STRANDED

I watched the movie Stranded, about the 1972 Uruguayan soccer team plane crash. The team and many family members traveling with them went down in the Andes during a snowstorm. I was very moved by two aspects of the movie. One was the apparent randomness of who lived and who died in the initial crash.

There were 45 people on board, mostly young male premed college students from upper middle class backgrounds. Twenty-nine survived the initial crash. Of the 29, 25 had no injuries at all. The people who died were often sitting next to those who lived.

 I really resonated with the survivors who questioned this randomness of life and death. Why do some of us get dealt an easier hand, why do some of us die young and some live to be very old? Was Andrew’s life less because it was shorter? How much do we participate in how and when we die and how much of it is completely outside our control?  

WHY AM I WRITING THIS-2

I am writing this book for myself, to get the details of Andrew’s life and death into a form that I can hold, and read, and add to, and share. If I can put it onto paper—capture some of Andrew and my life together, it may help me  get to my goal of living to be 125 years old.

This means I have as much of my life to live as I have already lived. Andrew’s part in this second half, if I am lucky enough to get there, will be what I can remember, ponder, and maybe begin to understand.

If I can share these words with others and hear from them, in return, it seems like I might have a chance at sharing more.  Sharing what exactly,  I do not know.  Definitely more than just the horror.  Maybe the relief, the joy, the sadness, and the details of  our full experience.

Maybe that would ease my starvation, help me in my life’s work of connecting the dots. 

WHY AM I WRITING THIS BLOG

          That’s a very good question. At first, I thought I was writing it because I wanted to get more in touch with my feelings. I also wanted to recall Andrew before his suicide. The horror of it seemed to be taking up all my psychic space. Also, I am drawn to stories about suicide and its opposite, living to a very old age.

     I check the obituaries and look at the faces of the people who have died, searching for young people and very old people and reading their stories. If the death notice is vague, sometimes I go kind of crazy for the details. 

     Once, when I saw a picture of a young couple in the Sunday New York Times Obituary Page, I was obsessed with learning what had happened. I ended up googling them and finding their story of flying together to a vacation spot and never arriving; instead, dying in the crash of their private plane, very reminiscent of John and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. There were few other details of this tragedy and I found myself feeling starved, for what I am not sure.  

I BELEIVE I UNDERSTAND

I believe I understand Andrew’s decision and I appreciate that his decision in some way protected us from any future suffering, ravages or consequences that may have been ahead for him.

I wonder now if Andrew is still with us in some way, maybe only our memories. About 10% of schizophrenics commit suicide. I believe it was his concern about the worsening of his cognitive deterioration that got to him in the end, causing him to lose his job after being tortured so long by the critical job voices.

        He said to me after he received his unsatisfactory review, right before they let him go-"I don’t have to put up with this anymore" I said you’re right. There are other jobs out there for you. I think at that point he may have been talking about suicide although I did not  get it.

NOT WHAT I HOPED FOR

         Ever since my children were small, it has been my goal to figure out how to have an equal-equal relationship with each of them. The parent-child relationship being inherently unequal it seemed to me adult-adult is the only way to go. 

      That means giving up at a very instinctual level my need and demand to remain a parent and by inference my demand that my children in some way remain in need of parenting.

     For me this requires enormous self-discipline which is sometime less than successful. I have to be aware constantly of how I project my uncertainties, inadequacies and unlived life onto others particularly my children. This discipline and the confidence it requires are often illusive.

          

        With Andrew, I eventually made a conscious decision, and with uneven effort, tried to allow him to be the decision maker for his life. The outcome was not what I had hoped for. 

ADULT CHILDREN THE OXYMORON

I have thought about the concept of adult children quite a lot. While I may say my son or my daughter we do not have a collective word for adult children in the English language. It is almost as though we  have formed a tacit agreement to ignore  the fact that our adult children are not children and do not need us in order to function successfully and independently in the world.

          Of course this delusion then allows me to behave as if I continue to be needed, necessary and responsible for my adult children's thinking and behaving. This notion when spoken aloud sounds ridiculous. However on another level parenting has grounded me and given me a reason d'etre for so long that it is hard  to impossible sometimes to separate myself from my children emotionally, physically, financially etc. 

A DIFFERENT ENDING

Italics below are still quoting from the interview with Karen Green, widow of David Wallace who committed suicide.

"You know, I still," she suggests, "have a different ending (for him, for me): it's the one where he controls his own damn poignancy, and also kisses me goodnight…"

I truly had a different ending for Andrew. I always felt we would get through it; we would figure it out, we would manage it. He seemed willing to try. I felt that my experience and education had laid the groundwork for helping Andrew. I felt he would someday have the life he wanted. That he would have his own home and his own family and yes that he would be around to give me a hug and share his life with me. 

THE MONSTER THAT ATE HIM UP

Italics still quoting from the interview with Karen Green widow of author David Wallace who committed suicide.

"I have these visual cues where it all comes back to me, and if there is any way you can make that stop then you will do. If it means bashing your head against the wall, or whatever. The fear that you won't get out of it is worse than the thing itself. I think that is where he was that afternoon.

  "People don't understand how ill he was. It was a monster that just ate him up. And at that point everything was secondary to the illness. Not just writing. Everything else: food, love, shelter…"

Andrew said he needed a rest. His disease wore him down. He wanted relief. He knew he was loved and he had resources but the disease was truly a monster that ate him up.

A NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE

The italics below are still quoting from the interview with Karen Green widow of author David Wallace who committed suicide by hanging.

Problematic for me is that there is a post-traumatic stress that comes from finding someone you love like that, as I did. It's a real thing. A real change to your brain, on a cellular level, apparently. 

      This I certainly share. My body has been and still is in a state of responding to and recovering from Andrew's death. This for me has been the biological equivalent of losing a limb, having a major organ replacement surgery or a near death auto accident. 

      At times, but less now than right after Andrew died, my body  alternates between humming with a pulsing energy that I had never consciously experienced before and numbness.

 
     I only rarely even get sleepy these days. I am in what feels like a constant ongoing state of shock. 

IS SUICIDE IN ANY SENSE A MEANINGFUL ACT

Quoting again from the interview with Karen Green widow of  David Wallace who committed suicide.

She resists the idea that suicide is in any sense a meaningful act. “It was a day in his life," she says, "and it was a day in mine. People tell me I should have been prepared, because of David's history with depression. But of course, I wasn't prepared at all. I wouldn't have left him alone in the house, ever, if I thought that would happen. I still feel like it was a mistake that was made."

I also do not know if suicide is a meaningful act. In one sense, it is a way to relieve the pain of suffering that must be pretty awful for someone to seriously contemplate suicide. I think Andrew planned his suicide with an escape clause, which for better or worse, he did not activate. As I mentioned, he told Marnie that he was going to go off his medicines, eat healthy, and see what happens. If that did not work, he was” going to do something about it”. Looking back with our 20/20 hindsight, it is so easy to see what he was considering. He was leaving us plenty of clues that he was planning to take his life.

      In some way, we all collaborated with him by being unable to see what was unfolding even though we were all in communication with Andrew. He spent the last week at our house and I spontaneously decided to take the week off work.  The conscious mind seems fragile to me. At least in my case, it seems I was simply not able to see what I could not cope with. I did not have the emotional know-how to deal with the reality of Andrew’s death, so in the end I was unable to see what is now so obvious.  

WHAT MIGHT COME NEXT

I do not know if there is a better or worse to any of this. Andrew obviously did not make the choice to hang around. 

I respect his choice and have gratitude for it in some very important way. I think my gratitude and relief are related to removing an unknown. As horrible as the known is in Andrew’s death, I guess for me it has a sanity that was eluding me when Andrew was living with frustration, disappointment, and suffering; and I was living with not knowing what might happen to him next. 

While I am usually quite good at putting a positive spin on life, the underlying anxiety of what might be coming next for him, usually not a conscious thought, played heavily on me. 

LIFE STOPS

"When the person you love kills himself time stops," the widow says at one point. "It just stops at that moment." 

     I look at Andrew’s wonderfully handsome face in pictures and think he will never grow old. He will never age. He will always be 28. This thought is filled with sadness at all of Andrew that I will never experience and also with a deep relief that he will never deteriorate, never land on the street talking to himself and waiting for help from a passerby. 
       Maybe this would be preferable to being dead or with no hope. I don't know 

COULDN'T SEE A WAY TO BE

      As I continued with Pale Horse, I also found references to his wife and immediately wanted to know more about her, as a survivor of suicide. I sat down and searched online for the author’s name and found an interview with his widow, Karen Green, done by Tim Adams for the Observer, on Sunday,  April 10, 2011. Certain portions of their conversation resonated deeply with me.

      “He couldn't see a way to be." Andrew was not able to find much peace in the options that were available to him.  He seemed most worried about not being able to achieve what he wanted. Maybe this was the most lethal part of his disease. 

REDUNDANCY

After reading the book review section of the NY times a couple of Sundays ago, I ordered the Pale Horse by David Foster Wallace from the local Library. Novels are not usually on my selection list but I was drawn to this review because it led with the story of his suicide by hanging.  

When I picked up the book, I immediately read the cover flaps to remind myself what I had ordered as I usually forget. Seeing again a description of the author’s death, I read on with something close to voyeurism.

The book itself, about boredom, did not sound interesting but did remind me of something that I often say, maybe for its shock value, that the leading cause of death is boredom.

Seeing it now, in the context of someone’s work, who would eventually commit suicide, I wonder if boredom really is a terminal disease.

 If life seems redundant, which maybe it did for Andrew, does it turn to hopelessness and then to suicide?  If  Andrew experienced redundancy it may have had to do with the unrelenting and emotionally exhausting symptoms that he felt ruled his life and kept him from achieving what he wanted. 

BLACK AND WHITE

This was different from when Andrew first got sick. Then he had dismissed his consideration of suicide. When I asked if he had considered suicide he said he could “never do that to you and Dad”.  

While Andrew spent the last week of his life at our house I never asked him about suicide. Looking back at that week it seems like there were many clues that Andrew was at risk that I didn't pick up on.

I believe we were all well intentioned and were doing the best we could with a difficult situation. Explicitly our goal, that is John, myself and Andrew, was always trying to improve things for Andrew.

This may actually have  been the outcome depending on how you view the afterlife. Andrew said, in his note to us, that he needed peace and wanted to set his love free and I feel like he did that.

         In some way our family dynamic implicitly and largely unconsciously, supported  the actual outcome of Andrew’s early death, for better or worse.The further I move away from Andrew’s suicide the less black and white life and death become.  In many ways I do not feel like Andrew is gone. It seems he is around me most of the time.  

FREEDOM TO LEAVE

I thought that if I could learn to manage my own anxiety by being aware of myself, Andrew would be relieved of at least my portion of the family anxiety. Then he would only have his own anxiety to deal with.

I never considered that this family dynamic was all that Andrew knew and if we took it away from him without simultaneously discussing what we were doing that he would lose an important relationship dynamic.

Even when Andrew said “You don’t need me anymore”,  I thought he was talking about being displaced in my affections by Angus. It never crossed my mind that he might be saying you don’t need me anymore to contain the family anxiety.         

         It occurred to me later that this may have left Andrew with the emotional freedom he needed to decide to leave us.

AT MY WITS END

At some point, I became aware that I should and could begin to manage my anxiety moment to moment by claiming it, rather than assigning the blame to Andrew’s illness or some other hapless family member, usually John.

I felt like my years of projecting my anxiety onto Andrew and other family members was all I was able to do at the time, but it simply wasn't working any more.

While this felt like I was managing the situation, I was making it worse by expecting Andrew to be or do what I thought was best.

          Instead, I was actually blindly ensuring that all my energy was tied up in being anxious, angry and tired. It became untenable. I was at my wits end. Something had to give. 

NEGATIVE PREDICTIONS

Seems it takes years to never to internalize the wisdom of self-awareness. At some point, I realized that while anxiety is existential I do have choices about how I use my anxious energy, probably my  greatest survival tool. It definitely had me by the balls, or whatever the female version of that is.

        All those feelings of rage and bewilderment I directed outward where I had no control. I constantly felt lost and without options. My life seemed painfully driven by Andrew’s illness. The feeling associated with my incessant anxiety was usually anger. 

      I know now that my anger/anxiety, rather than being caused by Andrew’s illness was actually being fueled by my habit of making negative predictions about the future. I expected the worst and then acted like it was already a reality.  

DIFFERENT LEVELS OF KNOWING

I was driven by these horrible moments to realize something had to give. Things could not continue the way they were. I was going crazy with worry and it was not making things any better. I needed to look for a different way to be with Andrew and myself.  

I had been seeing a Jungian therapist since just before Andrew went to the Citadel. I also did group psychotherapy work and I was learning a lot about myself. It was hard to bear and hard to bare my new understanding of just how immature and unaware I am. The good news is it looked to me like I did at least have options.

        

           However, learning about these options and putting them into play as my default setting were two very different levels of knowing.  

IMPOSSIBLY HEAVY

How does life and all its complexity work together to get the specific outcome that is our personal reality?  I know at times after Andrew got sick, I felt myself wishing he were gone or worse yet dead. 

Then hated myself for wishing such a thing, but feeling unable to tolerate the intense anxiety I experienced when I was around Andrew, always waiting for the next shoe to drop.

          How can you be someone’s mother and wish them gone or dead? It was impossible for me to see that I was externalizing my own anxiety and a large part of it was being projected onto Andrew where I had zero control over it. Also this projection and those of the rest of the family were making Andrew’s burden of the family angst impossibly heavy.  

CAUSE OR BLAME

 In reading and hearing about the last incident where the father shoots his son in self-defense my heart broke for the whole family. After Andrews’s suicide, we were all besieged with what ifs. 

 I guess all disease is a family disorder and certainly all deaths.

My children often disapprove when I assume responsibility for collaborating with Andrew in his illness and death. They say things like “Mom, you can’t blame yourself”.  I counter with, “there is a difference between cause and blame."

         I make this distinction because to me blame requires a conscious intention to do harm. I do not feel blame for Andrew’s death.  I do not know what caused Andrew’s disease and death but I do believe that the family that we were played into the dynamics of Andrew’s life and death both consciously and unconsciously.