One Friday in April Read online

  ONE FRIDAY IN APRIL

  A Story of Suicide and Survival

  DONALD ANTRIM

  W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  For Marija

  Ask not what disease the person has, but rather, what person the disease has.

  —SIR WILLIAM OSLER

  ONE FRIDAY IN APRIL

  ONE FRIDAY IN APRIL 2006, I SPENT THE AFTERNOON AND evening pacing the roof of my apartment building in Brooklyn, climbing down the fire-escape ladder and hanging by my hands from the railing, then climbing back up with sore palms and lying on the roof, in a ball, or stretched out on my back or on my stomach, maybe peering surreptitiously over the roof ledge. The roof is painted silver. The building is four stories tall. A group of my friends, each of whom had been on the phone with me, one after the other, all through the morning, when I’d been alone and dialing wildly, had got busy calling each other. Janice owned a car, and she and Nicky were coming across the bridge from Manhattan, but there was traffic, and no one knew where I was.

  From the roof, the world seemed to scream. I heard sirens—police, ambulance, and fire. What agency would come for me? A helicopter was flying overhead and circling back. The woman I’d just run from, the woman who had rushed over ahead of the others, who had been with me downstairs in my apartment, my partner then, Regan, thought that I’d gone to the street. We had been fighting over something I’d done. I’d hurt her, and we were both in anguish. She spoke harshly, and I ran away to die and end her burden. She charged after me, but the wrong way, down instead of up, out the front door of the building and toward the avenue. The sun was setting, and the sky over New Jersey was orange, and I was in my socks, shivering. I was afraid for my life. I didn’t know why I had to fall from the roof, why that was mine to do.

  When telling the story of my illness, I try not to speak about depression. I prefer to call it suicide. The American novelist William Styron, in his memoir Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, argues that the word “depression” is inadequate to describe this illness, and I agree. A depression is a concavity, a sloping downward and a return. Suicide, in my experience, is not that. I believe that suicide is a natural history, a disease process, not an act or a choice, a decision or a wish. I do not understand suicide as a response to pain, or as a message to the living—or not only as those things. I do not think of suicide as the act, the death, the fall from a height or the trigger pulled. I see it as a long illness, an illness with origins in trauma and isolation, in deprivation of touch, in violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging. It is a disease of the body and the brain, if you make that distinction, but its etiology, its beginning, whether in early or later life, in the family or beyond, is social in nature. I see suicide as a social disease. I will refer to suicide, not depression.

  My sickness lasted years. It continued after that Friday on the roof, and went on for more than a decade, through long hospitalizations and more than fifty rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, once known as shock therapy. It lasted through a decade of recovery, relapse, and recovery. Those times seem far removed, though they can also feel recent in memory. Up on the roof, I felt as if I had been dying all my life. I felt that it had begun when I was a little child.

  I was hanging from the fire escape. I kept a toehold. The sun was low; the air was cold. I was wearing socks but no shoes, and my palms were scraped and beginning to blister from my letting go a little, one hand at a time, falling out at an angle, sideways or backward, then grabbing fast for the rail, and clutching tight. I gazed down at the concrete patio and the chain-link fence surrounding the backyard. The yard was inaccessible, small, and neglected. My apartment is on the third floor, and windows in my kitchen and bedroom overlook it, though you’d have to stick your head out to see much. I’d never looked at the yard for more than a minute, or heard anyone in it.

  Below me was the small patio area littered with trash, and an outdoor stairwell leading to the locked basement and the boiler. The rest was hard ground. Since that time, since 2006, new people, a family, have moved into the first-floor apartment, and they’ve replaced the old chain-link fence with one made of wood and put in a barbecue and a picnic table; I can hear their children when it’s warm out, along with, on school days, even in the cold winter months, older children, neighborhood kids, playing and screaming on the rooftop playground of the private school a few doors down the street.

  Recess was over; school was out; night was falling. I had no children. I held on to the railing. It was less dizzying to look down than up. Clouds blew across the sky. Here and there, I could see people having after-work cocktails on private decks on neighboring roofs—it was the beginning of a spring weekend. Now, remembering that day, I wonder what those people might have thought of the man scrambling from fire escape to rooftop and back, letting go with one hand, flopping down on his belly to crane over the edge. Did they imagine that he was doing work, maintenance or repair, some job they couldn’t clearly make out? If they had known the man’s troubles, had known the man, would they have understood that he was about to die? Or would they have imagined that he was trying to live?

  It was getting darker, and I could hear traffic on the street below, people driving home through Brooklyn after work. I was cold; I’d been up there a long time. I didn’t know that it had been five hours. It could have been any amount of time. I had on pants, a shirt, and socks. My hands and clothes were dirty from the rooftop. My pants fit loosely, and were falling down. I’d become thin over the winter. Where was my belt? I shoved my hands in my pockets and squeezed my arms to my sides, trying to get warm.

  I’d written about my mother, her alcoholic life and her resignation in death, and my role as her son, savior, and abandoner. I began writing the year after she died, too soon for writing to be safe. The book was an accounting of the death of my family. Writing the book had been an excitement, but publishing was an ordeal. The book was a movement from exposition to scene, defense to acceptance, mortification to love. But my old worlds—Charlottesville, Gainesville, Miami, Sarasota; all the places of my childhood—were costly to rebuild. I worked at betrayal, mine of my mother, hers of me, mine of myself.

  I was born in Sarasota, Florida, on a September night in 1958. In the story that my mother tells of my birth, I was taken from her by force. Her mother, my grandmother, pulled me out of my mother’s arms and kept me. My mother was not allowed to hold me. My father, who had graduated from college the summer before on an ROTC scholarship, was away, training to command tanks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where, eleven months later, my sister, Terry, would be born. My mother told me that she and I were distraught; I cried and cried, but her mother would not give me back. There was panic, she told me, and more fighting and crying, and it took my father a day and a night to get there.

  Where was my grandfather? I knew my mother’s father as a docile, suffering man. When I was very little, he’d fallen off the roof of the house, while replacing tiles, and broken his back. The house was a two-story white stucco bungalow with a red tile roof, venetian blinds in the windows, a mowed lawn, a paved driveway and carport, a front door that wasn’t used, a guest bedroom downstairs, and three bedrooms upstairs. My sister and I lived with our grandparents when our parents were divorcing for the first time. Terry was five and I was six. We lay awake in separate bedrooms, in the heat. Fans blew. Downstairs, a sun porch with orchids and potted shrubs faced a little square yard planted with orange and tangerine trees. There was wisteria and hibiscus. The air was wet and sticky. Down a little walkway out back was the two-story garage where my grandfather spent part of each day, where he had tools hung on a pegboard, stacked paint cans, a worktable w
ith a vise, and beer in an old refrigerator. The garage smelled of paint thinner, insecticide, and lawnmower gas. My grandfather sat at a bench and mended kitchen-cabinet drawers, or rewired appliances, or sanded wood, while sipping from a can. He chewed cinnamon chewing gum and toothpicks.

  My mother was subjected to Munchausen syndrome by proxy—also known as factitious disorder imposed on another—a form of abuse that is carried out, usually by a parent or caregiver, as medical or surgical intervention. My mother recounted a succession of unnecessary operations, heart operations, demanded by her mother and performed by compliant doctors. In one story she told, she was a teenager, at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Under anesthesia on the operating table, her chest cut open, she heard the doctors pronounce her dead. She could not move or speak, but she could see them peering down at her. The long story of forced visits to doctors, of my grandmother’s control of her daughter’s body, the authoritarian cycle of manipulation, intimate violation, and symbolic repair, was never understood in my family, and it implicates my grandmother and my grandfather, together in collusion or complicity, in crimes against their only child. “They drank,” my mother told me shortly before she died. She told me that her parents fought and were violent toward each other, and that her mother had tried to drown her in a well when she was a baby. She told me that my grandfather was not her real father, and that no one knew the truth about anything.

  I was in my socks on the fire escape. I was cold, underweight, and scratched up from the roof’s rough surface, from crawling to the edge and leaning over to peer down. I imagined my body on the ground. It was something that I could picture. But the fall, how long would that last? Might I, during the seconds of falling, regret my own death? Would dying hurt? I’d had no intention of running to the roof. I’d run up the stairs without deciding, and I’d climbed onto the fire escape without deciding. The idea of letting go was terrifying. I did it again and again, though. It would have been easy to miss catching the railing. My motor control was failing. I held the railing, then let go a little, and then grabbed hold, and then let go again, but caught myself.

  I was not on the roof to jump. I was there to die, but dying was not a plan. I was not making choices, threats, or mistakes. Is this what we mean by impulsive behavior? I was, I think, looking back now, in acceptance. It was a relinquishing, though at the time I would not have been able to articulate that. I did not want to die, only felt that I would, or should, or must, and I had my pain and my reasons, my certainties. If you have had this illness, then you’ve had your reasons; and maybe you’ve believed, or still believe, as I have, that it would be better for others, for all the people who have made the mistake of loving you, or who one day might, if you were gone.

  Depression, hysteria, melancholia, nervousness, neurosis, neurasthenia, madness, lunacy, insanity, delirium, derangement, demonic possession, black humors, black bile, the blues, the blue devil, a brown study, a broken heart, a funk, a storm, a brainstorm, the abyss, an inferno, an apocalypse, Hell, the Void, anxiety, a lack of affect, panic, loneliness, bad wiring, irritability, hostility, unipolar disorder, bipolar disorder, mixed depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, borderline personality disorder, bulimia, anorexia, rumination, grief, mourning, malingering, laziness, sadness, despondency, dysfunction, dysthymia, detachment, disassociation, dementia praecox, neuralgia, oversensitivity, hypersensitivity, idiocy, unreasonableness, an unsound mind, cowardice, obstinacy, obduracy, intransigence, instability, apathy, lethargy, ennui, recalcitrance, battle fatigue, shell shock, self-pity, self-indulgence, weakness, withdrawal, delusion, dissatisfaction, negativity, a turn in the barrel, a break in a life narrative, bad thoughts, bad feelings, falling apart, falling to pieces, wigging out, freaking out, a chemical imbalance, a heavy heart, self-destructiveness, excitation, exhaustion, thoughts of hurting oneself or others, the thousand-yard stare, rage, misery, gloom, desolation, wretchedness, hopelessness, unworthiness, mania, morbidity, genius, terror, dread, a descent, a fall, suicidality, suicidal ideation, aggression, regression, deregulation, decompensation, deadness, drama, agony, angst, breakdown, a disease of the mind, a disorder, heartbreak, rough sailing, crackup, catatonia, agitation, losing one’s mind, losing one’s way, losing heart, wasting away, a crisis, a struggle, a trial, existential despair, a philosophical problem, a decision taken after long thought, shame, shyness, ranting and raving, the furies, an old friend, a constant companion, a punishment, a tragedy, a curse, a crime against nature, a crime against God, a sin, a mystery, an enigma, and, of course, psychosis—suicide, in the past and in our own time, has been called, and attributed to, many things.

  I was thin and cold. I held my arms to my sides. I peered up at the clouds and the jet planes and the sunset. It was hard to look at the sky. I couldn’t hold my head up. I was taking a benzodiazepine, Klonopin, for anxiety and insomnia. My mother was dead, and my socks had holes. The light hurt my eyes, and sounds felt like sharp little jabs at my head; when the helicopter came, that afternoon on the roof, I hunched over, protectively, as if I were being hit. Was the helicopter coming for me? Regan had raised her voice with me.

  She and I were in the living room. This wasn’t our first close relationship. We’d got together in 1994, and stayed together until 1999. But we had a tough time. We were combative with each other, and our arguments reminded me of my parents’ nightly battles. Right before we met, she lost her mother, and was for a long time in grief. We broke up and got back together more than once. We never lived together, but we lived near each other.

  Regan and I had been together—the second time around—for only a few months, since the summer of 2005. That Friday in April, she rushed to Brooklyn from her office in Manhattan, panicked after hearing my voice on the phone; and of course Janice and Nicky were on their way in Janice’s car, in traffic. Regan had stayed with me, done her best to help me. She was sleep-deprived, anxious, angry, afraid, untouched, breathing my cigarette smoke, not eating, not laughing, morose—the winter. Then, in early spring, I had staggered into Manhattan and spent the night with a former girlfriend. Regan screamed at me that I would go to Hell, and that she hoped I would die.

  I wrote so many notes. Most suicides don’t; we don’t leave testaments. I wrote them all winter long, on a notepad, while sitting on a tarp on the living room floor. Writing, moving my arm, my wrist, my hand, was effortful. My grip on the pen was rigid, and my hands ached, and were always cold. I wrote an opening, tore the page from the pad, and began another note. The notes were apologies. Sometimes I called friends and held them on the phone. I was fine, I told them. When I lay down, I crossed my arms over my chest, in the position of a corpse.

  But then I was up, startled, pacing, shaking, scared, awake without having slept, worrying about my heart, spreading out the tarp, not wanting to leave a mess, and then sitting with pills, pad, pen, and a knife, an old Sabatier that had been in our kitchen when I was a boy. The blade was rusty. None of the letters got finished. My heart pounded. I knelt on the living room floor and forced myself to cough as hard as I could, coughing and coughing, on my hands and knees, spitting up on the carpet. Maybe I could induce a heart attack. One day, the zipper on my winter coat jammed, and the metal zipper handle broke off, and I felt that my life was coming to an end. I drew the blade of the knife across my wrist. How much pressure would it take to cut through the skin? Would I be better off bleeding in warm water in the tub? I was frantic, worn out but unable to stay still. At the end of each day, at around five or five-thirty, before Regan came over after work, I stowed the tarp, replaced the knife in the kitchen drawer, cleaned the ashtray, put away the pills, and buried the suicide notes in the garbage.

  On the roof, late that day in April, after running from the apartment and up the stairs, after hanging from the fire escape, letting go in stages, I climbed the ladder to the roof and huddled against the stairwell bulkhead, next to the door to the stairs. I was breathing fast, and my body hurt.
Night was falling. Beyond the Brooklyn rooftops was Manhattan. Lights were on in the skyscrapers. The pain seemed to come from my skin and my muscles and my joints and my bones. But when I touched myself, I couldn’t find a source. I felt like I hurt everywhere, but also nowhere. My chest was constricted, as if a weight were pressing in—but from where? There was no weight, no feeling of a source or origin or cause, nothing to palpate. I’d say that it was the pain of being crushed or squeezed to death, but I’ve never been crushed or squeezed to death. Have you? Have you felt as if your body were collapsing from the inside, collapsing and hardening? Where was Regan? Where were my friends? I wanted a bullet. I’d wanted one since Christmas, to eliminate an itch behind my temple. I imagined the bullet easing in. Was Jesus waiting, or a trip into brightness, some stellar afterlife? Was death knowledge, or might I wake up, a baby again, born into some new violence? What were the chances? Might I, after falling, be alive but maimed? And if I were gone, might Regan live?

  I grew up sleep-deprived. I was always sick. I couldn’t keep up in school, and often missed days. I had anxiety, allergies, and asthma; and irritable bowel, and headaches, and, starting in fifth grade, when I was ten, awful and incapacitating back spasms. They began early one morning before school, in the upstairs bathroom in our house on Lewis Mountain Road in Charlottesville, while I was bending over the toilet, throwing up after a night of staring around my dark bedroom, struggling to breathe, listening to the fighting.

  Sometimes in the middle of the night, my sister and I crept out of our rooms and sat in our pajamas on the landing, behind the banister, afraid to look. You could say of our childhood that she played in her room, while I went out in the yard. Or you could say that she fled into her room, and that I fled outside. I made friends, but my friends were always changing; our family moved almost yearly, moved up and down the southern Atlantic seaboard, or sometimes just across town—Sarasota, Gainesville, Charlottesville, Tallahassee, back again to Charlottesville, and then south again, down Interstate 95 to Miami. Pretty much every year, we moved to a new house; single-story, two-story; driveways, sidewalks; screened porch, no porch; three cats, four cats; swimming pools, beaches, ponds; a converted army barracks in Gainesville, Florida; a bungalow in Tallahassee; an apartment and then a two-story house in Charlottesville, Virginia; suburban tract houses in Miami; a farm at the foot of the Blue Ridge.