Honolulu, where most of the white men gathered, became a stage upon which posturing expatriates acted out their public passions and their private pain.
—GAVAN DAWS, SHOAL OF TIME: A HISTORY OF
THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS
After flying for nearly six hours, the Boeing 747 glided smoothly onto the runway and taxied to a stop at Honolulu International Airport. Leaning forward and glancing apprehensively from his window seat above the wing, Mark David Chapman reached beneath his feet and withdrew a small suitcase. The suitcase contained everything he had not sold or given away during the preceding year. Still dressed for a north Georgia winter, wearing a dark suit and tie, knee-length overcoat, and brimless hat, Chapman stepped off the plane and into a delicate tropical warmth that caused his skin to tingle.
Deeply inhaling gardenia-scented air, he bowed his head to receive a fragrant necklace of flowers. He smiled broadly as the traditional Hawaiian lei was draped around his neck by laughing, brown-skinned girls just like those pictured in the islands’ travel brochures. As he walked the short distance from the edge of the runway to the airport terminal, Chapman’s emotions began to overflow. He felt himself bursting with a distantly recalled love of life that he found exhilarating. He also found it unsettling. He had come to Hawaii with death on his mind—his own death.
Confronted even in the commercial bustle of the airport with the tropical splendor of the islands, he struggled against voices of self-loathing that had called to him at random moments, day and night, for more than a year. The voices had called from a blackness that steamed and hissed from a pit that had opened inexplicably inside his brain. As he struggled against them in the bright Honolulu sunshine, the voices grew urgent in their effort to recall him to his purpose.
“Captain Nemo,” he reminded himself. “Captain Nobody. Captain of Nothing. Captain Security Guard. Nowhere Man with a nobody job. Just turned twenty-two years old, and it’s over. Your life is over, buddy.”
Between the time he had finished high school in 1973 and entered Covenant College in 1976, Chapman had traveled to the Middle East as an international YMCA emissary and shaken the hands of two American presidents. He had been praised and decorated for his work with underprivileged children in Georgia and with refugees from the Vietnam War. He had survived a civil war that had erupted around him on the streets of Beirut, Lebanon.
He had been somebody. Suddenly, he was nobody. Mark David Chapman decided that being a nobody was worse than being dead. It was worse than spending the rest of his life in prison.
Neither prayer nor love had been able to assuage the pain of depression.
“I would call out to God and it felt like He wasn’t there,” he said.
When he had felt himself on the verge of disappearing in the dark clouds at college, his spirits had been mercurially lifted by the discovery of a map. The map, a chart of the Hawaiian island chain, had rekindled a childhood spirit of adventure.
“I remember that I started coming out of the worst of it one day when I was in the library. I found a map of Hawaii and made a copy. I kept it in my room, in my drawer. I’d pull it out and look at the islands, the Hawaiian Islands, every once in a while.
“The thought of these islands away from everything just seemed like paradise. I became obsessed with the urge to go there before I died.”
When he left Covenant and went back home to Decatur in the spring of 1976, he took the thumb-greased map of Hawaii and a few personal possessions. He clipped a color photograph of a jet airliner from a glossy travel brochure and glued it onto the steering wheel of his car.
Although he had fled college, Chapman had been unable to escape the chaos that was at the core of his disintegrating self. The gloom of depression and self-doubt had continued to settle in restless layers upon his mind. He finally had abandoned the frustrating search for an identity that he had begun to realize he could never have.
“I don’t think I was ever the same after that experience at Covenant. At Covenant, my whole insides caved in. I didn’t have any identity. I had splintered into atoms, into total nothingness.”
Beneath the blanket of his depression, Chapman had spent much of the year since leaving college in careful preparation for his final, dramatic exit. He had lingered hesitantly with Jessica and with his mentor and confidant, Dana Reeves. Reeves, his closest friend, who had helped him get a job as a security guard after leaving college, begged him not to go.
“Honolulu is going to turn out to be a Hono-boo-boo,” Dana had joked, half seriously. “I think it’s a mistake, old buddy.”
Chapman confided to no one, however, that he was planning to end his life after a transcendent “last fling in paradise.”
Death in a beautiful and elegant place seemed the only alternative to the razor-blade fear of walking through life without a personality that he could recognize, from one moment to the next, as his own.
He had spent many months making elaborate preparations and saving the money he would need for the first-class death he envisioned. He had decided that he could at least die with a semblance of the adventure and dignity with which he had hoped to live.
Chapman had come to Hawaii, he said, “like an elephant going to the dying grounds or something: a place of comfort. I wanted to go there.”
“I’m too sensitive for this world,” he had told himself. “I don’t understand. Nobody can help me understand. Nobody cares. Nobody. Nothing.”
It was with an unaccustomed exuberance that he approached the first day of the remainder of the brief life he had carefully laid out in Hawaii.
“We’re going to end it, but not quite yet,” he told himself as he walked from the Honolulu airport. “Soon. Perhaps in a week or two. Just not quite yet.”
Even before he had decided to kill himself, Chapman had envisioned this moment when he would step from a plane in Honolulu and ride an open-air bus through warm, fragrant air to the legendary Moana Hotel on Waikiki Beach. He had learned of the Moana from Hawaiian history and travel books he had sought out in libraries and in bookstores back home in Georgia. He had virtually memorized one of the comprehensive travel guides, Hawaii A to Z. Already, from his voracious readings, he was confident that he knew more about the islands than most people who had been born there or those who had lived there for many years.
During the long, stop-and-go ride through urban traffic from the airport to the hotel, entranced by the exotic surroundings, he didn’t bother to remove his jacket or to loosen his tie. Inhaling deeply, he drank in the scenery of the clean, shop-lined streets leading into the orderly heart of Honolulu. Striking up random conversations with other passengers on the bus, he began pointing out sites of interest to the newly arrived tourists. He spoke with the practiced familiarity of a seasoned Hawaiian tour guide. As the bus neared the Moana, he talked of the venerable and elegant inn as though he had visited it many times before.
When he at last stepped from the bus, Chapman stood in reverence before the celebrated oceanfront edifice to which Mark Twain, Robert Louis Steven son, and other writers, artists, and international dignitaries had paid tribute. Like Dorothy and her friends entering the gates of Oz, he stepped into the lobby.
Climbing low stairs of burnished stone, Chapman stepped through a wide breezeway into a timeless courtyard that framed a postcard image of beachfront, ocean, and sky. For the first time since the molten lead of depression had spilled and begun hardening around his brain, he didn’t want to die.
“The air was alive. The very atmosphere made me want to live. I walked into the elegant courtyard of the Moana, the white sand, the blue ocean, the gently waving palm trees. There, in the center of the courtyard, was the ancient, ornate banyan tree that Robert Louis Stevenson had sat under. He used to sit beneath that very tree, sipping a drink and writing his novels and short stories and letters.
“And there I was, a goofy kid from Georgia, standing there in a long coat with my mouth open and a suitcase dangling from my arm, totally spellbound at the magnificence. Standing in the very place that Robert Louis Stevenson had stood. I must have looked like Holden Caulfield.”
Chapman stepped beneath the gaily colored awning of an outdoor bar at the edge of the hotel courtyard. He gazed on an emerald ocean that whispered against a beach of fragantly oiled flesh. Motioning to a grass-skirted waitress, he set down his suitcase and ordered the native Hawaiian drink, a mai tai, from the open-air bar. Without removing the whimsical paper umbrella from the glass, he swallowed the potent nectar in a single gulp and ordered another as the liquor began pleasantly to cloud and color his rapidly racing brain.
“What a place to live,” he thought. “What a place to die.”
For nearly a week, until his money began to run out, Chapman basked in the luxury of the Moana. He began to feel it was where he had always belonged. He imagined that his room, number 624, was his private residence, a beachfront sanctuary with magnificent coastline views from two windows on the top floor of the hotel. During the day, he alternately sunbathed and strolled Waikiki Beach or stretched out on the bed in the room, ordering drinks from room service and gazing dreamily in the direction of Diamond Head. The distinctive, cratered mountain of volcanic ash rose like living history in the near distance, just outside his window. He thought about getting a job that would pay him just enough money so he could live at the elegant hotel for the rest of his life.
“For the first five days in Hawaii, I felt just like Holden Caulfield. I just did lots of drinking, partying, boat cruises, and went on a ’round-the-island tour. I met this couple and we went up to this restaurant and I got drunk as hell. The guy made me dance with this girl from Canada and it was a big fun time and I thought, ‘Great, it’s just going perfect, you know. I’m living all the happiness at once here.’ It’s just like I wanted to have: one big shebang before committing suicide, and it was going fine.”
After five days, Chapman’s reservation in paradise expired. The taste of the unaccustomed good life pungent on his tongue, he didn’t feel quite ready to die. Becalmed by the elegance of his rented surroundings, he started thinking again about the relative pain of life and the anticipated solace of death.
From the expensive luxury hotel, he moved to a small, cheap room at the YMCA in downtown Honolulu. In a tangled mood of tranquility, remorse, and loneliness, he impulsively decided to call his former fiancée.
The startled girl answered the phone and listened as the familiar and persuasive voice explained to her why he had come to Hawaii—to end his life. Jessica said later that she was no longer in love with Mark Chapman, but she was frightened for him. As she listened to him speak, she began to feel guilty, responsible for the life of a friend who had made her feel that she had let him down. Jessica also grew frightened for herself. She realized with a chill that she had come dangerously close to marrying her unstable and pathetic childhood classmate out of a strange mixture of admiration, Christian duty, and pity.
“I came out here to kill myself,” Chapman told Jessica. She listened in silence to the pain in the voice at the other end of the phone.
“But it’s so beautiful here, Jessica. It’s truly paradise,” he explained to her. “It’s made me want to live. I’ve gotten over that awful stuff I went through back at college. I’ve grown up. I’ve found myself, and I need you. You’re the only one, Jessica. There’s no one else in this world for me.”
“Oh, Mark, please,” the girl implored him. “Please come home. Just please come home. I …”
“I’ve found myself at last, Jessica,” he said, interrupting her as she spoke. “Pray for me, Jessica. I need you. I hope that you can forgive me. Don’t cry. I’m coming home. I came out here to Hawaii to kill myself, but I want to come back to you, Jessica. I want everything the way it was before. Just tell me it’s okay. Tell me you can still love me and I’ll come home.”
“Oh, Mark,” the girl sobbed. “Oh, Mark, it’s okay. Just come home.”
Jessica Blankenship explained later that she had believed her former fiancé would again become despondent if she rejected his entreaties over the phone. She said she believed that he would be better off if he came back home to Decatur, where they could talk in person and in familiar surroundings about their friendship—and about their separate futures. Jessica had never intended to resume their engagement. She just didn’t want to be responsible for the death of a former friend who had told her that he was suicidal. She had lied to a friend to save his life.
“I was crushed, you know,” Chapman says, recalling the disappointment on his arrival at Jessica’s doorstep. “I was hurt deeply, but I still managed to get over that and get over the next two weeks where I lived with my parents. For a while I stayed at the Sheraton Hotel in Atlanta after I got into arguments with my mom, my dad, and my sister. My sister told me, ‘Go to hell’ and my dad said, ‘Fuck you.’
“But I made it through all that and I called up Jessica and said, ‘Let’s just be friends.’
“I went back there to Georgia hoping it could all be like it was before. Of course, nothing is ever like it was before. So I decided that I was going to return to Hawaii, not to kill myself this time, but to get a job and make a new life for myself. I dreamed of getting a job at the Moana and living there for the rest of my life.
“The night before I left, I asked Jessica to go to a movie with me. We saw Casablanca. It seemed appropriate somehow.
“After the movie, we sat for a long time in the car in front of her house and I told her I was going back to Hawaii. She started crying and we said good-bye.”
Several days after saying good-bye to Jessica, Chapman spent the rest of the $1,200 he’d saved up for his “last fling.” He bought his third one-way plane ticket between Georgia and Hawaii.
Mark Chapman was manic with anticipation in the moments before he landed for the second time in Honolulu. As soon as he stepped from the plane into the humid air, he knew it wasn’t going to be the same.
His body quivered with a spasm of dread. He realized he had come back to a place where it would be even more difficult to escape a confrontation with the void that, he sensed, lay at the center of himself.
When the money runs out, the islands of paradise pose a torpid dilemma, a lesson that countless wanderers and mainland expatriates before Mark David Chapman had learned. The main island of Oahu can be traveled easily by car in a single afternoon. An exciting playground for short-term vacationers with plenty of money, Hawaii can be a difficult place to live 365 days a year.
As Chapman had found on his first trip, the rainbowed islands trigger a spontaneous joy of life among vacationing tourists from more dismal climates. But those who, like him, try to go back to Shangri-la—those who linger too long without money, purpose, or friends among the glittering beaches and bars—find the attractions fleeting and illusory. Stranded on a small island surrounded by endless ocean, the long-term tourist is finally forced to turn inward for escape.
First discovered by pirates and merchant seamen who ravished its women and plundered its natural treasures, Hawaii later fell victim to fatal diseases imported unintentionally by Puritan religious zealots from New England. The missionaries, who invaded Hawaii to erect a Protestant “Holy Community,” left a deep evangelical tradition that has for the most part endured. The city of Honolulu and surrounding suburban communities are studded with churches of virtually every faith and denomination, from traditional old-time gospel meeting houses to soaring New Age temples.
In addition to its exotic array of churches, the city’s phone directory carries extensive listings of mental-health counselors and public and private mental-health agencies. A smorgasbord of therapies is available to those unable to find, either within themselves or the larger spiritual community, the inner peace and self-assurance required to live contentedly in paradise. Even though he had come to Hawaii to commit suicide, Mark David Chapman would cling to ministers and mental-health professionals alike in the struggle to survive.
It was the end of May 1977 when he had returned to Hawaii after failing to repair his relationship with his former fiancée. In desperate financial straits within days of his return, he took a series of temporary, low-paying jobs. He worked with Filipino migrants peeling rotten potatoes at a snack-food factory on the outskirts of Honolulu. On many days, especially the day after payday, he didn’t bother showing up for work.
When he had money, he stayed in a cheap room at the Honolulu YMCA. When he didn’t have money, he lived on the streets. Often down to his last dime, existing on beer and cookies, Chapman began spending his nights at a phone booth on the sidewalk in front of the Moana Hotel. He gazed with envy upon the wealthy, famous, and fashionably dressed tourists who patronized the sumptuous hotel. Unlike him, they never seemed to have to worry about how much money they spent. Eyeing the tourists, he dreamed of luxuries he had enjoyed there just a short time before. When the sun went down on the island, he continued to linger past dark before the hotel. He would stand at the pay phone and talk, sometimes until sunrise, to a woman with a friendly voice at the other end of the city’s suicide hotline.
Returning to work one morning after a night of drinking and talking to the anonymous counselor, Chapman saw that a pigeon had flown through an open window and become trapped in the cavernous food processing plant. It flapped in confusion and futility above large vats of boiling oil. His migrant coworkers put aside their peeling knives. In sport, they began hurling rotted potatoes.
“I prayed fervently for the pigeon to get away. I started to cry and I yelled for them to stop trying to hurt it.”
The trapped bird crashed from window to window. After an overripe potato splattered sickeningly against its target, the bird fluttered in dazed exhaustion to the floor. A laughing man seized the mass of flapping feathers and held the bird ceremoniously over his head in one hand. A moment later, the small, cruel drama ended when the man pressed the bird against a wooden block and drew a knife across its head. As the factory worker burst into laughter and applause, the man dropped the severed head and a mass of bloodied feathers into a cauldron of bubbling oil.
Fleeing the warehouse, Chapman spent the next several days drinking. At night, he talked longer and more urgently on the suicide hotline to the faceless woman who had come to know him by name.
“It just seemed like, with all the pain I had inside me anyway, what was the point? What was the point of living in a world where people do things like that to innocent animals? It made me think about when I was a kid, maybe ten years old. My father was a scout leader and he took me to summer camp.
“The first day I was there, I went for a hike and found a turtle. It was really a beautiful turtle, with colorful designs on its shell. I was real proud of it so I took it back to camp and showed it to the other kids. They took it from me and threw it in the campfire.”
Several days after abandoning his job at the food factory, Chapman decided that he’d waited long enough. He reminded himself why he’d come to Hawaii in the first place.
Less than two months after first stepping from the plane at the Honolulu airport, Mark David Chapman found himself again mired in hopelessness and despair. He began making final preparations to succumb to the dark voices he had been unable to silence.
“I wasn’t frightened when I made the decision. I wasn’t angry or upset. I felt strangely at peace about everything. My mind felt very clear again.”
With the little money he had left, he rented a compact car. On his way to the North Shore of the island, he stopped for a leisurely last meal, paid for with bonus vouchers included in the rental price of the car. After dining on steak and beer, he visited a shopping mall where he bought a length of vacuum cleaner hose. Returning to the car, he drove slowly to a deserted stretch of beach. In an isolated parking lot beneath low-hanging trees, he got out of the car and removed the hose from its plastic bag. Opening the rear hatch of the car, he draped one end of the hose across the backseat. He jammed the other end snugly into the car’s exhaust pipe. After sealing the edges of the rear hatch with rags and bits of clothing, he lingered outside. He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs and nostrils with fresh, salted air that wafted from an impassive sea. He gazed for a long, pensive moment at the watercolor scene that stretched before him, of fishermen rhythmically casting lines into foaming surf up and down an endless beach.
Finally ready to die, he got into the car and rolled each of the windows tightly shut. He switched on the ignition. Within moments, Chapman began to inhale the dusty odor of exhaust fumes and deadly carbon monoxide. He leaned his head against the back of the seat and closed his eyes. He thought of the pigeon in the warehouse as he waited for death.
Mark David Chapman awoke to a birdlike pecking against the car window. He twisted his head, opened his eyes, and peered through a vaporous mist. An elderly Japanese man with a fishing pole smiled back at him.
“Just want to see if you are all right,” the fisherman said apologetically, as Chapman cranked down the window. He was groggy and he wondered briefly if he had died—if it was his spirit stepping out of the car and back into the world that he had wanted to escape. He turned around to look back into the car, to see if he had somehow stepped out of his body.
As the fisherman ambled away in the direction of the beach, Chapman walked to the rear of the car. Below the exhaust pipe he found a pool of molten plastic. With amazement and relief, he took the melted hose into his hand. He prayed.
Chapman prayed earnestly and deeply. He thanked God for giving him a sign at last—a sign that he was supposed to live. In spite of the pain, he decided after a single failed suicide attempt that he was going to live. He had known all along that, no matter what he might ever try to do, he couldn’t cause it to happen unless it was God’s will. No matter how foolish or violent his ideas might sometimes seem, he believed God would prevent him from carrying out any act except those he was destined to carry out.
As he stood with the burned hose in his hand, Chapman realized that he had been foolish and selfish to think in the first place that his life had been his to end. From that day forward, Chapman knew that God would talk to him. Even when he was depressed or angry and unable to see the signs, he knew that God would show the direction for his life. He looked around for the fisherman. The Japanese man had disappeared. Chapman smiled a knowing smile. The man with the fishing pole, he knew in his heart, had been a messenger sent by God to save him.
“Angel,” he said to himself. “Thank you, God, for sending one of your angels to save me from the small part of myself.”
Seized by the fear of what he had almost done in his depression and confusion, Chapman also understood something more fundamental, something that he had known all along: More than anything, he needed the attention of other humans.
“Maybe now,” he said to himself, “somebody will pay attention.”
He disassembled his defective suicide machine as hastily as he had put it together and drove himself back across the island to Honolulu. From the car rental office, he walked about three miles to a mental-health clinic near Waikiki Beach. He had been advised by the suicide counselor to visit the clinic a week or so before. They had given him pills that he had thrown away. Finding no one on duty in the evening hours, he walked another several blocks to the familiar façade of the Moana. Still clutching the burned vacuum hose, Mark David Chapman resumed his accustomed, lonely vigil outside the hotel.
Early the next morning, Chapman retraced his steps to the mental-health center. Cautiously, he approached a well-dressed woman, a staff psychologist who had arrived at the clinic early to open her office. He showed the psychologist, Judy Herzog, the melted hose. He told her of his suicide attempt. He described an escape from death that he believed to have been miraculous.
The psychologist invited him to her office where she listened again to his story, examined the hose, and picked up the phone.
“We’ve got to get you some help,” she said.
On the morning after Chapman’s suicide attempt, the psychiatric beds at downtown Honolulu hospitals all were occupied by other tormented souls likewise struggling with the dark side of paradise. It wasn’t until late in the morning that the psychologist found a place for him. She drove him several miles, across a volcanic mountain that rises in the middle of the island, to a recently opened, eight-bed mental-health ward in the suburb of Kailua. Several hours later, he was admitted to Castle Memorial Hospital, an infirmary operated by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.
After a brief admission interview, Chapman was diagnosed with acute depressive illness, a malady familiar to Hawaii’s mental-health professionals and to natives who dismiss it as “island fever” in its milder forms.
Exhausted from the emotional ordeal of the previous month, Chapman remembers that he slept through much of his first three days at the hospital. He was confined to a doorless room under round-the-clock supervision.
“I slept very deeply, and when I finally woke up I began eating enormous quantities of food. They had me on a full suicide watch, twenty-four hours a day. Even when I took a shower, there was someone there watching me.”
According to medical records, Chapman was admitted on June 21, 1977, with a diagnosis of “depressive reaction, depressive neurosis, severe” after “a very serious suicidal attempt.”
In his notes, the late Dr. Ram Gursahani wrote that Chapman had been counseled about two weeks earlier at an outpatient clinic in Honolulu and given an antidepressant, Elavil, that he had thrown away. Dr. Gursahani made a note that Chapman was “inherently suicidal.” In layman’s terms, the psychiatrist confided to another therapist, “I wouldn’t bet a nickel on this guy.” On June 22, two days after the suicide attempt, Chapman told the psychiatrist, “I just want to kill myself. I’m tired of fighting.” He added that his “mom and dad used to fight all the time and he would hit her until I got big enough to get in the way.” He asked the hospital staff not to contact his parents. While he was being treated at the hospital, the therapists noted on his chart that he “contacts mother fairly regularly by mail. Not close to father or sister.”
When the psychiatrist asked him how he felt, Chapman answered with a dramatic metaphor of violence.
“I think of myself as a boxer in the twenty-seventh round with my face all bloody, my teeth knocked out and my body all bruised,” he said.
The doctor noted that the suicidal young man from Georgia “actually looked tired as he expressed these feelings” but “did not want to explore who or what he was fighting.”
In contrast to Chapman’s suicidal depression, however, the doctor noted that “patient appears neat, cooperative, open and alert.”
Although Chapman did “not appear to be psychotic” after the suicide attempt, his doctor observed that he was “extremely depressed and states that he does not see any purpose in living and wants to die.”
After less than a week in the hospital, Chapman’s depression seemed to have all but evaporated. On June 27, Dr. Gursahani noted that the “patient went with one of the staff members to Honolulu and talked to state employment officer. He does not appear to be depressed much. In fact, at times he smiles and even laughs. He will have a pass again tomorrow to meet welfare, etc.” The psychiatric nurses who looked in on Chapman would observe him reading late into the night.
Less than a week after his admission, Chapman was reported to be initiating conversations with therapists and other patients. He also was playing guitar and singing to the hospital staff and to elderly nursing-home patients. He thanked his caretakers profusely for taking a personal interest in his life.
Two weeks after his admission to the hospital for treatment of suicidal depression, Mark David Chapman had become a different person, “discussing the realities of life like work, living, money, etc.,” the psychiatrist noted. “Appears cheerful. Has found a place to live close to the hospital. At this point he feels quite optimistic.”
Chapman talked excitedly to his caretakers about the future and about the many career opportunities that he believed he had the talent and intelligence to pursue. He told the doctor that he didn’t like the idea of being on welfare and said he wanted to become responsible for himself as soon as possible after being discharged.
On July 4, 1977, Chapman went to Kailua Beach with a group of patients and therapists to picnic, swim, and watch a fireworks display. Dr. Gursahani made his final entry in Chapman’s record: “Patient’s depression has lifted. He is now concentrating on finding a job. Will be discharged tomorrow.”
Dr. Gursahani arranged a job for Chapman at a gas station near the hospital. The doctor later supported a decision to hire the former mental patient for jobs in the maintenance and public-relations departments at Castle.
In several of his notes, however, Dr. Gursahani expressed concerns about sexual and other unspecified “fantasies” Chapman had reported. Before he was discharged, the patient was interviewed by an unidentified therapist who made a brief report on one of his more curious fantasies of “wanting to be in prison.” If he were in prison, Chapman told the therapist, “he could rest and read. Pointed out that his day was spent [at the hospital] in that exact way.”
“He was an attractive and a pleasant young man and most of the hospital staff liked him,” Castle psychiatrist Dr. Denis Mee-Lee later recalled. “He tried hard to give a good impression, to please, and to be helpful. But his approach to getting along with people was to be ‘too nice.’ I felt it covered up a lot of anger.”
Thanks to the care and the personal attention he received at Castle Memorial Hospital, Chapman bounced quickly and enthusiastically back to life after the suicide attempt. His doctors and therapists said they were astonished by an apparently remarkable recovery. Still feeling that he needed the support of those who had healed him, Chapman returned to the hospital within days of his discharge to work as a volunteer. About a month later, he joined the Castle staff, filling a vacancy in the housekeeping and maintenance department. Working at the hospital made him feel accepted at last in the lonely islands.
After being delivered from suicide and having undergone a psychiatric rebirth, Chapman found himself in a spiritual crossfire between reawakened, self-effacing religious instincts and the lure of a world in which he still needed “to be somebody.”
He found himself trying to be all things to all the people he met in a frenzied effort to be anything at all to himself. Exhibiting a remarkable talent and desire to learn about himself, Chapman began to parrot the psychiatric jargon of his caretakers. Some therapists were concerned when he began counseling other patients. He explained that he was just applying the same “reality therapy” on other patients that had worked so effectively with him. In one instance, the therapists asked him to meet with a young man who had come to Hawaii, like him, for a “last fling in paradise” and had then tried to kill himself in a hotel room.
He started teaching himself Japanese so that he could communicate with the hospital’s numerous elderly Asian patients. The therapists at Castle tell a story of one aged nursing-home resident who hadn’t spoken to anyone for several years. Chapman visited the woman regularly for several weeks. In a faint, creaking voice, the woman began talking to him.
Within weeks of his rapid recovery from suicidal depression, Chapman found himself accepted into the social circles of his caretakers.