Better than a note is a previous attempt. A previous suicide attempt is the best predictor. My father made a note of a British study that showed that almost forty percent of successful suicides have a history of previous attempts. But none of this guarantees anything. Sixty percent of successful suicides are not known to have made serious attempts to take their own lives before their first and last attempt.
My father had had suicides before, and he’d have them again. Goes with the territory, right? No, wrong. This one was different. My father was damned. He tortured himself wondering if he should have seen it coming, if he should’ve made his house call sooner, if he should’ve tried harder to get him back into therapy, if he should’ve referred him to another therapist. Or if he should’ve had him committed.
But there were no apparent grounds for having him committed. There are a lot of angry people out there and a lot of unhappy ones. Very few unhappy ones kill themselves. In his journal, Dad quotes a Hungarian-born psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz: “Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed to adults by children, and by children to adults.” No, Mitch did not present as a suicide risk.
11. I searched everywhere for a while looking for a note from Sam. I thought he might want to explain what the hell was going on. I cried for a few days, probably because, in reality, part of me had actually already figured it out. But we make the phone calls, leave the messages, and then visit the haunts, at first in hope, and then more in homage. Don’t you agree? It’s only after this that we start to mentally retrace the last steps.
It might sound incredible to you, but I think our problems began with a political argument. I say incredible not because politics is not important to either of us. It is. We’re both intellectually, and even emotionally, politically engaged. It’s incredible because, fundamentally, we agree politically on very nearly everything. He credits you with his political awareness, which is a credit to him. When I’ve told him this, he’s said that my telling him is a credit to me. So, with all this mutual appreciation, where did things go wrong?
The peculiar striations that define someone’s personality are too numerous to know, no matter how close the observer. A person we think we know can suddenly become someone else when previously hidden strands of his character are called to the fore by circumstance. Sam might have been intellectually, and even emotionally, politically engaged but he was never likely to become politically active. This much I could have predicted. What I couldn’t have known was how he was going to react to me telling him I was thinking of doing something as trivially party-political as handing out how-to-vote cards at the impending federal election. I didn’t ask him if he wanted to do it with me, knowing full well that he wouldn’t, but from the strength of his response I thought, possibly flattering myself, that he might feel a little threatened by my contact with other men in the party.
“You’re jealous, aren’t you? Admit it,” I gently taunted before I’d registered the sternness of his countenance.
“Jealous of what?”
“Of the time I’ll be forced to spend in the company of all those serious young men working their way up the party machine.”
“The ladder.”
“What?”
“You work your way up a ladder, not a machine.”
“Really, what do you do with a machine?”
“You get caught in it.”
That wasn’t it. He didn’t feel threatened. He was disappointed, disappointed in me. My sudden need to be politically involved was to him a shocking betrayal, not political, but personal. We didn’t do that sort of thing. We were loners, not “joiners.” That was the deal, or part of it, and I was reneging. It wasn’t even all that important to me. I thought maybe I might meet one like-minded interesting person, male or female. It wasn’t meant to signal any dissatisfaction with him. I was just thinking out loud. It was just an idea I’d had.
“Are you doing this for political reasons or social reasons?” “I’m not even sure I’m doing it.”
“But if you do?”
“I don’t know . . . a little of both. Political really . . . mainly.”
“Really?”
“Why do you say that as if it’s the wrong answer?”
“Hey, you decide . . . what’s right for you.”
“What does that mean? You want to get rid of this government.”
“Of course I do but . . .”
“But what?”
“I don’t know . . . Buchanan. It’s fucking Buchanan.”
“Well, you’re going to vote for him.”
“I’m voting against the government.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“It’s not the same as actually campaigning for him.”
“It’s just, you know . . . how-to-vote cards. I’m not even sure I’d—”
“Rachael, how could you even contemplate it? Buchanan is so . . . Where do I start?”
“Oh, that’s right, your mother or Simon or someone said he’s sleazy. Well, they’re all sleazy. And what do they mean by that anyway? What was the story? He made a pass at your mother or something ten or twenty years ago? Didn’t everybody? Let’s assume he’s the biggest womanizer on either side of politics. Frankly, that doesn’t bother me, and—”
“It’s more than that. Look at him on television. He sweats insincerity. What do you like about him?”
“He’s not the government.”
“So vote for him by all means, but, for God’s sake, don’t campaign for him! He’s like the mob that’s in but less so. Name one policy of his you like. You can’t.”
He had me there and with every second that I cast about, my mind flailing for a policy I positively liked, I looked more naïve, more juvenile, more like what I was. I just liked the idea of being part of something bigger than me and my arts degree, my interstate mother and sister and my dead father. Then I came up with a policy, one policy.
“The Patients’ Bill of Rights. He’s said he’d introduce a Patients’ Bill of Rights to stop people getting ripped off by health-insurance companies. You’re in favor of that, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but look how long it took you to think of it.”
“Well, that’s not his fault.”
“No, but you’re the one who wants to campaign for him. And maybe it is his fault.”
“Why?”
“Because he only came up with a Patients’ Bill of Rights when he was pushed, and even then all he’s really said is that he’ll consider it. If he does consider it he won’t legislate it, and if he does it’ll have loopholes big enough for the health-insurance companies to drive their ambulances through. Did you know he also agrees to limiting compensation for medical negligence and for work injury? He’s in the pocket of the insurance industry like all the rest of them.”
“So, Sam, if he’s that bad, how come you’re going to vote for him?”
“Because the other side is worse.”
“Well, at least he says the right things.”
“Oh, Rachael, by all means vote for him but as you look around for something to believe in, don’t shout ‘Eureka’ when your eye falls on him.”
“This is all about your insecurity, isn’t it?” I shouted. I was hurt and I was wrong.
I was wrong because, while there probably was some element of insecurity in his response, it was far from what all this was about. I was hurt because he’d exposed in me a need to find something to belong to. But he was hurt too. He was hurt and angry that I needed to belong to something bigger than us.
So with both of us hurt, we argued more and our voices grew louder. We said things we shouldn’t have said. I told him he needed to form his own opinions and not rely on his mother and stepfather to tell him what to think. It was around that time, give or take a few gratuitous expletives and insults, that he walked out.
12. “Give me a psychotic any day,” my father began a passage which I think, no, I’m sure, was about
you. “The problem with this man,” he wrote, “was that he was too reasonable. He was too likeable. He made too much sense. One could easily have been him.” He’s writing about you, and yet he lapses into past tense.
After Anna had done the right thing by you, made you an honest or, should I say, a not-guilty man, and the two of you started . . . what? . . . courting, my father seemed to feel that he’d lost you. See the way he switches to past tense? It might sound strange, but I think he thought that he’d failed you. He saw your obsession with Anna as an illness, or a symptom of one. He was supposed to cure you of it. When you were acquitted and free and everybody, and especially you, started behaving as though you really had been having an affair with her, he felt defeated, maybe even cheated.
But it’s possible to fool a therapist, even a good one, isn’t it? When you first came to him, or rather, when you first came to each other, my father didn’t think you were all that unwell. Your concern for others was, he thought, inconsistent with serious depression. The extent of your illness became impossible to ignore only when you decided to include kidnapping in your decalogue of moral imperatives. It was a deterioration Dad had been unable to predict.
He wrote about you that within you a highly developed sense of morality, of empathy, coupled with a vigorous almost muscular rationality, was continuously at war with a disorder characterized by an obsessive longing for Anna, chronic feelings of emptiness, fears of abandonment, and, fleetingly, by intense periods of anger, all of which made you feel greatly ashamed. This madness (my word for it, not his) he felt was, in part, the cost of so much time spent seeing things too clearly. It’s a cost most people know instinctively is too high. “The illumination is not worth the candle,” my father writes wryly. So most of us get by by not seeing things too clearly. Everything is a little blurred but, being always this way, people don’t notice it and we say that each of them is a picture of mental health.
I would like to have discussed your case with my father. I think his writing permits me to at least speculate that you were a classic victim of what Durkheim calls anomie, the situation that pertains when all traditional social bonds and all genuine social life have been destroyed. Doesn’t that sound like you at that time? As Fromm points out, for anomie to be removed, it’s not enough simply for someone to be fed and clothed. There must be some not insignificant coincidence of interests between those of society and those of the individual. Unfortunately, consumption and competition, which are what currently drive society, have never been valued highly by you. I would like to have talked to him about that.
Dad was interested in the question of how people respond to the burden of unremitting acuity. That might be part of the explanation for his tremendous interest in you. More and more as I make my way through the journal I see him talk about a division between those people who are burdened by the clarity with which they see the world and those who are not. For those who are not, any semblance of emotional stasis or equilibrium is threatened only by things particular to them. If they, personally, can avoid poverty, substance abuse, sexual abuse, unemployment, divorce, physical illness, random violence, or moving house, they might well feel and be considered mentally healthy.
But what about the other group, those who, even if only fleetingly and from time to time, are encumbered by their perception of the way the world really is? This group presented a problem for my father. Was he really prepared to categorize only the fortunate and simple or obtuse as mentally healthy? Most people are not all that fortunate and not that simple. Was he really prepared to deem the vast majority of people mentally unwell?
Naturally, he was dissatisfied leaving things like this, and here is where Seligman and Beck first make their way into the journal. Did he ever talk to you about Marty Seligman? He and Aaron Beck were the Empsons of cognitive therapy. If he didn’t talk to you about them, he would have eventually. It was Seligman who came up with the concept of “learned helplessness.”
Sometime in the sixties, Seligman devised an experiment in which a group of dogs were exposed to a series of mild and random electric shocks under conditions in which the dogs were unable to avoid the shocks. Each time before receiving a shock, the dogs would hear a warning tone. The conditions were then changed so that, each time they heard the warning tone, they would now be able to avoid the shock by jumping over a low bar. Seligman was expecting that the dogs would learn that the tone meant an impending shock and that they would then know to jump over the bar whenever they heard it. This wasn’t what happened.
When the dogs heard the tone they just whimpered, lay down in front of the bar, and accepted the shock. Seligman concluded that the first stage of the experiment—the one in which there was nothing the dogs could do to escape the shock—had “taught” them to be helpless. Without any apparent way of controlling their circumstances, the dogs became resigned to their fate. This state of hopeless resignation Seligman called “learned helplessness.”
My father hypothesized that many, if not most, of those people who were neither fortunate nor obtuse learned to be helpless. This is how a huge proportion of society goes through each day. Whatever you think of this, it certainly accounts for those people who recognize the way things really are both in the world and in their lives and who do nothing about it. They do nothing because they feel helpless. You flirted with helplessness for a long time and then acted decisively to change your circumstances. You thrashed around, got yourself locked up and then manipulated your way back into the mainstream. What can we learn from you? Nothing, you were unwell.
There’s a huge gap of some twelve or so years in my knowledge of your illness. Perhaps you are not ill at all anymore? The way Sam tells it, with the exception of your nightmares—a legacy of your time in prison—you have lived pretty much happily ever after. I know that he would think that, in the couple that has been us, Sam and me, I have been the naïve one. But I don’t quite believe that you walked out of prison, smiled for the cameras and for your family, and lived happily ever after. Nothing is ever that smooth. In the grafting of you to Anna and to her then little boy, you would have experienced at least moments of rejection. And there would always have been the worry that if Anna could ditch her husband, her son’s father, for a crazy obsessive with a dubious history—you used to drink, you were chronically out of work, and you stole her son—if she could leave him for you, then perhaps her eyes might not remain permanently fixed on you either? When does a woman with twenty-twenty vision close her eyes to the next best thing? You think I am unfair? I am, and yet you know that she was seeing someone when you took Sam and that it wasn’t you. When no one else knew, it was easy to kid yourself that, in taking a chance on her after all that had happened, you weren’t crazy. But now, well, there’s the problem.
13. My mother and elder sister live out of town, and the quality of their advice is—I try to be objective—unreliable. My father is famously not alive. Sometimes, seeing myself this way, I act like a child. I let a day and a half go by after Sam and I had that ridiculous argument without making any attempt at reconciliation. What marked the passing of the day and a half was not me not contacting him but him not contacting me. I wasn’t going to call him. He’d been the one to walk out. You can guess at around what age I stopped growing up.
Knowing my lecture timetable, Sam knew when I wouldn’t be in. (I rarely miss classes. You can say what you like, but I’m not so insecure that I need to affect indifference to my courses.) He was therefore able to get into the student residence I live in—he has a key to my room—when I wasn’t there. I’d been practicing a sort of punctuated self-restraint. I wouldn’t call him before lunchtime and then, having survived to lunch, not before dinner and so on. When I came home that day racked with doubt about the wisdom of not having called him, I was overjoyed to find he had left a bunch of flowers and a card for me.
The card was soppy, at least objectively. Subjectively, it was just what I needed. In it he asked me to call him when I got home. I was so rel
ieved that we were about to make up and that it was he who’d made the first move. There was nothing now to be gained by waiting further. As soon as I’d read the card I kicked off my shoes, flung myself on the bed, and picked up the phone to call him.
“Hey, it’s me,” I said to his answering machine. “Pick up. I love the flowers. I love the card even more. Where are you? Answer the phone, you rotten bastard. I’m impatient to make up . . . No? You’re really not there? Where are you? Okay. Call me as soon as you get this.”
I waited, but he didn’t call. I waited some more, not unhappy, just impatient. I left another message, several more on his cell phone, and started reading for an essay. I began to worry, but looking again at the flowers and the card, I told myself not to be stupid. I tried him one more time, leaving him a message asking him not to call me because I was about to go to bed.
In the morning I tried his home and cell numbers from campus after two back-to-back classes, again without success. I grabbed something to eat and then went back home. I tried both his numbers again a few times, leaving increasingly frantic messages. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t hearing from him. We weren’t fighting anymore. I hadn’t dreamed up the card or the flowers. I wondered whether I should be calling the police or at least some of his friends. That was the first time I seriously thought of calling Anna or you. I didn’t know exactly where she worked, but I thought I could get hold of you through the university. I looked at the flowers. There’s nothing ambiguous about six long-stemmed roses. I was starting to panic. I picked up the phone. I was going to call you or the police. As I tried to decide which, I noticed the card. It was lying on the desk, between the flowers and the journal. Then it hit me with an almighty thud, and I put the phone down. Now I knew I was right to panic.