The Valedictorian of Being Dead Read online

  I do a really fantastic job. I’m good at this; anyone who has as much practice as I do would be good at this. And I only have two hands. How had I just done it again? How would I possibly do it again tomorrow? I did a great job of disguising the agonizing monotony: Make sure they’ve eaten, make sure they’re dressed, they’ve showered, make sure they have all their homework. Is Marlo wearing socks? Make sure to remember to call the office and tell the secretary that Marlo has a doctor’s appointment in two days. Make sure to let the dog back in. Where is the dog? Make sure we have enough Cheerios for the next two breakfasts. Make sure I signed the permission slip. Make sure Leta has taken a pill for her allergies; make sure Leta has asked her friend for a ride to school tomorrow, since the other carpool just canceled. Make sure to tell them, “Sink!” because the dishwasher is full of clean dishes.

  Morning after morning after morning. And then again. And then again.

  No one knew that I wanted to be dead. That’s how good I am.

  But then, as I’m driving back to the house to begin working, still dressed in the same clothes I’ve worn three days in a row, I suddenly remember, Oh no! Marlo was supposed to have taken empty milk cartons to school for an art project, and I totally forgot. She will be devastated—she always is when I forget this kind of thing—so I really try to stay on top of it. I should be better about staying on top of it. And I will think of this exact moment when I wake up the following morning in a vat of sweat. I will hear through the howling Satanic chorus of All the Things Needing to Get Done—that low whisper, now becoming a roar, that she would be so much better off without me. Someone else would have remembered those milk cartons. Someone else would have collected them weeks ago. Someone else would have spared her that sadness. Someone else would be a better mother.

  They would be so much better off without me.

  THREE

  THE MICHAEL JACKSON DRUG

  AFTER MY THIRD CUP of apple juice and several minutes of awkward silence and knowing, concerned glances passed around the room, I suddenly blurted, “It’s 2017!” The year finally emerged in my brain—a brain that had just exhibited no activity for over fifteen minutes—like a word you’ve been searching for that suddenly comes to you two days later when you’re enjoying a completely unrelated hamburger. I could hear my mother’s shoulders relaxing, and I would later learn that her sigh of relief was so heavy because I didn’t wake up from the anesthesia for almost two hours. Add the stress of that to the idea that I might not remember the last thirty-eight years of my life, and the Mormon God would have forgiven her if she had taken me home and immediately raided my liquor cabinet. He would have lit her a cigarette.

  I repeated my name and the correct year a few more times before Chris asked me if I thought I felt strong enough to swing my legs over the side of the gurney. All I could think about was the chocolate protein bar I had stashed in my purse.

  I knew I was going to be ravenous after fasting for so long—I hadn’t eaten anything in over eighteen hours—so I told Chris I was fine and not to worry about me. Nothing to see here. I swiftly draped my legs over the gurney and didn’t even wait for anyone to ask me if I thought I was able to stand up on my own. I just did it, and that’s when the headache almost knocked me to the ground. A searing bolt of electricity shot through my head from my left temple to my right, and it blinded me for several terrifying seconds. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. I could only feel a thundering throb of pain through every corner of my head. I frantically grabbed at my ears and tore at my hair, an involuntary reaction that removed my hands from the gurney beneath me. When I began to sway underneath the weight of the pain, my stepfather reached out to steady me, a gesture that would be only one of countless ways in which this man helped save me.

  I had not been able to remember the correct calendar year after coming out of anesthesia, but I clearly remembered Dr. Tadler telling me beforehand that they were giving me fentanyl to prevent any potential headaches from the propofol.

  “You mean the Michael Jackson drug?”

  “Yes, the Michael Jackson drug.”

  “The drug that killed Michael Jackson?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “But that’s the drug that killed Michael Jackson.”

  “I just told you that, yes.”

  I had this conversation over and over again when I told anyone about the treatment and was always tempted to moonwalk while answering the first question.

  I remained in my stepfather’s embrace until I regained my sight, although the pain at that point had become so rhythmic in its throbbing, it resembled a low, driving bassline. Once I was able to demonstrate that I could walk a few feet, they let my parents escort me out of the building to their minivan. When my stepfather opened the giant sliding door to the back, I dove in head first, quite literally, over the seat and into my giant purse. I found that protein bar and wrapped my fingers around it so tightly that I almost crushed it.

  After wrangling my body into the seat so that my stepfather could shut the door to the minivan, I slouched with the entire weight of my body on the armrest in the center of the back seat. Air felt heavy on my face and chest, and even moving my arms was tiring. I don’t know how I got the protein bar out of its packaging; my mother probably helped after noticing my entire body lolling. Suddenly it was in my mouth and I experienced a brief two-second respite from the agony of my headache.

  The back windows of my parents’ minivan are tinted, something I only just then noticed.

  I noticed the tint on the windows only because the sunlight in Utah at that time of year hit at an uncomfortable, punishing angle, and the tint did nothing to shield it. My headache had begun to pulse in sync with my heartbeat—it had traveled down the side of my forehead and settled into the back of my jaw where I could feel it in my teeth—and the rays of the sun were crushing my skull. I tore at my head again and finally rested both of my arms over my face to block out the light.

  “You should get the tint on these windows fixed,” I mumbled through the headache. “The tint doesn’t work. Who makes a tint that doesn’t work?” It’s always odd, the things over which we obsess when we are tipsy or, as in this case, totally wasted. I was dealing with the headache that normally follows a bender, mixed with the agony of a high that has gone horribly wrong and has you pleading for it to end.

  “Someone, please make it stop,” I moaned again and again. We wound our way down 900 South, past the park and into my neighborhood. Every right and left turn would swing the pain in my head in lurching diagonal lines. When we pulled into my driveway, I waited for my stepfather to open the minivan’s sliding door, having no strength to do it myself. He helped me walk to my front door and from there I held on to the walls and the countertop in the kitchen to steady myself. I finally made it to the staircase that led into my basement, down into my dark, cavernous bedroom with blackout shades hanging in the windows. The wooden railing guided each torturous step toward the welcoming black clutches of sleep. As I fell onto my bed and pulled a pillow over my head, that punishing, lying voice of despair spoke over the drumming vibration of my headache: This isn’t going to work. This isn’t going to work. This isn’t going to work.

  They would be so much better off without me.

  FOUR

  JUST HOW BADLY DO YOU WANT TO BE DEAD

  “YOU’LL TELL THEM I can’t take the fentanyl, right? Please? You’ll tell them? Because I can’t do this if it’s going to be like this every time. You’ll tell them?”

  “Of course I’ll tell them,” my mother assured me from the front seat of the minivan, the three of us together again, winding up 900 North toward the ECT clinic. Today I’d have my second treatment, and the afternoon before they had called to tell me to come in at noon. I had stopped eating the night before at 7:00 p.m. and had my last gulp of water before I fell asleep at 11:00. My stomach was rumbling and gurgling, mostly from hunger, but also from anxiety. Yet another lovely side effect of my constant state of panic
was what I called the Anxiety Shits. You didn’t want to know this about me, but then I’ve already told you about the unique shape of my urinary tract.

  It was a good thing that I hadn’t had a bite of food that morning, otherwise I’d have spent every ten minutes running in and out of the bathroom. When faced with a deadline or when Marlo would whine about practicing piano or when adding yet more items to the list of All the Things Needing to Get Done, my anxiety would not only begin to choke me, it would defeat my body’s ability to handle food. I’d get diarrhea as bad as that which I once suffered after eating raw fish in Peru.

  Oddly, I had missed something crucial during the first treatment. They were also giving me Zofran to combat possible nausea. Fentanyl, propofol, and Zofran, which I would later find out can cause constipation in certain people. You’ll never guess who is one of those people.

  When we pulled into the parking lot at the south side of UNI, I asked my mother again, “You’re going to tell them, aren’t you?” I couldn’t—no, I wouldn’t—continue with the treatment if what had happened the first time was going to be how I lived my life for the next month. I didn’t ever again want to experience a hallucination like the one I had experienced while going under. When I woke up from my headache nap that afternoon, I felt hungover and irritated in every part of my body. I don’t know what other word to use to describe the sensation. I didn’t get a moment of relief until I climbed back into bed that night—after the homework routine, after piano practice, after putting my shoes back on and driving to my child’s middle school to watch her sing as part of an ensemble chorus in a full production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

  My gut was telling me that whatever had happened concerned that vial of fentanyl. It’s a powerful opioid, and after the birth of both of my children I illegally gave away all my hydrocodone and oxycodone to friends, because those drugs make me violently ill. This was before I knew that the opioid crisis is an actual crisis. The day that I brought Marlo home from the hospital, I took a hydrocodone for the pain of having pushed an eight-pound baby out of my body, only to start vomiting so ferociously that I ripped my stitches.

  We entered the clinic and the sterile smell hit my face like a cold, wet rag. That sounds unpleasant, but it wasn’t terrible. It smelled like winter—frosty and aseptic, different from the smell of a normal hospital, where the smell of disease seems to hang in the air. A long corridor connected the front doors to the waiting room where I had to check in. They’d ask me my name and date of birth more than once and wrap around my wrist an identity bracelet. Usually a guy named Greg sat at the check-in desk. He was a little shorter than me and had thick, dark hair and a matching mustache. He wore a different pair of sneakers every time I saw him—hip sneakers for millennials, although he didn’t strike me as being that young. He radiated an air of being completely comfortable in his own skin, the kind of confidence you earn through years and years of life beating you over the head. I always wanted it to be Greg at the desk. He never asked too many questions and always smiled and said hello so genuinely that I instantly felt like I had known him my entire life.

  “Everything’s good, so just fill out the sheet and I’ll go see when they’re ready for you,” he said, handing me a clipboard with a double-sided piece of paper hooked to the top. Before each treatment I had to fill out a questionnaire titled “The Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (16-Item) (Self-Report) (QUIDS-SR 16)” or what I liked to call “16 Ways to Determine Just How Badly You Want to Be Dead.” I’d check one response next to each item that best described how I felt for the last seven days.

  Each item indicated a symptom of depression and the responses were graded 0, 1, 2, or 3.

  1. Falling Asleep

  0 I never take longer than 30 minutes to fall asleep.

  1 I take at least 30 minutes to fall asleep, less than half the time.

  2 I take at least 30 minutes to fall asleep, more than half the time.

  3 I take more than 60 minutes to fall asleep, more than half the time.

  Falling asleep wasn’t ever a problem for me, not with the amount and combination of medication I took each night. I wondered if my answer to this question alone would downplay the seriousness with which I did not want to be alive. Thirteen years previously my psychiatrist treated me for postpartum depression during a four-day stint at UNI. I had not slept for more than thirty minutes at a time for over six months. He prescribed a mixture of drugs that essentially cured my insomnia even though his intention was to treat my anxiety, a wonderful by-product that I had now enjoyed for over a decade. In fact, if I know I am going to be on the phone with someone close to my bedtime, I will wait to take my medication until after we have spoken. Otherwise I might fall asleep mid-sentence.

  I took great relief with the second item, though, because surely they’d see my answer and think, okay, we get it now.

  2. Sleep During the Night

  0 I do not wake up at night.

  1 I have a restless, light sleep with a few brief awakenings each night.

  2 I wake up at least once a night, but I go back to sleep easily.

  3 I awaken more than once a night and stay awake for 20 minutes or more, more than half the time.

  This would be the second time I would mark a thick X in the box next to 3 and underline the whole sentence four times. I even put a few exclamation points next to the box. I never had a problem falling asleep, but rarely did I ever sleep through the night. Much of my anxiety toward the end of each day centered on the fear that I’d wake up at one or two o’clock in the morning and be unable to fall back asleep for two or three hours. Once I was awake, I was awake. I was awake in a state of total panic thinking about how impossible it would be to get everything done: piano lessons, piano practice, deadlines, dance lessons, therapy, math homework, dentist appointments, parent-teacher conferences, laundry, grocery shopping, meal making, dog walking, dish washing, bill paying, meetings, conference calls, deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.

  If by chance I did fall back asleep, I’d be restless until my alarm would go off and cue the routine: shoot straight up and gasp for breath as my anxiety set fire to every molecule in my body. I had come to dread nighttime again like I had during my postpartum depression when I would wonder about the baby, Will she sleep tonight? Will she sleep tonight? But instead the refrain had become, Will I sleep tonight? Will I sleep tonight? “Wonder” isn’t the right word to describe how those questions sounded in my brain. I wasn’t wondering about it. Those repeated worries appeared as faceless apparitions tucked into a dark corner of my head, their arms wrapped around their torsos as they rocked back and forth.

  The next item on the Quick Inventory was “Waking Up Too Early.” If by “waking up too early” you mean 2:00 a.m., then yes. Next, “Sleeping Too Much.” The nap I had taken after the first treatment was the first nap I had taken in over a year. In college, when my depression was just the good old-fashioned, generic, run-of-the-mill, I-hate-myself depression, sleep was my only escape. I could nap through a Category 5 hurricane. But having kids turned my depression on its head, and now it manifests as anxiety, and napping is a distant memory. I have friends who talk about growing up with depressed parents who experienced episodes so bad that they wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. When my children grow up, they will tell their friends about the year I walked over 20,000 steps a day. Sitting still is for people who can cope.

  The fifth item was “Feeling Sad,” and again I underlined and circled and almost ripped a hole in the paper next to box 3, which said, “I feel sad nearly all of the time.” I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be happy or even fine. I would have gladly taken fine, because “fine” would mean that I wouldn’t live the rest of my life wanting to be dead. How many times in the months leading up to this treatment had I asked my mother and my therapist, “What if this is it? What if this is the nervous breakdown that people have, the one they don’t recover from? What if this is my final nervous
breakdown?” How many times had I pleaded with them both, as if they could in any way honor my request, “Please, just let me be dead.” If I were dead, I wouldn’t be sad all the time.

  Items six and seven asked about appetite, whether I’d experienced an increase or a decrease. When I saw items eight and nine, again I almost ripped up the paper.

  8. Decreased Weight (Within the Last 2 Weeks)

  9. Increased Weight (Within the Last 2 Weeks)

  Could we please not bring up my weight? Every time I moved my body, I thought about it. Every time I breathed, I thought about it. I’d lived over twenty years of my life free from the torture of thinking about it, but I couldn’t remember what that felt like. What would it be like to notthink about my weight? How amazing would it be to free up that brain space?

  Item 10 concerned concentration and decision-making, and here again I did not fit the mold of traditional depression. I put an X in the box next to 0, which said, “There is no change in my usual capacity to concentrate or make decisions.” I’m good at this. I do a really fantastic job managing all of this: Imagine me waving my arms around in wild circles to indicate ALL OF THE GODDAMN THINGS. Indecision is not an option. Struggling to focus is not an option.

  And then came item 11. Oof. A punch in the gut that knocked the wind out of me. Again.

  11. View of Myself

  0  I see myself as equally worthwhile and deserving as other people.

  1  I am more self-blaming than usual.

  2  I largely believe that I cause problems for others.

  3  I think almost constantly about major and minor defects in myself.

  I wasn’t allowed to choose more than one response, but I wanted to check 1, 2, and 3. They were all true. I immediately thought about the morning I had forgotten to send empty milk cartons to school with Marlo, or the times I had run out of the room away from the piano because her refusal to practice was making me angry to the point of tears. All the pain I had caused my mother and stepfather, how many times they made the forty-minute drive from their home to mine because I had cried into the phone about laundry. Sure, I did a really fantastic job managing all of this, but I hated myself for the way I felt about it. I hated that I dreaded waking up. I hated that I dreaded going to sleep. I hated that I cried all the damn time. I hated that Leta would see the panic in my eyes every morning and ask, “Are you okay?” knowing that I wasn’t okay. And more than anything else I felt foolish. I felt like an idiot that I hadn’t anticipated the choices and sacrifices I would have to make for my kids in order to be able to raise them alone and what that would do to my full-time work, what juggling all of it would do to my career. I was a failure. I was a fraud. I was less than that.