Memento Vitae
Now that I find myself on more stable ground, we should talk about how you found me that day. The timing is right. Your face reads as mine must have when you first came to help. Perhaps the moment has arrived to return a small portion of your kindness. You’ll allow some latitude, I trust, a little circumscription so that I might not start with simply, ‘I had gone insane.’ It’s likely I always had been insane, and only the vigor of youth had managed to hide whatever my condition. But nothing is certain anymore. The view backward into those events is riddled with blind spots, like deciphering ancient text gnawed by time and creatures.
I used to watch the mice up here in the late hours, just between three and five. That time was always best. No one comes calling between three and five when the world is quilted in soft silence. I’d watch the bravest emerge first, taste the air with whiskers on a fidgeting snout. Feelings of affection and kinship far beyond acquittal rose up in awesome waves and receded. I entertained thoughts that it was the same mouse that ventured out first each night. My familiar. My favorite... But of course you haven’t come to hear about my favorite mouse. I mention it only to illustrate a point: though you have never known me to be a fearful man, I had come to live in terror of my own mind so much so that the company of mice was all I could support.
Yes, yes, it’s true that the process of examination does stir some nervousness in me even now. Rarely, if ever, are we forced to consult the atlas of the self. Avoid such inquiries; unless you’re willing to make a life of hard travel. You’ll trust me that the topography is too complex where landmarks warp and shift locale. The Personality is no star to navigate by; what you believe to be stable aspects of yourself are always in flux, and nothing like the cardinal directions. Nor do any contiguous emotions give scale to the distances you’ve traveled. You don’t recognize the pivotal markers of your life when you first stand beside them. No one does. It is only in charting the journey after-the-fact that we color those monuments with meaning.
Each step toward that pitiable state in which you discovered me seemed as natural as one foot laid in front of the last. No action held significance. I’d been in that bathtub for the better part of three days. Maybe more. I had already tried to die once, and without your intervention, would have no doubt succeeded in a second attempt.
...Plummets, my friend, need not be preceded by a climb. Sometimes a depth yawns beneath your feet, careless of how you sound the void with an echo. Nearly as far back as my memory stretches, there was the pit. I think I was about ten years old the first time suicide occurred to me. The idea came on a fleeting daydream. A fantasy. No previous brush with ill moods had given me words to call it out. What was extant had always been, waiting in the murmuring dark to be named.
Any functional life I lived was on a neutral ground between inner factions — not warring, but ambivalently straining in discord. One part would collapse while another held fast. One region would fall under attack as another knew peace: you and I came to know each other in such a place.
Alcoholism and a daily meditation practice were mostly responsible for maintaining a status quo. Alcohol allowed me to escape when nothing else would, and I’d not be speaking to you now were if not for that regular prescription. Meditation, on the contrary, gave me access to those processes normally outside my awareness. Something known is not a cause for dread; and although depression still overhung me, I could connect with it, learn about it, even dissipate it at times. But such reprieves never lasted. The inevitabilities of life would inevitably encroach. Drinking would become heavier and longer. Slowly, meditation would give way to hungover afternoons. The armistice maintaining my borders would collapse.
What episodes typically followed such falls became predictable. The first spell lasted just a few weeks, but then tended to double in duration with each recurrence. Slowly, the interludes took shape, developed identity, became entities themselves to be watchful of and feared. This past instance lasted nearly three years—three years of a constant struggle to leave bed, maintain relationships, enjoy my life beyond tiny, drug-enabled instances.
Always in the grimmest moments the mice would return—perhaps because of the mess. The condition of one’s living quarters is often a reflection of one’s mental state. Mine were similarly faithful. But as I told you, to my isolating mind, the rodents were my only friends, and their presence was most welcome.
It’s true that, on occasion, a mouse or two would offend me. We tried to practice a kind of live-and-let-live policy, but I would periodically decide that the vermin had overstepped, usually after pillaging a bag of bread. The heathens revelled in the destruction. They hardly even ate the food, preferring instead to make cosy nooks in a thousand crumbs.
I would immediately set about constructing a trap. But with no veil between me and my emotions, the idea of those fragile, furry bodies being hammered by cruel, spring-metal jaws was unbearable. I was too much an exposed nerve to witness that cruelty. So a glass mixing bowl, short stick, length of thread, and bit of bait—usually peanut butter—became the components of a simple drop-trap. For hours on end I would hold the string, tied to the stick, propping up the bowl across the room, ready to drop the glass cage over both bait and quarry with a thud.
It worked, too, believe it or not. And the mice never got wise to the trap—even after being benetted multiple times. Which does, I’ll admit, illustrate a major flaw in my design: after being captured and released on the sidewalk more than once, the critters never took long in finding their way back inside.
What I mean to say is that sitting there, with that guyed trigger in my hand, watching in silence, I hit on something. The catatonia I inhabited in those senseless spans became a home to me. It even sounds like a place, doesn’t it? The Kingdom of Catatonia. Like some deep underdark only accessible to myself, I could drift inside and stay in that thoughtless country for short eternities. In retrospect, such escapism was not entirely healthy. Each time I emerged from my trance, the world was a little paler, my body a little more sensitized to the painful electricity in my skin. What torments I had avoided in my absence invaded the present moment, renewed.
To plummet, my friend, one need only slip. And after so many hours lost in the heedless places of my mind, that day arrived. After all those years of fighting, using tricks and drugs and mental gymnastics to keep myself moving, I finally stopped. I slipped and I tumbled.
Despair is the most devious of emotions. It feeds on the intellect, sups on logic like a thumb-thick leach and turns all to excrement. Nor can such a bent be fought with logic, that being at once its composition and nourishment. In nullifying the mind with the mind’s own devices, despair builds walls around a pacing captive. One cannot think themselves out of a cell that thought has shut them into.
In that haze, the world appeared clear. I saw plainly the landscape of ideas that we have sculpted for ourselves and I saw the natural order of things. No real choice existed. I did not belong here. Either we should change the very world we live in and give nations back some kind of heart and compassion, or we should get about the business of death. Just so, if we are to cease living, let us equally forswear survival. Let all those who cannot find a place here, who feel like aliens in an alien land—and judging by the political strife, social calamity, and mass shootings our society is plagued with, we are legion—find whatever end suits them best. If the world is not to change, then let those unequipped for the inhumane pass from its confines. Then, at least, we might breed a Humanity more ready to the yoke we’ve fashioned for ourselves. Let the hearts of those not housebroken to a 70-hour work week explode in massive coronaries so that we might make room for those who are. And let those survivors be the new Humanity’s forbearers. Bring on a world of middle-managers, ruthlessly clamoring over the fallen to advance a single rung.
The next few days were spent in a stupor. Maybe it was weeks. The images are scattered and overlapping like piles of old photographs. An arm here. A leg there. A laugh that could be a scream. What remains is visceral. Even as we speak, I am there, casting about inside a two-dimensional image.
Work was an impossibility. I was in the bathtub nearly always. That winter was cold, as you’ll recall; so cold. Anxiety outgrew its name and swelled to intense pain in my flesh. The warm water of the bath was proof against the freeze and the burn, like a sensory deprivation tank. And I drank profusely—handles of whiskey straight from the bottle, taken like shots of medicine more so than like drinks.
Voices consoled me... No, no, nothing so schizophrenic as all that. Real voices. I would listen to seemingly endless podcasts about ancient history. I suppose a piece of me understood what was happening and was loath to waste the experience. If I was obliged to feel this way and lose all this time, at least I should be learning something. Those memories are still the most salient. Even now, the tenor of one specific podcaster transports me back to that swirling space.
I only left my apartment for more whiskey. I suppose I looked like one of my mice. My head was always down; I moved in the same fidgets, foraging. Really, I was terrified of an encounter with anyone I knew. How would I ever explain my absence? My condition? Those memories cling stickily like remnants of monsters chasing me through nightmares—the kind of remnants you can’t shake that make you weird all day after a fitful night.
Listen. You have to believe me that the mind will shatter. Given the right stimuli, for the proper amount of time, the self can anneal to the point of brittleness and crumble like red-hot glass quenched.
Naked in the tub, I awoke in corpse-cold water. But I was not myself. I looked down and my arms were not my arms. My bulging belly and bowed legs were not my own. I clawed and hit myself—not savagely because I knew intellectually that this must be some illusion instantiated by my brain—but I had to know what I could feel. And I found that I could not really feel. All my sensations had turned telegram: the information was there, but soulless to the touch. Everything was echos and second-hand consciousness.
I was very drunk, and recall it but darkly, but I do see someone tossing the end of a bathrobe belt up over the old pipe. This was not an act of deliberation, but of desperation; something to save and not to destroy—or in destroying, save. I cannot tell. It may have been a passive attempt. I’m not sure. I’m fairly certain I didn’t expect the pipe to break. When I came to, I went back to the tub.
The following morning you called and I answered. I’m not sure why I did. I hadn’t answered my phone in weeks. Perhaps it was for fear of something more dangerous than the dark. Or maybe I’d been ready for help, but had never known where to seek it. But you called and I answered and I am eternally grateful for your insistence, your gentle insistence, that I should seek help; for driving me to my first appointments; for encouraging me in any small progress I made. The first thing depression takes from us is what we need most: those close to us. The deeper I fell, the more impossible reaching out became. I could not have survived had you not helped me discover just how viciously that cycle does wound us.
Even now, after more than 30 years of struggling, of insanity—after a suicide attempt—I sometimes wonder if I am genuine. Am I embellishing to be more interesting? Does everyone feel this way and I’m just too weak to stomach the norm? Could I have decided not to feel this way? But then I am reminded that the mind is a clever assassin of itself. It implicates the will with a killing stroke and leaves all our motives to doubt.
Hopefully you will glimpse death but once. Once old. Once happy. Once confirmed. For I tell you now that our demise is so expansive that it loses scale and becomes indistinguishable from nothingness... nothing can make you feel so small. But somehow, so complete and tragic a negation legitimizes all our actions, everything, all at once. This is the most difficult point to convey to you, and I’m not sure if I can. Death crystallizes all of life before a retreating vision. The fluidity of our every choice and connection becomes an object that we can hold. And when we hold it, we forgive ourselves all our failings and see the gem that Time has wrought and say ‘this is a thing unlike any other.’ And our only passing wish will be that we’d only seen the Truth in the working.
And so I struggle to remain close to my own death. I wish to remember closely my limits, that I am mortal and no less. Comfort is in that weakness—the unassailable shelter of swearing off shelter. The violence of life had nowhere to land a blow when everything I was had already been burned away. Simplicity reified at a vanishing point, and my life took a turn for the hygenic. Now I am more open with the ones who love me. Steps come easier as more of my life is conducted under the sun. I can speak with you now. Such vulnerability can be a secure scaffold.
But still I struggle. I struggle where unmarked paths branch and weave endless complication. I struggle as I find myself staring down the hollows of my old ways while that brief affirmation of life grows dim within me. And, I must admit to you, sometimes I wish the mice were still here. But they all went away when I tidied up—to somewhere hidden I cannot access. They ferry between the unseen places and the seen, speaking to me of the unbounded mysteries we might travel.