The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

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Last night, I was in one of those moods, the kind where my throat feels as though it's being squeezed, the air barely getting through, the stomach churning, the dull ache spreading to the back, and I knew it wasn't real. I knew it was just a Sunday night, the dark hours before the beginning of another long week, and even though I am not working at the moment, I remember too well how it felt to know what was coming. The crazy thoughts started frothing and boiling over, how I can't cope with this life, how I can't manage on my own, how I'll never be able to...and so on.

I took a bath, dropped a tiny bit of lavender oil into the water and read my book of Plath memoirs. She had a lot to say, and the book was too heavy for my arms to hold above the water, so I got in maybe four pages before I carefully placed it on the side of the tub and brought my arms under the surface. Why does the heart fool me into believing I am running from a predator while I am doing nothing more than lazing in a tub of hot water? When will this strange torment begin to feel less convincing? When will I let it go. Maybe I shouldn't be reading Plath?

So, I got out, wrapped a towel around me and headed toward the computer where I scoured through the headlines: Natasha Richardson has been laid to rest, a plane carrying fourteen people, half of which were children, crashed and exploded in a cemetery in Montana, another plane crashed in Japan, economy, economy, economy, and then, there was that last story. Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, dead by suicide in Alaska. At first I thought I was seeing things, but as it began to register, the throat felt invisible fingers wrap around it and squeeze once more. Wasn't he still a sleeping baby in a house in England? Was he not still sleeping soundly while his mother put her head in the oven? Somehow, he had become a forty-seven-year-old man, one who could not tolerate the life around him, and so he wrapped a rope around his neck and kept the legacy going.

There is no poetry in this, I think. Suicide is not in the DNA. I didn't know the man, but I wonder how many people actually did. The problem is that his mother became famous for being tragic, and he lived under that his whole life. The morbid fascination of the maudlin and the curious, always there, always a part of his waking and sleeping. Imagine the weight of it, being this person involved in one of the strangest, heartbreaking, sinister situations in modern history, having a father who is largely deemed villain for his romantic entanglement, a man who wore the guilt like an oversized sweater for the rest of his life. I don't know how that must feel, growing up knowing that I was one of the two children in the Plath tragedy. How would you carry on normally with that label trailing behind you wherever you go? I imagine that anyone who met him, particularly young women, would be instantly entranced by him and his association, not really seeing him, never hearing his voice, only listening for poetry, searching for cups of milk beside him, and any hint of the dead woman they'd come to worship. Sad is not a word that fits his passing well.

According to his sister, Frieda, he'd been battling depression for a very long time. No wonder, I thought, and how are you doing, Frieda?

M. told me that a friend of his from his younger years had lost his father to suicide. Jumped from the top of the house and broke his neck. The friend could have handled his father's passing if it had been more mundane, perhaps a heart attack or a bout of cancer, but to know that his father would willingly end everything without considering those he was leaving behind, no matter how personal his pain was, was too much for his son. Some years later, M's friend would kill himself as well. I suppose that the suiciders don't consider the residue they leave behind, how it becomes infectious and begins to surge through the veins of those who cried the hardest for them. The hopelessness is learned and then put into practice. It's a lonely world after that.

My brother-in-law's grandfather killed himself, but most members of the family think he died of a heart attack. It was kept quiet because of the family's Catholicism and the shame which they'd all be forced to endure should the truth come out. My brother-in-law happened to overhear his father and uncle discussing their strategy when he was hiding outside the garage where the grandfather had gassed himself. He told my sister, she told me, and now I'm telling you, but I don't suppose this will change anything. Something about the grandfather's shame at having lost all of his wealth during WWII, when the Nazis stole everything he had in Holland, leaving him penniless. He couldn't accept his new life, felt as though he'd ceased to be a man when all of his worldly possessions had been taken from him, and for forty odd years he nursed that blackness, until he couldn't anymore. A friend of ours took her supernaturally sensitive boyfriend to that house (my sister and now husband had come to own it, and at that time no one knew that the boyfriend had any kind of sensitivity to the dead), and the boyfriend kept looking at the garage with a horrified stare. When he was asked what was wrong, he responded that he saw an old man looking at them through the garage window, and wanted to know if someone like this had ever died in there. My brother-in-law shrugged and said 'Yes, my Opa. It was a heart attack.' The boyfriend narrowed his eyes and looked back at the garage. 'Okay,' he said weakly. He later told his girlfriend that he knew that the old man didn't die of a heart attack. There was too much shame in his face for a simple heart attack. My sister would not go into the garage under any circumstances, and they eventually sold the house and moved on.

Everyone thinks about it. It's natural, I think, to not only wonder about death but to occasionally will it to happen. Some people do things they know have risks, while others flirt a little more wildly by strategizing and executing some kind of half-baked suicide plan. For me, the fear of death is too great, so what I do instead is fear the want of it. I fear wanting to do it, especially when I'm anxious or on the edge of what I believe to be madness. I know how close my sister has come to it, and I've known others who went the whole way. There was John, the grade A egghead who put a shotgun in his mouth while his parents were in the driveway outside, leaving them childless. Billy, had an argument with his sister on Christmas Day and promptly went home and shot himself in the head while intoxicated (he was a police officer, actually). My uncle's brother, Claude, jumped off a bridge into heavy traffic. My father ex-wife, off a bridge into an icy river in Denmark. What were their reasons, though? John was worried about the future, and also he'd been diagnosed a manic depressive which didn't help matters much when you consider how intolerant society was at the time with regard to mental disorders. Billy was drunk and did something stupid. Claude also drank too much and was having money problems. My father's ex had been left by her second husband for a younger woman. So, essentially, you have people who killed themselves for insecurity, alcohol and a relationship which didn't work anymore. From here, their reasons seem weak, but from in their heads, I suppose that at the time they didn't seem trivial at all.

What I get from it, though, is that most people who survive suicide attempts are happy that they did. One of my best friends works as a psychiatric nurse in the hospital of the town I went to high school in and she tells me that she regularly sees people I know in there from this very thing. She can't tell me who they are, but she assures me that they leave with a new perspective, and so far, none of them have actually gone back and tried again. Sometimes, all they need is to feel understood, she says. It is more often than not an inability to see beyond one's nose, an outright refusal to look at the bigger picture. It would be fruitless to point out all the people who've died untimely, unwanted deaths to someone who is invested in their own despair because they don't care. They believe in the illusion of helplessness and only they have the means to change it.

I know what anguish is. I know that the colour black has a texture, a smell and weight. I do battle with my own weaknesses every day, and my head knows what the way out of it all is. It's in finding the beauty in a blooming daffodil, in breathing in deeply while sitting on a park bench, in letting chocolate melt on your tongue, in petty distractions, in poetry and music, in the sensation of relief. Because I know it isn't real, in that depression doesn't have a body or pathology, I am aware that it is my own invention. My chemistry can be altered by my will, I believe, but the tough part is pushing my will through. As I sit here now, my mind is with this entry, but my body is already tensing for the day ahead, for the appointment I have in the afternoon, for the dinner I will have to make afterward, for the possibility that I will have a panic attack and embarrass myself, for the future which may have M. drop from an aneurysm or us sink into financial ruin. What happens, then, is that I often am forced to wait for the big, dark wave to wash over me, the dread and the worry to push me under until I am finally able to rise to the top, and it's exhausting. I am envious and hateful toward anyone who does not know what this feels like because it seems so unfair. I am angry with everyone else for not being able to pull me out of it, once and for all.

But, this is who I am, and I owe it to the people who love me to keep moving.

I am still frightened, all the time, and reading about Nicholas didn't help matters much. But, at the end of the day, there is still the possibility of blooming daffodils, the air is still relatively clean, there is music and chocolate, and I still have me.

I wish I could help them all. I have to start with me, though. I have a right to all of this, too.