Chapter 15
A man who decides to commit suicide puts a
full stop to his being, he turns his back on the past,
he declares himself a bankrupt and his memories to be unreal.
Boris Pasternak, An Essay in Autobiography
On July 3, 1998, Guy asked for my help, though not in words.
That afternoon our friend Mike Young showed up unexpectedly. He and I were sitting on the porch when Guy appeared at the bottom of the garden, home from a hike to the White Mountains. He unlatched the lower gate and walked slowly up past the rows of beans and corn. He took his time closing the upper gate, then proceeded up the path as if he were in no hurry to reach the porch. As he drew closer I saw that he had that squinty look about the eyes, a sign to me of his reluctance to engage with an unexpected guest. I was surprised, and a bit upset with Guy. Why should he be holding back? Mike was a dear friend whom he hadn’t seen in several years.
The three of us had supper on the porch in the warm summer evening. We chatted with Mike about his plans. He was moving back east after years of being away. Around ten o’clock Mike went out to sleep in Twin Firs Camp. I was sitting at our table, reading for a few minutes before going to bed, when I became aware of Guy pacing back and forth beside my chair.
“I tried to jump off Cannon Cliff today,” he said.
My eyes leapt to his face. It’s as though a kitchen knife has slipped, the blade drawing itself across your fingers, slicing deep into the flesh. You stare at your fingers, but see no blood. So it’s not so bad. But the blood wells up, beading along the edges of the wound, spilling down your hand, which begins to shake.This cut is deep, deeper than you thought. I went numb.
“Just take one big step.” Guy’s voice. He was standing in front of me.“I thought this would be easy.”
This is crazy, but this is Guy talking, and I know he isn’t crazy. So I know he is serious.
“I was at the top of the cliff before eight.”
“Near which route?”
“The Whitney-Gilman.”
The narrow arête we’ve climbed many times that looks across the Notch to the Franconia Ridge and six hundred feet down to the talus, a rock-strewn slope with boulders the size of cars.
“I sat down to eat my ice cream . . .”
“A pint?”
“Vanilla. A last treat. But I heard voices down on the talus and didn’t think I had much time, so I ate fast and ended up feeling bloated. Then the voices stopped.”
“Where did they go?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry you had to bolt your ice cream, Guy,” I said. I couldn’t make what he was telling me seem real. He was standing within touching distance of my chair.
“I sat staring at the Franconia Ridge and thinking about our trail work. All the years. The sun was so warm I took off my shirt. I think the sun had something to do with why I couldn’t jump.”
Good sun, I think.
“I stood up and propped the sign I’d made against my pack.”
“Your sign?”
Guy dug a piece of cardboard out of his pack and showed me.
to whom it may concern:
this is a deliberate jump.
it is not an accident.
 
please notify:
Laura Waterman
East Corinth,Vt.
 
The Car Keys are with
Identification Cards in Top
Flap Pocket of Pack
I stared at Guy’s handwriting: black lettering made with a thick magic marker.
“I walked to the edge. I fully expected to make this last step. Just walk off.” His voice turned high-pitched. “I couldn’t do it. The space. I couldn’t step into that nothingness. So I tried lowering myself onto the rock face. . . .”
“It’s all loose. . . .”
“Yes, on the Black Dike side. I started dancing from foot to foot, to break off a hold so I would fall. I kept telling myself to let go. A foothold broke, but my hand gripped.”
Guy was reliving this. One half of my mind listened as if this were a climber’s story about a close call. Plenty of adrenaline, but it ends up fine. The other half of my mind was collapsed in fear. I stretched my hands across my thighs and squeezed—the cold sweat on my palms penetrated the fabric of my pants.
“I pulled myself back up over the edge. Then I stood on top, right on the edge, and swayed back and forth. I couldn’t make myself fall.” He keeps pacing in front of me. “When I left this morning I wasn’t planning on coming back.”
I can’t imagine him not back. “When you woke me to say good-bye you seemed upset,” I said. “I watched out the window, and you flung a look back. I thought about you all day.”
“You did?” he said.
I nodded.
He shrugged.“I packed up my signs and came down. Listen, Laura, I’ve heard that after an unsuccessful suicide attempt you can feel glad to be back in the land of the living. The world looks like a rosy place again. I didn’t feel this way. I felt utterly defeated. I don’t want to be here, and I don’t see any way out. I passed two people on the way down. The last thing I wanted was to talk with anyone.”
Guy came to rest where I was sitting in the chair at the table. He looked at me with pleading eyes.“In a few days I want to try again. But I don’t know if I can do it. I’m terrified of making that big step.”
I thought about standing up and giving him a hug, but kept feeling that kind of numbness I’d heard about when you cut off your foot with an ax. It lies there, detached from your leg.You just can’t take it in. I didn’t feel anger. I never thought of stopping him. I just jumped, as I always had, into wanting to help him do what he wanted to do. And deep, deep down, at the level of instinct, I felt the jolt a small animal feels in the desperate search to save its own life. “Guy,” I said, looking at his face, “if this is what you want, I have to be in a better position.”
He nodded.
Before going to bed, I wrote in my journal, “If he really feels this way we should plan for it. This is awful. Guy feels totally uninterested in life.”
The next morning, when Guy awakened me with a hug as he always did, I said,“I didn’t sleep well.”
“Neither did I.” We smiled at each other.
Something in me had shifted, lifted. What he had tried to do yesterday had pried things open. Not that I questioned his decision to take his own life. Guy seemed so sure of this. Only, since this was his plan, the next logical step was to make sure I would be all right after he was gone. My own future, one without Guy, was what had opened up.
We had breakfast with Mike, who got into a conversation with Guy about the senators he had known—Lyndon Johnson, Everett Dirksen, Robert Taft, and Jacob Javits. Guy talked, telling stories with his usual animated energy. On some level, I thought, he is enjoying this. Then he and Mike began speculating about what makes for great leadership. I kept thinking: To Mike this is like any other visit on a summer morning at Barra. It never crossed my mind to talk to Mike, who knew about Guy’s unnamed moods and was a doctor. Guy had come back. He had told me everything, and I had forgiven him without even thinking about it.
As I kneaded my bread, half-listening to Mike and Guy, I knew that Guy and I had started down a new road together. The renewed closeness I felt—and I sensed he felt it too—came from this complicity, though I saw it then as only a continuation of all our years of working side by side. This would be our last side-by-side walk, and at the end we would go our separate ways. On this road we would not meet any fellow travelers.
As soon as Mike left Guy strode over to his desk and picked up some folders stacked in the upper right-hand corner. He carried them over to the table.
“Did you see these yesterday, Laura?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“I was worried you might have found them before I got back.”
The top one contained notes he’d written to family members and friends, with a note to me asking if I would deliver them. He showed me the items that would help me to carry on, such as our schedule for the rest of the year and the finances. He left directions for wood collection that summer, noting which firewood stacks I needed to bring in and which areas in the woodlot I should take trees from next.
Then he said, “Look at this.” From his shirt pocket he pulled one card. It was his schedule for yesterday, July 3. I felt myself grow cold. Gone was the card on which he kept the list of birds seen and heard each day; gone was the grocery list card and the card for hardware and clothing purchases. The weather card was gone, as was the card for wood. Guy was down to one card. More than anything else, this let me know that he had not intended to come back.
He didn’t stop there. He showed me his shelf by the table where he kept items for reading: clippings friends sent us in the mail, magazines, anything that we set aside to read later. It was empty. I hadn’t noticed this. Not that I could have concluded anything from it; Guy could get caught up with this reading. But not often.
He showed me the three-by-five schedule card he made up at three-week intervals and posted on our bulletin board by the door. I frequently referred to this, just to remind myself when I was baking bread next or when our next visitors were due. It ended with July 3. But this also would have signaled nothing to me. Guy made up a new card and posted it on the last day of the old card, which he then took down. Still,Guy was showing me in every way he could that he wasn’t planning on carrying his life beyond July 3.
He showed me next the page in the three-ring notebook where he recorded our schedule for the year, penciling in events as they became firm. Across the top of the page containing May, June, and July Guy had written “final page.” The last entry in the July column was: “Fri. 3—G to mts.” Near the bottom of the page Guy had penciled in, in capital letters, “no more.”
It wasn’t likely I would see this. I rarely looked in these notebooks. Guy kept them over by his side of the table, and though he frequently pulled them out, I only needed the schedule cards that he posted for me.
“Why July 3, Guy?” I asked him.
“I didn’t want to leave before we’d planted the garden,” he replied. “I wanted to help you get a good start on wood.”
It was true; we’d had more wood days than usual this spring.“I thought then you’d have the rest of the summer to get set up for continuing on without me.”
I wrote in my journal for Saturday, July 4:“He’d really worked this out, as he always has attended to detail. But the world does not look rosy to him. He doesn’t want to go on. It was after Johnny died that these demons acted up again. Mentally, he’s never been very happy since April 1981. Though I don’t regret one day.”
That evening at supper on our porch, Guy talked about trying again later that week, on Wednesday or Thursday. I told him then that, if that was what he was set on, I wouldn’t stand in his way. But at the same time I couldn’t imagine him walking out the door just four days from now. He was back, and I was going to keep him here.
We sat close to each other on the bench at the porch table and looked out over our garden, at all we had built. I had fixed a salad supper, but our appetites were gone. We couldn’t eat, but we could hug each other and shed tears. Guy told me he loved me. He said he should have said this a long time ago.
“I know you love me, Guy,” I said. “But why didn’t you tell me what you wanted to do?”
“I thought you would try to keep me from doing it.”
“It would have been awful if you hadn’t come back.”
“You’re a survivor. You would have been all right.”
“I would have been furious at you.”
“You would have?” He looked surprised.
The next morning, Sunday, July 5, Guy was up at 4:15 a.m. His unvarying routine was to tramp up to the outhouse and, when he came back down, pull out his typewriter until it was time to start the woodstove for breakfast. I always slept through all of this, until I heard him lifting off the iron rimmers to build the fire in the stove, crumpling up paper, shifting wood around. Comforting sounds that eased me back to consciousness.
But this morning I was wide awake. I gazed out the window. The sky was filling with a pearly light. Twin Firs Camp stood nestled under the sheltering double evergreen for which it was named. Suddenly I saw what I needed to do.
I remembered that Guy had asked me several times during the last months if I saw myself continuing to live at Barra when he was gone. I knew he didn’t want to live to be old. He had often told me this. But what was “old”? To me old was very old.
“Do you want to move back to Lawrenceville?” Guy had asked.
“No.”
“Or New York?”
“Heavens, no.”
“How about the village?”
“I don’t know.”
We’d left it that I’d remain at Barra. We talked about how I could put in a road. Get local loggers to help me with the wood. I’d keep planting the garden.
Early that morning of July 5 I knew I couldn’t remain at Barra. I didn’t want to be there without Guy. Suddenly I could see myself in a house within walking distance of everything that was familiar: the post office, the general store, the library, the church, and our health center. I felt this surge of energy as I lay there on the bed. I would propose this to Guy. It would be his last big project, and we would work on it together.
I heard the wooden latch fall into place on the outhouse door and Guy’s steady stomp as he descended the steep log steps. I heard his boots crossing the porch. He opened the door and eased it shut.
I said, “Guy?”
He came into the bedroom that was filled with the soft gray light of dawn. He put a knee on the bed and leaned over me.
“I have an idea,” I said and began to talk. He lay down beside me, propped on his elbow, and listened.As the light turned golden we worked it out that together we would take the practical measures that would allow me to carry on by myself.
All that day we talked, and as had happened the day before, we ate little. We discussed the timing and manner of Guy’s ending. He concluded that going to the mountains in winter might be the easiest.
This winter?
I’d been planning a trip to Australia with my friend Carolyn Hanson for January 1999. I offered to forgo this. “If you leave this winter, Guy, I want to spend every day until then with you.”
“No, no. Go with Carolyn. I can put it off for a year.”
I knew that he would be here when I returned from Australia.
So it was settled. We had a year and a half left together. I felt elated with myself for my idea. Eighteen months seemed like another lifetime.
My journal for Sunday, July 5, read:“He wants to go. I am not fighting this. He has made it so clear this is what he wants. I am deeply grateful to him for hanging around to help me because of course he thinks of all the important steps, financially and otherwise. His mind breaks it all down systematically. . . . Now we have come to grips, and I think it will work out all right. I feel much better today. Guy rearranged our books to make more room for my published short stories. He is wonderful! We worked outside—garden, yard, flowers—all afternoon.”
For Monday, July 6, I wrote: “We are talking about the future—mine and G’s—and ours together for the present. When he leaves, I will be ready—in all ways. Meanwhile, we will try to keep him from difficult situations and too many trips away from Barra. We should have done this years ago, but as G says, he doesn’t like to be unsociable or rude.”
And on Tuesday, July 7:“It feels like a new life together—or it feels like we stepped back to how we were together years ago, but with all our past life’s experience to enrich this present. Worked in the garden (weeding), and G in the yard (scything, mowing, raking). We stop in our work to admire Barra’s beauty.”
Guy picked up his life again. He went back to making up the schedule cards he posted on the bulletin board near the door. He began keeping track of birds seen and heard, garden yield, blueberries picked, and all the rest. He carried his three-by-five cards in the left-hand pocket of his shirt, his glasses in the right.
In many ways those last eighteen months were happy months. We had visits from a few friends we hadn’t seen in years. We attended a reunion of Guy’s five siblings at his sister Bobbie’s house in Connecticut. These occasions, though often edged with sadness, gave Guy a chance to say good-bye—a one-way good-bye. Later, after he was gone, a friend pointed out that those months gave us both a chance to say good-bye to “Laura and Guy.”
Guy’s bad times seemed less oppressive, less frequent, perhaps because he knew he was so close to stepping across to the other side. When we were down to our last few weeks Guy’s spirits grew even brighter, as if he were anticipating a voyage. With the end in sight, his pain eased. At the time I didn’t see the irony.
We began talking to our friends about our plans: buying land, building a house closer to the village in anticipation of when Laura would be without Guy. For several years Guy had been outspoken that he was “going first.” But these plans raised questions. When would we (or just me?) move in? Would Guy stay at Barra? Guy was clear that this was my house. What would happen to Barra? In the mid-1990s we had begun talking with the Good Life Center, an organization that advocated sustainable living and ran Helen and Scott Nearing’s homestead in Maine, about taking over Barra when we were no longer living on the land. Barra fit into their plans. They wanted to keep on running it much as we had: as a working homestead. We told our friends of our decision to give Barra to the Good Life Center.
But what is the timing? our friends asked. Would we live in two places for a while? Guy always came back to saying that he wasn’t planning on living in the new house. It was Laura’s house.
As the months slid away we talked over whether to tell certain family members and close friends about Guy’s decision to take his own life. He decided not to. If he confided his plans, he said, he put friends and family in the position of talking him out of it, or at the very least urging him to seek medical help, which he wasn’t going to do. I offered no opposition. He was so dead set on this course that it never occurred to me to try to change his mind. Perhaps he was thinking about the time his parents had taken him to the appointment with the psychoanalyst and he’d been left there, locked in the psycho ward. Perhaps he was thinking about Johnny, whose mental difficulties led him to break with reality. “There’s a lot of me in Johnny, and a lot of Johnny in me,” Guy often said.
Guy did not want to cross the line Johnny had crossed, so he was not about to let himself drift anywhere near it. For me, right then, the main thing was that Guy was alive. We were still together. I knew his plan, but he was going to stick around long enough to make sure I’d be able to carry on without him. I couldn’t see any further into the future than that.
It was a strange bargain we struck. But in the context of our world—our life at Barra—it made sense. It grew out of how I’d been acting toward Guy, especially since Johnny’s death.
Guy had kept his suicide attempt a secret. But he had been unable to pull it off. He had returned, and he told me about it. Somehow the fact that he told me erased my anger.
If he was to pull this off, he needed my help, though this wasn’t something I reasoned out at the time. Just as, at the time, I didn’t conclude that he was unable to jump off Cannon Cliff because, well, he just couldn’t do that to me. Maybe I’m reaching here—maybe I’m just trying to comfort myself—but the fact remains that Guy couldn’t commit suicide that first time around. He did not have to reveal his secret. He could have come back and said nothing, then left a few days later, as he said he wanted to do. Or he didn’t have to come back.
But he did. The sinews of our life were too closely entwined to allow him not to come back and not to tell me. We were too much of a team. We had built Barra together. He couldn’t leave me, and leave everything that Barra had come to mean to both of us, without bidding a proper good-bye.