Rick haunts my Twitter feed.
After I received stronger-than-expected responses when I tweeted about his life and his death, I began an annual tweetstorm about Rick and about depression and mental health. I urged people to get help to treat a treatable illness. I explained that a suicide reverberates and damages the people left behind. I pointed out, stridently, that this is a common illness, and it’s treatable and potentially fatal, so do something about it.
The responses were overwhelming. People thanked me for talking about it, which was nice, but they also opened up about loved ones they had lost, and they promised me, a stranger, that they were going to make appointments to try to get better. They wrote to me, months later, about how things were improving in their lives.
Coming forward about my own condition was a different story. I was afraid. If I told the world I was depressed, it seemed pretty likely that my professional opportunities would dry up fast. Who would want to work with me? Who would be able to trust me? Would other employers want to take the chance on a rapidly aging and openly crazy host? At the same time, I simply could not continue to preach that people should open up about mental illness while not doing so myself.
Being a public figure associated with the brand of my employer, I likewise worried that American Public Media, aka Minnesota Public Radio, could take heat and damage from the disclosure. I met with Jen in the HR department and explained that I would like to come forward on Twitter about my depression, to “out” myself, and asked if that would be okay with Minnesota Public Radio. “I think you should,” Jen said, “and the company will stand behind you on this. And personally I hope you do, because it’s something I’ve been dealing with for years and I agree with what you say about it.”
I took to Twitter. “The truth is, I haven’t done all I could do. I haven’t been forthcoming. I haven’t lied but I haven’t told the whole truth. The truth is that I’ve been living with the disease of depression for many years,” I wrote. The positive response came in a tidal wave, people thanking me for being open, coming out of the closet themselves, again vowing to get help. The negatives? No one has ever told me it’s a mistake for me to share stuff like this.
I was invited to give speeches at mental health events around town, based on me being on the radio, kind of, but mostly based on tweets. Tweets! “Either I’m really good at talking about this stuff,” I thought, “or people are absolutely starving to hear someone talk about it and no one but me is coming forward.” Might have been my smoldering good looks, too. You never can tell.
So in the Twitter sense, Rick had been haunting me like a friendly ghost.
After a few years in Minnesota, my professional life could not have been going better. I had helped start an on-stage interview series called Wits that morphed into a music and comedy variety show on public radio stations across the country. We taped at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, home of A Prairie Home Companion. In the course of hosting Wits, I found myself in situations I’d have never dared dream of: performing sketches with Fred Willard and David Cross and Maria Bamford; being on stage for intimate musical performances by Neko Case and Brandi Carlile and Rufus Wainwright. I couldn’t imagine a dreamier dream job.
Putting a show like that together, however, was a whole lot of work and meant a degree of pressure I had never experienced in a professional setting. Besides being host, I was also the head writer, overseeing freelancers and doing a lot of the writing myself, endlessly reworking scripts in hopes that what we brought on stage would be funny and engaging. Putting out twenty to twenty-five new shows a year meant that there was nowhere to test the material before it went in front of an audience, at which point I just had to hope (because there is no science to comedy) that it would get a laugh. If something fell flat, my mind told me, it was because I’m an unfunny person and a bad person and dumb and I’ve let down the audience and all the other people working on the show. If something wasn’t working, it was because I didn’t care enough or work hard enough, I told myself.
Although Wits toured a little, most of our shows were in St. Paul. This meant constantly trying to come up with performers our producer might be able to talk into flying to Minnesota for not much money in order to appear on a show that was struggling to find a national audience. The guests had to be famous enough to help sell a thousand tickets at the Fitz but obscure enough that they’d be willing to actually do it. A surprisingly narrow band of celebrity. Our invitation list always needed new names.
If Jill and I were trying to relax in the evening and watch a movie, I would be noting who was in it, wondering if they’d be a good guest, could they sell tickets, and would they be willing to fly out. I was constantly pulling the car over while listening to the radio, Shazam-ing the song being played, investigating how famous the musician was and whether they were on tour and already coming to Minnesota. Entertainment had turned to evaluation; distraction had turned to stress.
The depression engine was roaring. “But how can I be having constant bleak despair when I have the dream job of a lifetime?”
Which is a dumb question. Depression doesn’t evaluate your career. Depression wants to kill you. “Oh, you got a raise? Oh, you got passed over for promotion? Oh, nothing happened at work? Cool, cool. Whatever. Don’t care. Listen, I want to kill you,” says depression. The show was a bit of a deal with Satan: get your dream job, become friends with accomplished people you love, soak up fame and adulation, and all it will cost is your happiness and peace of mind. You get all the pizza in the world but pizza will taste like lettuce. Real Twilight Zone stuff.
So now I’m rocking my midforties, on meds for the depression but not doing anything to improve my mental health. By this point, I’ve spent decades essentially stalling, attempting to find ways to put off dealing with this thing. Actual thought from this period: “If I can stop depression from overwhelming me until I die, then I sort of … win.” The problem with putting it all off until later is that later will one day show up. The stress of the dream job was a little rock hammer that busted a hole in the dam. And that made me remember that I had killed my brother.
Ah yes, we haven’t heard about that idea in a while. It had taken some heavy damage after good counseling from Mark Hoagland, but that had been years ago. How horrible was I to live this Minnesota life with a loving family and a successful career when I had given Rick the idea to get a membership at Discount Gun Mart, then go in there and fire a bullet into his head? How could I live with myself after killing him? How could I even do radio when he had left all those messages about hearing me on the radio, the messages I never returned, the messages I barely even listened to on voicemail before deleting them?
Of course I knew, deep down, that I hadn’t killed him. I understood that. But deeper down, of course I knew I was guilty. Depression looks for the most horrible option on the menu and selects that every time.
The thing about a traumatic fixated-upon memory is that it is exhausting to the brain. I wasn’t just haunted by this memory, I was tired all the time. Ever wonder why saddies can’t get out of bed? For many, that’s one of the reasons: an obsessive memory simply wears them out.
As if the knowledge weren’t enough, my brain offered a constantly looping visual aid: the memory of Rick’s body, stretched out and yellowed, bloated beyond recognition from the transfusions, connected to endless tubes and monitors, on an ICU bed in San Diego, just as he was about to die. I saw that body more and more often; it was posted on the backs of my eyelids when I tried to go to sleep at night. And I couldn’t go to sleep at night. Insomnia, which runs in the family, raged. I was lucky to get four hours some nights, so I had to stare at that body in bed for hours. Knowing I did it. Reader, I was going—and allow me to use the proper medical term here—nutso.
You can’t move to Minnesota and get away from all your problems. Or Seattle. Or New York or Los Angeles or Rome or Melbourne or Mars. Your problems have maps, and they will find you. And when the problems of depression and shame and anxiety and grief and guilt started piling up again, well, friends, I felt so tired. Depression was my oldest companion; it had been with me since before Jill ever came along and was sticking close through every move. I was accepting that.
What I did not wish to accept was a lifelong attachment to that picture of Rick in his final moments. You can’t spend all your time in a jump scare. It simply won’t do.
Carol was therapist number eleven in my life. I finally had enough therapists to field a theoretical and highly pensive football team. My relationship with Carol was intermittent; she lived way out in the suburbs, so I used her services only when things were trending toward crisis. It was kind of like calling the fire department a lot instead of working hard to put safety measures in your home.
On one visit I was explaining to Carol the obsessive looping recurrence of the horrific image of Rick’s body, how I couldn’t stop thinking about this real thing I had seen. “Do I have post-traumatic stress disorder?” I asked.
“Well, are you going to work and getting things done? Are you showering and wearing clean clothes?” she asked. I was.
“Are the kids getting to school and getting fed? Are you doing your part to make sure that happens?” Yes.
“It sounds like you’re functioning. So I wouldn’t call it a disorder at this point. That’s all the word ‘disorder’ really refers to. But you certainly have post-traumatic stress.”
“Okay. I guess that’s good to know.”
“Have you heard of EMDR?” she asked.
“Sort of. I think,” I said. “No. What is it?”
She explained that it was a technique to work through traumatic memories, to make the brain do something different when those particular harmful thoughts and visions return to make trouble. The patient recalls a painful or traumatic memory and focuses in on particular aspects of that memory. As that happens, the patient is asked to look in particular directions, signaled by the therapist’s hand or a pointer or buzzers in the patient’s hands. Through this, the patient can form new associations with that memory. For instance, a victim of a violent crime can replace the terror of that moment with a new association that they are strong and a survivor. Essentially, it’s like cleaning a wound so that the body can set about healing itself without irritants and infections, except in this case the wound is mental.
I’d hold hand buzzers, little electronic pulsers, and she would talk to me until I was in a very calm and receptive place. This sounded like either the dumbest pile of crazy or the craziest pile of dumb I’d ever heard of. But I figured that worst case, it would make for a good story and I’d be no more miserable than I already was. Best case, I could stop carrying heavy, awful memories that were dragging me down.
To pull off that best case would mean trafficking in some psychotherapy clichés like finding your happy place or resolving mother issues. These are terms dragged out when someone wants to make fun of therapy. In popular thinking, imagining a happy place in order to help your brain is a denial of reality. This is a common way to dismiss mental illness and to dismiss possible ways to address it. This thinking often comes from the same people who believe that the best way to treat depression is to “snap out of it” or “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” These are the same people who will bemoan “political correctness” when asked to treat those different from themselves with at least a minimum of politeness. Their mockery, their eye-rolling, and their scorn are, to my way of thinking, the result of being taught the same discriminatory perspectives shared by the people who raised them.
So these jerks make jokes and roll eyes, and the average person gets a little more hesitant to go to therapy and work hard at it because they’ve been told that these issues—which might be causing a lot of pain and stunting development—are ridiculous. As that discriminatory mindset further infests society, people might believe that therapy itself is ridiculous and that people who seek it are ridiculous. And then people who need help don’t get it.
Getting better is not ridiculous, and using whatever means you can to get there isn’t ridiculous either. Imagination, like a thumb, is a tool available to humans, so we should use it. Establishing a peaceful place you can return to with imagination is genuinely beneficial. Most people who are serious about this stuff don’t refer to it as a happy place because “happy” isn’t really the point here. The point is to establish a sense memory of a place where you are calm and serene enough to conscientiously recalibrate your stormy mind. Maybe you get happy, maybe you don’t, doesn’t matter.
One of the first things I did in EMDR with Carol was establish where my peaceful place was, a location I’d been to where I felt the most calm and relaxed. This was not difficult. The tiny town of Oceanside, Oregon, is right on the Pacific Ocean. Jill and I have spent at least a dozen vacations there, and it’s my favorite place in the world. My exact peaceful location is one specific spot on the beach, looking out on some huge rock formations in the water. It’s warm and breezy, and in my imagination I’m holding a Tillamook Brown Cow ice cream cone and my kids are there and somehow being civil to one another.
Carol took me deeper into that place, encouraging me to notice the smells, the sounds, the sensations under my feet. Am I there alone or with other people? What am I wearing? At this point, I was pretty relaxed and, I guess, hypnotized? We established that spot on the beach as a safe place and rehearsed how to return to it in my mind, both during the impending EMDR sessions and in other parts of life.
The goal in my EMDR work was to take what I knew intellectually to be real, that Rick was responsible for his own death, and make it what I actually feel as the primary response whenever I think about how he died. The nightmare trauma image of his body was a problem, yes, but more than that it was a symptom of a larger problem: the irrational responsibility and guilt I had over his death. Carol and I established a three-word phrase to keep in mind: Rick shot himself. All the issues over culpability, the long rambling monologues of guilt and self-loathing, led to the factual statement that after everything else he held the gun in his hand and squeezed the trigger.
Yes, but I wrote this thing in my book about gun ranges—Rick shot himself.
There were all these phone calls, and I just turned my back—Rick shot himself.
I could have done so much more—Rick shot himself.
Rick shot himself. Establishing that was the only path to feeling something other than that I also deserved to die.
Now let’s get to the hand buzzers. She used gizmos that went by the delightful name “TheraTappers.” These were slightly bulbous disks, one for each hand, connected by cable to a box she held, which was used to control the intensity and frequency of the pulses. The pulses and the directed eye movements that follow them guide the memory to a safer and more manageable place, so that the patient doesn’t routinely fall into horror when the thought comes up. If you’re thinking the TheraTappers sound like Scientology’s E-meters and thus scientifically dubious, well, brother, I was right there with you, especially because the equipment didn’t look so much “state-of-the-art medical device” as “failed RadioShack home project from 1978.” But again, what the hell did I have to lose besides my desperate shrieking?
So with eyes closed and TheraTappers tapping, I set about recalling the sight of Rick’s body in that ICU. And as I had done with the safe place on the beach, I recalled all of it. The sounds of hushed personnel, the smell of both disinfectant and grievous bodily injury, where the desks were, the other patients in my peripheral vision. None of these sensations needed to be retrieved so much as let back in, me holding the door for the long-suppressed demons waiting in the lobby outside. With the sense memory came all the feelings of that moment. Whereas back in 2007 shock prevented me from fully experiencing the present, no such shock existed now. I was consumed by the pain of the past. It was awful. Really awful.
From there, using TheraTappers—I am not a paid endorser of TheraTappers, I just like the name a lot—we redirected my brain to connect the feelings, the sensations, the image in my mind with the phrase Rick shot himself. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t comfortable, and it took more than one appointment. After each appointment, I could barely drive myself home because I was so exhausted. Once I got there I napped, hard, because my brain had just run a marathon. But the whole EMDR thing worked. The guilt and all the other thoughts about Rick’s death, which had several years to mutate and calcify, now went to the thought that Rick shot himself, a horrible truth that both made sense and allowed me to live my life. It all worked. I still can’t believe how successful it was.
That said, I wasn’t exactly celebrating. The goal of my EMDR was to form a thought pattern that told me that my brother shot himself and died. Sadness and loss, while devastating, at least adhere to a world I could navigate, whereas the old association “I killed my brother” did not. Carol said that if the old thinking acted up again, I could always return for more EMDR (and TheraTappers!), but it’s been several years now and the fix has held.
EMDR surely does not work for everyone, and plenty of people dismiss it as pseudo-science without enough underpinning in provable outcomes. The people who practice it aren’t certified by the state and are more likely than most health care practitioners to have macramé wall hangings. It’s very possible that EMDR worked for me simply because I wanted it to, because I wanted to believe in something that could get me somewhere better. And that is fine with me. I’ve always admired religious believers who know that there is order to the world. I could never get there. I never much went in for alternative medicine either, which as a resident of Seattle in the ’90s meant my eyes were more or less locked in rolled position for a decade. So perhaps I was simply so beaten down by life, I got on board with TheraTappers in a way that I couldn’t with Jesus or crystals. But it worked, and that’s good enough.
Now, when I think of Rick’s death, which happens daily, and get around to my possible culpability, my brain directs all those thoughts to Rick shot himself. It feels like the truth all the time. Not long ago, my daughter was sledding with some friends. She was part of a group that encouraged a kid to go down a particularly steep run. The kid ended up fracturing a vertebra and missed some school. My daughter came to me devastated with guilt, cursing herself for causing his injury. Instinctively, I blurted out, “Brandon chose to go down that run himself!” Which was true.