This article contains discussion of suicide. I need to be faithful to the experience. This is how I felt, and this is how I acted; this is what people in despair are driven to do. These are the people we fail in myriad ways, and this is the cost of that failure. I discovered I was wearing a hospital gown and attached to a catheter the latter, especially, not something you want to take you by surprise.
I was shocked when I surfaced at how much time had passed. Just the lasting image of a churning strawberry-red slushy machine, which is how my dad described the life-saving contraption days later. When I asked about this later, the coworker who had called said I had just sounded groggy.
No kidding. That, in , was my first suicide attempt, my first post-attempt hospitalization, and my entry point into a labyrinthine psychiatric-care system via the trap door of botched self-obliteration.
But the preceding eighteen-odd months had been characterized by worsening, lengthening episodes of despair, during which all I wanted was to die. Could still convince myself, in giddy interludes, that my life had purpose. But those interludes of story-chasing joy became spotty and infrequent, a radio signal subsumed by static.
The bilious taste of failure swallowed everything. That late-September Friday, two days before the attempt, I put the final edits into a political feature as sheets of rain thrummed against the wall-wide newsroom window. I felt scraped empty, nothing left and nowhere else to go.
