KAREN LYNCH
When I was seven, my mother taught me how to kill myself. She said you must hold the gun firmly to your temple and squeeze the trigger without hesitation. Don’t be a wimp about it. The bullet will pierce the soft flesh of your temple, travel through the occipital lobe, and take out the executive suite of your brain. Maybe she didn’t say “executive suite,” but her words made me picture a Wall Street financier doing the deed in his private office bathroom. Mom said those who failed to follow these simple instructions risked leaving themselves alive and hideously deformed. “Hideously,” she emphasized.
Mom shared other useful insights she had acquired along the way, such as her certainty that she could perform a competent emergency tracheotomy using just a steak knife, should we be dining out and I ever begin choking. Though Mom had spent a great deal of time in psychiatric hospitals, I probably don’t need to say here that Mom had no formal medical training. She was an autodidactic physician. I hate to sound like one of those “I blame my parents for everything” people, but her offer to perform surgery is the probable source of my neurotic phobia of steak knives, restaurants, and meat.
We never owned firearms during my childhood, which was a good thing given Mom’s history; nonetheless, the vivid picture of my self-inflicted head shot made cameo appearances as I grew older. I had never touched a firearm until I became a police recruit, nor had I ever seen one in the hands of any of the hippie tribe who raised me, but Mom was so detailed in her instructions, at times it seemed she hoped I might somehow acquire a revolver and do myself in.
Mom’s Thorazine came in a jumbo bottle, similar in size to a Costco bottle of Ibuprofen that might last an average family ten years. When she took the medication, our life was calm and relatively predictable. I would take the bus to school, then return home to find Mom where I’d left her, harmlessly perched in bed, reading historical novels and smoking cartons of Marlboro Lights. I loved the periods in our life when she took her meds, small lozenges of tranquility that kept the dreaded manic episodes at bay. But as inevitable as the changing of the seasons, Mom would stop taking her Thorazine, saying she hated the side effects of lethargy and weight gain. I pretended everything would miraculously be okay, convincing myself that she no longer needed the medication.
However, within a few weeks off Thorazine, Mom’s mania would return, the upside to her being bipolar, and then all bets were off. Mom might then lock herself in the bathroom, hollering that she was slashing her wrists. There was never any actual slashing; no blood, or razors to be found. Her screaming was only a gesture designed to manipulate me into calling her ex-boyfriend to save her. Reliably, I would call him, playing my part in Mom’s script, and Jim would arrive stage left—the Colt 45, Pall Mall-smoking white knight in a Chevy pickup. Mom had achieved her desired reaction, never intending to voluntarily remove herself from the planet. Like those who test positive for a disease, never showing any symptoms, Mom was a suicide carrier, not a victim.
When the time finally comes, I will disregard Mom’s vivid instructions. Having no access to a firearm, and no desire to make myself hideously ugly in the event of failure, I will choose the most obvious and convenient of escape routes.
Maybe my future struggles with depression were inevitable from the beginning. If I were a standup comedienne, I’d open with, “I was committed to a mental hospital before I was born” . . . badaboom. But it’s a fact. I was committed to Agnew’s State Hospital for the Mentally Ill, along with Mom, several months before I was born.
By fifteen, I had endured many episodes of Mom’s hospitalizations, followed by my abandonment or internment in a children’s home. I was physically and mentally spent, overwhelmed at the prospect of dealing with yet another “nervous breakdown.” With each of Mom’s hospitalizations, my existence seemed more tenuous. I became dependent on the kindness of strangers and learned from past experience that some strangers were less than kind. The anxiety of what might become of me lurked in the dusty corners of my bedroom, taking on various shapes: the pimp, the rapist, the slave master.
One evening when Mom was still lucid, she took me to see the movie The Exorcist. Though the family in the movie, a single mother and her adolescent daughter, mirrored our family down to the similarity in family surname, Mc/MacNeil, I didn’t foresee the impact the movie would have on her. Within days, Mom was convinced I was possessed by the devil. She choked me, exorcising me, screaming for Satan to leave my body. Though I managed to push her off me and escape, I stupidly returned to our apartment shortly after with the intention of gathering my clothes and leaving for good.
And this is how it happens.
I find Mom collapsed on the couch, smoking and watching television. She is exhausted from the exertion of the exorcism earlier in the day.
I cannot see what is ahead for us. I cannot see how close I am to freedom. I only know I cannot leave her like this. I am all she has, and as much as I hate to admit it, she is all I have. I cannot see it in this moment, as I measure Mom’s mood from the doorway, but in seventy-two hours the police will arrest Mom at Aquatic Park for assaulting a woman picnicking on the grass. She will be sent to Napa State Psychiatric Hospital, and I will finally be free of her. I cannot see that Mom’s boyfriend, Jim, ever the rescuer, will provide me a safe haven to finish school, or that I will receive scholarship money to attend UC Berkeley. I cannot see the husband who will one day love me, the career that will give me a sense of belonging and family, the birth of my sons, the adoption of my daughter.
I can only see another chaotic nightmare with Mom, and I decide this is the end of the road for me. This is where I get off the Mom rollercoaster.
It’s June 2, 1974. I lock the door to the bathroom and pull the jumbo bottle of Thorazine from the medicine cabinet. I pour a handful of tablets, round and orange, into my hand. “Skf T79” is printed in black on each one. I am not thinking, This is the end of my life. I am thinking, I am done with you, Mom. I examine the print, wondering what Skf means, not really caring. I like these pills. They are bringers of peace, that much I know. When Mom takes them, life is tolerable for everyone around her. I think, If she won’t take them, I will. I gobble the tablets without further examination, sucking water from the tap to wash them down. I repeat the process with another handful. I don’t finish the bottle. Two handfuls should do the trick.
I unlock the bathroom door and sit down beside Mom.
In that moment, if I’d had the ability to see myself separate from her, I might have acknowledged it wasn’t me I wanted dead, it was my mother. But at the age of fifteen, that thought was too shameful to admit. “Honor your mother and father.” Though not religious, I knew that wishing your parent dead was a sin. I sit beside my victim and die by proxy. Or try to die.
A few minutes pass before panic takes over. Just hours earlier, I was fighting my mother for my life, and now I’m killing myself? I didn’t want to die!
“Mom, I just took a lot of your Thorazine.” Now I was putting my life in her hands, letting her choose for me. Maybe I wanted some validation that she hadn’t really wanted me dead earlier, that she had not known who I was or what she was doing.
“Why the hell did you do that!?” Mom was instantly lucid, as if the last few days of manic behavior had never happened. She picked up the phone and called for an ambulance, then ran to the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of French’s mustard and mixed it in a glass with hot water.
“Here, drink this,” she ordered. I drank it. It tasted horrid, but not bad enough to make me vomit, the intended effect.
Within minutes, two cops arrived at the door.
“What seems to be the problem?” the younger one asked.
“I took a bunch of my Mom’s Thorazine.” The cops rolled their eyes at each other. Maybe I was the hundredth suicidal teenager they had met that day.
“We just needed an ambulance, not the police,” I said.
“You’re fine to go in a car, you don’t need an ambulance,” the cop replied.
“We don’t have a car, and we can’t drive,” I said.
“You can take a cab,” he said. He did call us a cab. I’ll give him that.
When the taxi dropped us at the Emergency Room, the admitting nurse asked me questions about the number of pills I had taken and how much time had passed since ingestion. I had reported on myself early enough that stomach pumping would not be required. Instead, the doctor gave me Ipecac. I guzzled the bottle, then vomited into a paper bag during the whole taxi ride home.
It took two days for the Thorazine to get out of my system. The first day I was paralyzed, unable to move from my bed. I now viscerally understood the lethargy Mom had complained of. While I lay glued to the bed, I could hear Mom return to her manic state in the other room, screaming at demons, telling me I had better come help her or she would slash her wrists. I was supposed to come save her, but I couldn’t move.
I survived that night, and I survived Mom. When I came home from school two afternoons later, Mom was gone, arrested at Aquatic Park. Jim came to my rescue again and acted as my guardian, saving me from the monsters that prey upon vulnerable girls.
Mostly, I thought I was fine once I escaped Mom. I made it my personal challenge to live a good life, to be happy in spite of my chaotic childhood. I believed I had overcome my past, and though I had a few garden-variety neuroses, after a few years of therapy, I assumed I was as happy as the next person.
I had been working as a cop for more than ten years and had found myself in countless intense situations. I was often required to make split-second decisions: shoot, don’t shoot, use my baton, not my pepper spray. I had never frozen or freaked out. I had consistently made good choices. Then in the winter of my thirty-seventh year, the darkness caught up to me without warning. We were driving home from a snow trip; my husband, Greg, in the passenger’s seat; our two sons—five and two—strapped in their car seats behind us. I had the wheel. As the snow began brushing the windshield and the visibility decreased, I panicked, suddenly acutely aware that I was steering two tons of metal down a freeway at 50 miles an hour with my husband and children in the car. I could not drive a moment longer, and I did not know what to do next. Here on this freeway, I was as paralyzed as I had been after the Thorazine ingestion. Greg coached me to the shoulder of the road and took the wheel.
My physician diagnosed me with anxiety disorder and prescribed Zoloft, which is also prescribed to treat depression. She warned me not to mention to my coworkers that I was taking the medication because of the stigma associated with it. My lifelong goal had been to live the opposite life of my mother’s, and I had failed. I was now also a mental patient. The difference was, I agreed to take the medication.
Within a few weeks, my anxiety symptoms disappeared, and I noticed something else was missing. Though I hadn’t been aware of it until the medication kicked in, for years I had been host to an internal voice on repeat play that would say, Just kill yourself . . . just kill yourself. It was a chant that started after any argument with my husband, or anytime I felt badly about work, or really maybe it had been there most of the time. How had I not noticed it before? It had been mildly annoying background music, but now, with its absence, I felt infinitely lighter. Maybe it had been playing since Mom’s first description of suicide. Yet I never would have described myself as depressed. I suppose, had I even noticed it, I would have assumed all people walked around with voices telling them to kill themselves.
The happy ending to this story would be that I went on Zoloft, it cured my anxiety and depression, and my life has been great ever since. That would be the happy story, but not an entirely true story. The fact is, depression is a lifelong challenge. Oh, let’s face it—life is a life-long challenge. Zoloft worked for me for at least twelve years. Then, at fifty, I was hit with breast cancer and its subsequent trifecta treatment: surgery, chemo, and radiation. My cancer was early stage and I went through the treatment like a trooper, few complaints, happy to be alive, but when the circus of treatment was over, the daily rides into the city for radiation completed, the cards and attention from friends over, I was left in an abyss so dark and black that Zoloft was no longer enough.
And this is how it happens.
For the first time since the Thorazine episode, I seriously consider suicide. I feel that since death is inevitable, I might as well choose how and when to go on my own terms. I become obsessed with knowing if the cancer will return. I plan various ways of ending my life. My witty, if heartless, suicide note will read, “I couldn’t stand the suspense.”
The thought I keep coming back to is, how can we be expected to love life, be involved in it, engaged, and simultaneously accept the inevitability of our eventual death? I feel that God, if there is one, must be sadistic. I cannot climb off this thought cycle. I want to love life again. I know I am supposed to appreciate my life, but I cannot because it feels so pointless to love something that will eventually be taken away from me.
During this time, the impact on my family seems negligible. I cannot foresee my son graduating from college and getting his first job in New York City, or my younger son graduating high school, or my daughter winning gymnastics ribbons. I cannot see the beautiful places I will visit and people I will meet. I can see none of the dozens of joyful events that I am opting out of in this moment.
But this time, I recognize the black dog for what he is.
Unlike that day in 1974, I do not act on my thoughts. This time I ask a doctor for help and am prescribed a new medication. Within a few days of taking it, I magically feel the way I imagine happy people must feel. I even try to consciously return to my depressive state, just to see if I can make myself obsess over death and darkness, but I can no longer go there. The switch has been turned off and I cannot go back to that place as long as I take this combination of medication.
My current chemical stew may still need tweaking over the years. Nothing works forever. Like Huey Lewis, I feel like I’m always saying, “I want a new drug.” But unlike my mother’s Thorazine, there are medications available now that work without turning the patient into a zombie. I now accept, without doubt, that depression is purely a result of the chemicals swimming in our brains, and we can choose those chemicals.