Showing posts with label alcoholism. Show all posts

Monday, August 11, 2014

Robin, we hardly knew you

Suicide a risk even for beloved characters like Williams

Karen Weintraub and Dennis Kelly, USA TODAY10:05 p.m. EDT August 11, 2014

That a "universally beloved" entertainer like Robin WIlliams could commit suicide "speaks to the power of psychiatric illness," mental health experts say.

Robin Williams, who died Monday at age 63, had some of the risk factors for suicide: He was known to have bipolar disorder, depression and drug abuse problems, said Julie Cerel, a psychologist and board chair of American Association of Suicidology.

People who are severely depressed can't see past their failures, even if they've been as successful as Williams.

"With depression, people just forget," said Cerel, also an associate professor at the University of Kentucky. "They get so consumed by the depression and by the feelings of not being worthy that they forget all the wonderful things in their lives."

They feel like a burden on their family and that the world would be better off without them.

"Having depression and being in a suicidal state twists reality. It doesn't matter if someone has a wife or is well loved," Cerel said.

Williams was certainly beloved, as shown by the outpouring of grief and sympathy on social media outlets last night.

Ken Duckworth, medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, agrees the impact is "shocking" when it involves a "universally loved character" like WIlliams.

He caught the news while watching TV with his children. "They all said, 'Nooo, not Robin Williams.'" It's hard to hear that successful people like Williams, who was a genius of comedy, could also have this vulnerability, Duckworth said. "You'd like to think they're immune from the heartache and suffering of mental illness and that isn't true."

"It speaks to the need for better treatments and the need for society to be more welcoming to people who have these conditions," he said.

About 90% of people who commit suicide have some kind of psychiatric illness that's typically untreated or "undertreated," he said.

Cerel said the impact of suicide ripples far beyond immediate family members.

"Friends, people in our social network, even when it's people on TV, it really affects us all," she said. "Even though most of us don't know him directly, he's someone who's entertained us, and (his death) will have an effect on us and will make us think of others who've died."

The fact that someone as successful as Williams could kill himself shows that suicide is "not about objective markers of happiness and success," said Dost Ongur, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of the psychotic disorders division at McLean Hospital outside of Boston.

The deep psychic pain that drove Williams to suicide, "must have been part of his experience all along," Ongur said. "It was part and parcel of his gregarious, funny, so intelligent, so special outward persona – but on the inside it seems like it wasn't always happiness."

In addition to previous problems with mental illness, Williams was also in a demographic that is particularly vulnerable to suicide, Ongur said.

White, middle-aged men with medical problems are at the highest risk for suicide, he said. It's not entirely clear why that is, but Ongur said "this idea of control and virility and being able to deal with the world in a certain way – as that starts to slip away, there's often a sense of loss of control and threat to one's manhood, and that seems to be associated with higher rates of suicide."

Although depression can last for years, suicidal thinking is "a temporary state of mind and it will pass," Ongur said. If someone is deterred from a suicide attempt, they are likely to get over their urge to kill themselves, he said, so it is crucial that people who are suicidal get help.

Advocates for people with mental illness say they hope Williams' death will motivate more people to get help for depression, and spur the USA to treat suicide as a public health crisis. Suicide claims more than 38,000 American lives each year -- more than the number killed by car accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- and the rate hasn't budged in decades, says Jeffrey Lieberman, professor and chairman of psychiatry at New York's Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons

"We know what to do to prevent suicide," Liebeman says. "We just don't do it."

Williams could put a human face on a problem that often gets little attention, Lieberman says.

"He was such a charismatic and beloved figure, that if his death can galvanize our society to act instead of just grieve, it will be a fitting memorial to him."

Monday, February 10, 2014

Mangled by media

The media fascinate me, and horrify me. (And it's plural, folks. One medium; two media. But it doesn't apply to those psychic dudes, for some reason.) I'm closer to the subject than most people: I have a daughter who's an award-winning reporter with CTV News, and even after a dozen years I feel immensely proud to see her on the air (and I will still say to my husband, if he's out of the room, "Hey, Shannon's on!")

One of the things we both do is watch all the newsmagazines: Dateline NBC, 20-20, 48 Hours. I'm always interested in her take on these things and how they're covered: she often catches things I miss. The stories can be lurid and sometimes (as in the case of mass/child murder) too extreme for me to watch. But Shannon always watches, with the eagle eye of the insider.

But there's another aspect to this, quite apart from the stories themselves. It's how they're covered, the spin they're given (and believe me, there's always a spin). And as Shannon has often told me, this is inextricably bound up in the personalities behind the news.

Some 50 years ago, communications guru Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message," and if we never hear that statement any more, it's because we're frogs in hot water, not feeling the temperature gradually rising as we come closer and closer to being boiled. The public is never consciously aware of this, either, but personality is also the message, or at least it trumps content every time. Far from being mere delivery devices, these strangely compelling men and women often seem to be the whole point of turning on the TV.

My daughter's favorite reporter is the craggy, canny Keith Morrison, an ex-pat Canadian whom she describes as a brilliant storyteller. He's an old-style journalist, long and lean, his face seamed with wrinkles, his hair falling down in a floppy silver forelock. In spite of the wrinkles, he seems ageless, gangly like a teenager and dressed in youthful clothing that never seems incongruous. His delivery is unusual too, almost exaggerated, his voice sometimes dropping to a whisper as he describes the hideous domestic murders that seem to make up 85% of the show. But he gets away with it, makes it work. It's his style and he's comfortable with it, plain-spoken but not quite folksy, low-key, intense and hard to get away from.

Compelling television. The Keith Morrison Show.

But his lean, striding, casually-tossed-mustang-mane'd delivery is far from the norm. Some reporters are so tensely-wound that you can almost see the key in their back. They appear shiny, their teeth gleaming and their hair perfect behind a bulletproof, plexiglass shield. But we're not buying it, not falling for their invincibility. The consumer/viewer probes, poking around for vulnerability, feasting on it while we pretend to be sympathetic.

We aren't. Not really. Mostly, we're just hungry.

Not long ago, the diminutive, deceptively-smooth Elizabeth Vargas came on 20-20 and talked about her decades of alcoholic drinking and her (harrowingly short, I felt) stint in rehab, but she looked tense and very uncomfortable, and at one point said she was only doing this because the press had already “outed” her. Otherwise she would have kept it private.

Then there was that utter disaster on The View – and what’s Barbara Walters doing on TV, anyway, when she “retired” a couple of years ago and is now doddering around in her 80s? – when Walters said, “Oh, we knew about it, all right. We all knew.” Vargas just looked mortified and offended and shocked. In the name of spontaneous live television, pandering to the grand old bitch of TV, she had been swiftly and ruthlessly ambushed.

Vargas drank heavily for years and years, assuming she was hiding it from her colleagues, and (in a twist of irony) did FIVE stories on 20-20 about alcoholism, including how it affects women and even mothers. All the while, she was a mother dangerously drinking and being secretive about it (though as Barbara Walters gleefully pointed out to her on live TV, they were on to her all the time).

Of course there had to be backstory about her anxiety disorder, her separation from her father who was in the military (though I kept expecting them to say he had died). There had to be. Addiction is almost as bad as mental illness in demanding “WHY?”. You can’t just have it. Something has to have damaged you into it, really badly, or else you'd be normal like the rest of us. Right?

Where’s the weakness, where’s the flaw? The public jabs and probes like a dentist attacking a rotten tooth, while the object of all this drilling hopes desperately they'll garner some sympathy from it, not pity and contempt. But it’s always a mixture, because people love to feel superior to those in the limelight. Build them up, knock them down.

But that's nothing compared to the extent that these "journalists" can be vicious to their own kind, consuming them with a carnivore's gusto in full view of the watching public.

I hesitate to get into the bloodbath of Ann Curry being ripped out of her job on the Today show, the siege led by Matt Lauer who did the world's worst impersonation of a warm sendoff. Rumor has it that she had been subjected to every sort of humiliation imagineable, while at the same time being assured everyone was just thrilled to have her on-board. Thus if she felt bad about what was happening to her, if she thought she had to run run run to keep from going backwards as the rug was steadily pulled out from under her, she was just too sensitive and should man up.

Her sendoff was nothing like the usual "it's been great, but it's time to move on to new blah, blah, blah" that we usually hear. To everyone's profound discomfort, she began to whimper and cry and endlessly rattle on in what began to sound almost like an apology for her career. I've seen Ann Curry's work, and it does seem a trifle too vulnerable for comfort, just a little "off", though I can't put my finger on why. She wants to be my Mommy, and I won't have it - or, worse, she wants ME to be HER Mommy. The slaughter was jokingly referred to behind the scenes as Operation Bambi, though I think Curry ended up being more like Bambi's mother.

(Note: I decided to find a YouTube video of her now-infamous exit scene, and it was horrendous to watch, one of the most embarrassing things I've ever seen. It was like listening to a narcissistic actress winning her first Oscar and refusing to be "played off", or a teenage girl with galloping PMS, with just a bit of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz: "I think I'll miss you most of all." I was going to try to make one of my famous gifs of her wiping away her tears, but it was too much, I had to turn it off.)

The more I read about this boiling swamp of piranha, the more I want to turn my TV off forever. . . except that I can't. I'm just as hooked as anyone else. Though reality TV loves tears and snot and shoving the camera up the subject's nose, the TV newsmagazines still seem to demand the plexiglass front that kept Elizabeth Vargas trapped in her alcoholism for so many years.

Not too emotional, please. But not cold! No one will be able to identify with you! And you can't have a speech impediment, for God's sake, unless you're that famous museum piece from Madame Tussaud's, Baba Wawa. No wrinkles, you'll look old, but it's OK, even endearing on Keith Morrison. Reveal your flaws and failures, make those fatal "admissions" about horrendous things like alcoholism and mental illness, but be aware it will be a black mark on your record forever, and that whenever people hear your name, that's the first and perhaps the only thing about you that they will ever remember.

I think I'd drink too.

(BLOGGER'S COMPLAINT. Since they're so goldern fun to make, and since my reading audience is so minuscule I might as well do whatever I gosh-darn please, gifs have almost taken over this labor of love that I call my Blog. When I discovered Gifsforum, I began to turn cartwheels of joy. It was not only easy to use, but had a fantastic array of options: size, speed, forward or backward, a dozen different filters/effects, the option of compressing frames so that the gif moved like a silent film, even incremental reductions of color that turned them into superb moving paintings.

NOW IT'S ALL TO SHIT. I mean it. All. To. Shit. I go on the site to do my usual fun fiddling around, and whoooshh, it's all gone now except the most basic gif-making, with NO flexibility at all. All those features have been removed. The gifs cook up very swiftly now, but so what? They also look like shit. The large ones once had an almost 3D clarity to them, especially old black-and-white ones of my beloved Harold Lloyd movies. Now you get one size only, kind of a mediocre medium. I can't choose the option of making them smaller to embed in emails and in my posts. Not only that, I was horrified to discover that the ratio is "off" and they look distorted, vertically stretched! I'd go back to the one I started with, Y2GIF, but it doesn't work at all any more. You sit there while that little goddamn thingamabob swirls around and around and NOTHING happens. And your brilliant little gif doesn't exist because you are tired of waiting for it.

Worst of all is the way they describe their primitive gif-making gizmo: "NEW!" Oh yeah, it's new, all right! It's a piece of shit! They're bragging about it being new and improved, when 90% of the capacity of the thing is shot all to hell! So what's the point? I might as well DRAW my bloody gifs and nudge them with my fingers and hope they will move.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Little sexpot (or: the smooch and snuggle)

It’s not that she wasn’t grateful. When you don’t get to go anywhere on a Saturday night because everyone thinks you’re a loser and full of shit, you should be grateful for any kind of social contact at all.

Or so her siblings thought. Her sister Noreen was thirteen years older than she was, and obviously Mum and Dad were going to trust her with her little sister's wellbeing. Besides, it was good for her to “get out”, much better than hiding in her room crying like she always did.

Her older brother Don had lots of friends too, and their wives came along, but that didn’t stop the “goings-on” that were considered to be all part of the fun. She noticed the minute she stepped into the babble and funk of these parties that she was the mascot, younger than anyone else by ten years or more. Was she game? A target? Who knew, but what she did know was that she was supposed to be grateful.

There was an obnoxious creep called Shivas, but after a while she figured out that it wasn’t his real name, that it came from his habit of making a certain drink called a Shivas Special. Chivas Regal and one ice cube. Another was Tang crystals dissolved in vodka.

They were all quite interested in seeing how the mascot would react to having her glass filled and refilled. After all, she was allowed wine at home. Lots of it. Her parents didn’t frown on her drinking and even seemed to think it was “good for her”. Her brother and sister waved the banner of booze at every opportunity, insisting it was an unalloyed good, even when they woke the next day vomiting and ashen.

The party deteriorated over time, got louder, with people bumping together and the smell of pot wafting under door-cracks. Once she felt a hand, someone’s hand, didn’t know whose. Then her brother’s best friend started smiling at her. She looked the other way. Like the Ugly Duckling, she just didn’t believe it at first.

But then he sort of beckoned with his eyes. Come upstairs with me. Upstairs?? His wife was over in the corner flirting with her brother like they always did. Did she dare to do this, could she sneak up with him and –

This is how it always happened.

It happened because her brother’s friend was a really good kisser. He knew the spots to touch. Her body responded like flame, though she felt overpowering shame at her reaction. She knew she wasn’t supposed to feel this way, to feel anything at all. But she also knew she had caused this, somehow. He managed to convey without words that he had always found her attractive and not mousy or fat.

All she knew about sex she had learned from books, the books stashed in her father’s bureau drawer under his underwear and pajamas. When her parents were away at choir practice, she took them out. They were very clinical and did not deal with passion or pleasure, as if those sensations did not belong in the field of sex.

But she knew about erections, because he was pressing his against her body with force. Her heart beginning to race, she wondered if she would be raped. She wondered if she should fight back, break away. But the truth is, she loved the attention.

“Hey, you two!” a voice came up the stairs. “Get down here, will you? Quit messing around.” It was a woman’s voice, and at first she wondered if it was the man’s wife. When she came downstairs, stumbling a little, she saw it was her brother’s girl friend, her makeup badly askew. The woman grabbed her around the waist and squeezed: “Little Lolita,” she crooned. “Little sexpot.”

The booze continued to flow. Her sister held court in an astonishing display of vanity and narcissism, “looking after” her little sister by ignoring her and handing her over to the good graces of Shivas and his endless noxious drinks. People made less and less sense. She felt more hands on her and didn’t know who they were.

She remembered trying to tell her sister about what was happening to her at these parties, what was being done to her. Done to her by married men with their wives in the next room (or even the same room). Her older sister rolled her eyes a bit and said, “I don’t know why you’re so upset! You don’t seem to have any friends your own age. This way you can have a social outlet with the grownups.”

When she told her a little bit about the seductions, she shook her head.

“Are they having sex with you?” For one second, concern seemed to flicker in her eyes.

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. You’re exaggerating. I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with a little smooch and a snuggle. Look, we’re trying to include you and I really think you should be more grateful.”

Much later, she read about something called Walpurgis Night, a sort of witch’s Sabbath with hideous swarms of demonic figures that swept through communities leaving blackened wreckage in their wake. But this was supposed to be an advantage for her, a social outlet!

How many 14-year-olds wouldn’t give their right arm to be included in a group of adults with full-blown adult privileges?

She would go home after midnight, stagger into the bathroom and throw up all the Chivas Regal. The next morning, pale as a spook, she would throw up again, with her mother hearing her but saying nothing.

Her mother knew. She knew everything. Wanted to be rid of this social liability, to hand her over. Keep her happy. Later that day the family received a bouquet. She knew it was from her brother’s friend, the one who had pinned and groped her. It couldn’t be anyone else.

”Had a great time last night," the sloppily-written tag read. "See you next week."

It was not signed. Incredibly, her parents did not ask who had sent it, but put the pink roses in a vase on the table.

Twenty years later, the family was absolutely horrified to learn that Little Sister had joined AA. It was a total disgrace to the family, who had never had problems like that and never would. It was obviously an act of hostility on her part. They could never understand why she wasn't more grateful for all they had done for her. When she began to see a therapist, it was even worse, for that implied that the family was crazy. Then they decided that SHE was the one who was crazy, and the matter was closed.

Post-script. Some years later my sister's lover, the one who liked to send me roses and take me to the movies, lost his job and all his money and (finally) his wife, and shot himself in the head. I suppose these things never end well. For me, they never end at all.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Now they call it bullying

“Oh. My. God.”

“Here she comes.”

“It’s the suck.”

“Suckie.”

“Suck of the world.”

She could never quite recall or understand when this name was fastened to her, but now it was so stuck that to rip it off her would be fishhook-like, tearing her flesh and infecting her in ways she couldn’t imagine.

There was another name, Maggots, but that was supposed to be an affectionate name, a pet name, the kind of nickname all the kids had at school, now pull yourself together girl, don’t you understand that all the kids are treated this way and all the kids have to learn how to take a little teasing so they can make it through the school day?

But “all” the kids aren’t razzed at the school dance because nobody’s dancing with them and all they can do is stand around gawky as if they weigh about 3 thousand pounds. “Whatsamatter honey, having a slow night?”

I don’t know, I try to be normal I guess, but (the guidance counsellor wrinkles up his brow in that “I don’t know what you’re talking about” way she will never see the end of, not even when she’s 50 years old and trying to communicate with a psychiatrist).

Don’t you make an effort to enter into the normal activities of the school day?

What about your social life?

("Suckie."

“Suck of the world.”)

She has thought about the end of the world lots of times, especially while getting stoned with her brother or trying to keep a guy’s hands off her at one of her older sister’s drunken parties. Some married guy. Her sister phones her up and says hey. You’re wondering why you exist again? I guess you can come over. It’s as if she’s doing her a big favour by inviting her to an adult party. So she decides to come over.

Come over and watch people 15 years older than her get soused, whoop, fuck, and throw up. A guy named Chivas keeps topping up her glass and calls it a Chivas Special. Or is Chivas the name of the drink? She can’t tell, she’s dizzy and spinning around and puking and falling down. Her older sister is taking good care of her and her parents are not at all concerned, nothing bad can happen to her. Right. It’s still better than standing there at the dance by herself or finding notes stuck in her locker, CUNT. We. Do. Not. Want. You.

Some day there will be a name for this activity; they will call it “bullying”. For now, they call it “school”. For now, they call it “hung over and puking in the toilet and telling Mum I have the flu and being sent to school anyway and getting rocks thrown at me by the Catholic kids”.

Rocks?

Yeah, I meant to tell you that it’s

Young lady, I find that hard to believe.

Oh okay, so it isn’t happening then. So I’m not getting those cold stares from my “friends” and those puzzled, puckered looks from teachers when I show up in class crying: “Do you have a cold today?” Yes, a cold that feels like the end of the world.

And it’s lower, lower, lower when she is sent to a psychiatrist and begins to chat him up, flirt with him, make him laugh in that Old World way that shrinks always laugh, the stupid fuckers. He looks like Sigmund Fucking Freud with that beard. She hates them, hates every one of them, and lies about what happens. That’s what they want to hear.

"Suckie.”

“Suck of the world.”

A long, long, long time later, after she has finally beaten the alcoholism her sister generously bequeathed her in her teens, she will hear news reports about girls who killed themselves, girls who were only 15 years old, slender and pretty, girls who seemed to have absolutely everything she would have died for in Grade 10, but they died anyway, hung themselves, hung themselves because someone abused them, but it’s doubtful that anyone threw rocks at them or stuck notes in their locker.

No, this time it will appear on a screen, and absolutely everyone in the world will be able to see it.

Human meanness leaks out in all sorts of ways. Pieces of paper stuck to the inside of a locker with tape: “cunt”. Black magic marker on the inside of a biology text book: “stinking twat”. She will get in trouble for defacing a book and have to pay for it. You can’t rip out pages like that, it’s destructive!

You can’t rip out brain cells, blackened memories of a hell she barely scraped through. You can’t do anything but live around it, the carcinoma of social persecution. What was it about her that caused them to brutalize her so relentlessly? Why can’t she die? Is there another sort of life she can find beyond all this hate?

Living around it is like slinking around the outside of a shadow that is permanently sewn to your body. Don’t fool yourself, everyone can see, even though nobody has the nerve to say it now. You are here because of OUR generosity and you should be GRATEFUL we spared you, that we tolerated your presence! We gave you every chance to be social at those parties, and what did you do?

The Old World psychiatrist looks at her over his glasses. “Vhat you heff,” he pronounces, “is yoooth paranoia.”

“Paranoia? Isn’t that imagining you’re – "

“Yes, imagining! But zere is goot news. You vill outgrrrrow it.”

“Glad to hear it. Just one question?”

“Yes.”

"WHEN?”

Monday, September 10, 2012

I'm your puppet (short fiction)

Human puppet: someone who is easily jerked around by others. Someone who realizes her position in life is always so, so fragile. Someone who gingerly creeps, tippy-toe, tippy-toe, along thin ice at the top of Niagara Falls.

She doesn’t know how it got that way, but maybe she does. Right out of the egg? Wrong egg, wrong sperm? Sometimes it seems that way. And it truly does not matter what she had to bear to survive her childhood, to pull herself out of an inferno of post-traumatic stress in her 30s: it has all been reburied, forgotten again, put away. Then there was the alcohol, but we won’t get into that, will we? About how her kids at first felt proud of her for going to AA, for finally getting her act together and not landing in the goddamn hospital with sickening regularity?

Going to AA wasn’t exactly a picnic, but her kids were there at her cakes, and her daughter even gave her a cake at some point, maybe five years. Who knows what the creep of time brings? A restored life, maybe, spreading out in many directions, being seen almost as normal sometimes, though of course she wasn’t. Only she knew about how the fragments of her life were wired together, held together by main strength and force of will.

And then, many years later, when everything exploded and flew to pieces again, it was: sympathy, compassion, love? No: horror, denial, and accusations that she was making the whole thing up. Faking sickness to get attention for some bizarre reason. When the truth was, for most of her life she had been faking health, trying to keep up a mask that looked enough like her that most people were fooled.

All right, all people.

How is it that you can be married for 40 years and have a spouse who knows absolutely nothing about you? How is it that he can even admit, “look, I learned to tune you out a long time ago for my own survival”? Admitting that what she said was just noise, verbal garbage, narcissism and histrionics in a form that wasn’t even words any more, just a sort of “bluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluh” that didn’t even go in one ear and out the other, because it never went in one ear to begin with.

So he has learned to tune me out “for his own survival”, and he has become extremely good at it, to the point that any time I am in pain or distress, a big soundproof sliding door comes down with a heavy clang. But what about MY survival? Or have I already died in this family? I try too hard, I know I try too hard with the grandchildren and it is beginning to backfire. I see the hard-eyed looks my children give me, the sense of “what the hell is she up to now?”. I realize the things I love and work so hard at are so incomprehensible them that not only do they not take any interest in them, they don’t even know what planet they are from or why anyone would want to bother with them at all.

So I am lonely. If I say I am lonely within this family that I co-founded so long ago, the response will be outrage that I would ever accuse them of being so heartless. Lonely?? What are you saying, when we allow you to come to our houses and look after our children, when we give you every chance to make individual gifts by hand for their birthdays (secretly sniggering about it behind my back: “waaaaaaaay too much time on her hands!” - I’ve heard them at it, but mustn’t say anything. Mustn’t.) How can you be “lonely” unless you’re some kind of freak? Go out and make some friends! Do something normal for a change, stop pretending you’re a “writer” and being so pretentious and unrealistic.

She remembers the shrink, a thug who looked like Leonid Brezhnev, who said to her in his thick deep thug voice, “Get a job. Get a job at 7-11 maybe and just do writing as hobby.” If she’d had a gun in her hand his wonderful vocational counselling would have been spurting out the other side of his fucking thug head and splattering the psych ward walls with brain pulp that had turned out to be a complete waste of time.

Thinking about dying is something she has become very good at: she started at maybe age thirteen. Though there have been many fallow periods, even years at a time when it never crossed her mind, it was inevitable that SOMETHING would toss her right back to the beginning again and hold her there until she suffocated. She has come to realize that you must not just think of “a way to do it”. You must choose at least two methods concurrently. Take pills, slash wrists (and if you’re really thoughtful and caring, do it in the bathtub so there will be less mess to clean up. Just turn on the tap, you’re done, no towels spoiled). She saw that YouTube video of the guy jumping off a bridge and thought it was magnificent, but he’d have to be full of pills, a lethal amount, first. A dear friend of hers, incarcerated in a psychiatric ward when his psychic agony began to overflow again, smuggled in pills, took them all, then wandered out in the middle of a blistering winter night, passed out beside the railroad tracks like a bum, and was found frozen stiff the next day, a Bobsicle, doublekilled. Man, he was good! He must have practiced for a long time.

She wondered about THREE ways, but didn’t know how to juggle it all: slish, slash, I was takin’ a bath; jumping-jack flash, it’s a gas-gas-gas; and she couldn’t think of anything cute and self-concealing for the pills. Suicide was hilariously funny. She could not count the number of times she had made therapists smirk, smile or even bark with laughter. They thought she was funny. Badda-boom! She had trained herself that way all her life, learned in her cradle to be amusing, to be the mascot, to keep her father from murdering her in her bed. She had learned to be witty while her older siblings got her drunk at parties and snickered when they found out their married friends (with their wives in the next room) had groped her in the bathroom.

But it’s all in fun, isn’t it? Fun, fun. I was lucky to have those social occasions. So they said to me. I should’ve been grateful. And though for years and years she thought she had escaped those poisonous dynamics, she hadn’t. Once again she was a sharecropper in her own home. All she had was some sort of fragile tenancy that could fall through at any moment. “Oh, massa, don’t sell me down the river!” Bark, bark, oh, that’s so funny! Don’t look at me that way! Stop it, stop looking so hostile, it’s just that you’re funny, that’s all. You’re obviously trying to be funny, so why do you get so hostile when I laugh? You’re very entertaining. Besides which, are you really sure any of this really happened? Your Dad sounds like a pretty swell guy. You’ve heard of false memory syndrome, haven’t you?

How could anyone want to keep going, to feel any relish for life, when after years and years of struggling to do reasonably well everything blew apart again and hurled you back four decades into helplessness? How could anyone be “entertaining” when their life was unravelling like a sweater, when they were trying frantically to grab on to a greasy pole, when some hideous beanstalk or poison tree had suddenly thrust up out of nowhere to blow all order and sanity apart?

The most important part of the suicide thing, and the place where nearly everyone falls down, is not letting anyone find you. DON’T do a Marilyn Monroe and get on the phone. DON’T call 9-1-1 because 9-1-1 doesn’t rescue useless pieces of shit that want to die anyway. Sylvia Plath set it up so that someone would find her, but oopsy, doopsy, this was a person who wasn’t very punctual, and on that particular day she was tardy enough to cause Sylvia Plath’s death at 30. Or at least, to not prevent it. Everyone dies anyway. Lots of people die catastrophically every day, accidents, poison, murder. Some die in the womb. We all get erased, then the timer is reset to before we even came on the scene. Click! Isn’t this just speeding it up a little?

But she doesn’t, not on that particular day anyway, because even though she ceased to believe in a benevolent God a long time ago, she has still not completely dispensed with the fear that there is a hell, that she won’t escape herself at all, that she will be pinned, doomed to drink her own poison for all eternity. Or perhaps watch her family howl and scream with rage: “How could she do this to me?”