1:50 p.m. - 01/31/02
chasing tornadoes.
I've been working the past day or so on that piece for Laura's newsletter. I think it's "honest" enough to give her, but if anyone has suggestions or feedback, know I'll be putty in the hands of anyone called to respond.
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Promises To Keep <--unsure title
Outside, the white sky rains down a thousand streams. I look out at the rain, the near woods I walk through on warmer days, the gold-green grass. I�m a thousand miles from the home my memory brings to mind; yet, I remain there, relieved and haunted by it. This house quiet, this rain gentle; I remember.
The look on Tracy's face the day Brittany returned to us from the main hospital has not left me. My memory of her deep eyes, slightly twisted with the confusion of something never before witnessed and not completely understood, remains with me, and even as the days since her death stretch behind me, and I'm left to photos and dulled recollections of her voice, I can see her, sitting in group that morning - a baggy gray sweatshirt masking her bony form. She did nothing, however, to mask her eyes, a trait that has kept her fondly in my heart. In the midst of all pain and illness, Tracy stood by her integrity.
Days had passed since I found Brittany in the bathroom at the end of the hall, near the tiny room where I'd been reading. Her sobbing had awakened me from the escape of my novel; however, in my two months at the residential hospital, the sound of crying was a familiar one, and I gathered my breath for a few minutes before going in search of her. Just before I put the book down, I heard a sort of coughing I couldn't help but recognize. To a bulimic, like Brittany, Tracy, or myself, the sound of coughing that precedes a purge is as everyday as a doorbell, footsteps, or an alarm. I sighed when I heard it, disappointed that in this white-walled land of recovery, Brittany had fallen back to illness once again.
I waited another few minutes, then walked the few steps down the hall to the bathroom. I could see her bent over the counter, her face red, covered with tears weighty enough to bruise. She was crying hard, almost hysterical, and my own heart pounded seeing her. I knew about the day she'd had, the meeting with her parents that ended with her staying past their visit, the decision for her to stay after she'd already packed her things. Awful, still, somehow the crying seemed like more; it frightened me. I went into the bathroom, and at my first steps, she appeared full-form before me, clutching out and bawling. I tried to tell her things were going to be all right, that we would continue taking care of her, that she just needed to let herself cry and calm down, but she was shaking her head before the words had even passed my lips. And suddenly, her words began clicking in my brain, and I began to understand. She'd taken something; somehow or another on one of our weekly outings, she'd managed to pocket some pills, and she'd taken them - all of them - then attempted, unsuccessfully, to vomit them, and only now, realizing the weight of her decision, had the fear kicked in.
"Ok," I said. "Ok." In my heart, racing, my breath catching like warm metal in my throat, I knew it wasn't ok, but all the same, I repeated the word. "I'm going to go tell Stacy." Stacy, yes, Stacy, a staff member; let someone else figure out what had to happen now. Let someone else bear the weight of this girl's shaky life.
"No," Brittany begged. "No, you can�t."
But I shook my head as well. "I have to," I replied, and, reluctant to leave her, walked in my longest stride to the day room at the other end of the hall. I could hear her wailing again behind me.
Stacy was calm, and seeing her nod and begin to move prompted my instant gratitude. She was trained. She could handle this. I didn't have to handle this...but what would happen? Brittany in the back room, with a bottle full of pills spinning in her stomach; Stacy going through the motions of a handbook I had never read. Over and over again in my head, I saw her face, her eyes clawing at me the way Tracy's do today, begging me not to tell. In many ways, I don't want to remember. I don't want to remember minutes later, Brittany rushed to the hospital while I sat, a human ball, in a corner of the hallway. Watching.
A few days later, her stomach pumped and treated with charcoal, she returned - the epitome of brightness. She wore a scarf over her curly hair, was dressed in laidback workout clothes. She bounced around like the cheerleader she is: she'd missed everyone, she was grateful to be back. I felt the anger well up in me, heavy as relief, and in our group that morning, I did as I'd been instructed the past two months: I expressed it. Falteringly, then with growing frustration, I expressed it. I could barely look at her, and yet, I was yelling. Tears flew to my eyes as I asked her how, why...questions I knew my own answers to, but felt necessary to ask nonetheless. I told her about the fear in my heart when I realized there were pills in her stomach killing her as she spoke with me, and how I felt the same fear watching her now, breezy and carefree. In the back of my brain, I remembered my first days at the hospital, when Brittany, a four-day veteran, came up and gave me firm hugs and words of comfort, promised me things would grow easier. My honesty prompted feelings of guilt, and as the conversation continued unbridled, I remained unable to meet her eyes. Instead I caught Tracy's clouded expression and watched her listen to the exchange. I remembered her first week there, when I rose early one morning to find her in a wheelchair outside the staff office, too dazed to notice me. She'd swallowed nearly an entire bottle of astringent during the night, and even when I neared her, she couldn't recognize me.
Like Brittany, she too had returned. Mellow and afraid, but also grateful. She told us how a residential facility was heaven after a week inpatient at the hospital. She told us she was grateful that she'd gotten to come back, and in her eyes, there was some renewed hope, as if she understood now the chance she'd been given the day she was admitted here. Perhaps coming into this hospital was not punitive but rather an opportunity for liberation from the silent hell we'd all been brewing. Our eating disorders, our depression, our shame, had stolen our lives away until we were no longer sure we cared, and perhaps in this place, where there were people to listen, where words of fear and pain, signs of emotionally unbearable circumstances, did not go unnoticed, we could finally achieve that life we envied in our friends. To be here meant to be escaping- finally, but one must go through before one gets out, really out. The pills, the chemicals, were faster, but they provided no reward. Only an end.
For Tracy and Brittany, the option had long-existed; each girl had her own terrifying history of attempts, and slowly, Tracy at least, began to share them with us. Her stories of hopelessness and poisoned self-perception, struck home with me, and I began to remember my own struggles more clearly, including the day I almost ended my life, just weeks before the holiday break of my freshman year.
I remember most clearly the complete lack of clarity so constant in those days. I remember school hallways looking airbrushed, colors vibrant yet fogged, outside voices drowning together, while the ones in my mind remained distinct: You're hurting them, you're worthless. Your death can hardly cause them more pain than all these mistakes you make. The day was one in a string of slow-motion days played out against the track of my erratic breathing. I felt like a shock victim, each moment spent awaiting the next attack, each breath too shallow to break past my tight lips. By the time the day ended, I had lost all strength, and slowly the thought slipped into my mind, kind and somewhat freeing: It could end. I could end it. I could make it stop.
Imagine a girl with no understanding that the sun will set on this moment and rise on a new one, a girl who sees only this pain- this constant, torturous pain- stretching on for an eternity. Only fourteen. How long would it go on if I allowed it to, and how much longer could I hold out before I completely broke down below the weight of it? I could escape, I told myself, and at that moment, one period short of school dismissal, I suddenly felt like I could make it through the next few hours. Aware that they would be the last, that this agony had been made mortal, I gained strength. In the margins of my Spanish assignment I scribbled notes about how I was going to kill myself, oblivious to the idea the words might catch a classmate's eye. There was nothing the matter with this, I told myself. I'd finally found a way to break down my own most impenetrable wall: my life.
Is that what Tracy felt? I ask myself now. The night she swallowed the astringent, or a month later, when she disappeared for hours - admitting the next morning, that she'd spent the time at the edge of the lake, drawing the courage to drown herself? Were these the same thoughts that ran through her head, sounding almost heroic amid all the hopelessness?
For me, once home, it all became too easy. My parents, both at work, would not return for hours; the only sibling still at home quickly disappeared to pass the time with friends. I perched on the kitchen table, listening to the thoughts spin in my head, watching the world outside the windows fade into dusk, and then night. I could see my reflection in the window, and I tried to keep from catching my own eyes. I didn't want to second-guess the source of my pain; I was tired of thinking, of trying, of disappointing and being disappointed. I was tired, exhausted, and a foot from my right hand a large butcher knife was resting on the table - one room away a basket filled with old prescriptions called to me. I had the perfect opportunity, the perfect way out; I could escape.
With such a weighty decision all but made, the circumstances sound oddly minimal. I couldn't have explained what factors led me to sit there that night, letting my fear of life minimize death, and even now, some two years later, I cannot explain the factors that led me to postpone going through with it. I know that I did not completely avoid my eyes, that somehow seeing my face cast against the dark picture window broke through the surrealism of the moment, reinstated the fiction as my life, made the choice real- final. I remembered the thoughts that had plagued my mind earlier that day, the idea that everyone I cared about would be better off without me, and suddenly one face jumped into my mind, the only one who had stepped to the forefront of my imagination to challenge that thought. I decided I would write the girl behind that face, a woman named Chas, an e-mail explaining my feelings, and after that was finished, once it was proven to me that there was no remaining route to try, I could go through with this. In the two days I waited for her response, it clicked inside me that the people I loved cared for me as well, and if I gave up, I might lose them even more completely than I felt I'd lost myself. I survived the next days by sleeping through them, and when I received her response, caring and frightened, I became aware, even at the pit of my depression, that I wanted to fight.
What frightened me about Brittany�s return was her apparent lack of understanding; the fear that had registered in her expression when she realized she could not purge the pills she�d taken seemed dismissed, and my own memory of that decision, hers and mine, left me scared and angry. As the day passed, I was reminded that in all likelihood, Brittany was aware of what had almost happened; staff members suggested she was using her lightheartedness as a cover for her fear. Even understanding this, I worked through the weight of my own feelings, above all my powerlessness to convince others of the decision I�d made for myself. With the help of friends, I�d been able to sustain my own life, but in reality, the choice remained for each girl, and seeing Brittany come so close sparked a terrifying helplessness in me. I remembered my brother telling me of the night he went to sleep with the aid of far too many Tylenol, relieved at the idea he would never wake up. I remembered the September morning the school principal came across the intercom to inform the student body that a junior, Paul Regan, had committed suicide two nights earlier, found by his brother in a cornfield with a bullet through his brain. My stomach twisted; my eyes bled tears. The immensity of the problem choked me. How many times had I been on a phone until morning, with a friend convinced they had no reason to make it through the night? How many times would I receive a call from the friend of a friend, scared and though advised to tell no one of the situation, breaking that because they �knew I would understand�? How many times would I be in that classroom, that bathroom, on the other end of that phone, paralyzed by my own uncertainty? I�d witnessed the call of suicide as a sister, a friend, a classmate, as well as in my own life, and yet I felt I understood it least of all. Perhaps, I did not want to understand. While others could cast it aside as the overly spontaneous decision of someone too out of it to care, or the Shakespeare-influenced act of a lover scorned, I�d seen it too closely to minimize it so, even for my own peace of mind. I remembered Tracy, drugged in the wheelchair, oblivious to her surroundings, and I wondered what thoughts remained behind her sightless eyes. Her distance, I knew, was not simply chemical; it was the depression as well. Suicide thrived on isolation, on the feeling that no one could or would care to understand. I looked at her as the living model of what lay so deadly just below each of our surfaces.
Tracy�s two suicide attempts during the time we roomed together in the hospital were not her last, and the cause she once testified to with her life, she now is martyr for. The call came in the days just before Christmas last year, less than two weeks after the anniversary of my own decision to fight. The voice on the other end of the phone threw me back to those days spent working amid comrades. Although, most of the girls I lived with then now continue the fight on the outside, the time spent in residence gave us the opportunity to struggle amid friends. Leaving that hospital was difficult in a way few of us imagined it would be, and it was soon after her own discharge, that Tracy, feeling frightened and hopeless, once again swallowed pill after pill. Perhaps, after ingesting them, she remembered the hope we�d fought to find those months we were together, because she second-guessed her own decision, and told her mom what she had done. She was taken to the hospital and stabilized for the thousandth time. But the next morning, likely due to the weakness of her body from illness and the other attempts, she went into seizure and died, never to turn eighteen.
My memories of her remain hidden, surfacing always as unexpected times. I remember her love of dances and buoyant pop music, the way she longed to be back with her friends. I remember how much she looked forward to returning to school, to finally being a senior, how touched she was when a few of us made her a simple poster congratulating her for being among this year�s graduating class. I remember the afternoons she came into our room and found me lying on my bed, trying to hide tears; how she would slip silently back into her half of the room and out again � yet just before she left she�d toss her favorite stuffed animal to my side to help me through this round of tears. I can see her working endlessly on gifts for the friends she planned to visit over the weekend, only to find her bawling the night before she left, so sure was she they�d hate her for the minimal amount of weight she�d gained. I remember the struggles to finish snacks, the meals dragged past the end of the hour, but I also know how she always came back from them, how she would always return to group the next day or week, brighter for the struggle, armed with some amazing bit of inspiration she simply had to share.
The great struggle of my grief for her is that she didn�t want to die, but rather, had never known how to live. I struggle with the idea that if anyone deserved to be here, if this world needed anyone, it needed Tracy. Some days knowing that only makes it harder that she�s gone. I walk in the woods near my house, some days silent, some days crying, some days screaming at her for leaving, when she promised we�d win our lives back together. I know Tracy thought, for that one deadly moment at least, that suicide was the only way to take her life back; in some odd manner, she wanted simply to survive it, but the knowledge doesn�t calm my loneliness, thinking of her. Tracy glowed; her blonde hair a halo, her bright eyes an ocean tide. Still, I don�t like to think of her as an angel; it seems to diminish her humanity. She didn�t stand on a pedestal above us; her beauty was the stride with which she walked among us, the way she never complicated life, but watched its simplicity, wide-eyed. When I walk in the woods, I want to change the reality, and often, I want to offer my life in exchange for hers. It�s at those moments that I have to remember the pattern of Tracy�s life, that each time her illness knocked her down, she rose even higher. The last we saw of Tracy was the pain with which she died, so it�s up to me to trust that she�s found a level of beauty and inspiration even greater than those she shared. It�s up to me to trust that she�s safe now. I draw on the strength she showed in life to survive her death, and to tell of the gratitude with which I knew her.
And then, I remember my own decision to live, one I made years before I ever hugged that girl, back in those dark December days of my freshman year. I remember the first time I saw Chas after writing her, the firmness of her hands on my shoulders as she held me. Her words, like Tracy�s, have not left me. �Promise me you�ll never go through with this,� she said, and when I nodded, nearly crying, she shook her head. �Promise me.� I promised; she continued. �You are too important to this world,� she whispered, �not to be a part of it.�
When I walk outside, the air is that sweet January mixture that remembers winter and recognizes the coming of spring. I hike through the brambles and fallen trees, perching on limbs and remembering. And no matter how many times I cry and scream and wish I could surrender to my pain, the trees whisper poems I�ve all but forgotten. I cry to Tracy to give me strength and suddenly the wind in the branches is beating out a rhythm, and the voice of my own memory is whispering to me, reminding me I, too, �have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.� I promised Tracy, Chas, and myself, that I would not let this win, and now having seen Tracy pay the dearest price of illness, I�m left to live a promise we both made. To stay and fight � to tell the story of this pain until the day comes when I�m free from it.
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in memory of the girl we should all honor...
chord
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