This Is A Scream

AUTHOR’S NOTE: For ages, the dictate has been not to write honestly about suicide —  not to mention even the word, never mind methods, lest, in referencing it directly, you prompt suicidal spirals in others. But you can’t tackle the endless abyss of wanting to die on tiptoes; that just leaves you with the half-hearted interventions we’ve pretended are the best society can do. I need to be faithful to the experience. This is how I felt, and this is how I acted; this is what people in despair are driven to do. These are the people we fail in myriad ways, and this is the cost of that failure.

- Anna Mehler Paperny

WHAT SCARES me most is what I don’t remember.

And that’s everything between scarfing sleeping pills on a Sunday night to waking fuzzily in the ICU days later, Velcro ties strapping my wrists and forearms to cold metal railings ringing the bed, keeping my erratic sedated writhing from disconnecting a maze of IVs plugged into veins. I discovered I was wearing a hospital gown and attached to a catheter (the latter, especially, not something you want to take you by surprise).

I was shocked when I surfaced at how much time had passed. I’ve no recollection of the hours on dialysis. Just the lasting image of a churning strawberry-red slushy machine, which is how my dad described the life-saving contraption days later. But my text messages and call history betray me: I’d offered, in a near blackout state, to rush out and report on a story that, mercifully, was taken on by someone else. When I asked about this later, the coworker who had called said I had just sounded groggy. No kidding.

I can’t remember being found in my apartment, overdosed on antifreeze, by two senior editors at the Globe and Mail, the newspaper where I worked at the time. Mortification overwhelms me each time I imagine the scene, and I still wish I’d died rather than be found that way.

That, in 2011, was my first suicide attempt, my first post-attempt hospitalization, and my entry point into a labyrinthine psychiatric-care system via the trap door of botched self- obliteration. For me, it was an inexorable resolution — the only possible culmination of a conviction I’d had for months but kept putting off.