Homecoming

Trigger warning: this chapter contains a mention of suicide.

What would have happened if I had done this on Friday, April 20, 2018? How would our lives be different today? (We’ll never know, but oh, how I wonder.)

The first time that I picked Noah up from 12A, on a Friday less than a week after he’d been admitted, a middle-aged mom and dad were leaving with their son. I’d been excited because I was bringing Noah home for dinner, but when I saw those other parents heading toward the door, flanking their son and holding bags filled with whatever he’d accumulated during his stay in the Young Adult Unit, the joy leached right out me. I wanted to be happy for them, but all I could feel was envy and resentment. I couldn’t wait until it was my turn to take my son home for good.

And now, April 20, 2018, my turn had arrived. I picked Noah up at 4:15. All the kids from the unit were out in the hall as he emerged with his belongings. I thought they’d come to say goodbye, but it was dinnertime and they were lining up for food.

Noah was gloomy in the car, like he’d been the night before. I, on the other hand, had shed my lousy mood. It had evaporated with a good night’s sleep. I had not contemplated the possibility that Noah wouldn’t also be happy, and his gloom was infectious. I felt as deflated as I had watching the happy family exit 12A six weeks earlier. Trying to engage Noah in conversation made me feel even worse. The only time he volunteered anything was to announce that he was upset that there hadn’t been a formal exit interview. I told him I felt the same way.

Then he offered up more clues to his frame of mind. “I don’t want to keep taking my meds,” he announced.

“You might be able to stop taking the sleeping pills,” I said, welcoming the opportunity to be positive about something. “You didn’t have trouble sleeping at home, only at the hospital, right?”

He agreed.

“But you should probably call HealthLink because there are some meds you’re not supposed to wean yourself off of without medical supervision,” I pointed out.

“I don’t want to keep taking the anti-depressants,” he said.

“You need to keep taking them,” I said. “I mean, what if you go off them and you get depressed again?”

“I’ll kill myself,” he said.

I should have pulled off the highway. I should have made a U-Turn and driven him straight back to the hospital. But I was so desperate to have him home.

I told myself there was no way he would try to kill himself again.

I told him, “That’s why you really need to keep taking them. Because you can’t kill yourself. We don’t want you do to that.” As if that was any kind of deterrent.

“It’s my life,” he said, shrugging.

It took every ounce of self-control not to yell at him. I wanted to throttle him. I wanted to shake some sense into him, but if six weeks in the psych hospital on so many meds that his otherwise clean-spoken uncle described him as “a fucking zombie” hadn’t done anything, if six rounds of electroshock treatment and the occasional cognitive behavioral therapy session and meetings with a clinical psychology graduate student hadn’t succeeded in making him want to stay alive, yelling, throttling, and shaking weren’t likely to help, either.

Why hadn’t I paid closer attention in that Mental Health First Aid course Elizabeth had signed us up for last month? The instructor had given us all sorts of strategies for talking people out of killing themselves.

Why hadn’t I paid closer attention?

Here’s why: because I thought the instructor was speaking nonsense. You couldn’t talk someone out of suicide. If you could, my father would not have thrown himself off a bridge when I was thirteen years old. Instead, he would have listened to my mother when she told him we would not be better off without him, and that he should get help.

When I’d heard my parents’ voices through the wall that separated our bedrooms on March 6, 1974, had Mom been yelling at Dad? Or had she been pleading with him? I would prefer to think she had been pleading. Wouldn’t it make more sense to show compassion?

Or maybe Dad was the one who had raised his voice and that just made Mom flail even more, as I was flailing now. Where were the words that would save my son? What were the words? And why couldn’t I find them?

I could not bear to hear Noah going on about how it was his life and he could do with it what he wanted. But I had to say something, so I appealed to his sense of community. I had no idea if he even had a sense of community, but I needed to drown out the voices in my head that were screaming What kind of a mother are you? Your son wants to kill himself! Do something about it! Stop him! What’s wrong with you?

“What you do affects all of us, and it’s in our best interests to keep you alive,” I said, which was absolutely not what I’d learned in the Mental Health First Aid Course, not that it mattered. Noah was too far gone. Nothing I could do or say would stop the momentum that was pulling him away from me, his family, life. But still, I kept driving toward home. I wanted him home.

“You should wait until you start talk therapy before you think about getting off the anti-depressants,” I said. “Talk therapy will help. It can change your life.”

“You know that from experience, right?” he said.

I nodded. Then I told him that talk therapy takes time to work, and if after a few weeks he didn’t feel comfortable with the mental health therapist the hospital had assigned him, we would look for a new one. “That relationship is really important,” I said.

He was supposed to see the mental health therapist the following week. He never made it to the appointment.

Note to readers: I am so grateful for your support, to know you are here every week, reading this story. I would love to hear more from you. I know this is difficult subject matter. I’ve had readers tell me as much both in writing and in person. Sometimes I find it difficult to write, but a few things keep me going. One is that writing is how I make sense of the world. The other is a hope that others will benefit from reading my story as I have from reading memoirs and essays by people who have gone through something difficult and emerged stronger, resilient, and with more compassion. If you have the time or inclination, please share a title of something you’ve read that has provided that kind of positive experience for you. I’m aways looking to add to my list. Two memoirs that have inspired me are Dani Shapiro’s “Slow Motion” and Stephen J. Dubner’s “Choosing My Religion” (also published as “Turbulent Souls”).

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