August 10, 2007

• Another Inept Suicide Attempt

  I felt that I’d gotten “over the hump,” past a major obstacle, a while back when I got rolling again on my memoirs with the story of my marriage when I was fourteen.   The latest hiatus was caused not by any problem recalling details of what happened, nor any reticence about telling them.  I couldn’t, at first, figure out what to call it. 

  One day, as I contemplated the story, I thought of titling it, “My First Suicide Attempt.”   Then I said to myself, “Hey, wait a minute!  That one wasn’t the first… remember those times in San Jose….”  That had been soon after my father died, when I was consumed with grief, and guilt for having wished him dead.  Several times, I held my breath into unconsciousness.  I had been warned against holding my breath, told you need to breathe to live, and I thought I could die by holding my breath.  I don’t recall whether I’ve written about those incidents, but I suspect that I hadn’t written about them because until now I hadn’t recalled them.  I will have to go back, reread and maybe revise some past segments.

  Back story for this episode is linked from my main page.  The narrative summary for that portion of my story directly preceding this episode goes like this: 

  “Even though we didn’t have to, “Ford” and I
  got married, had an itty-bitty
  honeymoon, and set up
  housekeeping together.

  My husband and I, aged sixteen and fourteen respectively, became
  emancipated minors upon our marriage.

  In the spring after our December wedding, we moved to
  Amarillo, where my husband found his first job and had his first extramarital affair.

  Readers’ reactions to that impelled me to post a little piece about neurochemistry and penis size.“

  About seven years after those first inept and ill informed attempts to kill myself, I tried again.  It was the day after my step-father picked me up from the hospital in Amarillo and took me back to his and my mother’s house in Vernon.  I was alone in the house and felt like I was alone in the world.  It was as if the roof had fallen in on me.  My illusions were shattered,  my heart was broken… all those ridiculous clichés that people have devised to distance themselves from their true feelings.  As many people do, even ones a lot older, better educated, and presumably wiser than I was, I was using the fantasies of a broken heart and shattered illusions to cover up my personal sense of failure.

  In truth, I was not disillusioned.  I still had plenty of illusions.  I was ready to take all the blame for the failure of my marriage.  For a few days, I had put my mother’s needs ahead of my husband’s, and he had turned to another woman.  Layer upon layer of denial and self-deception, blaming myself for my marriage’s failure kept me from thinking that my mother had been right all along and we were too young to get married.  Bottom line:  I felt like I’d made a total mess of my life; what lay ahead for me was something I didn’t want to think about.  I had learned a thing or two since those initial suicide attempts as a child.  I knew that holding my breath would make me pass out, lose consciousness, but that my lungs would then begin to work on their own and eventually I would wake up.  I decided that time I would poison myself. 

  Poison hadn’t been my first choice.  I had thought about shooting myself, but there were no guns in my mother’s house.  I had heard of people slitting their wrists with razor blades.  There were razor blades in the bathroom.  I had never heard of, “hesitation marks,” the scratches and shallow cuts that are often found on the arms of unsuccessful suicides and the bodies of suicides who try and fail a few times before eventually succeeding at bleeding themselves to death.  I made a few such marks on my arm, and soon realized that it was not going to be as easy as I had assumed it was to kill myself.

  I started looking around for poison.  There were very few things in that house with the old skull and crossbones symbol on the label.  A tiny cardboard tray of grains dyed green with rat poison was under the sink.   It didn’t look like enough to do much harm to a full size human, so I passed it up.  Knowing what I know now, I think it might have been more toxic than what I settled upon.

  I found a quart bottle of rubbing alcohol, isopropyl, in the bathroom.  It wasn’t completely full, but what I drank was probably close to thirty ounces.  I was unconscious in a puddle of vomit when they found me.  I woke in the emergency room of Christ the King Hospital, with a sore mouth and throat from the alcohol and a fiery trail from my right nostril down my gullet from the tube used for gastric lavage.

  The nun attending me, Sister Diane, gave me a stern lecture before letting my mother in to see me.  She said that my baby might be born blind because of my “rash and selfish” act.  She said that if I had succeeded, my suicide would also have been murder of my child.  I hadn’t even been  thinking about my unborn baby.  I was so focused on my fear and despair that I hadn’t given a thought to my responsibility for the life I carried.  Sister Diane’s admonishments did nothing to relieve my fear or give me any hope, but it did convince me that I had a reason to go on living.

  I have often heard unsuccessful suicide attempts such as mine called, “plays for attention,” or, “cries for help.”  I remember wanting to die, wanting an easy way out of the mess I had made of my life.  I had been getting more attention than I wanted.  I was in a depressive withdrawal, and wanted to be left alone.  I didn’t believe that anyone could help me.  I had killed my father, disappointed and alienated my husband, and endangered my unborn child.  I didn’t deserve to live and had no right to die.  Right then, a month or so before my fifteenth birthday, I felt hopelessly trapped in an impossible situation.

  

  • 2:34 pm
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