By Christopher Nigel Ross
*content warning: suicide*
The first thing that always hits me is the enormity of what people have done—or have tried to do—whether they swallowed a bottle of aspirin or a whole pharmacy, or tried to die by some other, usually messier, means. And while for some, a suicide attempt is much more a cry for help than a genuine wish to die, it calls up in me, in either case, the utter despair that ruled my own life for too long a time and out of which I am able to connect with my patients.
My first and, fortunately, only direct encounter with suicide was in March 1998, when I found Owen hanging behind his apartment door. Although I had ended our six-and-a-half-year relationship in 1992 when I moved into my own place across town, we continued to speak at least once a day, saw each other frequently, especially on Friday nights when we would make the rounds of the West Village piano bars, and I still had a key to his apartment. When he uncharacteristically had not returned my calls for two or three days, I phoned around to mutual friends. I also called Fay, building owner and first-floor occupant, who, we all joked, maintained a log of everyone who entered and left the building. If anyone knew anything, it would be Fay. The answer on all fronts, however, was no. No one had heard from him. The next morning, I called Fay at work to let her know I’d be going over to investigate.
Halfway up the stairs to Owen’s third-floor walk-up, I knew he was dead. There was simply no energy coming from his apartment. Hesitating for a moment at his door, I took a deep breath and prepared myself to find him at his desk, slumped over his computer after suffering a massive heart attack, or dead in bed, having passed peacefully in the night of natural causes, even though he was just two or three weeks shy of fifty-four.
What I found instead was Owen hanging from the chinning bar that he’d installed many years earlier just inside the apartment. In the one or two seconds before I looked away, I saw the dried blood under his nose and noted that he was fully clothed. But I no longer remember if his eyes were open or closed or if he was still wearing his glasses. I remember some strange animal-like cry coming from my throat before I closed the door and sank to my knees in the hallway.
The rest of that day and the following days and months, as we all tried to connect the dots, remain a blur. I do remember banging on a neighbor’s door in order to call Fay—my
first cell phone would not materialize until 2005—and she and the police showed up sometime later, in what sequence I am no longer sure. I remember asking the police to give me Owen’s address book, the old-fashioned paper-and-pen variety, which he always kept next to the phone, so that I could call his sister in Los Angeles.
Sometime later, other friends of his and I cleaned out his apartment, nagged at by Fay to do so, reeling at her incredibly tactless remark that Owen had been behind in his rent. Then it was over—worldly goods distributed, apartment emptied, ashes scattered—and he was gone. That was, incredibly, twenty-four years ago, a time I view now as if through the wrong end of a telescope.
I have never tried to kill myself. And I learned firsthand through Owen’s death that the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” applies to ourselves as well. Perhaps there should be a number 6-a, “And thou shalt not kill thyself.” Nevertheless, I am all too familiar with the utter hopelessness and desperation that drive people to suicide, which is why, I believe, I am able to help people who have survived it. We connect in some visceral, gut-level kind of way.
I often met patients for the first time in the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital where I was a chaplain. Not all those who have survived a suicide attempt, however, acknowledge that they did indeed try to kill themselves and therefore see no need for help with emotional and spiritual recovery from their “accident.” Nor can I help someone who truly wants to die. But for those who readily admit that their suicide attempt was what it was and who do, after all, want to live, Phoenix Rising, my catchall name for some combination or other of Reiki, meditation, talk therapy and general cheerleading, has been successful.
It is important that patients know that I get it, that the unspeakable pain of growing up gay in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, in the ’50s and ’60s, that being in a career I hated as well as in a heterosexual marriage, drove me to ponder on many a morning as I went down into the subway, “Shall I get on the train or under the train?”
Nor do I push Jesus at them, or judge them, or attempt to dissuade them from their belief (and mine) that life is hard. That it takes work. But if they want to live, together we can uncover the events—and the meaning of those events—that eventually led to our encounter either in the Intensive Care Unit or elsewhere. Together, we can find the road back from the brink of despair and create a life worth living.
I will not pretend that this ministry is not in some way an attempt to save Owen, though I know, intellectually, that is impossible. Moreover, we can ultimately only save ourselves. Nevertheless, I whisper after each session, “This one’s for you, Owen.” As well as for anyone
and everyone else experiencing a “dark night of the soul” in which a kindred spirit might prevent the irreversible.
If you are concerned about someone you know or if you yourself fear you might harm yourself, please seek help. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached at 1-800-273-8255 (Espanol: 1-888-628-9454); deaf and hard of hearing: 1-800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741