In “The Afterlife,” I report that my mother was subjected to Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a form of abuse that is carried out, usually by a parent or a caregiver, as unnecessary medical or surgical intervention. My mother recounted a succession of operations, demanded by her mother and performed by compliant doctors. In one story she told, she was a teen-ager, at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Under anesthesia on the operating table, her chest cut open, she heard the doctors pronounce her dead. She could not move or speak, but she could see them peering down at her. The long story of forced visits to doctors, of my grandmother’s control of her daughter’s body, the authoritarian cycle of manipulation, intimate violation, and symbolic repair, was never understood in my family, and it implicates my grandmother and grandfather, together in collusion or complicity, in crimes against their only child. “They drank,” my mother told me shortly before she died. She told me that they fought and were violent, and that her mother had tried to drown her in a well when she was tiny.
I was in my socks on the fire escape. I was cold, underweight, and scratched up from the roof’s rough surface, from crawling to the edge and leaning over to peer down. I imagined my body on the ground. It was something that I could picture. But the fall, how long would that last? My motor control was failing. I clutched the railing, then let go a little, then grabbed hold, then let go again, but caught myself.
I was not on the roof to jump. I was not there to kill myself. I was there to die, but dying was not a plan. I was not making decisions, choices, threats, or mistakes. I was, I think—looking back now—in acceptance. It was a relinquishing, though at the time I would not have been able to articulate it. I did not want to die, only felt that I would, or should, or must, and I had my pain and my reasons. If you have had this illness, then you’ve had your reasons; and maybe you’ve believed, or still believe, as I have, that it would be better for others, for all the people who have made the mistake of loving you, or who one day might, if you were gone.
Depression, hysteria, melancholia, nervousness, neurosis, neurasthenia, madness, lunacy, insanity, delirium, derangement, demonic possession, black humors, black bile, yellow bile, the black dog, the blues, the blue devils, a brown study, the vapors, a funk, a storm, the abyss, an inferno, Hell, a pain syndrome, stress, an anxiety disorder, lack of affect, an affective disorder, a mood disorder, panic, loneliness, bad wiring, a screw loose, a mercurial temperament, irritability, schizophrenia, unipolar disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, borderline personality disorder, laziness, pain, rumination, grief, mourning, malingering, unhappiness, hopelessness, sadness, low spirits, invalidism, despondency, dysthymia, detachment, disassociation, dementia praecox, neuralgia, fibromyalgia, oversensitivity, hypersensitivity, idiocy, an unsound mind, cowardice, obstinacy, apathy, recalcitrance, spleen, a broken heart, battle fatigue, shell shock, self-pity, self-indulgence, self-centeredness, weakness, withdrawal, distraction, distemper, a turn in the barrel, a break in a life narrative, bad thoughts, bad feelings, coming undone, coming apart, falling apart, falling to pieces, willfulness, defiance, thoughts of hurting oneself or others, the thousand-yard stare, craziness, rage, misery, mania, morbidity, genius, suicidality, suicidal ideation, aggression, regression, decompensation, drama, breakdown, crackup, catatonia, losing one’s mind, losing one’s shit, losing one’s way, wasting away, psychic disorganization, spiritual despair, shame, raving, the furies, a disease, an enigma, a tragedy, a curse, a sin, and, of course, psychosis—suicide, in the past and in our time, has been called many things. Whatever terms we use, whatever the specific nature of their origins and progress, our so-called mental illnesses are themselves traumatic and stigmatizing. They isolate us from others.
I was thin and cold. I held my arms to my sides. I peered up at the clouds and the jet planes and the sunset. It was hard to look at the sky. I couldn’t hold my head up. I was taking Klonopin for anxiety and insomnia. My mother was dead, and my socks had holes. The light hurt my eyes, and sounds felt like sharp little jabs at my head; when the helicopter came, that afternoon on the roof, I hunched over, protectively. Was the helicopter coming for me? Regan had raised her voice with me. It was happening more and more.
She and I were in the living room. It was a bright April Friday. She’d rushed to Brooklyn from her office in Manhattan, panicked after hearing my voice on the phone, and of course Janice and Nicky were on their way in Janice’s car, in traffic. For months, Regan had been with me, sleep-deprived, anxious, angry, afraid, untouched, breathing my cigarette smoke, not eating, not laughing, morose—the winter. Then, in early spring, I had staggered into Manhattan and spent the night with a former girlfriend. I remember Regan screaming at me that I would go to Hell, and that she hoped I would die.
I wrote so many letters. Most suicides don’t; we don’t leave last testaments. I wrote them all winter long, on a notepad, while sitting on a tarp on the living-room floor. Writing, moving my arm, my wrist, my hand, was effortful. My grip on the pen was rigid, and my hands ached, and were always cold. I wrote an opening, ripped the page from the pad, and began another note. The notes were apologies. Sometimes I called friends and held them on the phone. I was fine, I told them. When I lay down, I crossed my arms over my chest, in the position of a corpse.
