Names are left out for protection

My cousin whose name begins with the first letter of the alphabet, a common letter, one vowel out of five, reminded my family of my cousin who died twenty years ago. I repeat the vowels- a,e,i,o,u. The letters feel round and weighted with purpose. They make up words and words have meaning. I first learned vowels in first grade but sometimes I forget things, like vowels, or multiplication, or that my cousin didn’t just ‘die’ but committed suicide, and those are completely different things. Dying is a natural act, we will all experience someone dying of a sickness or or an accident, old age. Suicide is not natural. It is an act of ending a person’s own life. It is dying from a sickness such as depression but it is not how God intended it, if you believe in that sort of thing. In orthodox Judiasm suicide is viewed as a sin and is forbidden but we didn’t grow up orthodox so I guess it makes suicide an option like cheese or no cheese on a burger.

Vowels make up words which make up sentences and those sentences make up stories, they make up beginnings and middles and ends. My cousin who died but not as god intended, through the act of suicide, his name begins with the nineteenth letter of the alphabet. So does suicide but that doesn’t mean that was how the story was supposed to go. His name was Scott and if you have kept up with the blog, you then know I never give names, but this is different. A name is a place to start, rather than ‘This is about a boy,’ or ‘His hair was thick and brown with bangs hanging over his forehead, sometimes covering his eyes.’ That is the beginning even though I gave you the end. Sometimes knowing the ending prepares a reader for the story. The reader knows what to expect. Knowing the ending doesn’t necessarily ruin the story. Kurt Vonneget says when writing short stories to start as close to the end as possible for plot. I gave you the ending. The journey, how a character moves from beginning to end, the choices a charter makes, are what makes a story interesting. Vonneget also says to give the reader someone they can root for. A character should always want something. I’m not sure if wanting to die is what he meant. When I begin a story I often begin in motion in such that the reader joins the story in flight. In flight is often my beginning. My stories aren’t mysteries or fantasy so I don’t worry about ‘giving something away’ because it is the journey I am most interested in or the form in which a story is told. Like in this piece, you know the end- My cousin Scott committed suicide, but what about the middle? His journey of how he landed there.

Middles are hard. Ask any writer, that is the place they get stuck and it’s the most important part, the longest passage. When I get stuck it’s usually because I don’t know what my story is about or the character. I’ll come up with a beautiful first line and pat myself on the back for the discovery, stare out the window in the coffee shop where I am writing and smile for example, ‘…we didn’t grow up orthodox so it makes suicide a choice like cheese or no cheese on a burger.’ I’m fond of that line but it can not carry the story, you will not want to continue to read if you don’t understand how he came to that decision. For me, Scott’s journey is empty space, a question mark. As if I have done too many drugs, took too much acid in my twenties and thirties and forgot or can’t trust what I know. His middle may have been like my middle: mania and depression; a bipolar diagnosis; a life put on hold when your friends or family have discovered themselves, found a person and are on their journeys. When my younger sister was getting her master’s in nursing I was in a hospital. When we were living together in Bucktown her life was stable, she had a dog and a boyfriend. I had one night flings, drugs hidden in pill boxes in my room, working in a restaurant, acting in a show I would have to drop out of because of mania or depression or a mixture of both like one of those rainbow cakes.

In the beginning of my story I start happy. I have bright orange hair down to the middle of my back. In a picture I have on my dresser my papa is holding me. We are at the zoo and it’s summer. I am around five and we are both smiling. It is a real smile, the sort that fills you as if you ate something sweet, and it’s summer so you feel the sun’s heat as a radiance which seems to come from you and this moment. When I think of my cousin my first image is his smile when we were young, he may have been fifteen. His teeth came over his lip, his eyes were light. He was wearing a t-shirt and tight shorts, it was the seventies, his legs so pale. We are at his home for a family gathering, mother’s day? We are in his backyard and I am sitting on the concrete steps while he runs around with his dog Augie. She had bright blue eyes. We are at my house and it’s hanukah and we are choosing a present to unwrap at our white elephant party. We choose based on the shape of the gift: small and thin maybe a gift card; precuriously wrapped probably something ugly like a random vase found in a basement. The story is in motion but I don’t detect any sadness yet.

We are still in the beginning and I am sad. I am anxious but we didn’t have a word yet. It’s the eighties and nonone spoke about bipolar. I don’t know if Scott was yet sad. He lived in the city and we lived in the subburbs and that distance made everything feel different. When we left our house and went to theirs I laughed louder, I could see my voice fill the living room, turn my family’s head. They would smile.

In the beginning of my story I had depression. My sister remembers me laying on the couch during college after a back injury watching the same movie over and over again. It was the nineties and I was watching Reality Bites longing for a relationship and for my life to turn out ok like Wynona Riders. ‘That’s the first time I saw what depression looks like.’ I still don’t know what she saw. I remember when my boyfriend at the time broke up with me over the phone. Acutally I hadnt heard from him and when I called him from my parent’s basement, the place my father and I would smoke cigarettes. The smoke was so heavy, you could smell the smoke when the door was closed sneaking out from under the crack in the door. The basement was a depressing place, the place you would go to do secretive things like smoke a cigarette.'I thought you knew we had broken up.’, he said. He hadn’t told me, I was supposed to assume that him not calling was breaking up. I lay on my parent’s bed crying, ‘I want to die,’ I said. My dad rubbed my back and I felt the fear in his touch. I heard my parent’s voices float above me, gray clouds in the sky, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ That is my first memory of real depression.

This is the middle. My middle. I don’t know my cousin’s middle because I didn’t see him much. His character here becomes vague and that’s why this part of the story gets stuck. His ending is strong and full of emotion but I don’t know how he came to his choice. As a writer I should go back to the beginning and understand my character, figure out his journey but this is real. This will have to be a different kind of middle, writer’s choice.

During the pandemic youth suicides and suicidal idiation increased. Over 5,568 young people died by suicide during the first ten months of the pandemic.The pandemic exacerbated risk factors overall. Mental health during the pandemic increased such as stress, anxiety and depression. The world became more aware of mental health (but those of us who have been living with a diagnosis way before know of its existance before).One in five adults experience depression, that is before the pandemic. It has increased since the pandemic.In 2021 14.5 million of people over 18 in the U.S. have had a least one major depressive disorder. It is one of the most common mental disorders.

A major depressive disorder is a period lasting at least two weeks. Loss of interest or pleasure in daily activities. Symptoms such as problems with sleep, eating, concentration and self worth. This definition does not describe the feeling. The symptons are part of the story but it’s details are not there. William Styron who suffered from depression disliked the word. He called it ‘a true wimp of a word for such a major illness.’ He describes depression as ‘a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self-to the mediating intellect-as to verge close to being beyond description.’ I have bipolar disorder but it is the depression I remember the most. It’s a feeling I choose to keep at a distance, a repulsion as I have to blue cheese. I have searched for words, have come up with explanations for my family, my friends, most recently since this last depressive episode for my husband. Styron is right, it is close to beyond description. Beyond description makes it difficult to tell a story but that sentence works as a description in itself. Plainly, I don’t even know much about what Scott may have had or experienced since he moved away and pushed us far away, leaving me to make up the middle. When talking to my husband recently about this blog I was wanting to write, I tried to describe depression. I told him there is almost no word encapsulating it intensity and devestation. He was leaning against our dining room table dressed and getting ready to ride his bike to work. I was drinking coffee in my sleepshirt while sitting on our couch, the place I last experienced the weight of depression. I said,'It’s opening the door to nothing, just grey. It’s thinking of the next moment but there isn’t any because hope doesn’t exist. I can’t explain the pain,’ I said. I haven’t found words for the pain. Yet when I contemplate it, I immediatly draw it up as if it never went far away. It’s heaviness lodges in my throat and I cry. I cried when I spoke with my husband. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I always apologize when I cry as if such an emotion is shameful or not aloud. ‘I’m not depressed but the feeling I remember stronger than I remember happiness sometimes. It scares me. I don’t ever want to go there again.’ Then I smile because we have moved past this middle part of my story after two and half years of intensive group therapy and family sessions. For the first time in fifty-two years I have hope and happiness, most days, even when a day sucks.

I was in my apartment in Wicker Park. I think it was cold so it may have been winter or early spring. I stood between my kitchen and front room, surrounded by orange, ‘melon’ as I had ???? choosen to paint my kitchen in a hypomanic state. My sister called to tell me the news that Scott had shot himself. I buckled over as I have seen in films and once on a soap opera when a wife found out who her husband’s killer really was. I have never buckled. I never saw myself as a person who would buckle. Buckling is so extreme and although I lean towards big emotions, it felt too dramatic. It’s an action giving in to gravity. It is to bend and give way under a weight or force; give way; bend or crumple. I imagine my mother would have buckled if I succedded in suicide. My father would have been standing above her trying to hold up a body that didn’t want to be held up. I was twenty- six when I took all my Lithium pills. I had my then boyfriend call my mom and tell her I didn’t think I wanted to die. “Tell her to make herself throw up.” I imagine as she said this she was calm. She worked well in stressful situations. If there was a zombie apocolypse I would want her on my team. She is a nurse and I think that also taught her to be calm. When she hung up the phone I’m sure her voice spread widly and rose in pitch.

When my dad, uncle and cousin’s went to my aunt’s place to tell her of her son’s suicide she was asleep and didn’t hear them enter. She is deaf. She must have been startled to see them all there at the same time standing above her, their mouths one downward line, stricken. Colorless faces, acid words being held back. I have wondered if she knew what they were about to say, mother’s instinct. She must have known a little more about Scott’s mental state then I did. She was sitting down and I don’t know if she buckled.

He hadn’t gone into work in weeks,maybe longer. He may have quit. There was nothing in his apartment. He had made strange angry calls to his family. He was found in his car having shot himself. Some drugs were also found. Drugs are normal in some suicides, making it easier to go through with it. Men tend to have much more violent suicides: guns, hanging. Women tend to use drugs, carbon monoxide poisening, razors. The first suicide I remember was of my friend whose name also began with the nineteenth letter of the alphabet. A week before I heard I ran into him at the Starbucks near where I lived. He was drunk early in the morning. He didn’t seem well. When I heard I was stunned but I didn’t buckle though his death stands out in neon. I was experiencing some depression, one year before my first manic attack and shortly before my official diagnosis. He hung himself and sometimes when I think of him I don’t think of when he stayed with me after returning from Mexico when we drank cheap beer and smoked cigarettes in the first apartment I lived by myself. I left early for work the next morning but he had already left. I think of him hanging from a rafter not knowing enough of his beginning, a little more of his middle and just enough of his end.