The threads of a process. Part 2: Breaking

*Part one of this series can be found here.

The smear of  blood on the frayed cuff of the wet, snow-covered Army sweatshirt I was wearing was an indicator that I should be feeling pain, but I didn’t.

I DID feel pain–more pain than a human should ever have to carry on their back, it just wasn’t of the physical kind.

It was the middle of a bitter December night. The air was so cold that it almost hurt to take a breath but I was in a cemetery wearing soaking wet pajama pants and sweatshirt,  laying in the snow on top of the earth that contained the body of my little son.

I don’t remember if I was even wearing shoes.

There were mounds of icy snow around me mixed with clumps of earth and dead brown grass that I had upturned with my bare hands. I lay covered in tears with snot running out of my nose, panting hard from my efforts to physically claw my way down to my baby.

It was all too ‘The Christmas Box” for words, people.

And it made no logical sense.

None.

But I was there to end my life, so logic was not on my mind.

I reached in my pajama pants pockets and felt for the bottles of medication that I had grabbed when I ran out sobbing of my little house some time before.  It was a grotesque lifeline to the plan I had been thinking of off and on for the better part of 2 years.

I had a plan.

I had a plan and the time had come to execute it.

I reflexively wiped my nose on my sleeve and when I saw the dark red smear and looked at my raw, torn hands and the headstone of my son with the little ladybug engraved on it, I knew that I couldn’t end my life there.  No more than I could have done it in the home of my children and where my Little Bug saw all of his days or somewhere that meant something to people I loved.

It didn’t matter where I died as long as it wasn’t anywhere I had lived.

So, I drove.

I parked in front of a wide open field that was back lit with lights. It created a hazy, surreal glow that almost looked like a frozen sunset of blue and grey and white mixed in with the darkness.

It was pretty, so I stayed.

The back seats had been taken out of my van and there was a pillow and blanket that I kept inside. I never knew when I was going to need to run. Hide. Flee. I had to be prepared. I spread out the blanket and took the pill bottles from my pocket.

There are lots of people who say that suicide is the most cowardly acts a person can commit.

I can understand that statement.

At the time that I was in the thick of it there is no way on this earth that I would have understood.

None.

I felt I was doing the world a huge favor.

And as for the act itself?

It is anything but cowardly.

For a human to really, truly, utterly, stare death in the face and plunge off the cliff headfirst into his proverbial arms takes a tremendous will and conviction that you are not worth one more single moment of existence.

And I was there.

With two huge bottles of Lithium.

I didn’t have anything to drink, but it didn’t matter.  I choked down pill after pill after foul, metallic, powdery pill.

If you’ve ever had to swallow even one or two pills without water, you know how difficult it can be.

At one point I gagged and threw up many of them in my hands.

I stared at the bile and pill mound of mush in my hands and wondered how many pills were there. How many had come back up? Was it enough to thwart what I was determined to do?  I wasn’t sure and I was not willing to take the chance that after everything I would be screwed out of what I felt was my deserved fate at that point.

So, with less hesitation than I care to admit, I put the whole foul, disgusting, mess right back into my mouth and swallowed.

I wrapped up in my blanket and lay with my head on the pillow watching the plumes of my breath create condensation on the vinyl of the passenger chair and thought how utterly surreal it was that in a few hours I would stop breathing.

That I would never lift my head up again.

It didn’t matter because it had been down for so long it was easier to just lay there and let it come.  I didn’t want my last thoughts to be horrible. I tried to think about good things but like I am wont to do, I started to review why and how I had come to this moment.

Where I truly thought that death was the only single answer I had left to me.

Matthew. Huge pain from my past. Hurt and destruction of other people at my hands. Being SO overly medicated. Isolation.

The moment months before when Jonathan had his packed bag sitting on the bed, delivering a huge blow that I should have utterly expected, but didn’t.

“I’m leaving…and taking the children with me.”

When he told me, I sat there in stunned silence.

When I hear news that is huge and life-altering it always seems to send my body into a state of shock. Everything slows down and speeds up simultaneously and my mind splinters into many different segmented compartments-each thinking and feeling very different things simultaneously.

They can only be pulled together into a cohesive moments with a lot of time, hind sight and water under the bridge.

Part of me was processing the words that were coming out of my husband’s mouth. That he didn’t want a divorce. That this was for the good of me and our children. That I could barely take care of myself, let alone others. That I needed time to focus and work through the hell I was in alone without having to worry about anyone or anything else.

Part of me absolutely knew this was coming, but it was a part that was deeply buried and that had had very few flickers into my realm of consciousness. Part of me was mystified and shocked because this was the man that day after day, time after time said, “I’m fine. It’s fine. We’re fine. We don’t need counseling.” Part of me was terrified and scared. I do not like big change. It freaks me out. I have abandonment issues. And even though he said his intent was to stay together in the end, I had been through divorce. It’s not fun and I was not looking forward to doing it again.

The rest, and largest part at that moment, was hugely pissed off and furious.

My entire marriage flashed before my eyes.

I had been HORRIBLE the last year.

But.

I thought about everything I had gone and stayed through time, and time, and time again for years. The things and effort and pleading and begging until I just shut off and became a Novocaine-numbed mound of “I don’t care”. The times I had asked if we were fine and asked for us to please give counseling a real chance.

And.

I had never left.

Not even for his “own good”.

With everything that was going on that week that I was facing, that had just happened the day before, to put this on me right then seemed fantastically, horribly, unbelievably cruel.

All I could see at that moment was anger and it shook and sputtered, “Get the fuck out of my house. NOW.”

(Not my best moment. I’m utterly ashamed of my response but it was all I could manage at the time.)

And he did.

Without a word.

I sat there shaking and reeling as I leaned on the bed for support.

After a few minutes the room stopped spinning and I realized that I had friends in the living room who were probably mightily confused when Jonathan went out the door with a suitcase instead of lighting the grill for us all to have pork chops. And I had to go out and tell them what had just happened.

All I could spit out was, “Jonathan left me”.

It was horrible.

I fled my house, not sure where I was going, not sure where to go or what to do.

I just knew I had to run away.

Which was pretty much what I had been doing ever since my son died in my arms and since I started dealing with all the hell that was in my head that was years old.

Running.

Hiding.

Fleeing.

Lashing out.

The next day and week were full of so much pain I don’t want to remember but can never forget.

The next months were horrible even though I tried my best to keep everything together.

I failed at that.

I fell  apart so hard that when all was said and done and I was looking at the clusterfuck and ashes that had been my life I wasn’t just in hell. I had to look UP to see hell.

And it took more reasons that not a soul knows fully to get there. There are very few walking this earth that actually know most of what makes up “me”.

And NO ONE knows it all.

No one EVER WILL know it ALL.

That little slice of special is just for me to bear and live with.

This story is so tricky for me to tell.

I can only say so much. You are getting about 20% of what happened and why. For one, huge chunks of my memory are gone from medication and insanity. For another,  it’s very hard telling you just my point of view because there are things that absolutely contributed.

Things that came into my life and turned me from coping to…not.

I just cannot, will not, talk about them in detail.

There are more people in this story than myself and while part of me is extremely frustrated I can’t just talk about it fully, I just…cannot talk about it fully.

The one thing that I MUST stress–this was not due to just one thing.

When Matthew died, I survived the initial hell. The reflexive time that usually sends people off the edge of sanity because the pain is like nothing you can believe. When I went through my entire life and heart being torn to shreds and burned to the ground a decade ago, I survived it. Barely, and with huge chunks of my heart and soul destroyed, but I did. I probably would have survived being on the massive pharmacy of medication that I was on.

Separately, while breathtakingly painful, they are surviveable.

Together?

No.

Not even close.

It was a perfect storm.

And it is a miracle that the fall out did not kill me.

After Jonathan left, I was alone in my house for months.

Almost 6 to be more exact.

6 months of failure.

Of loneliness

Of pain.

Of sobbing.

Of isolation.

And quiet.

So, so, SO MUCH QUIET.

I tried to keep up with school.

I had a plan.

I had a plan that was my lifeline out of the mess I was in.

And I failed that plan.

While I was doing OK grade-wise, the failure of finals the week that Jonathan left plagued me. I had worked SO HARD to pass math, my very worst subject but I had an F because I could.not.make.it to the final. The program I was in was wicked fierce competition-wise and we were all reminded daily how we wouldn’t get into graduate school if we didn’t do well.

I couldn’t take it and I withdrew from school.

Another failure.

Once I lost my plan, my goal, my chance for some future for myself and my kids I felt devastated and really started to crumble.

I spent weeks in bed. Staring at the wall. Sleeping. Watching television.

Being medicated.

I HAD PEOPLE WHO LOVED ME AND TRIED. I don’t want  you to think I was just left there on my own. Even though he had left, Jonathan made sure I had food, the bills were paid, that I remembered to eat and occasionally he came by to dump me in the shower. We were in a horrible place but he still made sure I was checked on and taken care of.

I had such dear friends and family.

You CANNOT BELEIVE how hard they tried for me.

How hard they all fought.

They listened and tried and fought and struggled and carried me until they were just worn out. I carry more guilt for what I did to them than I can possibly put down into words here or anywhere. I have put them through so much that I refuse to write about anything involving them here except to say that no one abandoned me.

NO ONE.

Eventually, yes…it wore on everyone so much that they HAD to back away if only to save themselves. It got to the point that people were afraid to come to my house. They were afraid that I would be dead in my room or my bathtub or in my closet.

I wish I could say I was being my theatrical self, but I am not.

THEY TRIED TO SAVE ME AS HARD AS THEY COULD.

But sometimes?

There is no help.

No saving someone in that condition.

If you are to the point where your mind is in such pain, turmoil and sickness that you genuinely, truly believe that the entire world is better off without you? That is something that is usually very, very out of anyone’s hands to tame and control without some huge fucking intervention.

And I got quickly to that point.

In December.

Even though I tried (with SO much love and assistance) to “Get help”.

I didn’t have money for traditional therapy AND a psychiatrist. We had already spent thousands on my hospital bill and with my (mis) diagnosis of being BiPolar the choice of which to choose seemed obvious. I needed meds to control my issues, right? So, I went monthly to see a psychiatrist who had treated me in the hospital. Now that I know more about what went on, it was a horrible course of treatment. He talked and gave me things to do only to a point. Like a BandAid on a huge, gaping wound.

But I had to see him to get the medications that were so important to help me get better.

Thing is?

THEY MADE ME SO MUCH WORSE.

SO. MUCH. WORSE.

I was on a pharmacy of medication. Many of them mind altering. I broke out in spots and it got to the point that I could barely remember things that had happened a half hour before. I was agitated all the time and I would often wake up in the middle of the night in a pool of sweat that reeks of a metalic, medical smell.

I felt truly, TRULY crazy.

But…I did what I was told. I took what I was told to take. I wanted to get better.

Then…

My psychiatrist demanded (again, DEMANDED) that I do something so against everything I wanted to do.

In hindsight, he was a manipulative bastard of the utmost kind but I did not realize it at the time.

I felt cornered, forced, horrible, and scared. I was given an IMPOSSIBLE choice. It was so hugely egregious and against the ethics of his profession that if one of my best friends had not been in the damn room when it happened I don’t know if anyone would even believe me. I wish I could tell you but I cannot. If were not such a pivitol part of my story I would leave it out completley.  Please forgive me for leading you horses to water and bitchslapping you with “NO, YOU CAN’T DRINK” but it is what it is.

This decision sucked and at the time I felt like I had no choice but to pick what I saw as the lesser of two really shitty evils.

So, I did what he asked.

The fall out was something that haunts me to this day.

If you are going to aim a fucking nuclear weapon at a group of people you care about and press fire, you damn well better be able to know at the soul of who you are that you are doing the right thing.

And everything about what I was supposed to do screamed “I DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS”.

I could. not. deal with the repercussions.

And one of those was ending up in a colossal, horrible, awful knock-down, drag-out fight on the telephone on a cold December night with someone I loved more than anything. Awful, terrible things that were meant to sting and wound were said. Things neither had ever uttered to anyone let alone someone loved and cherished.

It was so ugly.

And my head and emotional state couldn’t take one more thing.

Not one.

It escalated until I sobbed out, ”You have killed me.”

The response was cold, hard and angry.

“I have killed NOTHING.”

Click.

And I broke apart in that moment.

They were right. It may not have been how it was meant to be uttered but I only heard one thing.

I was nothing.

I was nothing.

I was nothing.

Every single thing I loved in my life I had hurt, destroyed or killed.

Everything.

EVERYTHING I TOUCHED ENDED UP FOR THE WORSE.

And I couldn’t bear to put myself and anyone else through one more second of being subjected to the utter lunatic tsunami that was me.

For months and months I’d been stockpiling my Lithum. This is often what suicidal people do…they begin to plan months, sometimes years in advance.

I had two huge bottles.

I grabbed them and looked at them.

The time had come.

But.

My babies.

My little ones.

They were in the house with me. Jonathan and I had an arrangement. I got my boys right after school for 2 hours and once a week they slept over. It was that night.

I couldn’t, could not, COULD NOT let them find me.

I couldn’t leave them alone for long either.

I couldn’t let them wake up in the morning alone.

So, I grabbed the bottles and a sweatshirt and I headed out the door into the frozen December night and got in my van. I called my sister who lived up the street and tried to sound as normal as possible despite the fact that it was nearing midnight on a weekday night.

I asked if she could go to my house. I had an emergency I had to deal with and I needed her to watch the kids. I thought I sounded normal.

I was wrong.

I hung up the phone and all could think about was my pain, my hurt.

I’m nothing.

I’m nothing.

I’m nothing.

I wanted my son.

So I drove to the cemetery to be with him before ending up in a “van down by the river” waiting to die.

While I was lying in my van, full of poison that was slowly seeping through my body, I was calm for the most part.  I was just waiting as the clock ticked.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Then there was loud pounding on my van that seemed to come from everywhere.

I saw flashlight beams and people were yelling my name.

Law enforcement had found me.

Shit.

I was pissed.

I told them I had broken no law. I had every right to be there. THEY were just as “insistent” that I come with them. They had a 9-11 call from my sister. They asked, pushed, demanded to know if I had taken anything.

I am the biggest law enforcement fan you will ever see and I am here to say that I was found by the most punitive, asshole PRICK that ever wore a badge. I do NOT say that lightly. The other two seemed ok enough but they were so busy congratulating themselves for finding “Suicide Girl” that I distrusted and disliked them instantly.

I am not blaming them for the state I was in, but if ANY of them had shown me ONE DROP of true concern and kindness, I would have told them that I had massive amounts of a lethal subject coursing through my body and that I had already been there awhile.

I know I would have.

But they didn’t.

They chose prickdom and utter insensitivity to a woman that was already in too much pain in the first place.

So, I lied.

And Officer Asswipe hauled me into his car and drove me home.

Where my entire family was waiting in various states of dress for me.

I looked at all of them and the worry and the pain and the fear and after a few minutes I couldn’t do it.

I broke down and told them what I had done.

And I told them it had been a long time.

I just wish I had waited until Dragnet had left because he “escorted me” to the hospital too. Where he sat there outside the trauma bay door telling the doctor on my case just how SUPER AWESOME he was for beating down big, bad, bitchy and difficult me because he was a freaking HERO.

I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Hey, you! Yes, the ASSHOLE IN THE UNIFORM!  I CAN HEAR YOU.”

That shut him up and the doctor asked him to leave.

It was completely out of character for me and while I am not proud of it, I really thought I was not going to make it, so what did I have to lose, really?

After that, the fun began.

Tubes, monitors, needles, restraints, charcoal, vomit, drugs, IVs…

Questions.

Questions.

QUESTIONS.

So much suckage.

So much is a haze.

Even though this account is detailed SO MUCH is vague and lost to the swiss cheese that is my brain at this time. I am doing my best to recount and am telling you what I remember how I remember it but honestly…I remember so little and am not entirely sure how much of it can be trusted. But it is what is in my brain…even though I know HUGE chunks are missing. And I am grateful for that because what I DO remember is more than enough.

I remember feeling more tired than I have ever felt in my life.

Someone telling me they were transferring me to Salt Lake because of the seriousness of the overdose.

And the cold.

I remember the cold.

I had piles of heated blankets on me but a deep cold was settling deep down inside me, freezing my arms, legs and face. It reminded me of the little runt kitten we had that died the same day I found out I was pregnant with Matthew. I knew it was dying. I held its tiny form in my hands and the poor thing was so cold. Cold that would not go away no matter how much I cupped my hands over it and breathed warm air into the space between.

It knew meant my body was shutting down.

Everything I had left was going to make my vital organs function.

I was dying.

I was so tired.

The mask that was pumping oxygen into my body made everything smell like plastic. I looked up at the sky and even though I was in a city and there were bright lights around me, the stars in the sky looked so pretty.

So beautiful.

I didn’t want the last thing I saw to be the sterile interior of an ambulance.

So, I closed my eyes as they loaded me in.

I am nothing.

I am nothing.

I am nothing.

And everything went black.

(To be continued. Friday. Promise.)