wallace-l: the last moments...

[Leigh]

<< William Styron in "Darkness Visible" >>

He wrote in that book that if he were sitting at a table, and on the
other side of the table, there was something that he knew would help
him feel better, he was so paralyzed by depression that he could not
reach across the table for whatever it was. At least that's how I
remember the description.

Personally, I think one has to be very brave to face suicide. I also
think it takes a certain level of competence. When one is that
depressed, just assembling the materials you will need to kill
yourself can be a challenge.

<< the pain is too much >>

In my experience, there wasn't really pain, there was vast emptiness.
I never cried once during the bad depression, I couldn't. When I was
younger, I was bulimic. At one point during the depression, I forced
myself to go buy a bunch of donuts, hoping that somehow binging would
bring me some sort of feeling. Nope, nothing.

That's why I found the recent suggestion to go "eat something
wonderful" to be quite off the mark.

Thanks for the description, Marie, I think you got it right.

Leigh

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Marie Mundaca <mungo181 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I can't speak to anyone else's particular state of mind, but this I know, and for the sake of search engines this happened to someone else I'm very close to.
>
> It's not like one day you wake up and think "This is a good day to die." You wake up every day thinking this. Actually, you're thinking this is a fucking terrible day. Everything is terrible. This very dear friend of mine, she'd see people on the subway with 3 kids with terrible colds, on their way to drop the kids off at school or day care before they go to their horrible job where they get yelled at by men with tight polyester pants and bad comb-overs and she would think, "why don't these people want to jump off a building like I do?" Sure, she had some real problems, but she felt like this before she had those real problems. She'd been on and off anti-depressants for years, and in and out of therapy. nothing worked. she'd go to work every day and see her friends and pretend nothing was wrong, but she hated everything and nothing brought her any joy, not even chocolate and petting the cat (not a euphamism). she attempted suicide like maybe 3-4 times, 2
>  were just half-assed attempts, more a "goddamn i'm so angry and sad i don't know what to do" and 2 very serious attempts. but she was always too chicken to do anything not reversible, so after each one she walked herself to the hospital after a few minutes or hours. well, the last one she didn't walk, someone poured her into a taxi.
>
> oh, yeah, the question. definitely mind-blowingly out of her mind at those times. but also a big fat chicken. a calculated decision, but crazy.
>
> she often, for months at a time, would think every day about killing herself, but would set little goals for herself because she knew that a few people would feel really bad about the whole thing, and that her father might yell at her mother that it was all her fault.
>
> for the record several other women in her extended family have attempted suicide. they obviously all have very fucked up brain chemistry. none of them, also for the record, were as smart or successful as DFW, but all pretty much held things together for a long long time and no one ever knew these things about them.
>
>
> Several times she thought about checking into a facility, but she was afraid of being treated badly by nurses and being on thorazine and having to play ping pong all day because her insurance sucked. several of her psychiatrists recommended ect, but she was afraid of memory loss. but other than those two things she tried everything, even crazy shit like brain-wave stuff and eye movements and yoga.
>
> she's on cymbalta now--it's the 1st drug that ever worked for her, and she can't believe that this is what normal people feel like! It's crazy. they don't think of jumping in front of trains or anything like that.
>
> I imagine that for quite a long time poor Dave felt like she did, but then it got worse. Dave was always much more successful than her at everything he did, unfortunately.
>
> Every time I pass a movie poster for "Blindness" I think "Didn't Dave want to stick around for that??"
>
> -marie
>
>
>
>
> --- On Tue, 9/16/08, RS <rs40 at roadrunner.com> wrote:
>
>> From: RS <rs40 at roadrunner.com>
>> Subject: wallace-l: the last moments...
>> To: "'wallace-l'" <wallace-l at waste.org>
>> Date: Tuesday, September 16, 2008, 6:20 PM
>> Look, I'm really not trying to intellectualize this, or
>> to turn our
>> beloved's passing into fodder for conversation.  But I
>> really need to know.
>> In those moments when he did it, was he sane or was he
>> driven over the edge,
>> basically temporarily insane in those last moments.  Is
>> suicide by
>> definition irrational and "crazy," and thus is
>> the act undertaken by a
>> person whose sanity has suddenly and profoundly left them,
>> or can it be a
>> calm, rational, calculated decision?  What haunts me most
>> is the potential
>> fear and feeling of loss he might've been feeling when
>> it happened.  But I
>> think, maybe if he were almost in a near deranged state,
>> that it might be
>> easier to handle.  Just wondering if anyone has knowledge
>> of this.
>>
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