I’d thought about suicide before.
In fact, I thought about it a lot in the couple of years leading up to when I decided to end my life. I even researched on the internet all the ways I could do it.
The year before I succeeded, I tried by taking an overdose of a medication called Provigil, but I wasn’t successful. I think I must have died for a little bit then, though, because I saw my deceased aunt, Denise, who’d taken her own life, and my friend Ally, who’d died from an accidental gunshot wound just after our high school graduation. They were sitting on either side of me, holding my hands. Their presence gave me comfort. It also gave me the sense that I was in a different place, better than the one I was in at the time, and I remember it feeling so good. I knew I wanted to go back there.
The day after my first suicide attempt, Pappa and I were standing by his truck. He asked me why I wanted to die. After all, the sky was blue and beautiful that day and everything seemed calm. Nice. Happy. I told him that I just wished I wasn’t here anymore. It was difficult to explain, and I know that that reason couldn’t even begin to express how I was feeling or why I wanted to die, but it was as close as I could get. Eventually, I’d get my wish.
On the last day of my life, things started out like any other day for me—a ride on a roller coaster. Ever heard that expression “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up?” Well, mine only went down. Or, more accurately, my ups never lasted long enough and my downs felt like they’d go on forever. When I woke up that morning, I remember thinking, “Damn, another day,” but once I got out of bed, I felt this strange peace and calm. It was fleeting, though, because those familiar periods of inner darkness soon took over and sent me into a tailspin.
It wasn’t like I’d planned, “This is going to be the day. This is going to be the moment.” I didn’t wake up that morning and say, “Today is the day I’m going to die.” It was more of a combination of circumstances and triggers that led me to make the decision I made. That morning, my parents had found out that I’d pawned some of their stuff to buy this awesome hunting rifle. It even had a scope. I just wanted something exciting and new to make me feel better. They were so disappointed in me, and I was tired of making them feel like that all the time. To be clear, this wasn’t the gun I used to end my life; this was just another object in a long line of new toys and experiences I chased after to try and fill the hole that my disease (bipolar disorder; I’ll talk about that more later) was carving away in me.
I’d bought a pistol a couple of months before because I wanted to go to the range for target practice with my friend Valentin. During those months, I thought about the gun quite a bit. I knew it was there, hidden away in my room, and the thought of it was almost a comfort. It was right after my parents fussed at me that I made up my mind to kill myself again, but this time with the pistol. I knew that shooting myself would guarantee my death while the overdose of pills didn’t. When my mom, my sisters, and my aunt Teri were about to leave for lunch—a lunch they would never have, as it turned out—I got up from the sofa in the living room and walked upstairs to go to my bedroom. They asked me if I wanted to go with them, but I told them no because I didn’t want my sudden determination broken. I wanted to end the pain forever, and I was sure that this time I’d be successful. I felt a sense of resolution. Like surrender, but not in a bad way.
Once I was in my room, I started to pace. I think well when I walk. So I paced back and forth for a while and then sat at my desk, contemplating. Aunt Teri walked down the hallway from the guest room and stopped in front of my open door. She asked me if I wanted to come, but I told her I just wanted to chill for a while. I could feel her hesitation. I knew she wanted to convince me to change my mind, but I guess my blank stare was a sign that I wanted to be left alone. Then, Maria, our housekeeper came in to make my bed. I totally tuned her out, and I must have given her the impression that I wanted to be alone because she finished quickly and hurried out of the room. After she left, I started to think about the clothes I was wearing and how uncomfortable I felt in them. My clothes felt like a second layer of skin that I wanted to shed. I guess my actual skin felt that way too. Everything felt too close and too much.
Once Maria had left, that strange sense of peace I’d woken up with suddenly came over me again, and that peace expanded and expanded until I felt much larger than life. It was a really enticing feeling. I wanted to be consumed by it.
Along with that peaceful feeling, I remember my mind filling up with emptiness. I know what you’re thinking. That sounds like a contradiction—“filling up with emptiness”—but that’s how it felt. As I sat there, memories of the shitty-ass things that had happened in my life flashed before me, slicing through the calm: people being nice to me but then talking behind my back or times when I’d helped my friends and then realized that they’d never return the favor. I kept thinking things like, “That’s fucked up,” and “That’s not fair.” After a while, the emptiness took over completely.
I didn’t think about how people would react to what I was going to do, and I didn’t want to think about how upset my family would be with me. I didn’t want to think about the hurt. I just wanted to get the result I was looking for: an escape.
I knew that if I really thought about it analytically, my consciousness would get a hold of me and pull me out of that inner peace I was desperate to hold on to. I wasn’t interested in that. I was in such a calm place that when I thought about my mom and my dad, it was really about how much I loved them and how they were there for me and how much they supported me. I wasn’t thinking, “They put me here,” or “This is their fault,” because they didn’t and it wasn’t. I wasn’t thinking, “They didn’t do anything to help,” because they did. I was so far away from blaming anyone. That moment wasn’t about any of that.
When I heard my mom, sisters, and aunt leave the house, I remember thinking, “This is it. Now is the right time.” I kept the bullets in my closet and the gun in a drawer under my bed. I knew that if I kept the gun loaded and my parents found it, then I’d be without both, so I kept them separate. I loaded a bullet into the gun and sat down at my desk again. From that point on, I was on total autopilot. My mind was still blank, and it was almost like I had already separated from my body. Have you ever been driving in a car and then suddenly you’re at your destination and you don’t know how you got there? That was how it was for me. I was in a trance.
I usually fidget and wipe my hands on my legs when I’m about to do something I’m anxious about, but I wasn’t even doing that. I was so relaxed. My hands weren’t even sweaty. I felt no uneasiness. I knew what I was going to do. I had thought about it tons of times, and I knew how fast it was going to be. I had this image in my head that the gun would just blow away everything that was bad. It wouldn’t blow away my family; it wouldn’t blow away my connections. It would just blow away what I couldn’t get control over. I didn’t really see what I was doing as resulting in death, even though that sounds stupid, I know. I saw it as an answer to blowing away that side of my brain that always seemed to work against me instead of for me.
I didn’t think about where I’d end up after I died either. I just thought about darkness, and I knew I would be happy. I didn’t doubt that at all, but I can’t explain why. It wasn’t like I thought that some god would come get me or that I’d fall into the arms of an angel or whatever, but it wasn’t like I thought things would be over or that I’d disappear either. I thought that if there was something after death, good. If there wasn’t, it’d be better than this. I saw it as a win-win situation. When I think about it now, I wish I would have given more thought to how my decision would affect the people in my life, but all I could think about right then was that all my pain would be gone if I just pulled the trigger and I would finally have relief.
My last thought before I did it was, “Okay.” That’s it. No good-byes. No thoughts or questions or worries. Just, “Okay.” I placed the barrel firmly and without hesitation to the spot on my head that I knew would do the job. I felt peaceful.
Then, bang.
I heard a ricochet sound, but I don’t remember feeling anything other than the sensation that I was being jerked or pulled, but there was no burst of pain or sense of shock. Then, for a few seconds, there was nothingness.
Right after the gun went off, I heard Maria scream. She was vacuuming the den. Her scream kind of sounded like an ambulance siren. Maria’s scream was probably the first sound I heard that connected what I had done to how it affected another person. It startled me and made me want to get up and go to her, but I stayed put in my room with my door closed. I remember the sound of her hurrying down the hallway. Then I heard her standing at my door for a few seconds. When she opened the door, she looked at me and screamed again—the kind of scream that would shatter glass.
I was standing in my room, but I had no idea how the fuck I was standing up because I had just shot myself in the head. I remember thinking, “Shit, I screwed it up. Maybe it didn’t work!” I was confused. Disoriented. I looked down and saw my body, and that’s when it hit me for real. “That’s me,” I thought. “That’s my body.” I won’t lie; it did freak me out a little bit. I tried to get back into my body, but I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried. I remember thinking, “Okay, I can’t get back in. I can’t change things. This is the decision I made. Fuck, what have I done? I take it back! I see the value of life now. Just let me go back and I’ll prove it!” Some part of me knew that I couldn’t—that this was a done deal—but these sorts of thoughts bombarded me all the same. For a moment, I panicked, and I felt really disappointed in myself, especially because I realized then that everyone was going to find my body. I hadn’t really processed how I was thinking these thoughts and feeling these emotions, since I was, you know, sitting there dead, but I know I thought and felt them all the same.
Next, my room sort of washed away like a fresh painting in the rain, and I felt like I was being pulled into the white of the canvas but still a part of the colors. At the same time, I wasn’t separated from the room. It didn’t feel like I went to an entirely different place. It wasn’t like I was in the bedroom and went to the living room or in Houston and then went to London on a plane or something. I was in the fabric of everything. I didn’t know what that meant yet, but I felt it.
As I looked around, it seemed like I had tunnel vision, and the periphery was all white. I didn’t see my hand on the gun anymore. I didn’t even see where the gun had gone after I’d shot myself. I didn’t smell the gunpowder. That was weird, because I thought that if I were really in the room, wouldn’t I have? I looked at my body through this narrow lens—this telescope—and although I knew it was me, I just couldn’t connect to it emotionally. You know how when you see someone who’s injured, it makes your stomach turn and your heart skips a beat and your adrenaline spikes, and it makes you want to run over to them to help? I didn’t feel any of that.
My body looked like me, but it didn’t look like me. I looked pale. My nose didn’t look right. Even my fingers seemed too long. It was like I was looking at a cheap imitation of myself, a wax figure in one of those museums, a puppet without a puppeteer. Even though I didn’t feel any empathy for my body, I had this need to put it back the way it had been only moments ago—sitting at my desk with a normal-looking head. I didn’t want to, like, crawl back inside my body and reanimate it or anything; I just wanted to clean it up. I wanted to help.
The scene in front of me was so weird. It was like being in the movies and you see all that gory shit, and you say, “Oh, whatever. That’s just entertainment.” For me, it didn’t seem like real life playing out right in front of me. It seemed separate from me, like it was playing on a screen, and I was in the audience watching, instead of being one of the actors.
I went to find the gun and pick it up. When I saw it and reached for it, I saw my new hand reaching for it. It didn’t look light or translucent—you know, the type of thing that you would expect to see with a spirit or a ghost. It did have a kind of a glow to it, though. Silver, shimmery. I know it sounds weird, but it looked solid and transparent at the same time. Think about it: when you look at your reflection in dark water, it looks solid, but you know it’s just a transparent reflection in the water. Meld those two, and that’s what it looked like.
When I tried to grab or touch something, my hand went right through it. I guess it felt like a tingly pressure, but it didn’t feel like regular touch. I tried to touch my body, but I couldn’t grab ahold of it. Then I tried to strum the strings on my Fender guitar, but my fingers slipped through them too. No sound. I remember feeling pretty sad then, thinking that I’d never get to play music again.
Next, I heard my mother running up the stairs. I could tell she was climbing up the steps more than one at a time, tripping. She came into the room, but she didn’t come in delicately. She came in like she was on fire—a flaming cannonball barreling through anything in its path. My point of view rose up like I was flying. I wasn’t standing on the ground like a human. Even though I felt like I was hovering up high, I suddenly felt really small, like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Still, I didn’t feel the same kind of shame or sense of regret I expected to. I just felt small.
I don’t want to sound like an asshole, but I didn’t feel the need to rush to her. I had this emotional detachment while watching her, but it wasn’t the same emotional distance I felt when I was about to pull the trigger or when I first left my body and looked down at it. It was an emotional distance that comes with an objective observation that made me feel separated from my feelings of remorse and shame.
When I left my body, my emotions came with me, but my physical instincts didn’t, and that wasn’t because of shock. Shock creates a distance you need for survival or protection when you have a physical body. I didn’t need that anymore. Because of that emotional distance, my emotions weren’t controlling me. Things were just playing out, and I was watching them while still feeling things, but in a different way. I believe I had that emotional distance so that I could continue to cross over with peace. I feel like I was in this weird dream state. Maybe that’s what traumatic experiences turn into. They feel like a dream, no matter if you’re a person or a spirit.
Despite that feeling of emotional distance, I was more aware—more sensitive but not more emotional, I guess. Because of this heightened awareness, I was able to absorb all the details of what was going on in the room. When you’re human, you can’t rely on your memory to look back accurately at traumatic situations because you can’t consciously absorb all the details. Your brain picks and chooses some of the highlights, and you often leave out the ones that hurt the most. It was way different for me in those first few minutes after I died—and still is different today. It’s just an objectivity that’s intensely involved instead of highly removed. Being in that room with my mom, the emotional distance made it seem like what was going on was far away, but it didn’t make it any less real.
My mom was talking to me, but she wasn’t looking at the real me—my spirit. She was looking at my body. She kept wailing, “Why? Why? Why?” She had no problem touching my body, and she was the first person to move me, but I wasn’t really in there at all. I was outside my body, watching her. There were two other people at the door peering at me—Maria and my sister Michelle. They weren’t coming in, and nobody was inviting them to. I couldn’t really focus on them; I was still fixated on what was happening to my physical body.
Even though I could see my mom crying over my body, I knew that everything was as it needed to be. It was weird, but I felt that to be true on a really deep level in those first few moments. It was a comfort to know that I didn’t need to correct it or change what was happening, despite how hard it had to have been for those I left behind. I didn’t yet know why it was going to be all right, but I just felt it would be.
I could see and hear everything and everyone in the house. Sounds seemed different than they did when I was in my body. They didn’t sound as loud or clear. Everything sounded like it was underwater. I didn’t have to travel anywhere to see things as they were happening. I wasn’t interested in doing that anyway because I was so focused on watching this chapter of my life close. I was in awe as I objectively observed the end of “me”—something I never thought would happen. Ever.
Two policemen came into the room. One of the policemen was wearing something different. He wasn’t in a police uniform. I guess he was a detective or something. Then there was another person who was with him, and I didn’t understand what that dude’s job was. I think it was to record—writing down and logging stuff. I didn’t really know; I didn’t really care. I went to the wall next to my bed and saw the hole in the wall where the bullet had ricocheted and ran my finger across it. I couldn’t feel the dent, but I knew that it represented the hole I had just left in my mother’s heart. I felt bad about that—really bad—but that didn’t cancel out that strange feeling of everything being in its right place.
Eventually two paramedics came in. The detective gently led my mom out of the room. When she was gone, everyone stood around and talked—procedural things like what each one was supposed to do. They didn’t react emotionally, really. You could tell they were trained to push aside their emotions and do their jobs without getting wrapped up in what they saw.
The first thing they did was discuss the time of death. One person was saying that they needed to get the story from Maria and my family. Then they came up with an estimated time of death. There were like four or five people in there going in and out of the room, up and down the stairs, doing their thing. They were wondering where the bullet was, whether it was still in my head or somewhere else, and eventually they found it. The policemen took pictures and measured things, like the gun, with a measuring tape. I heard a lot of rustling plastic. Everything went into plastic bags. Everything was sealed. Anything that was associated with my death was taken, but I cared less about these material things and more about what was happening to my body.
The two paramedics took my body out of the chair. One was on my left side; one was on my right side. When they picked me up, they didn’t hold my head. Who would? So my head kind of flopped back. I guess that’s the true definition of dead weight. Then they put me on the gurney. The body bag was already on top of it. They didn’t undress me or anything. They tucked my feet into the bottom of the bag. The bag was more than big enough for me. I mean, it was big, and I remember the sound of the zipper. I just watched them zip me up. Then they talked about how they hated to leave the room the way it was and how my family would have to go in there and see all that. Later on, the crime scene cleanup crew came in with their masks on and cleaned up the mess, spraying luminol everywhere. It lit up all over the walls and even the ceiling. I could tell that they just looked at it as another job. One of them said they were glad a lot of time hadn’t passed because it could have been a lot smellier. I realized that I could hear people’s thoughts as I noticed that there was random shit going through everyone’s mind. This didn’t really shock me—nothing really shocked me as this was all happening, because of that pervasive feeling of rightness and detachment that surrounded me. I remember sensing that it wasn’t a time for asking questions, even if there had been someone to answer them.
The moment I couldn’t see my body, that’s what made things more real. That body was no longer a part of me. Out of sight, out of mind. I didn’t follow my physical body down the stairs and out the door; I was just suddenly outside. I knew they were taking me outside, and that’s where I went. It was like blinking your eyes. One blink and you’re in one place, and then another blink and you’re in a different place. That was the first time I didn’t travel like a human. I just appeared outside. I watched the doors of the ambulance close and wondered why they didn’t just turn off the fucking lights, you know? No siren, though.
That’s when I started to focus on what I was thinking, where I was, and what was happening with my spirit body. Transporting myself with my thoughts like that was an ability that felt very new to me as a free spirit, and I remember just sort of taking it in stride and going, “Huh. Cool.” I was really curious, but I also knew that I had some stuff to take care of before I moved on to wherever I was going to go.
I didn’t follow my body to the morgue or watch them do the autopsy. It wasn’t necessary. As soon as my physical body got zipped up, that’s when I truly started to realize that I wasn’t just going to fade away into the air or whatever. I was, in some way, sticking around. At that point, I knew it was time to say my good-byes. I’d just said good-bye to me. Well, I really didn’t say good-bye; I just watched my body get zipped up. But it was gone. I was over for me. Once that had happened, I really started to think about everyone else.