Loving them enough to keep breathing

I was thinking about this the other day. Suicide. Not committing it but how the option had gone away. In my worst periods I never let it get so bad that I could do this. And, typical of me, it is not for me that I protect myself.

The first time I went on meds it was for me. I was in love and in law school and when the depression came roaring back, triggered by stress and who knows what else, I realized I could lose both my lover and my place at the law school. I knew about the drugs because I had kept up since first being diagnosed after graduating from college (barely.) Mind you, I'd suffered repeated and lengthening bouts of depression since puberty, but no one seemed to think it was more than my being dramatic, or willful or downright evil. Yes, my mother told me that.

As a mother now I cannot imagine but that she herself was depressed when she said it. I never harmed a creature, never stole, wasn't even self-medicating. I was making her life hard by not actually living mine and perhaps that seemed, to her bereaved mind, like an assault. I say bereaved because it feels that way often. Or perhaps bereavement is depression. You do lose the world in depression; it floats away from you and there is grief in that, for me, and rage. Numbness is not something I have ever associated with depression. I am not numb when depressed; I lack the vitality to express my grief and confusion.

But I am a mother now and so dying by suicide, or even selfish risk taking seems to be be a letter to my sons: I didn't love you enough to stay alive.

Please, do not think I look at other mothers or fathers and condemn them if they kill themselves. Usually, I don't. Murder suicide is another matter. As is dying stupidly. I remember when I was first told that Princess Diana was dead. I was on an island in Swedish archipelago, my infant son in my baby bjorn. The staff were quite upset about something, "Princess Dee- ahna is dead," they said. I thought maybe Swedish royalty. Then I realize, Dee fo Di. Ah. I didn't know how I was supposed to feel about this. I was never much for royals watching. I memorized the Declaration of Independence as a child because all the news could do was talk about "The Royal Wedding." But a death is a death and she was young for it. "How did she die?" I asked. When told the first thing I thought, but did not say was "there are worse things than having your picture taken. Like leaving your sons without a mother." Perhaps because I had already suffered a particularly frightening bout of postpartum depression, but standing at the dock waiting to go back to the mainland with my baby drooling on my hands all I could think was how selfish and immature she had been to die like that. So I do judge others. I shouldn't, but I do. But not the terminally ill. That's what that black sickness is, a terminal disease. And it is genetic, it can be contagious, particularly to teen-agers. It is brutal because it lies to you, it tells you medicine cannot help, your family cannot help, nothing will help. Oddly, it is not only easier to listen, to embrace hopelessness, than it is to walk away, it seems more comforting, like the sirens calling you, or Beezlebub, perhaps. Is that where those stories come from? The smooth talking darkness pulling you away from the light.

I come to all of this because Nicholas Hughes, who published his academic work as Nick Hughes, died on Monday, the 16th. He hung himself in his home.

Two weeks ago or so a writer friend asked me if it had shattered me when David Foster Wallace died. I was only partly listening, worrying, as he went through my books, what he'd find and condemn me for, or worse, question me about. Yes, I said, then retracted. It was sad, I said, but I wasn't shattered, I didn't know him. My friend said nothing. I wondered if he'd met him, edited him, smoked with him while looking toward a starless sky deep in the Mississippi woods. I didn't ask. I didn't want to have to cope with it right then. Anyway, my friend, like me, fights depression back with a soggy broom and prayer every day, though, like me, he is, as I like to say, god free. When others fighting the battle you are fighting lose it can rock you pretty hard. But this one didn't rock me. Oddly, it hit me harder when John Updike died. I had met him and this literary beast and fellow Red Sox fan had been kind to me, speaking to me as though for those moments he did not have thirteen better options for his time. It hurt that he was gone. So, if it is the meeting or the not meeting than why am I so thrown, so hollowed out by Nick Hughes death? I think it is because I am a mother.

I really was, just the other day, thinking this, that children of parent's who commit suicide are much more likely, statistically, to die in this manner. So to kill myself would not only rob my children of their mother, not only burden them with questions no one will ever answer, but will likely shorten their own lives. It ignores the extent to which the link is genetic - given the science that is a dangerous piece of information to overlook, unless you are trying not to kill yourself.

In labor with my second child I began to vomit - I was panicking. I was, I thought, in transition. I had been in labor off and recently on for 34 hours. The so called midwife refused to check my cervix for fear of infection. I was on three antibiotics by this time having developed a raging fever earlier in the proceedings. If I was evil, that woman would be no more. It was the not knowing that drove me to panic and to vomit. I was talking myself through it, how long it would last, what I would do, how I would manage, but I knew to restart the labor they had given me pitocin and I knew with pitocin "transition" could be hours of labor. I needed to know where I was, I needed to be able to plot my course through it, and I didn't know and no one would tell me. I panicked. This is what I think of when I think of not having a model. Of not knowing where you are, of not being able to plot a course out, of getting so lost that you believe there isn't one. And the dark, it is so calm. So reassuring.

I am sure now, this is where the stories of the devil come from. Not the serpent in the garden, the serpent is a cautionary tale against science in favor of faith. Do not try and find out, believe. Asking for knowledge, like looking behind the curtain, is treading on toes. God's toes, the wizard's, it's all the same. Yet if we insisted on not knowing we have no medicine for depression, or cancer, or infections. And there would be no democracy.

I saw a Kraken, pieces of a giant squid, at the Museum of Science. The pieces were no more real than a Kraken. But it cheered me. These are stories people told to find their way. What I thought of when I saw it was that David Foster Wallace may himself have been looking for the Kraken, that great beast whose discovery will change the world, give meaning to life, let him gulp down a sense of calm at last. But that doesn't explain his death. I don't know why he was so sick, any more than I know why my uncle had to get cancer. I only know that Nick Hughes, whatever tools he had at his disposal to fight his way out were not enough and I am terrified of leaving that inheritance to my children. It scares me more than death, more than living though the worst of my days.