Years ago when I was a new professor, a friend who was
active in the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) asked if she could
give a presentation on mental illness in my classes. To my eternal shame, I
declined. I didn’t think it was relevant to my students or course content.
Really, I was recoiling, buying into the stigma. My friend and her family were desperately
coping with their son’s descent into schizophrenia, and I didn’t want to bring that
into my classroom. Mental illness was someone else’s problem.
Yesterday, I finally apologized to my friend. I told
her that now, I give presentations in my classes on mental health
and suicide awareness with the same urgency she once had. That I include
suicide prevention information in my blog, my new book, and public speaking about suicide loss. These concerns are everyone’s problem.
But it’s hard to get anyone’s attention, outside of a captive audience, until
mental health conditions or suicide get personal.
“My son was
mentally ill and he took his life.” It’s taken another friend months to be able
to make this statement, frozen with tears. It took more than three years after my son
Noah’s suicide to understand that my family, too, was living with mental
illness. Like another struggling young man and his family in Kay Jamison’s Night Falls Fast, Noah’s illness moved
faster than his or my acceptance of it. My book traces the fraught dawning of
this realization and my still uneasy membership in this community.
Before Noah’s suicide, I would have read from a great
distance another mother’s lament about living with her son’s opioid addiction. “We’d known him
since he was in the womb,” Judy Chicurel writes of her adult son, “but that
wasn’t the same as knowing him now.” Yearning to connect, she conjures a quiet scene
of night fishing together. This, she imagines, would soothe her son’s mind and
allow the two of them to speak freely of “everything and nothing”—except his
condition, his many relapses and rehabs, “anything that would cause him to
crawl back into himself and become invisible.”
Though Noah was never a drug addict, I’ve been that
mother: desperate, bewildered, helpless, and exhausted as my child’s mind spun
out of control and he retreated ever further from love and help. How I
contrived, too, to set the scene where he could relax and return to the Noah we
knew, full of conversation, charm, and curiosity. Instead, there was this hunched,
haunted stranger at the table. Whatever I did to try to try to reach him, he rebuffed me with silence or “I don’t know.” Like my husband and me,
Noah was desperate, bewildered, helpless, and exhausted.
Was there some gateway drug in his youthful
experimentation that messed with Noah’s brain? After his death, we learned that
a bad marijuana edible triggered a massive anxiety attack; were there more such
disasters we’ll never know? “The gateway to all of it is life,” Chicurel
insists; “what happens, what you experience, what you choose to take in and
decide to leave behind.” What Noah took in from life and what he couldn’t leave
behind, like a good friend’s suicide, may have been too much for his sensitive
soul to bear. But no one chooses to be seized by addiction or other mental
illness. The only choice, I think, comes in finally summoning the will to get
treatment and commit to it, and some people are simply too far gone for that.
“I hope this is the last time,” Chicurel says of her
son’s latest visit to rehab. “I hope he can finally feel the love that surrounds him.”
How Bryan and I yearned for the same opening for Noah, who spent the last
months of his life seemingly cut off from feeling. How I regret not pouring out
my love to him every day of the weeks he lived with us. “The last time” sparks
hope for the families of addicts and those prone to manic and psychotic
episodes. “The last time” for suicide loss survivors reminds us of all the moments
that we didn’t know were the last chance to cherish our lost ones.
And for all that we share, there is the crucial
difference between a mother like Chicurel and a mother like me: she can always
hope to take her son night fishing and see him, one day, free of pain.
