The Pact

I was seventeen when I realized I could kill myself and no one could stop me.

It was late - after 11:00 PM. I was in the kitchen of the house my parents had purchased the previous year when we moved back to Maine after spending 14 years in Canada. At that time my family - my parents and four younger sisters ranging in age from three to fifteen - were in bed by 7:30. In the quiet of night I could almost hear them breathing, the soft sighs of deep sleep.

My parents, my mother in particular, must have been exhausted. I was in the throes of deep clinical depression. Part of my illness was an unrelenting impulse to plan my own death. I couldn’t be in the bathroom without wanting to take all the pills out of the cabinet and start lining them along the edge of the sink, or taking down the disposable razors, taking them apart, and cutting into my forearms with the blades. The images were vivid and hallucinatory; the compulsions exhausting and overwhelming. I remember my mother sitting with me, holding tightly to my shaking hands as she calmly told me she would take all the pills and razors out of the bathroom so I wasn’t tempted by them.

I didn’t want her to because I didn’t want to feel weak.

I had been a bit of a golden child. Outgoing, articulate, inquisitive, and socially fearless (which lead to more than one adventure!), I was moved up from kindergarten to first grade at the age of five. I finished high school in three years and by 16 I was in college halfway across the country. I followed my first year with an intense internship at a well-regarded professional summer stock theatre. For my sophomore year, I was planning a double major in theatre and international relations and had started exploring junior-year abroad programs.

Two weeks before the end of my internship I contracted a severe case of mononucleosis. Physically and emotionally depleted, I nonetheless insisted on returning to school. My mental health started to spiral. Less than a month later I became acutely suicidal and had to drop out of school altogether. I was so fragile my mother drove 1200 miles in 24 hours because I couldn’t travel alone.

I had always been the child who my mother never worried about because come what may I always landed on my feet. Now I was the child she agonized over, afraid she might lose me, concerned about the effect I was having on my sisters. I had often been moody as a teen but now I became cranky, unpredictable, and mean. Where before I might my lose temper now I could rage for hours. My eight-year-old sister wrote me a letter telling me she wasn’t sure she loved me anymore because I said such horrible things to her when I was angry, and I was angry all the time.

Always petite, I had lost weight with the mono, and I continued to lose weight on the new meds they described for the depression. I stopped coming to dinner - they would send my baby sister in to ask me because she was the only one I never screamed at - eventually they gave up asking. Where before I spent my babysitting money on fancy creams and trips to the salon, now sometimes I forgot to shower for days or just couldn’t bring myself to bother getting out of bed. I lost my ability to sleep regular hours and could sleep the day away only to prowl the house at night. My family referred to me as “the wraith.”

Which brought me to this moment all by myself in the bright kitchen late at night with my demons.

The knowledge came to me like a chime: if I wanted to end my life in that moment, as long as I did it quietly no one would waken to stop me.

I realized this and felt the itch, the impulse to give in. I could see it unfold clearly in my mind: how I would do it, how it would feel, how I would look when I was dead. Yet another vivid, lurid, and macabre fantasy.

In the next moment, a cold clarity set in, razor-sharp. I felt truth cut into me like a knife. I realized I did not really want to die.

I didn’t want to be dead; I just wanted the pain to stop.
Other thoughts ew by.

If I killed myself my baby sister, a sunny bright cherub just barely three years old, was always the first one up so she would be the one to find me. Which would change her forever. My death would change all of them forever. And I wouldn’t be there - not to see them grow up, not to rebuild my bridges with them, not to be anything.

Because I would be dead.

There was something deeper, too. A sense of my own worth. The beginning of an appreciation for all of the love and sacrifices my parents had made for me. A voice that said: no, you don’t get to do this. You have value.

My entire life my parents showed me they believed I was important and I mattered. In that quiet cold moment where if I really wanted to destroy myself I absolutely could . . . I found I didn’t want to.

I made a pact with myself in that moment.

I promised myself I would never kill myself. I would never even try. Ever.

The impulses would never go away, though I would develop systems to deal with them. There would be years of therapy and meds and disappointment and choices with difficult outcomes. I would rage and despair and burn figurative bridges with my loved ones, some which would end up beyond repair. But I would prevail. I would let go of my hubris and become comfortable with my truth.

Where before I was the Golden Girl on the Golden Path with plans to complete a PhD at a Good School by twenty-five, now my path would always be the path not chosen. I completed high school in three years but took ten years to complete my only post-secondary school degree, a BA. Where my classmates went to Stanford and Georgetown and Harvard, I finished at a community state university. I would be forty-three before I started my career.

Along the way, I would learn to not only overcome my demons but become friends with them. I would learn to be tempered like steel: to bend but not break. To fall down, lick your wounds, and get back up. To be proud of the small things when the small things require everything you have. To have an open heart and an open mind, because you never know where someone has been or what they have seen. To not judge, because I live in a glass house. To truly understand why that which does not kill you makes you stronger. To find in myself the determination to never give up, and never give in.

And when my daughter would inherit similar demons and have to make pacts of her own, I would be able to sit with her, a tempered veteran of similar battles who knows how to prevail.

But that is, of course, another story.