Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (21 page)

‘I’m going to go home and have an early night.’

‘Will you be all right?’

‘Sure.’ I was going to have a drink. Just one glass of wine. That couldn’t do any harm. Just to stop the feeling in the pit of my stomach.

She gave me a quick, scented hug. ‘Of course you are.’ And then she said, as if she could read my mind, ‘Try not to have a drink. Remember, it’s the first drink that does the damage.’

‘Sure. I’ll be fine.’

I turned away, but not before I caught her look of patient affection. Inwardly, I winced. She understood. ‘Look after yourself,’ she said.

I bought a bottle of wine on my way home and drank myself to sleep.

Tom said, ‘I don’t understand what it is you want. I can’t seem to make you happy.’

‘You do make me happy.’

‘So why are you so unhappy?’

‘I don’t know. Depression, I guess. I’m lonely. You make me feel so lonely.’

He shifted away, a quick exasperated movement. ‘Why? You have an interesting life. You’ve got hundreds of friends. I don’t see what I have to do with this.’

‘You keep disappearing.’

‘I have stuff to do, you know? I’m up to here with it, with the kids and work and legal stuff.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t want you to be sorry. Me being busy is not personal. It’s just the way it has to be at the moment. At New Year, you said you were happy. I thought we were both happy.’

‘We are happy. It’s just that we seem to keep going around in circles.’

Tom sat down abruptly and buried his head in his hands. ‘You always seem to want to be somewhere and I don’t understand where it is you want to go. There
is
no end point. Life is a series of circles, that’s all it is. We never get to a place where we can say, here it is, this is the place I am happy. The minute you get there, it’s gone. That’s the nature of life, to go round and round.’

I looked at his bent head. I knew that I wanted too much of him. I wanted him to take away my pain. I did not know, back then, that nobody can take away another person’s pain. It is not in their power. I wanted to be rescued from myself.

I put my hand on his back. ‘Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry. So, would you like to go round in circles with me?’

He sighed. ‘Yes.’ Then he stood up and wrapped his arms around me. ‘Yes, of course I would.’

‘I love you.’

His arms tightened. ‘I love you too.’

I couldn’t find a flat. There was nowhere I wanted to live, nowhere I wanted to be. I didn’t even want to be in my own skin. With every call from the estate agent, every letter from the solicitor, I felt the darkness moving in.

‘I can’t do this,’ I said to Nigel.

‘Then don’t. Call the whole thing off.’

‘I can’t. I promised.’

‘You’ll make yourself ill again. I don’t understand why you wanted to move house in the first place. It’s the worst thing we, as depressives, can do.’

‘A fresh start. A new beginning.’

Nigel laughed. ‘We’ve only just got out of the hospital. That’s enough of a new beginning. You were suicidal, remember? Right now, the most important thing is to feel safe and being in your lovely cosy flat is going to make you feel safe, not selling it and moving into some ghastly rented place. Call them. Tell them you’re too ill to sell right now.’

‘I’m too tired.’

‘Then I’ll call them.’

‘No, I’ll do it.’

They were not pleased. Nor was I. All my plans for a new beginning seemed to be lying in tatters at my feet. I was never going to get out of this place. I didn’t mean my flat. I meant that other place. My head.

I hit Tom.

I have never hit anyone in my life, before or since. I thought I was incapable of violence.

I slapped him hard across the face, a gesture so filled with need and passion and disappointment and anger and complicated love that it shook me to my centre.

It shook him too. I could see it in his face.

He sent me an email.

The pain was so bad I thought it would kill me.

The first time I tried to kill myself, it was not so much a trying for death as an abandoning of all pretence that I had, or any longer wanted, a life. I simply gathered together all the pills that were close at hand and took them. I didn’t count them, didn’t even look to see what they were, I just swallowed them. So, when I woke again, I wasn’t too much surprised, just accepted my being alive with a kind of weary resignation.

I felt neither pleasure nor pain. In truth, I felt hardly anything at all, not fear or wonder or any sort of horror at my own actions. I simply felt that, as the taking of unscientific quantities of pills hadn’t succeeded in killing me, that I might as well carry on with the grim business of being alive. I was a burden that I had to tolerate, at least until the agony of staying alive became too much to bear at which time, I thought, I would simply try a little harder to die.

I told nobody, not out of shame but because I believed that it was nobody else’s business. I still believe that suicide is personal. I know this is not a popular view, just as I understand the suffering of family and friends after somebody has taken their own life. But I also know the suffering of the person who takes their own life. I know how, literally, unbearable living can become.

The second time I tried to die, a few months later, I felt something. It was relief. As I took the pills, I remember thinking, with absolute clarity, ‘Thank God it’s all over.’ I had tried, very hard, for two years, to stay alive. I had carried on when all I wanted was to be dead. I had stayed alive for other people. I never stayed alive for myself. I cannot begin to describe the intensity of that effort.

I counted out the pills, having looked up the number required for a fatal overdose on the Internet. I trebled the dose and, almost as an afterthought, added my usual, nightly sleeping pills, just to be sure I would sleep. I remember thinking, even as I took my sleeping pills, that it was surely madness to take pills to make me sleep when I had just taken pills to make me die.

I smiled at my own foolishness, as I swallowed the pills. I smiled, thinking that at last, I was going to be free.

When I woke up, I did feel horror; not a moral horror that I had tried to kill myself but an irritable horror at my body for letting me down by insisting on staying alive. I also felt panic, as I appeared to be paralysed from the waist down. The panic was not so much that I was terrified I would be paralysed, although that was surely bad enough, but panic at the thought that now I would be unable to prevent anyone from locking me up. I would be unable to get more pills to do the job properly. Then there was panic at the thought of having to explain myself to all the people who would no doubt line up in front of my paralysed self and want to tell me all the good reasons why I should stay alive.

And then there was my daughter. I had sunk so low that I could not even stay alive for my dearest, darling, beloved Molly. I know the accusations of selfishness. I aim them at myself, often. I find it very hard to forgive myself. But forgive, I had to, if I was to find any sort of peace.

It was Molly herself who brought me that. When she was twelve, we were watching the film,
About a Boy
, in which the heavily depressed mother is carted off to hospital following a suicide attempt.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Molly said.

‘She’s suffering from depression.’

‘Like you were?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you try and kill yourself?’

Now, I could have lied or I could have told the truth. I am not entirely comfortable inhabiting the no-man’s land known as a white lie. The truth seems preferable in any situation and, in particular, with my daughter who, generous and pragmatic creature that she is, finds dishonesty baffling. Also, my suicide attempt is a matter of public record as I wrote about it in a national newspaper and, while Molly hadn’t read it, I knew that one day, she might. At the time, I had not even thought about writing this book, so it was not a consideration. I have always attempted to describe to her, within the language acceptable to a child, the nature of depressive illness and suicide is part of that nature. So I said that, yes, I had.

‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t,’ she said, scooted over and gave me a kiss, then went back to watching the movie.

A few months later, we were sitting in my bed one morning, having a cup of tea and a chat, as we like to do. Molly suddenly said, ‘Promise me that you won’t try and kill yourself again.’

I looked at her. ‘I can’t promise that because if I do promise and break my promise, I’ll let you down twice. Besides, suicide is part of depression and I’m not depressed now but I can’t promise that I won’t get depressed again. It’s the nature of the illness that it can sometimes come back.’

She thought about this for a while. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Then promise me you’ll try.’

I did. I promised her that I would try very, very hard; so a large part of my bid to stay well is in order never to have to break a promise to my daughter.

Molly was not with me when I took those pills. She was with her father. Even in my blackest moment, I had that much sense. I also had the sense to know that nobody would find me for three days. In that way I could have been said to have planned my death, but in no other. I left no note, put none of my affairs in order. I did, though, tidy the flat and do the washing up. I don’t know why except that I have never liked other people having to clear up my mess. It didn’t occur to me that I was the mess that other people would have to clear up.

I woke at three twenty, my insomnia hour; my waking nightmare. I was desperate for a pee. I swung my legs out of bed. They collapsed under me. I hit the ground hard.

‘What’s happened to my legs?’ I said, out loud. There was nobody there to answer.

‘What’s happened?’

And then I remembered. The pills. How many did I take? How much vodka did I drink?

I tried to crawl but my knees buckled under me. My legs would not work. I wanted to pee so badly I thought I would bust but there was no way I was going to piss on my own bedroom floor. I lifted myself on to my elbows and crawled down the corridor. It took hours, or so it seemed to me.

As I dragged my paralysed body down that corridor I thought, I have handled this badly, with consummate lack of grace. Just like I’ve handled everything else.

I hated myself.

I wasn’t dead.

Fuck.

I didn’t call the emergency services. I was too humiliated. I was humiliated and ashamed, both of the impulse and by the result. I wanted to go on the Internet, to check the drug profile and see what the chances of paralysis were, but I did not have the strength.

How much vodka had I drunk? I could not remember. I dragged myself to the kitchen and pulled the bottle from the fridge. There was, at most, one glass missing.

Was that good or was that bad? If I had drunk the whole bottle, would I now be dead?

Perhaps.

I took the bottle and dragged myself back to bed, crying in despair and frustration. I drank straight from the bottle and then passed out.

My dreams were filled with my child, her mute reproachful face.

How could I have done it? How could I have let her down so?

How could I be such a bad mother?

How could I still be alive?

How could I not be dead?

How could I go on?

How could I?

How could you, Sally? How fucking could you?

I moved in and out of consciousness. Awake or asleep, Molly stayed with me. She would not let me go.

A little later, I tried to get out of bed again to get a drink of water. My legs collapsed under me.

I thought, you are an unfit mother.

Ha ha.

I thought, Nigel would have laughed. He did laugh, when I told him. He did not scold, or turn his head away in fear or disgust. He laughed and then he hugged me. In microcosm it’s that old saying, if you don’t laugh, you cry. In hospital, when we met, we did both—it’s just we rarely inhabited the place between. Suicide is not funny, of course. But making jokes about it is our way of taking the horror out of something that is very close to us and which, ordinarily, we are not allowed to talk about, let alone make light of.

He came and got me, sat me in his kitchen and cooked me food I could not eat, then put me to bed in his spare room. He put an ashtray by the bed for the cigarettes I smoked through the interminable nights.

Nigel smoked at night too. ‘It’s
marvellous
, like smoking behind the bike shed for grown-ups. We can call out to each other when we feel bored.’

‘I really must give up smoking,’ I sighed.

He laughed. ‘Yes, you wouldn’t want to cut your life short.’

He didn’t hide my pills. In fact, he collected the rest of them from the table beside my bed. I felt humiliated enough already, without being treated like a child as well. He knew exactly how I felt. He knew that if I was going to die, I would do it; without his help or his hindrance.

The next day, I went home.

‘Stay,’ he said. ‘It’s probably better if you’re not alone, at least for the next few days. Or maybe it’s better if I’m not alone.’

He’s a depressive. He prefers to be on his own. I knew he was being kind.

The only other person I told, other than Sarah, of course, was my therapist, Margaret who I was still seeing at the time, and only because I felt that I should.

She was outraged. ‘I can’t believe you sat here for an hour without telling me. And then, just as you’re walking out of the door, you drop it into the conversation as casually as if you’re talking about the weather.’

I didn’t tell her because I loathed the fuss I knew she’d make. The demands, the questions, the explanations.

‘It’s over,’ I said. ‘And I’m still here. There’s nothing more to say.’

‘I think we should talk about it.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

What more was there to say? I wanted to die. I’d told her that often enough. And now I had tried to die, and it hadn’t worked.

‘We must try to contain you,’ she said.

I laughed. A woman in a purple smock was going to try to contain me. How absurd. Her belief in the method, her earnestness was touching. Or it would have been, if I had cared enough to feel touched. A failed suicide attempt is dangerous. It destroys inhibitions, cuts through the guidelines that keep us tethered to behaviour, to sanity, to life. What certainty could she offer me that was bigger than death? What
containment?

Margaret immediately called my psychiatrist, who called me. ‘I understand that you’re not feeling very happy.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘What did you take?’

I told him.

‘Yes, they’re highly sedative. I expect you’re feeling very tired. Are you sleeping a lot?’

‘I was, in the first few days.’

‘It might be a good idea if you came to see me. I thought your mood might crash, when you came off the medication.’

‘It wasn’t coming off the medication,’ I said. ‘It was the failure of the medication, or any other medication to bring me back to myself. I am not myself. I will never be myself again. That’s the despair.’

He was silent for a moment. I knew his head was busy, considering different medications. I was a problem that needed to be solved, a chemical imbalance that needed to be put right. ‘Perhaps we can sort something out that will suit you better.’

Like a new head?

‘OK,’ I said.

That’s why I like psychiatrists. No despair too great, no madness too impenetrable. Later, I realised he had never asked me why I had tried to kill myself.

He understood why.

I was grateful for that.

Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don’t kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, ‘He fought so hard.’ And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.

There is a theory, among the psychiatric profession, that people tend to commit suicide when they are getting better, when the acute phase of depression has passed. It is then that they have sufficient energy to take action. I don’t know about that. It’s not my experience but I spent very little time in the acute catatonic phase. My depression was furiously active, filled with black, loathsome despair and continued for so long that, by the time I did try to kill myself, it was because I had lost all hope of ever pulling out of it.

One day, when I was feeling particularly hopeless, Margaret said to me that I would get better.

‘I know it doesn’t seem possible now,’ she said, ‘but you will come through.’

I was sick and tired of people telling me that I would get better, when there was absolutely no evidence to prove it.

‘How do you know that?’ I said. ‘How can you presume to tell me my reality? Your feelings are not my feelings. I have seen nothing that shows me I will get better.’

And it was true. For two years I had seen nothing, no chink of light, no sense of possibility that I would ever be well again. I was not interested in the future, I was interested (if that’s a word that could possibly be applied to my furious, nihilistic despair) in the present, in the unendurable pain I felt, which was a pain that seemed to me then to be endless.

I thought at the time, and I think it still, that promising a depressive that they will get well is like telling somebody who has just broken their ankle that it will heal in three or six or nine months’ time—but being able to offer them very little to relieve their present agony. In cases of severe depression, it’s like giving an aspirin for a broken leg. Except that, and here’s the really crucial difference, we know the given time scale within which bones heal. We know why and we know how. Nobody knows how depression heals. We don’t know why and we don’t know how.

But it does.

I say that at the risk of infuriating any depressive reading this book, just as Margaret infuriated me. I know how you feel. I know, terribly, how you feel. There are no time limits and there are no guarantees, but if you can just hold on through the worst of the pain, its quality will change.