In the Room of Mental Health First Aid™

By Heather Lanier

In the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we joke about bad therapists and the body parts we lost to cancer. We describe with lyrical precision the places where our panic attacks begin and whether they travel up or down. We compare notes on the panic attacks like we’re comparing notes on dining experiences at a new restaurant. Or we stay silent and listen, grateful to those willing to describe their panic attacks because we’ve never had one, or don’t remember a time when we did … although, now that someone describes them that way, maybe we have. We recant our understandings of manic depression, tell stories about doctors’ mental health misdiagnoses, and collectively laugh at the rawness of what it means to be human.

In fact, in the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we’re invited to talk about so many things the world beyond these walls does not want us to talk about that I start to lose touch with my usual filters. At the beginning of this day-long training, our facilitator Mandi said that if we ever need to leave the room for any standard reason—bathroom, phone call—we should give her a thumbs-up, so she knows we’re okay. “Otherwise, I’ll think you’re in crisis,” she explains. A few hours into training, I feel nature’s call, walk towards the door, make eye contact with Mandi, and lift my thumb toward the ceiling. She gives me a knowing nod. As I yank on the door handle, I have the uncanny urge to call out to the entire group of twenty-seven in a jolly, assuring voice, “Just need to change my tampon!”

I do not do this. But in the room of Mental Health First Aid™, I imagine the group warmly nodding and/or chuckling in a way no group of near-strangers ever has in response to the words, need and tampon.

Maybe we laugh so much here because there is nothing funny about why we are here. We are twenty-seven college professors at a south Jersey university that will, in four weeks, make national headlines for suicide. Three in two months. But we haven’t hit the New York Times or CNN just yet. It’s November 2019, and right now the University of Southern California is in the news. Two months before, it was the University of Pennsylvania. Last month, while south Jersey’s October languished in summer-like heat, the CDC released its report: Between 2007 and 2017, the rate of suicide among people age 10 to 24 increased a whopping 54%.[*] A 2018 CDC report found that suicide rates in half the states increased among all age groups by 30%. News outlets clambered onto the stats but couldn’t position them into a landscape of meaning. Like a Brancusian sketch, the numbers offered a clear if bare-bones portrait: We are a nation in crisis.

I’ve been standing in front of a college classroom for fifteen years. I’ve never had so many students write about suicide before—their thoughts of it, their friends’ acts of it.

In the second week of this semester, a young man I hadn’t seen before walked thirty minutes into my creative writing class and sat in the back. It was my first semester at this university. I was still learning where the bathrooms were. I found his name on my roster and marked him present. At the next class, he arrived on time but left halfway through. I never saw him again.

Nine weeks later, a voicemail from the Wellness Center sat on my cell phone. It was about an unnamed student, and would I please call back? Before I could, I read the official email from the university: the student I barely knew had died. The university was not legally permitted to disclose the cause. An online forum would later name it suicide. Before the student’s death, I’d considered myself too swamped for this all-day Mental Health First Aid™ workshop. Ten minutes after reading my student’s name in that email, I asked if there was an extra spot in this room.

Four weeks from now, when we lose our third student, the conversations in the media will center around our university’s wellness center, about whether there’s a waitlist for counselors, about how well our school is supporting students in crisis. We are not counselors, and we are not in charge of hiring counselors, nor are we in charge of determining the nationally recommended counselor-to-student ratio. We’re a department of writing professors, peeking out from mounds of essays and stories and projects in this, the busiest month of the semester. We are setting aside eight hours on a Friday so we can learn how to save lives.

“You’re earning a certificate, not a superhero cape,” Mandi reminds us frequently. We nod from our seats.

The Room of Mental Health First Aid™ is, in its usual operating hours, a sterile classroom filled with six long rows of tables. This is the same room in which many of us meet monthly to discuss the unsexy specifics of curriculum changes and policy requirements. It’s the room I stood in six months ago and convinced a committee to give me the assistant professor position I now hold. I wore a black suit, clicked through PowerPoint slides, gave confident answers. I wore the very persona of infallible competence that this room has, at least for today, invited us to disarm.

Not quite public, not quite private, the room of Mental Health First Aid™ invites professionals to disclose, with promised confidentiality, all the ways it has been hard for us to be human. “We use Vegas rules here,” Mandi says, clicking to a slide that features the city’s iconic neon welcome sign. “What happens here stays here.” We can disclose adolescent-onset anxiety. We can explain how trauma might link across our years like beads on a string. We can say what we would otherwise never say in this room: “Nope, the textbook descriptions of panic attacks are incomplete. Mine begin in my arms, or my belly, or my dizzied head.”

It strikes me that if more spaces followed the norms of the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we might actually need less mental health first aid.

Mandi is a thirty-something woman with alto-voiced cheer. “How many of you have experienced depression?”

Hands go up.

“Anxiety?”

More hands. Nearly all the hands, including my own.

This is one of Mandi’s strategies: accessing our personal experiences. She has given us softcover textbooks, and she scrolls through infographic slides from the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare. But she also invites us to use ourselves as references, as wildly imperfect maps that might touch or even lay over and align with the maps of others, and which might, along with the textbook and slides, help us cobble together a fuller topography of what it means to be human.

We learn the official statistics: Twenty percent of young adults, ages 18 to 24, experience a mental health disorder.^[†] Two-thirds of students who need mental health support do not seek it. The average number of years between when a person needs help and when they receive it is eight. The age of a third grader, the time it takes for a typical human to go from drooling baby to sassy calculator of math problems. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for adults age 18 to 24.

“Why?” Mandi asks us to speculate.

“Social media?” someone calls from the front row.

“Climate change fears?” another person guesses from the side.

Mandi nods. “Sure. Those are all factors.”

But why, she says, is a question even experts haven’t answered. In our eight hours together, we will attempt to answer another: What can we do?

•••

It turns out that what we can do is remarkably simple.

She splits the twenty-seven of us into two groups. One group is labeled “Listening.” Another is labeled “Not Listening.” The groups must race each other to come up with as many outward signs of their designated label as possible. I am in Not Listening.

“Looking at your cell phone!” one of my group members calls out.

“Looking away!” another shouts.

“Not making eye contact!”

I’m not making eye contact. I’m looking at my notepad, frantically recording their ideas. A colleague grabs my list and runs to the whiteboard to scribble our answers. With equal urgency, members of Listening do the same.

“Time,” Mandi calls.

She tallies our lists. We of Not Listening have generated twenty-one outward signs. Listening only has nineteen. Not Listening wins!

But the whole point of the activity, of course, is that listening wins. It’s the “L” in our five-step Mental Health First Aid™ plan, which goes by the acronym ALGEE. We’ve skipped over the letter A for now. Mandi says it’s the hardest—we’ll get to it at the end.

Why ALGEE? “Because this program came from Australia,” our facilitator says to laughter. Maybe the others imagine what I do: surfers along the Gold Coast, aerial views of the Great Barrier Reef. Algae, the photosynthetic organisms that made the planet hospitable for life. Maybe it can help do so again.

•••

Sidenote: It is strangely freezing in the room of Mental Health First Aid™. I say this with zero metaphoric intention. I circle my hands around a mug of hot water. I wonder if I should slide my wool ski cap off my head, so I look more professional among my new colleagues. Then I remember: We’ll be talking about suicide here. It’s fine to strive for cozy.

“You are Anxiety,” Mandi calls out to three people clustered in the front row.

Their faces look up, stunned.

“And you right here,” she circles her hand around a group beside them, “are Depression.”

Nervous laughter erupts.

Another group is ADHD. A fourth is Schizophrenia. The laughter spreads, morphing from nervous to raucous. In a culture of person-first language, where we imply that people live with diagnoses rather than become them, her wording is jarring, but also hysterical.

So I am Eating Disorders, along with two men flanking me.

“Do you want to be Psychosis?” Mandi calls to a lone woman in the back. “Or you can join another group?”

The woman laughs. She’s fine with Psychosis.

Mandi has written age-ranges around the room’s whiteboards. “Go stand where you think your assigned mental health disorder, on average, begins.”

Substance Abuse stands beneath “13-17.” We of Eating Disorders sally up beside them. ADHD idles to our right at “8-12,” as does Anxiety.

Mandi asks Anxiety why they guessed eight to twelve.

“Personal experience?” a female colleague peeps with upturned uncertainty, then bursts into a low-bellied laugh.

She’s correct. So is ADHD, Substance Abuse, and we of Eating Disorders. Depression has planted themselves below “18-24,” but they’re off by a decade.

We return to our desks, and Mandi clicks to another slide. “Remember,” she says. “A mental illness is a physical illness. The brain looks physically different.”

I write these two sentences in my notebook. I box them and surround them with stars. Mandi’s quote gives new meaning to the dismissive phrase It’s all in your head. People hear this sentence in response to everything from depression to sexual harassment to autoimmune disorders. It means: What you’re describing, you’ve invented. It also means: Quit being inconvenient. But Mandi’s quote reminds us that the head is a powerful and real place in which to experience something.

The single greatest factor that contributes to mental health disorders, Mandi says, is trauma. Capital T trauma comes to my mind. The neglect of a parent. The fist of a spouse. A box for a bed. But she says no one can define trauma for a person.

“If anyone tells you that what you’ve experienced isn’t trauma, that’s bad counseling. In fact,” she adds, “everyone probably has trauma of some kind. Because everyone is alive.”

It’s the simplest mathematical proof:

Being alive causes trauma.

Everyone you have ever known has been, or is still, alive.

Ergo ….

I’m the stepdaughter of a chiropractor. If you fill out a form at a chiropractor’s office, it will likely ask you about your birth. Was it medicated? Were forceps used? A vacuum? The concern is for your neck and spine as it moved through the birth canal. But the implication is this: the very act of entering this world is traumatic.

•••

We break for pizza. We talk about our dogs, our cats, our Netflix binges, our children. We stretch cheese-covered triangles from our teeth and describe the things we love in this world. “I like your hat,” the man to my left, of Eating Disorders, says. I thank him.

•••

In 1990, I sat in a room with a judge and explained to him an ongoing experience of trauma. I was twelve. The judge dismissed my experience as not trauma. On my lap sat a composition notebook in which I’d written about my trauma. The judge wouldn’t read it. So mine was not, could never be trauma.

The details don’t matter—I’ve written about them elsewhere. (Thumbs up, reader. I’m okay.) What matters: Twenty-first century living sometimes affirms experiences that twentieth-century living denied. Not across the board, but in pockets of places, like in an op-ed that worries for the safety of transwomen needing to pee, like on a bestseller list where sits a memoir about a brown-skinned woman’s daily experiences with racism, like in a large discussion classroom on a patch of New Jersey that was once deciduous forest inhabited by the Lenni Lenape. We name at the onset of gatherings the tribes that inhabited the land we stand on. It’s a microscopic way of acknowledging Native people and the violence of white supremacy. It also ends up saying: Trauma brought us here. Trauma is embedded in the very birth of what we’re standing on.

Six months ago, when I stood at the front of this room wearing the black pantsuit, I described how I would structure my creative writing courses. I showcased my students’ work. Projected on the screen was a student’s poem about living in a female body in a country where the president bragged about grabbing female bodies. I talked about how I diversify my reading lists, distributed grading rubrics of varying complexity, and watched committee members nod.

Here’s what I didn’t say: When I ask my students to write, I sometimes invite them to excavate the ineffable little monsters in their guts. Just like I held a little monster in my lap in the form of a composition notebook when I faced that judge. I invite my students, however gently, to gather the courage to hold these little monsters up to their ears and listen to them. And what my students end up writing in response are often beautiful and strange and powerful songs about how they have managed to survive in this world.

But it is not always easy, handling these monsters. They can and do bite. If the student who died last month had been in my classroom, what would he have unearthed? Would my lessons have helped? Hindered?

During that interview six months ago, I was required to read my own work. I read a piece of nonfiction that excavated a little monster of my own. But the prose was polished, the structure artfully arranged, pressed into shape as neatly as my dry-cleaned suit. And when I was done, my future colleagues asked about professional things: how to craft a sentence, how an essay becomes a book. This is the professionalism of my field. This is also the gift I give my students: I take seriously the craft of their writing. Which means I also assume they, as people, are okay.

But Mandi’s ALGEE requires more. She’s still reserving the hardest letter, A, for the end. And we covered L, for listening. The G stands for Give reassurance and information. The two E’s stand, respectively, for Encourage appropriate professional help and Encourage self-help and other support strategies. As a writing professor, I not only need to help my students with syntax and diction and structure and voice and revision. I also need to help them stay whole.

It’s a daunting new job responsibility in the role of twenty-first century professor: to worry about how an absence of eye-contract might trigger isolation; to keep dibs on a student’s possible need for professional counseling; to make note of any mentions of suicidal ideation (so far this semester, three) and have the follow-up conversations: Are you okay? Are you getting the help you need? I feel the weight of my students’ well-being on my shoulders.

•••

What are signs of an eating disorder? What is the difference between substance abuse and addiction? How do PTSD triggers work? Much of Mental Health First-Aid™ training requires us to understand the range of mental health disorders, so we can identify signs of them and guide people toward appropriate help. We’ve become, in eight hours, like mobile triage rooms.

We tackle letter A, as promised, at the very end. And I too will get to it at the very end. For now, know that the light from the classroom windows eventually turns pink. The sun eventually falls below the horizon. And all twenty-seven of us eventually complete our training. Mandi reminds us to do something kind for ourselves tonight: a glass of wine, a bubble bath. Every flight attendants’ emergency instructions are both clichéd and true, and Mandi reiterates them: “Put the oxygen mask on your own face first. You can’t help anyone unless you also help yourself.”

The next morning, I am ensconced in a scene the Internet might call self-care: cocooned in bed beneath a weighted blanket, supine and turning pages in a book. My children are miraculously at their grandmother’s. I am burritoed in bed past ten. I have nowhere to go for two hours.

It will make every bit of sense if I want to stay in this place forever. It will make absolutely zero sense if I start to long, ever-so-slightly, and then very much so, to return to the room of Mental Health First Aid™.

It’s the book’s fault. A memoir about being gay and Black in the south, it’s one I planned on assigning next semester. But as I turn the pages, the author’s mother is unexpectedly diagnosed with a terminal illness, and it’s the very same illness that a student’s mother has recently been diagnosed with. This student has already registered for next semester’s class.

I want to go back to the room of Mental Health First Aid™. I want to raise my hand and ask the question I haven’t figured out how to answer. Not the first question perched on top of my head (Should I assign this book?). The question buried underneath it: How responsible are we for each other? Exactly how much are we in each other’s care?

The boundaries in the room of Mental Health First Aid ™ were clear. The doors were closed. The personal stories were confidential. People gave thumbs-up. We were okay, we were okay. The only signs of the outside world showed through the windows. By training’s end, the sky was nearly indigo, and we drove home in the dark. There are only so many questions you can answer in eight hours. How responsible are we for each other? It’s a question I’ll keep carrying.

•••

The answer I left with, though, is this: At least a little bit. We are all, every one of us, at least a little bit in each other’s care.

Over the next days, I catch up on grading, read a few dozen short stories, return them to my students with comments. Ten minutes into a lesson, a student is openly weeping. She can’t be upset about my comments—she didn’t turn in any work. I assign the class a short writing activity and whisper to her: “Do you want to talk?” She shakes her head no. I say okay. Five minutes later, she’s still wiping her face with her sleeve.

“Come on outside,” I say. She follows me into the hall. It’s a night class, and the hall is lined with bluish-black windows.

She chokes on a sentence. It cracks past her vocal cords. She’s in a domestic violence situation. It’s bad. What follows is another Vegas moment. The details of her story stay with her. But the all-day Mental Health First Aid™ shifts me into gear. I listen closely. I ask questions. I hug her for as long as she wants, which is much longer than I expect, and she weeps into the crook between my neck and shoulder. She holds tight, until she lets go.

I ask about her safety. I ask whom else she has told. We return to class, and I finish teaching, and then we sit together on a bench in the hall as she calls campus safety. She speaks to the counselor on call. The counselor gives her good advice. There are next steps. A way to feel safe tonight. An expert to talk to tomorrow.

I walk her to her car, which is right in front of the building—a spot she tells me she waits for each night that we have class. This is why she’s been late, she says. I watch her close her car door and hear the click of the lock, and she drives away. It’s raining, almost seven p.m.

Reader, I’ll tell you this: She won’t pass the class. But she’ll get counseling and a safe place to live.

On my way to the parking garage, someone behind me shouts with all their might: “FUCK!” During my ascent up the garage’s concrete stairwell, two men pass me. They are very tall, and loud, and seem amiable and they could also crush me against the wall, and they could be carrying something that crushes them from the insides, and they could be perfectly fine.

We’re all a little in danger, we’re all a little in each other’s care.

When I get inside my own car, I lock the doors, relieved to create a room of just myself.

•••

It is only at the tail end of the daylong training, when my blood sugar is low and the sun is threatening to set and I have the uncanny urge to scroll mindlessly through social media, that we tackle the hardest letter: A.

Assess for risk of suicide or harm.

In other words, ask a person if they’re planning to kill themselves. If we ever suspect someone is thinking of it, we need to ask.

We practice as a group, repeating the questions in unison:

Are you thinking of killing yourself?

Are you having thoughts of suicide?

We get the words right. We commit them to memory. Mandi tells us that it can be scary to ask, which is why we’ll practice in pairs.

“And if they say yes,” Mandi asks, “then what do you do next?”

A voice pipes up in front: “Ask if they have a plan.”

She nods. “And if they do?” she asks.

“Stay with them,” another voice says.

“Do not leave them,” Mandi adds. “Call campus safety. Call 911.”

Then it’s time. I turn to the male colleague next to me. I met him two months ago.

“Are you thinking of killing yourself?”

He knows it’s coming, and still he winces. His eyebrows relax, and he assumes the role. “Yes,” he says calmly.

“Do you have a plan?” I ask.

He pauses. “Yes,” he says.

The end of the role play is remarkably stark, like a cliff-edge. We switch roles.

“Are you considering suicide?” he asks.

I’m a terrible role-player. I give him the true answer. I give him the only answer I hope people will always give me, the answer I hope every person on this planet can give every day of their lives. It’s a hopeless hope for the world’s eight billion people, all of whom have been born and have lived years and are still alive. I say “No.”

[*] From Sally C. Curtin, M.A., and Melonie Heron, Ph.D., “Death Rates Due to Suicide and Homicide Among Persons Aged 10-24: United States, 2000-2017,” NCHS Data Brief, No. 352, October 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db352-h

^[†] All statistics in this paragraph come from the presentation literature from the Youth Mental Health First Aid ™ USA training.

•••

HEATHER LANIER is the author of the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Longreads, The Sun, and elsewhere. She writes about parenting, disability, spirituality, and what a kindergarten teacher would call “big feelings.” Her TED talk has been viewed over two million times.

When the World Bends

Content warning: suicide. —ed.

By Amber Wong

Before the big splash, Elizabeth and I eased our sculling shells into the water and breathed deep the cool morning air. Fifty-four degrees, no wind: perfect Seattle weather for a Fourth of July row. Perfect timing, too. We’d be on the water at six-thirty and back before eight, so we’d beat the rush of pleasure boats—and their butt-soaking wakes—as they crowded into Lake Union for the night’s premier event, the 2017 Seafair Summer Fourth fireworks show. Up at Gas Works Park, where grassy mounds hid tons of hazardous waste that few Seattleites knew about, people would already be spreading out blankets, ready to wait out the day.

Overhead, high clouds began to blur and fade, turning blue skies even bluer, while freeway traffic rumbled across the Interstate-5 Ship Canal Bridge. Just beyond our dock, the narrow bend of water linking the lake to the bay smoothed out like a fan, rippling lightly at the edges. Conditions couldn’t be better, I thought, as I settled into a shell barely wider than my hips. My fingers tripped lightly along the dock edge as I readied to launch.

“To the Cut?” Elizabeth called out above the traffic din, and I nodded. The Montlake Cut, a crucial navigation link between the fresh water of Lake Washington and the salt water of Puget Sound, is the gateway to the University of Washington’s crew training course. Along the way we’d pass under two drawbridges that carried car, bike, and pedestrian traffic.

As I slid into the shadow of the Montlake Bridge, I felt my chest tighten. I stared at the stern of my boat, refusing to watch the parade of feet and undercarriages undulating overhead. My shoulders tensed when something—water? bird poop?—dripped on my cap. But I kept my hands loose. The moment I emerged back into sunlight, my lungs reopened. I gulped at the fresh rush of air.

Even after eight years, rowing under bridges still spooked me. I could almost ignore the steady drone of tires across the University Bridge’s steel deck grate, but not the teeth-clenching ka-chunk ka-CHUNK under the Montlake Bridge. The irregular thump of tires hitting uneven bridge joints, amplified by the concrete walls of the Montlake Cut, thundered in my head like a runaway train. But Elizabeth and I had an understanding. Over the years she’d talked me through enough rough water that I trusted her implicitly. In her encouraging banter—Relax your grip, I’ll never let you fall in—I heard a deadly serious promise.

Legs pumping, I pressed hard, pausing briefly to enjoy the blue heron standing, in perfect profile, on a rock outcrop. Overhead, our resident bald eagle—his light and dark plumage unmistakably outlined against blue sky—circled slowly, fishing for his next meal. When I reached the mouth of the lake, I lifted my oars and glided next to Elizabeth. We spun our boats and reached for our water bottles.

“Mountain’s not out today,” she announced, nodding to the south. Mount Rainier sat cloaked in clouds. A typical day.

Water traffic was picking up as we headed west back to the boathouse. As we approached the Montlake Cut, two motorboats overtook us, kicking up a wake. “Slow down,” we yelled, and in a rare bit of courtesy, they did. Emerging from the Montlake Cut, we skimmed past a cluster of rowers awaiting instructions from their coach. When we cruised into home stretch, we pulled to out of the boat lane and angled our boats south toward the dock. Under the roar of the bridge, we watched for east-west cross-traffic and waited for our turn to sprint the last forty feet across the waterway.

Elizabeth went first. Dashing south between a westbound motorboat and an eastbound eight-person shell, she approached the dock, then slowed to let another woman in a single scull and a standing paddleboarder cross in front of her. I watched over my shoulder, waiting for my opening.

Suddenly, just off the corner of the dock, I saw a huge splash. Heard a deep WHUMP. Waves burst from that point like an underwater depth charge, rebounding off the dock, colliding in a wild interference pattern. Barely five feet away, the sculler and paddleboarder struggled to keep from capsizing. Elizabeth, caught in the erratic water, quickly braced her oars.

What was that? I scanned the shoreline for clues. It was too big and too loud to be a coxswain, who by tradition gets tossed off the dock by teammates after a race. Even a hefty dog would never plunge that deep. As a dark, motionless blob slowly broke the water surface, I bit my lip to keep from gagging. Here was a person, prone and still, and the only place they could have come from was the Ship Canal Bridge, 182 feet overhead.

Disbelief paralyzed me. A suicide jumper? Here? Amidst the fractured waves I strained to see signs of life while my thoughts bounced like a rain squall on granite. They’re blocking my way to the dock! Can I slip by and not try to help? But if I take my hands off my oars I’ll flip over. Without a life jacket I could drown! Must I risk myself for a stranger who is trying to commit suicide? What’s my responsibility here?

Frantic shouts cut the terrible silence. “What was that? Some fireworks?”

“A cherry bomb? Who threw it!?”

“Oh my god, it’s a person! Who knows CPR?”

“I do,” said Elizabeth. “But…”

“Jump in and do CPR!”

A coaching launch zoomed by. I took a few strokes closer and saw no movement, then lost courage and gave the blob a wide berth. The launch slowed and stopped, drifting in the water for what seemed like minutes. Suddenly it made a tight U-turn and roared in close. Had the rowing coach seen something fall? Had she quickly deduced the horror of what had happened? Alone, on her knees, she leaned down to drag the limp body aboard but couldn’t get enough leverage. Still she held on, struggling to keep the person’s head above water.

From way too close a megaphone voice boomed, “Get out of the way!” I looked up in alarm as a crew team and its coach rounded the corner and bore down on us. Couldn’t they see the coaching launch? I couldn’t flag them down so I yelled for them to stop. They didn’t. I wasn’t lined up with the dock, but I took a big stroke so they wouldn’t hit me broadside. Someone on the dock reached out, grabbed my oar, and reeled me in. I cursed at the coach as he raced by.

Sirens wailed from both shores and from mid-channel, growing louder and louder, finally converging on this spot. Blue police lights flashed on the far shore, red fire truck lights on ours. Medics came running to our dock as a speeding Seattle Harbor Patrol boat cut its siren and pulled alongside the rescue launch. Within a minute the Harbor Patrol moved the body to the dock on the opposite side. Three—or was it four or five?—Seattle police officers stood ready. We crowded the edge of our dock but by then the rescue was shielded from view. Behind us, unsuspecting rowers carried their shells out of the boathouse and slid them into the water. The world had bent in a handful of minutes.

What else could we do? Nothing made sense. In a fog we wiped down our boats, put away our oars. As Elizabeth and I left the boathouse fifteen minutes later, another rower approached with an update.

“He’s alive. His eyes were open and he was breathing.”

Elizabeth and I sighed in relief. But I hated myself for my gut instinct for wondering, for how long?

“He was swinging a hatchet on the I-5 freeway. Drivers yelled at him to stop. He lost control of the hatchet. It dropped just before he did.”

•••

At sixteen I was an Explorer Scout, a division of the Boy Scouts. In 1972, Explorer troops were supposed to be all-male, but my friends and I exploited a loophole to start a co-ed troop of Medical Explorers. We scheduled lots of lectures and field trips because several dads, including mine, were doctors with connections. We even got to volunteer in our hospital’s emergency room. During one evening shift, I pressed fist-sized wads of sterile gauze on a motorcyclist’s leg as he lay moaning on a hallway gurney, then watched a doctor pull glass out of a screaming kid’s foot. I peeked around nurses and doctors as a silent Code Blue was whisked in and pumped for an hour before being wheeled to the morgue.

When the hospital pathologist invited us to watch an autopsy, I thought, oh, just another activity. But when I asked Dad to sign my permission slip, he shook his head.

His eyes were steel. He growled, “I don’t recommend it. That’s not something you want to see. Not at your age.” I was still hopeful, thinking, that’s not a flat denial. As if he’d read my mind, he continued, “I’m warning you for your own good!” His tone dropped ominously. “Because once you see it, you can never unsee it.”

•••

Two hours later, Elizabeth texted me. Feels a little surreal, huh?

I was home drinking coffee, eating a bagel, deciding whether to try to remember or try to forget. Turns out that’s a false choice.

I texted back. Yes. How are you doing?

Feels odd to just go on with your day. Concerned for the person of course. But it was a really close call for all of us. Need to just sit a bit.

Exactly. I’m still sitting.

Alone in my sunlit kitchen, I set down my coffee and choked back the sour in my throat. Elizabeth’s comment put me on edge. Right after the awful splash, my thoughts had flown to the jumper: How can I help? Will he survive? But in the silence of home I focused on me and my tribe, the rowers on the water. In one blind moment we could have been killed. We were open and unprotected. Any heavy mass from 182 feet—an errant chunk of concrete, a thrown backpack or garbage bag, a one-hundred-sixty pound person—would crush like a cannonball. The aftermath would have been gruesome as a bomb explosion. A war zone. I’d never seen one, but my husband and stepson had. Never would they unsee the horror.

I sipped the last of my cold coffee, tried to still the ache in my chest. Repeating the salient, immutable fact—none of us got hurt!—I walked to the kitchen window, away from mental carnage that didn’t exist. Below, the yard was drenched in shades of green. Beyond my neighbors’ rooftops I saw a glimmer of Lake Washington.

I imagined the view from the Ship Canal bridge deck: the 182-foot drop, the flatness of the water, and the vast three-dimensional space between. Images could get distorted, narrowed, especially through desperation’s lens. With boats large and small, from barges to sculls, did we move like targets in a video game? Factor in wind speed—after all, I’m a civil engineer—and the open water below the Ship Canal Bridge could constrict to a pinpoint. If the jumper intended to avoid us, he chose the slimmest margin of error. If not, that same margin of error was our salvation.

Would knowing the jumper’s intent have sharpened or blunted the horror?

Each day we live with incalculable risk. Animate and inanimate objects fall from the sky. Meteorites fall. People fall. No one really noticed, but hatchets fall too.

•••

“So did he die?”

Sitting around the kitchen table a day later with my mah-jongg group, four women I’d known well over twenty-five years, I lifted my glass of wine and felt a gnawing unease. Everyone’s first question was always about the jumper. Why did his presumed death garner so much sympathy? If he’d survived, would the tragedy seem more equal, both of us escaping death by inches? How does his willful jumping—and my sheer vulnerability—factor into the equation?

I gritted my teeth and shook my head. “I don’t know.” I’d searched the news but turned up nothing, so there’d be no resolution. As their voices grew louder, each person positing the jumper’s fate, I signaled “timeout” and interrupted. “The Seattle Times’s policy is not to write about suicide jumpers. Unless a lot of people witnessed it, that is.”

“Did a lot of people witness it?”

Tersely, “I don’t know.” Why did it matter? I had.

“How long was he in the water?”

“Ten minutes?” Why this unnecessary detail? My temples pounded in frustration.

“So how close was he?”

Finally. Like a fever breaking, a welcome relief—someone acknowledged my trauma, my anxiety over the random fragility of life. As I gestured across the length of the table, my voice turned unnaturally shrill. “About ten feet. He was so close! If he’d hit us, he could’ve killed us!”

There was a moment’s silence, followed by a quick chorus of retorts. Clearly my words hadn’t had the intended effect. Instead, I felt like I was being scolded.

“Whoa, you sound angry!”

“It’s wrong to blame him. Of course he wasn’t aiming at you.”

“Think of his horrendous mental pain! It must have been overwhelming!”

What I heard was this: What’s your problem? Don’t you have a heart?

•••

Four days later, Elizabeth and I eased our shells into the water. Earlier that morning I’d debated with myself—Get back on that horse! Or not…—but the weather promised to be perfect, a promise that Seattleites are unable to resist. I was kneeling on the dock securing my oar riggers when a motion high above caught my eye. My head jerked up. Elizabeth saw my reaction and glanced up too. On the bottom deck of the I-5 Bridge, a cherry picker bucket was slowly lowering two men just below the bridge deck. I sighed in relief. In their hard hats and orange vests, I pegged them as state highway inspectors, likely testing for loose concrete. The bucket stopped with a light bounce. I tilted my head, visually measuring their relation to the water. They were about ten feet south and twenty feet below the spot on the upper deck where the person must have jumped. I stared a little too long.

Elizabeth knew exactly what I was thinking. If they fell, would they hit us? With a forced laugh she said, “Well if it’s your time, it’s your time then.” I could hear the thinness in her voice.

I frowned. I didn’t want Fate to be so lazy. Nervously I snipped, “Nah, I think they’re okay.” As soon as I spoke I was sorry. Why was I so rattled? Was I truly afraid they’d hit us? Was I ashamed to be caught thinking only of myself?

Or was something submerged now coming to boil? Was I reacting to the suicide jumper, how furious I was at him for terrifying me, yet how constrained I felt about expressing that anger? Four days of talking to my husband and close friends hadn’t helped—their comments felt way off the mark, strangely off-putting. So because I was alive, physically unhurt, I was expected to stifle my rage, ignore my feelings, and cluck sympathetically about his plight? How much empathy could I muster? Was it better for me to think of him more like a falling chunk of concrete—an object with no agency—than a suicide bomber who launches himself with intent to kill? Must I absolve him at all? Even if he wasn’t trying to kill us, the fact remained: he terrorized us. I felt like screaming, “There’s more than one victim here!”

Could I never unsee that concussive splash just ten feet from where I was kneeling?

I rose to kick off my shoes and heard the gentle lap of water. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I looked out beyond the dock to the west. There, at the wind-induced open water line between chop and calm, was a sharp demarcation drawn by the form of the land, the bend of the water, and the face of the wind. A warning: do not cross this line. So we’d go east then. I scanned the familiar scene across the channel: the white ferry, the concrete bridge supports belted with graffiti, the row of boats comfortably tucked in their berths. Ivar’s outdoor dining deck, its red and blue table umbrellas snugged down for the night, its dock empty now. All as it should be.

Absently I pulled on my cap and threaded my ponytail through the hole in the back. I stretched my arms wide, felt the air fill my lungs with cool deliciousness. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to get to look for our eagle again. I grabbed my oar handles, centered myself down on my seat. As I pushed off the dock, an involuntary glance—up at the men in the bucket, and from there, to the upper bridge deck. The railing was empty. But from now on I would never stop looking.

“Annual inspection for bridge cracks?” I started at the unexpected sound of Elizabeth’s voice right beside me, her boat so close that our oars almost touched. I couldn’t mistake the drollness in her tone.

As her words slowly registered I began to laugh. She’d caught me looking up at the bridge again, searching for ghosts. Nested within her seemingly benign engineering question was a deeper concern: Are you okay?

Until that moment, I hadn’t quite realized how not okay I was. My feelings sat like a jumbled weight on my chest. Like Elizabeth, I’d always prided myself on my ability to stay calm and reason things out, yet these days I felt so roiled, so defeated. Silently I ranted, Why can’t I just get over this?

But with that laugh, that loosened eddy of air, the atmosphere suddenly changed. My internal smog cleared enough so I could see that she was troubled too. In our exclusive club of rowers-who-barely-missed-being-hit-by-a-suicide-jumper, we were virtually the only ones who could reassure each other, You’re not crazy, I was there, too. We had much to discuss. I would soon talk her through her fixation on the hatchet’s trajectory—I heard it splash, did it land right behind me? It wouldn’t fall blade first, would it? I’d feel her first flash of anger when she thought someone was throwing fireworks, trying to scare us. She’d wade with me through my swamp of guilt. Together we would reshape the story into something we could understand, something we could only arrive at after dissecting every detail and every “what if,” hailing our luck again and again, until the day lost its power to haunt us.

•••

AMBER WONG is an environmental engineer in Seattle who writes about culture, identity, and her firsthand knowledge about risks posed by hazardous waste sites. Recent work has been published in Lunch Ticket (Summer/Fall 2017 featured essayist), Slippery Elm, and Metaphorical Fruit, and her short piece, “How I Learned to Write,” won the Writer’s Connection essay contest. Amber earned an MFA from Lesley University and a master’s degree in civil engineering from Stanford University. She is working on a memoir.

My Parents’ Delusions

By Gayle Brandeis

My dad thought my nose was a baby. He said there was a baby on my face, where my nose should be; a full body and a head. He found it funny. He wanted to take a picture so I could see what he saw.

•••

My mom thought my dad was hiding millions of dollars from her, from us. She thought he was part of an international money-laundering scheme.

•••

My dad called as I drove to pick him up to take him to the dentist. “I can’t make it to the appointment,” he said. When I asked him why, he said, “I’m in Bosnia.” Apparently he had been in Bosnia for the last five days. He told me he had received a voice mail message from himself saying he was lost in Bosnia, but he wasn’t afraid. When I got to his room at the assisted living place, he wanted me to listen to his voice mail so I could hear the message. Even though I doubted the message would be there, part of me wondered if he did somehow call himself, if I could hear what he had heard. But no, when I pressed Play, all I heard was myself, a message I had left a couple of days ago, the little-girlishness of my voice making me cringe. Later, he shook his head and laughed a bit, saying “Bosnia”, stunned by his own brain. When I brought up the story a few weeks down the road, he said earnestly, “It wasn’t Bosnia. I was in the Bosphorus.”

•••

My mom thought white vans were chasing her. She thought people were spraying her with poison from their cellphones.

•••

My dad thought President Obama had called upon him to be the new leader of the civil rights movement. He thought the FBI had transported his whole apartment to Washington, DC. “I’m going to be a hometown hero,” he told me excitedly.

•••

My dad’s death certificate reads

“IMMEDIATE CAUSE

(a) Cardiopulmonary Failure

DUE TO, OR AS A CONSEQUENCE OF

(b) Debility and Decline

DUE TO, OR AS A CONSEQUENCE OF

(d) Dementia, Vascular”

My mom’s reads “HANGING BY ELECTRIC CORD FROM PIPE.” (clearly there are no capitalization standards from coroner’s office to coroner’s office.) It doesn’t say “DUE TO OR AS A CONSEQUENCE OF Paranoid Delusion” but the subtext is written all over the page.

•••

Watching both parents lose their minds doesn’t give me a lot of faith in the future of my brain. My mind already feels slower than it once did, less electric. I find my memory fading, too; sometimes it feels as if the grooves in my brain are smoothing over, erasing stories trapped in each cleft, a sort of reverse evolution, turning my cerebellum from prune to plum, something firm and blank and tart.

This terrifies me—if I lose my memories, my stories, who am I? I feel panicky when I think of my childhood, my children’s childhoods, being lost to me forever. But maybe a sense of peace comes over people who lose all their memories. If we forget everything, every moment would be brand new. We could just be, like an animal or a plant.

I can remember lying in bed shortly after my mom hanged herself, nursing my baby, who was born one week before her death. I remember thinking I should be doing something more, something active, writing or researching or doing one of the many practical post-death tasks that needed doing, but then I thought about sows, about how a mama pig just lies on her side nursing her piglets, how that’s all she needs to do, that’s her task, she gives herself to it fully, and I let myself drop into that surrender, let myself just be a mother animal nursing her young, mind blank, and I found there was something comforting, liberating, in that. Maybe that’s what it feels like to have your memory erased—you can just be a mammal in your body, living from moment to moment.

In her memoir Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso writes “My goal now is to forget it all so that I’m clean for death.” But I have to remember that’s just memory loss. Delusion is a whole other story. Dementia is a whole other story. And after watching my parents, I know I can’t take my lucidity for granted.

•••

My mom, in her delusion, thought everyone was against her. My dad had his own moments of paranoia and disorientation, but his delusions were more often of the absurd, even sweet, variety. I know I have no control over the matter—over that tender, amazing, convoluted gray matter—but if I have to lose my mind, may it be in the way of my dad. May I say things that make my family laugh and shake their heads instead of traumatize them. May I travel to surprising places without leaving the room, see whimsical things, imagine myself a hero—which sounds quite a bit like the writing life, come to think of it, just without the mediation of the page. Maybe it would help to think of it that way, to think of delusion and dementia as a new way of living inside a story, entering non-linear, unpredictable narrative. A way of life in which we let go of chronology, let go of traditional plot and sentence structure. That makes it sound less scary to me, makes it feel more like art than ruin. But I also know how scary it can be to get trapped inside a story—I saw that in my mom, how terrified and alone she felt in her delusion, especially at the end. Story can save us but it can also imprison us. My mom may have killed herself to kill the story that had taken over her life.

My mind wants to create a happier narrative for itself—one in which it can avoid my parents’ fate, one in which it can hold on as long as my body does, one in which my body and mind stay vitally, inextricably linked, until they both give up the ghost—but at the same time, my mind knows it may not be the final author of my life. None of us know who will have the last word. For now, I’m grateful to be able to string words together, grateful to preserve some sharpness, some clarity, before the light ultimately goes out.

•••

GAYLE BRANDEIS is the author, most recently, of the memoir The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide (Beacon Press) and the poetry collection The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Books). Her other books include Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage (Ballantine), Delta Girls (Ballantine), and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt), which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. She currently teaches at Sierra Nevada College and the low residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Buy her books here.

Love and Death at the Gas Station: A French Suicide

By Cindy Price

Hey, hey, I saved the world today. And everybody’s happy now the bad thing’s gone away.

—The Eurythmics

I was in no way thinking along the lines of a proposal. I boarded the plane to Paris with Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song in hand; earlier, I’d had my boyfriend run an X-Acto blade through the thousand-page tome, dividing it into three cartable sections. “Who brings such a depressing book to the south of France?” he’d asked, shaking his head and pressing the knife deeper into the bind. I watched the sinew flex in his forearm and shrugged.

“Don’t be silly,” I’d countered. “The entire country is depressed.”

He asked me to marry him a week into our trip, kneeling down on a grassy hill in Bourgogne. I had to hug myself to keep the wind from whipping up under my jacket, and the sun had dipped so low it was hard to see. “Yes,” I blurted out of custom, and then demurred. “Can I think about it?”

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to commit—we’d lived together faithfully for five years and I wanted kids with him. I’d just always been vocal about the fact that I thought a marriage certificate was irrelevant—not to mention a possible death warrant for romance—and this was the first I was hearing that he did not. In retrospect, my position seems facile: what did I know about an institution that I’d never been a part of? That night, we dined in a hideaway restaurant with a huge brick oven that warmed the entire room. “If I say no, will you still grow old with me?” I asked, the wine drowning out my anxiety.

“Of course,” he said without hesitation, and I knew he meant it.

When I ask him now where the suicide happened in the span of that trip, he never says, After I proposed to you and you said maybe. He says, “After Arles and before Collioure.” He cannot tell me how he felt about it or if he was frightened that day, but seven years later he can tell me the exact gas station where it happened. “Here it is,” he says, pulling it up on Google maps. “Just outside of Montpellier.”

I remember thinking that the rest area felt almost comically American in scope—a football field–sized scrape out of the French countryside with a long row of gas pumps and two convenience areas flanking each end of the asphalt. The bird’s eye view of us, a young couple on a road trip pulling into it, dragged to mind the pivotal scene from The Vanishing—not the original Dutch version, but the American remake with Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock. “She disappears into a gas station,” I explained, shoving the middle section of The Executioner’s Song into the floorboard and pulling on my sandals. “And then Kiefer Sutherland can’t find her and becomes obsessed and then when he finally finds out what happened—well, it’s the worst possible thing.”

“You and your macabre stories,” he joked, parking outside of the smaller convenience store.

“I don’t like them because they’re macabre,” I said defensively. “I read them to be prepared. In case something bad happens.” I walked across the asphalt lot alone to the bigger convenience plaza, looking for food. In the Mailer book I was reading, people also met terrible fates at the gas station. Gary Gilmore killed a gas station attendant, Max Jensen, for no practical reason. I had told my boyfriend that these stories gave me a sense of control—that if I studied them, I might know how to save people. But Jensen had done exactly what Gilmore asked—given him the money, lain down face first on the floor—and Gilmore had executed him anyway. Now I realized that there was something more important they were cautioning me against: taking people for granted. The people we love, nothing more than a cluster of atoms, too easily destroyed. The narratives implored me to hold tight.

Returning, I cut through a line of cars flanking the side of the store where we’d parked. As I approached the driver’s side window of a small sedan, I saw the back of a man’s head propped against his window. Asleep, I thought, and then had the unmistakable feeling that I should look closer. My eyes shifted downward to his door, which was ajar by maybe a centimeter, and through the tiny sliver I could see his arm slack by his side and a steady line of drool trickling down his chin.

I looked around for help. In the car to my left, a middle-aged French couple sat talking and languidly smoking cigarettes in the afternoon sun. I waved my arms, and when the woman in the passenger seat turned I motioned to his window, flipping my palms heavenward.

She shook her head at me and mouthed, “Non,” then shut her eyes and put her head to the back of her hands to mimic sleeping. Then she turned back to the driver and started talking again.

My face flushed—the cliché of the unflappable French blowing off the overdramatic American—but I steeled myself and tapped the couple’s window again. “No dormir, no dormir,” I mouthed, hating my terrible French. Wearily, she got out of the car, stubbed out her cigarette and tapped his window. When he didn’t respond, she narrowed her eyes at me and cautiously walked around to the passenger side. She opened it and pulled out a note: A Dieu, pour tout ce que tu m’as fait.

To God, for all that you have done to me.

I ran into the gas station. My boyfriend stood at the espresso vending machine, a tiny paper cup in front of him. “Come,” I croaked, “a man is trying to kill himself. Can you tell the attendant to call 911 in French?”

Outside, a small group formed around the man in the car: the smoking couple, a pretty teenaged girl and her mother, the gas station attendant, and us. The six of us looked like stock characters in a canned farce, frozen in indecision until the mother announced she was a registered nurse. Under her direction, we slipped into action—grateful to stay busy until the ambulance arrived.

Combing through his backseat, someone unearthed sleeping pills and an empty six-pack of Heineken. With the car doors open, I could see dozens of small stuffed animals, some with the word Grandpa stitched across them. My stomach knotted: somebody else’s irreplaceable cluster of atoms. My eyes passed over the driver’s legs, which were small and atrophied. He was disabled. To God, for all that you have done to me.

When the paramedics finally arrived, they sauntered out of their vehicle slowly, like tourists stretching their legs at a vista. Even facing calamity, the French took their time. My boyfriend and the man from the smoking couple helped the male paramedic bring him into a tiny back room inside the station, while the female paramedic asked me questions and the nurse translated. After a while, they carried him to the back of the ambulance and my boyfriend returned with a smile.

“They think he’s going to be okay. They’re taking him to the hospital now, but they’re almost positive he’s going to make it.” I smiled, relieved, and he smiled back. “You saved him,” he said, his eyes uncharacteristically big with adrenaline. “You helped save his life.”

I nodded slowly, unsure how to process it. “But what if it isn’t okay with him?” I whispered. The man had wanted to die, and I had intervened. I was instinctually proud, sure that I had done the right thing—but a small part of me still felt uncomfortable altering another man’s life course. I could never know the extent of his suffering. I looked at him. “He was clearly in pain,” I said. “Maybe he needed peace.”

Walking back to the espresso vending machine, he picked up his cup. It had sat there for well over an hour, and nobody had touched it. Only in France, I thought. “If he doesn’t like it,” my boyfriend said, taking a sip, “he can always try again.”

The next year, I married him.

•••

CINDY PRICE (www.cindyprice.net) has written for the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, The Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Weekly, Hemispheres, and The New Leader. Her food and travel writing has appeared in three New York Times anthologies and the American Michelin guides, and she has taught classes for the New York Times Knowledge Network, Mediabistro, and Gotham Writer’s Workshop. Born, raised, and educated in the South, she now lives in Maplewood, NJ, with her husband and two sons. Follow her on Twitter @cindyeprice.

Love, Luck, and Letters

heart stone — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Glendaliz Camacho

Letters from JR (2012)

On a February night in 2012, there was a knock at my door. When I looked through my door’s peephole, I saw a young man in my hallway. My neighbor’s son from upstairs. I figured that he was going to ask if I had heat or hot water or to borrow something, so when I opened the door and heard him say, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time. Are you seeing anyone?” I put my hand up for him to stop talking and told him I’d get my keys and come out into the hall.

JR stood on the second step of the landing between our floors. He was built like the high-school football player he’d been—thick neck, broad shoulders, muscular legs. By the way his eyes, the color of wet soil, drifted up into a corner of the ceiling like a student remembering what the textbook said, I could tell that he’d rehearsed this in his head until he’d finally built up the nerve to do it. I knew what I should say. Point out our age difference—he was twenty-three, I was thirty-three. Point out how different we were as people—he wore his pants three sizes too big and I’d once heard him have a yelling match in the front of our building with his ex-girlfriend, while I stopped liking guys who wore baggy jeans in ’96 and kicked my previous boyfriend out for being too chaotic.

It would have been easy, too; it would’ve taken me all of a minute to say, This is sweet but no thanks. Instead, I gave him my phone number.

Breaking both cardinal rules I’d laid down the next day in his bedroom—this is not a relationship and discretion was required—JR and I went on dates, he met some of my friends, and we held hands in public. I played Otis Redding songs for him, introduced him to Carlos the Jackal via a mini-series, and read him Thich Nhat Hahn. He’d drive me to work and pick me up almost every day and make me tea in the evenings.

To see myself through his eyes was to witness feats of sorcery. The thrill was in coming up with more and more things to expand and amaze him with. All random things that I was into that he’d never been exposed to or never had the freedom to express interest in because of the street life he was drawn to. If I stopped too long to think about it, I knew I would find my relationship with JR to be unsustainable, but I swatted the thought away in exchange for how good the attention felt.

One evening, detectives knocked on JR’s door. I lied and said he wasn’t in. They left their card, saying they just wanted to ask him a few questions. JR admitted he’d committed a robbery. There was a good possibility it was caught on video. A week later, he decided to turn himself in.

We spent that evening sitting on the steps of the elementary school that we’d attended, across the street from our building. We had started out the same—two kids with cartoon backpacks and fresh pencils. As much as I joked that my School of Making Better Men was closed, I believed that boy could reemerge, the boy that went to the same gifted junior high school I did and earned a college football scholarship. From the corner at the top of the hill our building sat on, I watched him walk away until he disappeared into the precinct. He was sentenced to five years.

We wrote each other almost every week, at first. JR’s first letter began, “I miss and love you so much. I wish and pray I can go home to see, hold, and sleep with you again.” Another letter continued, “I also find myself trying to ascertain how or why you love a monster like myself. I know I haven’t shown you that side of me, but based on my way of living alone, it should’ve kept you at a distance from me.”

In another letter, “I still can’t believe I’m so lucky to have a woman like you on my side. My shrink tells me that I should call it a blessing, but I call it luck, because blessings have nothing to do with love. Luck has everything to do with it. Then he asked me how do I figure that and I explained, love is luck because not everyone in this world will ever know what love is, nor will they ever experience it. It’s like stumbling upon money in the street. That’s not a blessing, you was hit with enough luck to find that money.”

He closed another letter with, “please don’t leave me alone because without you, I’m just the same old monster I’m known to be.”

After a few months, I stopped writing back.

First letter from John (April 2013)

One afternoon, I checked my OK Cupid account to find a message from JLRodriguez. “Had I recognized you for you I never woulda stopped, but I did, and you probably already got a message that I did…so I will play this however you want me to,” it read. I had randomly popped up on his matches, and he didn’t recognize me until he was already in my profile.

I recognized JLRodriguez as John, a poet I met at a reading in the lower east side two years prior. We’d already been connected on social media, but the reading was our first interaction in real life. He leaned in conspiratorially and asked what happened between me and a publisher that caused the short-story anthology I was editing—that included one of John’s stories—to come to an abrupt halt. Wary, I gave John a diplomatic answer, something about my sense of timing with the publisher’s not being compatible. We didn’t speak again until a year later when we were reading at the same event. We were cordial, nothing more.

In his message, John closed with, “I’m looking like you are, and you look good. At any case, I do hope you find whomever you are looking for.”

I got called out on something I thought I’d hidden well. I was looking. I had been tirelessly looking since I was a child: for answers, love, approval, freedom, happiness. When I found some form of these things—in a conversation with my father, in a new love interest, in an acceptance letter—I sought it out in another way—spirituality, a new love interest, an acceptance letter to something else. Contentment is only a plateau, never a permanent state.

I liked that John offered to meet me on this plateau, as a fellow seeker, but with the openness to know that we might not remain there. If, scrolling through online profiles, I would’ve seen and recognized him, I also would’ve passed, but there was some significance to my appearing on his feed. One that was worth exploring.

Love letter from John (June 24, 2013)

On our first date, John and I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant that had a photograph of Marilyn Monroe on the bathroom wall. I told John I had been reading about the siren archetype and Marilyn Monroe, the prime example. I didn’t tell him that I took a photo of the picture thinking it was a good omen. We talked about Mourid Barghouti’s memoir and Rita Moreno’s autobiography in the park across the street from the restaurant. He gave me a tour of the college campus where he taught freshman English composition courses. It was one of the best dates I ever had.

John was the type of guy to listen to me over the phone so intently, I would ask if he was still there. One day, when I was marooned on my couch with a fever, he brought over tea, Gatorade, and croissants. We often spent time wandering through museums or at readings. He’d send me YouTube links to Wu-tang mashups and I’d send him Robi Rosa or Florence and The Machine songs. He introduced me to Vampire Hunter D and Dungeons and Dragons alignments. I was on equal footing with him intellectually and emotionally, standing on that plateau of contentment. If there was a right way to do a relationship, this was the one I’d gotten the most right. JR was the last page of Act I and John was the first page of Act II.

John was also the type of guy who when I ran out of toilet paper or Brillo pads, brought it up constantly as something that should never happen to an adult. In his thirty-nine years, he’d never once let that happen. The first time I made a meal for him—vegetable lasagna—he said that it was almost, but not quite, as good as his mom’s. In social situations, things could go either way: he was sweet and inquisitive or visibly uncomfortable until he was a block of ice. I wrestled with these pros and cons, but the pros still far outweighed cons.

When I was accepted into a week-long writing workshop in Berkeley, John dropped me off at the Airtran at JFK Airport. We hugged and kissed. “It’s just a week. I’ll see you Monday,” he said. A couple of days later I received a letter via email.

My Glendaliz:

We are far now, so very, and I want you to know how wonderful you make everything.

More than that day, when I saw that picture and wondered who was that beautiful woman; more than when I knew who she was; more than the red-cheeked rush of wonderment in writing you; more than reading your acceptance; it was your willing hand in mine.

You made me feel worthy of love. No one else ever has. It was always me dreaming, forcing the clichéd longing of pseudo-romance. You welcomed me and accepted me and for that, more than anything else that I have experienced, I love you.

You make loving so easy. My time, my concern, and even my Gmail password— it comes as no surprise that I share these things with you, that you find me good at sharing, at noticing, and that you are great at reading me, that you understand, and are willing to deal with the strange seeds watered around me.

With all my love,

Your John

I called to tell him he was the absolute best for sending me a love letter. We talked for about an hour. I can’t remember about what exactly, mostly about how things were going for me in the workshop. It was the last time that I ever heard his voice.

When my week in Berkeley was drawing to a close, my instructor pulled me aside during a break from our workshop and told me John was dead. His mother’s body was found earlier in the week, in her apartment, a hammer next to her bed. John was found a couple of days later when he never checked out of a hotel room where he slit his wrists in the bathtub. When I received his letter, he had already killed his mother and I imagine he had already decided he was going to kill himself.

That OK Cupid message, at first so ripe with fate, now seemed like nothing more than a cosmic joke, a lesson sent by a god in a Greek tragedy to humble me. I reread his letters daily. So many things had to align for John and me to meaningfully cross paths: algorithms, previous break-ups, the science behind what we found attractive. I kept regressing down that line of thinking until it seemed possible that even our parents leaving their respective homelands were part of this enormous web that extended further and further into history itself. If this wasn’t an aleph, it was the closest I ever came to a moment where every thing was visible at once, and painfully so. It was overwhelming to grapple with thoughts of chance, fate, and the way time moves more like nesting dolls rather than in any linear fashion, all while crying, making John’s final arrangements, and trying to meet the daily demands of work and parenting.

I did, however, begin to feel that there was still significance in joining John on that little ledge of contentment, beyond notions of good or bad. There is a quote by the sorcerer Don Juan Matus, from Carlos Castaneda’s books, that says, “The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.” The challenge for me was to hold on to goodness and mercy, and the world as a place where these things still existed.

Something in John’s letter prodded me. “My time, my concern, and even my Gmail password.” A list of things he’d given me, except for the password. Yet, here he was saying I had it. John was a poet and he had established a rhythm here, then disrupted it. One night, I was up with newly acquired insomnia when I remembered that he’d once asked me for a favor. He’d given me his Submittable password and asked me to send his manuscript to a publisher. I typed that password into his email and it worked.

John had emailed himself a letter and addressed it to me. The subject line was “just in case,” but I think that he knew I would find it because he counted on my looking. He apologized if I was hurting. His use of the word “if” was grating, as if there was any way I couldn’t be hurting. He said his favorite times were with me. The last five lines read:

You.
You made me a believer in love.
You made me believe.
You did that.
You.

Letter to John. (June 24, 2014)

On the morning of the one-year anniversary of John’s death, I wrote to him.

Hey John,

We haven’t spoken in a minute, I know. You’re certainly making up for that. This morning, I hear you everywhere. And I know there are things we still won’t talk about.

I workshopped an essay about you last week. My group critiquing it said they couldn’t see my love for you. They felt distance there. And they were right. It’s because I still feel shame for having loved you. You left me with a lot of shame, John. To be ashamed of good memories is a fucked up thing.

Anyway, it made me think well, how to do I revise this? What were the things that made me feel love for you? And I keep coming back to that morning we wrote together. You, working on that sci-fi novel. Me, on a short story. That morning, I looked over at you and thought this could be a lot of Sunday mornings. Our equivalent of reading the Sunday Times or going to farmer’s markets or whatever couples do on Sundays. It was symbiotic. It wasn’t that aficiamiento where you’re half-crazed over someone, and I think you knew that. It was the sense of partnership, of working, creating, side by side. Harmony. That’s what I didn’t say in my essay. That this part was so stellar that I was more than willing to work with the more jodon parts of you. Yes, jodon.

People ask me if I think we’d still be together. I always say no, without missing a beat. I don’t know whose benefit that is for. I say the critical, unbending parts of you would’ve swelled like a supernova to overshadow everything.

You know, eventually, I don’t want to remember this date. You, of course, I’d like to remember random things and laugh, but this date, no. I won’t mark it forever so maybe I will talk to you next year. Maybe I won’t. In any case, I’ll see you around, John.

-G

Last letter to JR. (September 2014)

I intended to write to JR because I was working on this essay. I didn’t. It’s been about a year since I’ve written to him. I know that the last time was after John died because I have a letter from him that says, “I won’t lie, I’m glad you’re still single but I’m very sorry about your friend.” I didn’t see the point of getting into details.

I save his letters, the first ones still bound with white ribbon as if I would be able to keep everything that neat for the duration of JR’s incarceration. The ones that came after, the ones I had time to read, but never got around to answering, are piled haphazardly on top. Maybe I’ll still receive the sporadic letter from JR, but one day the letters will stop completely because he will be home, a twenty-eight-year-old man who may not see love, or perhaps me, in the same fortuitous light as before.

I used to wonder if JR grasped the nuance between the terms “luck” and “blessing” when I reread his letters, but it was I that had been using them interchangeably, like shrimp and crab in the same chowder, close enough that I couldn’t be bothered to distinguish between them. Blessings elicit gratitude because of their benefit, suggest having taken action to achieve or suffering to earn. Only good people are blessed. Luck, on the other hand is as transitory and undiscerning as love itself. A spin on a wheel. But lucky or unlucky, blessed or cursed, none of those words really seem to be a good fit for the magnitude or complexity of loving or being loved by JR or John. It was both and neither and all.

•••

GLENDALIZ CAMACHO was born and raised in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Her writing has appeared in All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), Southern Pacific Review, and The Acentos Review, among others. She was a 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee and is currently working on a short story collection.

Strawberries in the Driveway

By Ellen Blum Barish

Titan. Teacher. Talker.

Tender. Thoughtful. Truthful.

Tenor. Tea drinker. Tolkien-lover.

Tyrannous. Troubled. Trying.

Preparing for Douglas’s memorial, I was still so numb from the news of his suicide that I could only grasp one word at a time, as if I were recovering from a blow to the head. Memorials are one of those few gatherings in which being a writer can actually be useful, and so not being able to string words together into sentences was only adding to my heartbreak. In the days before the service, as I was struggling to write something thoughtful or healing, words beginning with the letter t came to me. The first, titan, because of his genius and then, teacher, because he was professorial in all ways. The rest came swiftly, even if verbs and articles didn’t.

My list of t words was a weary attempt at honoring someone I’ve known and loved for more than thirty years, but I didn’t have any practice eulogizing a dear friend who died from a bullet that he sent through his head.

But offer it I did, to our gathering of six, all friends from college who had long histories with Douglas, who listened quietly as I recited my stupid t words on the campus where we all met in the late 1970s.

On the year he took his life, it had been close to four years since I had spoken with him. He’d been pulling away. On his fiftieth birthday, I sent him a coffee table book of Grateful Dead concert photography, but I never heard back, which irked me more than made me worry. On his fifty-first, I emailed him, but he didn’t reply. In previous years, when there was a chance for us to get together in Chicago, he’d grab a flight or jump into his beige Honda from his Lawrence, Kansas, home and, voila, reunion. His recent non-response was deafening; his absence creeping into every gathering, turning talk to the question of why he was shutting us out of his life. During that year, all six of us had all reached out to him in various ways, leaving emails, voice messages, acknowledging his birthday, the new year. I had gone as far as anonymously calling the university where he taught to ask the department secretary to confirm that he was still teaching there, which he was.

On his fifty-second, I sent another email.

I wrote, “Hoping this finds you well and that this day brings you joy and peace. Know that you are in our hearts.”

Later that day, he wrote back, simply, “Thank you.”

That birthday prompted a series of conversations between the six of us about what was going on with him.

We had several theories.

There was the bat mitzvah overload theory. Between us, all of us Jewish, there were six children celebrating bat or bar mitzvahs over a half dozen years. Douglas, who didn’t identify with any religion, made the trip up for two or three but then just stopped. A single, agnostic guy with no kids. We couldn’t blame him.

There was the theory that professional disappointments were at the root of his pulling away. The strain of grants not earned, articles not published; that job in D.C. that he really wanted but didn’t get.

Most of us shared the theory that he had gone off his antidepressants and stopped going to therapy. He’d been depressed for most of his teaching life, but it seemed to us that when he was seeing his therapist and taking his medication, he had been doing well. But somewhere around his fiftieth birthday, he had confessed to Steve, with whom he was the closest, that he simply didn’t want to talk or take medicine anymore.

There was a short-lived suspicion that he might be gay and not out. I didn’t subscribe to this theory, because during my first two years of college, he and I dated. In his heyday— our heyday—he looked like red haired, freckled Christian Bale. Imagine Christian, with a tinge of Howdy Doody. I’ll never forget him in his puffy blue parka and plaid, woolen bucket hat. He was, without a doubt, a self-professed computer geek with a Middle-earthy charm, drinking tea and calling friends “M’lady” and “M’lord.” He was insistent on being the teacher, in being right, and eventually I wanted to be more like a colleague so I moved on. In later years, the Christian Bale–Howdy Doodiness faded and he became a ringer for Mario Batali, bald head and ponytail included.

It took some time for us to meet back in the middle for what would become decades of friendship that would also, weirdly and wonderfully, include a close camaraderie with my husband. They shared a passion for disc golf, cycle-commuting, home-brewed beer, science fiction, Chicago Blues, and the Dead.

Douglas did date women but since becoming a tenured professor of computer science, he had been decidedly single, living in a ranch house with two black retrievers and an expansive video, television, and audio library.

He and Steve had exchanged email in recent years, but Douglas had even been avoiding Steve’s calls. Steve talked about flying down for an intervention, but before he did, he called Douglas, first unlisting his cell number. And Douglas picked up. Caught. Douglas confirmed that he was dodging us. He told Steve it was “the least bad alternative to avoid dumping gloom, doom, pessimism, and angst on top of your existence.”

In an email he later sent to Steve, he wrote, “I told Ellen some of this, and she was kind enough to say that my argument was logical, cogent, and reasonable, and what I said might well be true, but couldn’t I enjoy myself anyway? A reasonable question, and if I were sufficiently Zen, maybe I could do it, but the practical answer is no.”

He went on to tell the story about the Zen Monk who, while walking through the forest, hears a lion running after him. He outruns him, but, in doing so falls over a cliff, grabbing a bush on the way down, which stops him. Looking up, he sees the lion. Looking down, he sees a tiger. Both are hungry and anticipating lunch. But the bush is slowly ripping out of the hillside and he will soon fall down to the tiger. It’s then that he notices a big, beautiful strawberry on the bush. He picks the berry, takes a bite and smiling, says, “Delicious!”

“So,” wrote Douglas, “while I aspire to the monk’s moment-by-moment existence, in this case, I have been unable to reach that level of enjoying the moment while still seeing the lion and the tiger because you guys would want to help with the cause of my problems but cannot, or want me to cheer up, and I am simply not cheerful in the face of these lions and tigers. The only strawberries have been the books, videos, and students wanting to learn a few things I know how to teach.”

He then he added, “Sorry for the worry.”

It was a poetic description of depression. I learned later that the strawberry plant has actually been used to treat depression. None of us could disagree with his facts. That was the thing about Douglas—he bated and urged argument on, like sport. I saw it as a sign of his passion, the place he was most passionate—an argument with someone else in which he felt strongly. Why argue if you don’t care? That he stayed away from us, and the arguments, struck me as a frightening sign of his loss of interest in life.

But I kept thinking that as long as he showed up to class and had students who needed him, he was stable, even if we weren’t in his life. At the university, he worked on Linux systems, the free, open-source program designed for simultaneous multi-uses which dovetailed perfectly with his often-voiced philosophy that information should be freely dispersed to everyone, that the pursuit of knowledge is good for its own sake, and that people should live harmoniously with others.

And, there were Susan and John, two former computer science professor colleagues from Kansas about whom we’d all heard a lot. They currently lived and taught in Arkansas with Douglas and spent many holidays with him, even in those depressed years.

Other than teaching students and periodic visits with Susan and John, he was a loner. An only child, his father left when he was eighteen months old. He hadn’t spoken to his mother in twenty years. And his college buddies, the ones he was pushing away for reasons we will never fully know, were two, three and four states away.

Yet signs that he was losing his patience were becoming evident. There was that letter he wrote to Bill O’Reilly in 2005:

Mr. O’Reilly:

I have heard you are publishing an enemy’s list. I can think of nothing I would like better, at this moment, than to be included on the list of enemies of such a self-important, self-serving, egotistical, amoral, and slime-covered opportunist as you so obviously are.

Most sincerely,

Douglas Niehaus

Susan’s husband John saw Douglas ten days before his death.

“He seemed happier than usual,” Susan told me in a recent conversation, “not as abrasive as he could usually get.” Later, the gun receipt date confirmed that by that time, he had made his plans.

August 19

Douglas sent Susan and John a touchy-feely email thanking them for their friendship that struck them as uncharacteristic.

August 20

He didn’t show up for the first day of class. A department member phoned Susan. Susan and John called the police who said they might be able to find him via cell signal, which heightened their worry.

August 21

Susan and John left for work and, when the housekeeper later arrived, she found a box in the driveway. It was Douglas’s electronic library containing over a thousand hours of content. His worldy goods, dropped off, in a drive-by.

August 22

Douglas’ car was found by the landowners of a farm on an Arkansas highway, dead from a gun shot to his head.

Twelve days after he died, we gathered on campus to say goodbye; we left red carnations at locations where each of us had shared something with him to acknowledge our coming of age there. We began at the dorms where we all met and ended at the lake, where everyone managed to speak in full sentences, except me.

Some months later, Susan and John organized an academic fund at the university. A perfect legacy honoring the teacher, the titan. But what about the man?

This year, on his birthday I felt, as I did every year, the urge to reach out again. Even though, in the latter part of his life, he didn’t reach back. But maybe in death. Recently, Susan told me that her husband was in the airport and saw a tee-shirt printed with words that we all swear could have been a direct quote from Douglas himself. A suggestion of his presence, still floating in the world; a possible response to our questions.

It said, “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”

•••

ELLEN BLUM BARISH is a Chicago-based writer whose essays have appeared in Literary Mama, Tablet, and The Chicago Tribune and have aired on Chicago Public Radio. She is author of Views from the Home Office Window, a collection of essays from her syndicated newspaper column on motherhood. She has taught writing at Northwestern University, StoryStudio Chicago, and several other Chicago-area universities and adult education venues. Ellen also is a private writing coach, specializing in personal essay and memoir. Learn more at www.ellenblumbarish.com. This is her first piece for Full Grown People.