The threads of a process. Part 1: Unraveling

Sitting handcuffed in a police car in the middle of a bitter December night should have filled me with terrifying anxiety and worry, but it didn’t.

I already knew exactly what was going to happen to me.

By morning I would be dead.

Just as I intended.

It took a long time for my life to unravel and hit bottom to this point. In many ways every event, moment and genetic marker in my life contributed to this moment.

My life hasn’t been easy. I have seen and lived through a lot in my 34 years, but two events in my life stand out as the most destructive and painful. So painful that there should just be two headstones with my name and date placed where they happened because the girl that I was before they occurred figuratively died and in many ways never came back again. They changed everything and not in good ways.

The first one I absolutely do not wish to talk about.

Though it is a huge part of my life and definitely contributed to this story, it is also NOT for public consumption. My choice to not write about it is not for myself. I am fine with my history and am open about it but I do not live in a bubble.

Though it’s hard to feel forthright while excluding it, I’m writing my story anyway because it’s just time to. So, if you know more particulars, please keep them off the internet and to yourself. And if you don’t, the delete key is my friend.

The second event is also the main point of demarcation for my spiral of destruction.

My son died.

Matthew passed away on September 23, 2003 from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

He was 3 months and 16 days old.

He had red hair.

I loved him more than anything in the world.

His death brought me to my knees.

For 18 months after he died I was one of those people that others say is holding up “amazingly well”.

“Amazingly well” simply meant that I absolutely refused to deal with my deep grief and kept myself constantly preoccupied with anything that allowed me to not think or feel.

I was the President of the Parent Organization at my children’s school and I threw myself into my work there.I have persistent insomnia. After Matthew died my nightmares were so horrible, I rarely slept. 3a.m. often found me at the school in my pajamas doing copy work or other huge projects I threw at myself.

If I could have, I would have worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Anything to stop me from thinking about my boy and to drive the image of his small, dead body from my mind.

It worked.

I held up “amazingly well”.

Until I didn’t.

There came a definite changing point and trigger where I couldn’t keep it in anymore.

It started by talking with someone that had a long history with grief, who understood me and that was impossible for me to have a wall with. It made the thick fortress I carefully built and fortified around my heart, soul, and mind regarding Matthew start crumbling to the ground.

Along with my stability.

I was overwhelmed by Matthew’s death. On top of that, other huge loss and bitterness that I had not dealt with AT ALL till that point started to be talked about. Reviewed. Dealt with.

It was too much pain for me and I started to lose control.

I escaped my grief-filled little house, my now-incomplete family, my valley full of sad memories as often as I could, whenever, wherever. I ran and ran and RAN from my life, pain and hurt as hard and fast and far as I could.

My marriage was in utter shambles. Jon and I have always had a struggle with our marriage, that is no secret, but Matthew seemed to be the final straw. We were both in a state of high denial and had such grief we just had no desire to even try to be there for the other person.

And I kept unraveling.

My behavior became increasingly odd, extreme and unstable. My thoughts were growing darker and darker. The days were filled with increasing depression and anxiety, glossed over by a weird, almost grotesque mania and obsessions that were as uncontrollable as my despair.

Even though I was trying to escape and ignore my grief, I tried HARD to get help. I didn’t want to be a horrible friend, wife, mother and person.

I didn’t want to be crazy.

So, I tried to “get help”.

I did everything you are supposed to; I went to a doctor, got on an anti-depressant, went to therapy, read books, talked to people, went to a grief support group and even an addiction group though I don’t have any substance abuse.

If a situation or thing wasn’t working, I would move on to something else and try it but eventually I ran out of things to try.

I tried my best, but as is often the case with me-my best was woefully inadequate.

When I started to genuinely fear for my own life and nothing else was working, I took the biggest step of all. With the help of two people I trusted and loved most in the world, I checked myself into a hospital.

The psych ward.

The crazy house.

Nutterville.

Whatever you want to call it, I was going there.

On purpose.

I do not do well in locked places. If I know that I cannot get out of a room, I panic. I also hate and loathe hospitals with the power of a thousand burning suns. I have a special fear of psychiatric facilities from a loved one being in one when I was young.

Even with the absolute love and strength of the friends that went with me, I nearly faltered when it was time for them to leave.

It took everything I had to not sob and beg them not to leave me there all alone.

I walked through the heavy, psychiatric wing hospital doors and my heart pounded out of my chest. I felt like I was in a locked room that was slowly filling with suffocating water.

I knew that once I stepped inside there was very little I could do to get back out before THEY allowed me to.

It was one of the most terrifying, dread-filled moments of my life but I knew I was slowly cracking into so many pieces that I WOULD break and crumble if I didn’t find a way to stop it.

I knew I would die if I did not find something to help me.

So, I took a deep breath as I heard the door close behind me and stepped into one of the most depressing, punitive places I have ever been.

If you ever want to feel sane? Check yourself into the psychiatric wing of a hospital.

It’s not for the faint of heart, people.

I did not stay in a hospital close to my home. Not only was it where Matthew died, I was humiliated and embarrassed at my condition. So,I drove to a hospital far from my town because I didn’t want people at my local hospital to recognize me.

So, it was super AWESOME to discover at my bed check that one of my nurses was the high school crush of my husband.

She was really nice and lovely and said something that stuck with me. “Most of the time it is obvious why people are here, they are so mentally ill, but every once in awhile we see people like you and we really can’t figure out why you’re here because you’re an amazing person, Loralee.”

And in a lot of ways she was right.

I was mom to 2 beautiful boys, I was married, I had some of the most amazing friends a person could have, I was talented, pretty, I served in the presidency of my church’s young womens program, and I was finishing up 3.5 years of service as a pretty damn successful President of the Parent Organization (that I helped build from the ground up). I was the type of person that could do magical things when I put my mind to it.

I was also completely unstable and suicidal.

Talk about a fall from grace.

Instead of attending the school concert where I was to be lauded in a speech by the principal and awarded a plaque for outstanding service as PTO President, I was sitting in a psych ward, heavily medicated, wearing pajamas with their drawstring removed by staff as contraband, trying to eat shitty-tasting spaghetti with a plastic spoon in the dark.

(I don’t know if you have ever attempted to eat shitty-tasting spaghetti in the dark with a plastic spoon while heavily medicated and wearing drawstringless pajamas in a psych ward, but, um…I don’t recommend it.)

A bat flew into the hospital generator and we were the last priority for power restoration so we sat in the dark for hours. We were only allowed plastic spoons as eating utensils because apparently, plastic forks are a potentially lethal weapon that we could not have. ALL the food was shitty.  It wasn’t even normal shitty hospital food because I had their normal shitty hospital food the first meal I was admitted. This was…SHITTIER shitty hospital food. It was like we were a pen of pathetic pigs being fed the left over slop from the other patients. I lost 9 lbs in 5 days and THERE WAS NO DIET COKE!

(There was a machine that you could purchase a bottle once a day from. GUESS WHICH EFFING BUTTON WAS OUT OF ORDER. Yay.)

There were many other discomforts and punitive measures that patients had to follow.

My door always had to stay open. The bathroom didn’t even have a door but there was no shower curtain so it had a small ledge at the doorway to keep water in. I tripped over it the first day there and threw my back out severely.

Which seriously made the experience so much more awesome.

I was allowed to write in my journal, which saved me. I wrote and wrote and wrote, but I could only use a hated pencil. Pens could only be used under strict supervision. I pretty much resembled a Yeti by the time I left as razors were obviously on the “NO” list.

There were exactly two channels on TV we were allowed to watch: The History Channel and Animal Planet.

Lights out by 10 pm.  Alarm for breakfast at 7 am.

And the people.

OMG, the people.

Most were not bad, really. Some were like me and were just broken by things bigger than them. Some were bizarre but harmless.

Then there were the rest of them.

I was one of the better looking people in the wing. It was not a good thing.

There was a man in his mid-20’s that was quite good looking and very buff. He had just been let out from the PICU (Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit) into general population. One day at lunch he tried to force my very uncooperative person between his legs to feel his many regions. Luckily he was thwarted and was removed back to the PICU, much to the relief of my strange-penis-adverse hands.

In group therapy, I was sitting next to someone that strongly resembled The Unibomber who kept whispering that I was his girlfriend and that I was the prettiest girl in the room. He also said his penis could detect the truth and lies in people. (Honestly, what was with the penis stuff in there? Although, if my vagina was a lie detector my life wouldn’t be half as effed up as it is.)

My roommate tore at my heart. Her life was really hard. She had Huntington’s disease and was looking at a horrible death. She had the guilt that she had passed it on to her teenage daughter.

Her long-time boyfriend had finally left her because he could not deal with her manic depression and disease. He was visiting his mother in the same hospital that we were in and when she kept calling her room in an attempt to reconcile with him I watched her face crumple and can still hear the sobs that tore through her throat then the hospital operator told her that he requested a block put on the phone so that she could not contact him further.

She huddled on the floor and then when I went to hug her to try and help her through the moment, she lifted up the sleeve of her gown and showed me her arm. She had “I WANT TO DIE” carved in deep, jagged letters in her arm.

She started sobbing with a hysteria that grew and grew until she began banging her head on the floor screaming, “If I don’t get Lortab I will hurt myself!”, over and over and they had to put her in isolation as a suicide threat. I didn’t really see her that way. As I listened to her talk I knew that all she wanted was her boyfriend back, a happy marriage and life that didn’t include a psychiatric illness, a terminal disease, poverty and the hardship of being alone.  I am not trying to minimize her pain, but you could tell that though hurting so much she just needed a place to hide from life for awhile and get some help and recovery to get back on her feet.

Even though she was dying, I knew that she wanted to live.

As she left I noticed that the banging had reopened some of the cuts on her arm and they started to bleed. When she was gone and the room was quiet, I looked down at the long red marks on my forearm from my own faulty attempt and I knew deep down that while I also “just” wanted a happy marriage, love, and my son back, I was deadly serious about my intent to end my life.

I don’t know that intent really matters in the end, though. Pain is pain. I’ve learned that over the years.

And I experienced a WHOLE lot of pain while I was there.

That place would have crushed me except for visiting hour.

I had many WONDERFUL people come see me. One sweet soul came every single day. I don’t think there is enough “thank you’s” that can be said for the light every single person who visited brought to that hellish time. (Seriously, I cannot say how much the friends in my life saved me in general. I would not be here without them.) One of my favorite visitors included a friend that had been locked up when she was a teenager and she came out with a list of 100 ways to kill yourself in a mental institution. We could laugh at it as we were both IN one.

Jonathan made the trip once because I begged and they made it clear to him that it was an essential part of my therapy. It’s just further illustration of the level of misery my marriage was at at the time. We were hanging by the thinnest thread imaginable, but he kept insisting everything was “fine” and I kept running further and further away, not really caring what our marriage was turning into.

He had hurt me so deeply before Matthew died that I justified my ambivalence by remembering the near death-blows he had given to our relationship over the years. (Note:I have my own huge baggage. I’m not easy to be married to either)

We were both deeply immersed in our own worlds, in our own pain and the way that we each grieved absolutely conflicted with the grieving style of the other.

Though he rarely said so, he resented my need to turn to other people, yet he was incapable of giving me what I needed emotionally to survive. We’ve always and still struggle with this but it was exacerbated to the nth degree at this point.

When the verdict of “Bipolar” came down from the doctors, I did not deal well with the diagnosis and label they put on me.

Not well at all.

DID I MENTION THAT I WAS DEALING WITH ALL THIS SHITTIER SHITTY HOSPITAL SLOP IN THE BAT-DRIVEN DARKNESS, PENIS PUSHING MEN, AND ANIMAL PLANET,  BIPOLAR LABELING WITHOUT THE ASSISTANCE OF ONE DAMN DROP OF DIET COKE??????

It sucked a duck, yo.

I dealt with my newly issued lable the way I always deal with highly traumatic/painful/embarrassing issues.

I couldn’t shut up about it.

My ‘craziness’ was woven into practically every conversation I had with everyone from my family to the guy wearing flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt that opened the door for me at IHop that one time. Hell, I pretty much introduced myself by saying, ‘Hi! I’m Loralee and I am totally insane and bipolar! LOVELY to meet you!”

I called myself crazy every chance I could get. LOOK AT THE NAME OF THIS DAMN BLOG FOR PETE’S SAKE! There is a reason it is thus named and why I am so conflicted about it, people.

If I said I was crazy first, it would hurt less when other people said it.

After 5 days they let me leave.

These 5 days haunted me for years. They haunt me still. Every early May, I dreaded the sound of birds outside my window and the smell of the earth turning to summer because it made me flash back to the 2 weeks I literally spent in bed after I came home. When sounds and smells of the morning would trigger flashbacks I would plug my ears and shut my eyes tight. I was trying to ward off the feelings and images those things brought back to me. It never worked. I only recently stopped doing that.

Despite my good intent, and that I did every single thing you were supposed to when you are suicidal…In the end it hurt me so much more than it helped.

I wish I could say after enduring the hospital and months of tons medication that I got better or even improved.

Far from it.

Instead of making me feel better, the medication they had me on made my symptoms much, much worse.

It did not help that my life situation was hugely stressful at the time. I stupidly attempted to go back to school and get my degree. I was doing ok with the classwork but I was absolutely not fit to be there emotionally. My personal life was a complete and utter mess.

And it was about to get so much worse.

Which brings us to what I lovingly refer to in my head as “HELL WEEK”.

When everything REALLY started to come apart.

It was the week of my finals.

I was a heartbroken mess.

One day earlier, due to reasons I can’t get into, I basically lost 7 of the most important people in my life and a dog. (A totally awesome dog at that.) I had most of my finals the next day and it was two days before my very best friend in the world deployed for war in the middle east.

I was reeling.

I called Jon right as he left work.

He was still there despite it all. Day after day I asked my husband if we were fine and day after day he answered, “Yes”. He deserved a wife who could at least make him a good meal and that could still soldier on despite everything.

I told him that I was inviting a couple of my friends over to grill pork chops for dinner and asked if he had anything else he wanted me to pick up while I was out. He quickly said, “NO”. He sounded odd, but I didn’t really think anything of it.

When I got home my friends were already there waiting. Jon was in the bedroom and I chitchatted with my friends as I unpacked the groceries and went out to light the grill, but it seemed to be broken. I went inside and into the bedroom to ask my husband to help me turn on the grill.

On the bed there was a packed suitcase. I looked at it, not computing its significance. I moved my eyes from it and looked my husband, still completely unprepared for what was about to come out of his mouth.

“I can’t do this anymore, Loralee. I’m leaving…and I’m taking the children with me.”

(To be continued…)