Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me Read online

  I think I bought groceries and the Sunday New York Times. I think I loitered over tea and wi-fi in a Queen Street café-bar. Eventually I made my way home. It was past midnight by the time I grabbed the plastic jug of bright-blue antifreeze from its spot in the bathroom, poured it into a pair of oversized pottery mugs. (Suicidality notwithstanding, I wasn’t about to chug antifreeze from the jug: I had standards.) I placed the mugs of poison on the floor beside my burgundy futon-couch. I recall keeping the newspaper fanned out in sections beside me. Why? As a prop? Did suicide seem less pathetic if I just pretended I was catching up on world news?

  I swallowed the fistful of pills first, waited expectantly. I remember registering disappointment in their inefficacy before consciousness and memory dropped off a cliff.

  2

  When You Try to Die and Don’t

  Monday would have been when those unnerving ghost-exchanges took place, when I spoke with a colleague about who would cover an electoral spat over cancelled gas plants. So it must have been shortly afterward that I swallowed the antifreeze. I think. I don’t know. So terrifyingly blank is that space in my memory that anything could have happened to fill it. I only insert the most likely chain of events in the hope that if I repeat it enough the repetition will confer an internal sheen of truth.

  I do know it wasn’t until Tuesday that my unresponsiveness began to worry people. Following a series of phone calls and emails between co-workers and friends wondering where I was, a pair of senior editors from work arrived at my building just as, separately, my friend Wesley did. Wesley knew me. He’d seen me at my less-than-best. But the editors? Intimidatingly smart and really not the kind of people you’d expect at someone’s sickbed, these two managers held my career in their hands. I wouldn’t want them to see me fumbling through a fruitless phoner, let alone mid-methanol overdose.

  Truth is, they saved my life. But the shame and self-revulsion I feel at the thought of being found there by them hasn’t gone away.

  They got into my apartment (Had I left the door open? Why?) and found a mess.

  The place was a mess. I was a mess, covered in my own puke. It pained me to be told, months later, that I wasn’t totally unconscious—just not terribly responsive or remotely cogent. They called the police and tried to figure out what I’d taken. They failed: it wasn’t until my cousin and dad were dispatched later that week to brave the premises that they found the open antifreeze container, about a quarter of the four-litre vessel gone.

  Police arrived first, then an ambulance. I’m told I joked with paramedics while being wheeled out on a stretcher. What stands out for my friend Wesley, poor bastard, is how filthy my kitchen sink was. He and one of the editors followed the ambulance to St. Joe’s feeling there was little they could do right then apart from figure out who needed to know what. He and a group of five close friends—the people who became my rocks in the weeks and years following—then huddled to discuss what to do. Among other things they asked each other how emotionally invested they were each prepared to become in this. Surely most people in their right minds would go running in the opposite direction. I don’t know why these people didn’t disappear. (Other friends and colleagues did. I don’t blame them.) I don’t know why they decided to subject themselves and their own challenging lives to my prickly, unwelcoming, messy state of affairs. I don’t know whether they’ve regretted it. I’ve lacked the guts to ask. But my god, I’m glad they did.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I SURFACED my parents were there. My poor parents, who had flown in from Vancouver, who had by then had about thirty-six hours to acclimatize to the idea—and the sight—of their daughter hospitalized after a botched suicide.

  Years later my mom recalls being regarded by the kidney specialist who had come to oversee my treatment. “She said, ‘You’re so calm.’ And I realized I just had kind of been so focused on fixing it. Get here, fix it. I couldn’t really entertain the alternative.”

  One of the first things mental health practitioners tell you after you try to die is that your recent attempt is not selfish, not a misery you’ve inflicted on those you love most, but a fatal final symptom of a disease that’s destroying you. Which, sure. Fine. But seeing my younger brother’s face in that psych ward after he’d flown in from his first weeks of law school convinced me I deserved to die in the most torturous way imaginable. Loving people so much it hurts doesn’t necessarily negate the need to die; it just makes you hate yourself more for all the pain you cause, makes you feel your death would be a gift.

  Recollections return in uneven swatches. Sleeping pills, even when taken as directed and not downed like peanuts, are one hell of an amnestic. Now, when I try to pull memories forward from mental recesses for reinspection, I find them frayed and moth-munched, viewed through a lens messily smeared with Vaseline. Some reappear in high definition much later: the way I tried to read a book in my ICU bed only to find the words bounce as my squinted eyes stung and watered, unfocused.

  “This is a shitty book,” my mom claims I said.

  I owe Patrick deWitt an apology: I can’t look at the original cover of The Sisters Brothers without a shuddering flashback to the pain behind my eyes, the panic of being unable to read. This in all likelihood was an after-effect of the antifreeze, which, if it doesn’t kill you, can make you permanently blind. This inability to comprehend the written word was mercifully short-lived; I don’t know how I’d have coped otherwise, thus disoriented and unmoored.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER TWO OR THREE days in the ICU they put me in the short-term psych ward. I toddled over in that sky-blue dignity-depriving hospital gown, changing in the bathroom into civilian attire. The psych ward had no windows and no privacy, just beds separated by curtains sliding on rods.

  I was so out of it when first ushered in from the ICU that nothing registered. Surely I’d leave soon. Surely I’d be back at work in no time. A return to the newsroom that centred my universe was all I needed, I told myself. Find a way out. Everything will return to normal.

  Or not. There were Forms to contend with. I had just become one of a growing number of psych patients kept in hospital against their will—I was put on a Form formalizing my committal by a doctor deeming me too crazy to make my own decisions.

  Every jurisdiction in Canada, the US and much of Europe still has some kind of medical-legal framework for dealing with people who lack insight into their conditions or lack the capacity to make decisions. You can put someone in hospital against her will if a doctor decides—sometimes at the urging of police, a judge or family members—that she’s in danger of causing imminent harm to someone, including herself. (Important to note: she still has rights when you do this, and when you take away some rights, protecting the others becomes more important than ever. More on that later.) In Ontario,1 where I live, it begins with a Form 1,2 which subjects you to a seventy-two-hour “hold” that allows for a psychiatric assessment. By the time I toddled into the short-term psych ward, the seventy-two-hour hold that I’d been placed on in the ICU had just about run out, necessitating a new one: a Form 3 this time,3 which allowed me to be kept against my will for two weeks. I was too out of it to know this and nobody told me until days later, giving me the sinking feeling of being suddenly trapped.

  There are two primary reasons why you’d be upgraded to a Form 3. One is that you’re incapable of consenting to treatment but you’ve been treated and got somewhat better before and they have reason to believe, based on that prior experience, that you really need that treatment now or your condition will seriously deteriorate. But “deterioration” is pretty broad and subjective. So that significantly increases the pool of people eligible for involuntary hospitalization—which is either a boon to patient health or a draconian way to lock more people in hospital, depending whom you ask.

  The other reason, my reason, is that they’re fairly certain you have a mental disorder and there’s a serious risk of someone getting seriousl
y hurt or impaired. It has two key sub-categories: “Bodily harm to the patient” and “Bodily harm to another person.” The seeming fungibility of that check-mark differentiation—Does this crazy person pose a threat to herself or to other people? Should I be scared for her, or of her?—is what freaks out so many when it comes to people with mental illness. It’s what tormented me at the time, certified by that form, even with the “harm to others” box unchecked.

  Some assume people with mental illness are going to kill them, or attack them, or commit some horribly violent, depraved act without warning or reason. We assume this despite centuries of evidence to the contrary. People with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence than its perpetrators.4 When they get the treatment they need they’re highly unlikely to hurt anyone.

  I thought I understood that. Until I realized, that day in that hospital, how scared I became of myself. No one checked off that “danger to others” box on my form. Only the “danger to self.” But the two boxes are so close together! Just its paperwork proximity was enough to convince me I posed a threat without even realizing it. Was I going to hurt people against my inclination? Was I a murder-suicide risk? No, my doctor would emphatically tell me in the months following. Of course not. But unconscious biases run deep, and this wracked me for a while.

  But in the immediate term, this crazy-person paperwork meant I couldn’t leave the hospital. I couldn’t leave the ward without an eagle-eyed escort. I couldn’t shave. I couldn’t charge my recently returned cell phone without supervision. I entered a bad Groundhog Day remake. Over the course of five-ish days in the short-term ward, I murmured the same thing in the same chastened tone to an endless parade of health care workers armed with clipboards: a slim nurse with an eyebrow ring, not much older than I was; an affable social worker; another nurse who told me about his wife and their efforts to have kids and who remembered me, years later, when I was back as an outpatient; the staff psychiatrist who was there less often but who, when she was, was clearly in charge.

  I repeated it sitting on my bed, dutifully completing my daily suicidality checklist: “It was a one-off.” I repeated it sitting on the almost-comfortable couch of the glassed-off rug-floored consult room (“I thought I wanted to die because I thought I felt hopeless. I don’t feel that way anymore.”) I repeated it crouched by the low coffee table laden with coping-strategy worksheets and dated magazines in the common area (“It was such a dumb thing to do. I realize that now. I wish I hadn’t done it. I won’t do it again.”). I repeated it so much I believed it myself.

  So much for my model-patient alibi. What do you tell the people you love about the thing you did that caused them pain? You have abashed phone conversations with your Calgarian grandparents. You lie to your aunt when she makes you promise you’ll never try again. You hold your breath and avoid the topic altogether. My mother’s mom, the Los Angelina Auschwitz survivor and the strongest nonagenarian you’ve ever met, I’ve never told, although my mom told her years later, a harrowing impulsive disclosure and a brutalizing thing for her to hear. She’s ninety-three and I still feel ashamed just talking to her, the epitome of life’s triumph against all odds, having expended so much time and effort and brainpower toward my own death.

  From the moment of my arrival at the crisis ward, I studiously avoided shared spaces: the big table where patients congregated to watch the boxy dolly-mounted TV; and later, in the next ward I’d be admitted to, the TV and activity rooms where patients buzzed or lolled or sat. Introverted at my best, I spent my institutionalized time impotently attempting to construct personal spaces. Of course there is no me-space in a hospital, certainly not if you’ve been certified as posing a danger to yourself. No corner behind curtained dividers or unlatchable doors to effectively mark one’s own. As my eyes improved, I resorted to my childhood proclivity for disappearing into books, pulling my consciousness through that escape hatch and shutting it behind me.

  I was hardly a sociable patient, hardly the one to get psych-evaluation bonus points for successful interpersonal interactions. Hardly the insatiably curious inveterate reporter I’d fancied myself before entering that building.

  I encountered insomnia without end, twisting on squeaky hospital linen, shallow sleep interrupted by what I thought was the rolling sound of gurneys thundering through hallways but turned out to be the trundling pneumatic whoosh of specimens, samples, medication sent from one ward to another through a tube system within the walls. When I could sleep I’d dream I was trapped and tied down in a maze-like Mengele hospital where maniacs conducted sadistic experiments. It was almost a relief to be roused in the morning by nurses bearing thermometers and blood-pressure cuffs. Almost, but for the perma-fatigue that lodged itself in my joints and behind my eyes.

  I grew to love the hospital’s intercom announcements. Code Blue for cardiac arrest; Code White for a violent patient; Code Yellow for a missing person, an elopee, as they’re called, a runaway for whom I’d silently cheer. Go, sixty-eight-year-old Caucasian man with short brown hair last seen wearing hospital pants and a brown wool cardigan and no shoes! Run!

  Days were divided between Visiting Hours and Everything Else. My baby sister flew in, too beautiful and young and on the cusp of life to have to worry about this shit barely a month after I’d schlepped a printer uphill to her McGill University residence in Montreal. The five of us—my parents, brother, sister and I—went outside the hospital for meals and pretended everything was fine. We went for a late brunch on Queen Street West and sat in a corner table by the window and all ordered variations on the same huevos rancheros and my dad bought a stranger’s black-and-white photos. Their outward resilience and our collective ability to laugh at the most horrible things helped me get through without choking on my own guilt.

  These escorted outings were not carefree ones for my parents. “We were both happy to be there for you…but at the same time scared shitless,” my dad said, years later. “You once went into the bathroom at a Queen Street restaurant where we were out for dinner and suddenly we were terrified that maybe you took a knife to the bathroom and were going to try to kill yourself again while on an escorted leave from hospital.”

  (I was oblivious to this. I just went to the bathroom.)

  And my friends. I’d done nothing to deserve such stalwarts. Brendan brought me fancy overpriced sandwiches on the first day I was allowed a chaperoned out-of-ward excursion. I stood facing south on a bench in a green-space-cum-smoking-area near one of the hospital’s entrances, fingertips upstretched to touch a vine-laced wooden trellis as I blinked like a mole rat in the honeyed evening light. I’d never had a brisket sandwich before and it remains the most delicious bread-based thing I’ve ever consumed. I hoarded half of it for later only to have it confiscated by well-meaning nurses who seemed to interpret my sentimentality in a more pathological way.

  Omar, my closest friend and the most masochistic individual I know, came to hospital every goddamn day, even after I was moved upstairs to the ward for serious crazies. Every day! He signed me out and took me wandering through hospital hallways as I hyena-laughed uncontrollably, so stupid-glad to be with someone I loved who wasn’t running away despite all available evidence and common sense and instinctive self-preservation advising the contrary. (The only evening he missed was the day Steve Jobs died, because he had to write about it.5 Wesley came and braved the upstairs psych ward in his stead.) And as long as I returned from these brief respites to sign back in before my time was up, everything was okay. Pushing it once, trying to fit in two sign-outs too close together, aroused enough suspicion to temporarily cost me chaperoned sign-out privileges. I was left sulky and prowling for thirty hours, starved for fresh air.

  Most of my psych-ward time was deadly cabin fever: marathon pacing, ear-splitting earbud music, books that were never escapist enough to hold my splintered attention for long. So despite attempts to retreat within myself, I got to know my fellow patients.

  A Hispanic woman had family c
ome visit en masse. They trooped in armed with pastries and tamales, filling the common area with chatter and warmth. She was one of the few inpatients who got many visitors. Watching the way she swelled with love when they were near, the way she wept later, alone and deflated, made it seem imperative that everything in her world turn out okay.

  In the curtained bed space next to mine was an elderly woman, grey hair in a long braid slung over her shoulder. Her sling-clad arm was lined lengthwise with a thick spiderweb of angry black stitches I could not stop staring at. I’d imagine the scene at her home as she bled—did she call 911 herself? Had she changed her mind, was the sight of her own blood too much to bear? I knew she lived alone because I overheard a social worker talk to her at one point about learning to prepare her meals with one arm. She approached me one morning in the liminal space between our cubbyholes and asked me to adjust her sling and I tried to hide my fixation on her arm as I slipped the fabric into a slightly less uncomfortable space bracketing elbow and shoulder. (Following a knee surgery years later, I found the same sutures, a pair of baleful black knots, in my own skin while replacing one set of waterproof Band-Aids with another. Was astonished at the degree to which they froze me, took me back to that forlorn wrinkled old lady with the long grey hair and the thick spidery stitches crawling up her forearm. Did she have to go back to hospital to get them removed, as I did mine? Did she make the appointment? Follow-ups are a bitch at the best of times; surely far worse when it’s to untie the sutures undoing your effort to die.)