Suicide: The Quiet Haunting

Moonrise, 1884 Stanislaw Maslowski

A little over two years ago, I went to the closet where I kept a hidden stash of pills, carefully packed them among my things into a small weekend suitcase, made reservations at an inn I had stayed at with my mother when I was a teenager and left for the beach town of my childhood without telling anyone. I was headed towards the place where I had had my happiest years, those golden, magical summers when I was young. So I could remember. I needed to face down something -- either do away with myself or do away with the suicidal notions that had followed me for many years. Take the pills or throw them away into the sea.

Blindsided by a series of unexpected events sparked by my mother's passing, my underpinnings had been suddenly ripped away; what I had thought was a shored up foundation was washed away in a flood of unmanageable emotion. This was not depression but a reaction to circumstances that were out of my control. These circumstances had reactivated trauma and suicidal thoughts from the past. What I knew to be true was no longer relevant. I felt I had nothing left to hold onto.

I went for a long walk on the beach just past sunset, then for a night swim underneath the half moon near a 200 year old birch tree that overlooks the pool. The massive trunk, with its intensive root system and bark that looks like an elephant's skin, extends upward and outward with generous, unbendable branches offering shade and shelter. I thought of the many lifetimes that tree had presided over -- it grew and expanded generation after generation over the dramas, the loves, the different families who had lived their lives under the tree's watchful presence. Somehow this tree and all that familiar surrounding nature that my body remembered so well from childhood -- those distinctive small, pale pebbles in the driveway, the warmth of the cement under my bare feet, the sand between my toes, the weathered shingled houses and abundant bursts of blue hydrangea, that train whistle in the distance -- began to restore me, renew me. The body remembers even when the mind is lost in a state of confusion.

Two days later I found a rocky promontory on the beach far away from others. A fisherman came and interrupted me so I moved to the next outcropping of rocks down the stretch of isolated beach. An expansive but delicate cloudbank resembling an angel's wing spread to the right of the moon in the sky overhead. I gingerly walked over the large, mossy stones to the spot where the sea was its most tempestuous -- swirling, uncontrolled, persistent even demanding.

I emptied the three pill bottles into this whirlpool, one by one, watched the pills as the sea overtook and consumed them, tossing them around with an almost furious abandon. One pill remained trapped in a corner between two rocks, but the sea quickly swallowed that, too.

I not only released those pills, but with them the family "shadow," the specter of darkness and suicidal thoughts that had felt like a pall hanging over the family for perhaps generations. The pattern stops with me. On those moss covered rocks a decision was made.