Goodbye, my friend, without handshake and words,

  Do not grieve and sadden your brow,—

  In this life there’s nothing new in dying,

  But nor, of course, is living any newer.

  Most notes are not so dramatically drafted. Some note writers, despite being poets, use the words of others. Paul Celan, for example, underlined a sentence from a biography of Hölderlin—“Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart”—and then drowned himself in the Seine. Others leave a more extensive record of their thoughts. Cesare Pavese’s diary from the last year of his life is an unbounded history of pain. “The cadence of suffering has begun,” he wrote. “Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night comes.” Then, later, not long before he killed himself, he wrote, “Now even the morning is filled with pain.”

  The length of suicide notes varies greatly. Ian O’Donnell at the University of Oxford and his colleagues looked at suicide notes written by people who killed themselves on the London Underground railway system and found that the notes ranged in length from one that was only seventeen words long, written on the back of a railway ticket, to an eight-hundred-word “stream-of-consciousness essay written over the course of an hour sitting on a bench in the railway station and ending with a description of the last few steps towards the railway line and the final preparations for the arrival of the train.” The average number of words in their series of suicide notes was about the same as the number of words in this paragraph.

  Many suicide notes are short and may give only an explicit warning to those who are likely to find the bodies: “BE CAREFUL. CYANIDE GAS IS IN THIS BATHROOM,” for example; or “DO NOT ENTER. Call Paramedics.” Specific instructions or requests are common, most often detailing how to handle the body, what to tell children or parents about the suicide, how to distribute assets, what to do with a cat or a dog. The reasons given for suicide are often vague and allude to a cumulative pain and weariness—“I could not bear it any longer”; “I am tired of living”; “There is no point in going on”—without going into any further details. Young children are less specific than older adolescents or adults in their reasons for suicide and in what they wish to have done with their bodies and possessions. Both of the younger age groups are less likely than adults to leave notes, but they frequently and explicitly try to relieve their parents, brothers, and sisters of feeling guilty about their suicides. A twenty-year-old girl who jumped from an office building, for instance, wrote, “No one is to blame for my doing this. It’s just that I could never become reconciled with life itself. God have mercy on my soul.”

  The majority of all suicide notes are positive in their remarks about those they are leaving behind. Hostility, when it does occur, however, can be breathtaking. A man whose wife had fallen in love with his brother put a gas tube into his mouth; before he died, he wrote out a note for his wife: “I used to love you, but I die hating you and my brother, too.” On the back of her photograph, he wrote, “I present this picture of another woman—the girl I thought I married, may you always remember I loved you once but died hating you.” Similarly hostile sentiments were left in another person’s suicide note: “I hate you and all of your family and I hope you never have a piece [sic] of mind. I hope I haunt this house as long as you live here and I wish you all the bad luck in the world.” Fortunately, these acid notes are unusual.

  Suicide notes in general have a concrete, stereotypic quality to them. In a series of studies, genuine suicide notes were compared with simulated ones. The latter were written by individuals (matched for age, gender, and socioeconomic status) who had been asked to write suicide notes as they imagined they would write them if they were planning to commit suicide. The genuine suicide notes were much more specific about giving directives concerning property distribution and insurance policies; more concerned about the pain and suffering they knew would be caused by their acts; more neutral in tone, although also more likely to express psychological pain; and more likely to use the word “love” in their texts. The simulated notes, on the other hand, gave greater detail about the circumstances and thoughts leading up to the (imagined) suicide; more often mentioned the act of suicide itself; and more often used euphemistic phrases for death and suicide.

  Even in the midst of great mental suffering, some people before they kill themselves find time to lay out quite explicit instructions to their survivors. Before killing herself with gas from the stove in her kitchen, for example, a fourteen-year-old girl wrote this note:

  To whom it may concern,

  If I should die in my childhood, this is my will. I have no money, except $2.95 in the bank, and a little in defense stamps. This is to be given to Robert C——, my nephew. My clothing goes to charity or to anyone that wants them.

  If I am laid out I would like to be dressed in blue. If I have a funeral all friends and relatives are invited to attend.

  To my mother I give all I have and everything I possess. To my father and sister all my love and all I possess.

  No one has killed me. I wish to die. I have committed suicide.

  In 1931, a twenty-five-year-old man who was out of work and despondent about his young wife (whom he had pressured into prostitution so t
hey might live) swallowed poison and died. His suicide note read, in part:

  Dear Dear Betty

  Oh how I love you but I am not fit to be your husband or live. I have just gotten the most Deadly Poison there is & When you read this letter I will be gone thank God. I am giving Peggy [their dog] to the Landlady to keep for you and one Dollar to feed her to Thursday & also just Paid the room Thursday. The receipt is enclosed.

  I am also bringing over to the Detention home $23.00 in Cash, your ring, my ring & my watch for them to give you when you get out. I told the Landlady I would not be here this week but probably you would be here Monday, if you are not here I gave her the Attorney’s phone number & told her to ask him to see you & let her know what you want done with the things.

  I am also writing him a letter & telling him of the money & rings that I am bring [sic] over to you & I am also giving him orders to send you out home or back to my mother which ever place you want to go.

  A quite different kind of instruction and declaration was left in the mid-nineteenth century by an Englishman being held in county jail for indebtedness. Convinced he was the co-Deity, a son of God, and Elijah, and allowed access to his razor and knife despite widespread knowledge that he was insane, he was found dead of self-inflicted wounds to his throat and abdomen. He left behind letters to the governor of the jail, the coroner, and his wife. The disturbed state of his mind is apparent, but despite his delusions he managed to request specific and rational care in how the news of his suicide would be broken to his wife. He wrote to the governor:

  I am known to Mr. Herschell, the chaplain, and I have no doubt he will take the letter addressed to my wife to her home. I will, however, express my wish, and leave it perfectly optional with him to comply or not, as he pleases. I should wish him to ask Dr. Williams to accompany him, by the eleven o’clock train, to Newham, then take a conveyance and call on Mrs. Jolly, at Littledean, and request her to accompany them to my wife at Cinderford. Should she not be at home, she will be at Drybrook, at my sister’s, whither they must follow, and break the intelligence to her as gently as they can. I think, when Dr. Herschell reads my dying affirmation that I am the long-expected Messiah to his people, he will comply with my request.