We have all lost someone or something we loved dearly. I honestly don’t think you would be engaged with Celem’el and reading this right now if you had always had a perfectly happy perfectly easy perfectly perfect life. If you’ve never been knocked down, you don’t know that it can be hard to get up and you have no point of reference to appreciate how good it is just to be able to stand up.

And I have NEVER met someone who has NEVER been knocked down or even tripped on a rock in the journey of their life. I suspect someone saying their life is and always has been perfect is lying to you and to themselves.

As you can probably guess from the title, this is hands-down the hardest story I ever have to tell. I can talk about it, I almost always use a little piece of it as a base when I’m speaking with groups or individuals about survival and inspiration actually, but to sit down today and write out everything that goes into the story and all the background, well, there’s just too much about the five years of the relationship that ties in to why I was so utterly destroyed . . . I can’t go into all that now. So I’ll condense this to just “after.” As it is, this will be more truth than I ever put in one telling. My parents don’t know most of this story. I have no idea how I kept it from them, but I don’t think they ever figured out when I sank through the bottom.

But I digress, procrastinating. Give me just a second here to get a grip . . . deep breath, ok one more deep breath, forget the sweaty palms ad shaky hands, come on Cynthia, it’s ok to write about it, that was a long time ago. So, write.

No Reason to Exist

What I need to tell you now, up front and personal, is that the depression got so bad that I did not want to exist anymore. I saw no reason to exist. Without really thinking about it, I tried to end my life because I ran out of reasons to exist. This is the story about the pain. I’ll try to end it with some hope and joy, because like every other event or tragedy I survived in my life, there really was a reason I survived.

The Motorcycle Accident

His name was Arthur Spencer Grant, III, and I called him Artie. We were together for nearly five years. One night he was riding home from watching the baseball game with his friends in the City, and a 17-year old girl coming down the on-ramp blew a tire and lost control of her car. She shot across the lanes and Artie managed to get ahead of her, but as she hit the concrete highway divider she twisted the wheel the other way, and her car clipped Artie’s rear tire, shooting Artie and the bike into the air. Then a car that saw his motorcycle swerved to avoid it, and, since Artie was now on the ground, when the second car clipped him it actually dragged him a couple hundred feet down the highway. When his body broke free he rolled to a stop into the far right lane. And here’s where it starts to get nasty: Artie actually got to his feet and started to run to get off the road, but he was disoriented and ran towards the center divider shoulder, instead of the right-hand shoulder that he was closer to. The next car that hit him caught him in the lower body and he was down. And, here’s where it gets just plain horrific . . . after all that, he sat up and was looking around . . . when the third car hit him head on and shattered his body. The EMTs said the blow to his brain was pretty much instantaneous at that point, so, aside from the 30 seconds or so before that last car, it was quick and painless.

Can you imagine?

Lost

I wandered through the haze of shock for a month or so, seeing a psychiatrist for grief counseling and antidepressants. I still went to work every day, but that was actually because a week later, when I got back from the funeral in L.A., my good friend and office mate Deby lost her husband to lung cancer. It took Joel six months to die after his cancer was diagnosed, and Deby took care of him through the very last breath. So she and I really understood each other and I’m sure it helped us both.

But the swirl in my head was tightening into a tornado. One by one all the things that had mattered to me in my life before that day disappeared. I just couldn’t remember anything every having been enjoyable without him. I wore his clothes all the time, I even wore his dress shirts to work intead of my own. I slept wearing his racing suit, wrapped up inside that shell that was completely filed with his scent. I stopped wearing contacts because I was crying all the time and I couldn’t wipe my eyes with contacts in. I have no idea how I drove back and forth to work, I can’t believe I stayed on the road driving while I was crying so hard I couldn’t see. I would collapse on the floor of the shower, gasping and sobbing, sometimes for hours, shaking and unable to breath. I didn’t actually tell the psychiatrist how bad it really was, or I’m sure she would have had me institutionalized.

Then it got worse. The hour was approaching, the day and time of his death, just one month later. My feet were lead, my heart was gone, and I just laid down on the floor in front of the fireplace and wished I didn’t exist. I did not want to exist. I laid there crying, and eventually not crying, just thinking and wishing that I did not exist.

Then a weird thing happened. I sank through the floor. It was very slow, but first I felt myself sliding below the bricks of the fireplace, then the varnish of the hardwood floor, and then I was watching the fibers of the wood go by as I oozed downward, into the cold dark earth.

That scared the hell out of me.

That’s the night I cut my wrists, but I didn’t know much about how to do it and I certainly didn’t get it right. I did pass out, watching blood ooze from my wrists. No thought, no mind.

Waking Up

I woke up in the morning and saw the mess I’d made. The cuts really were not bad at all, I closed them up with those steri-strip tape things they use when you get stitches, wrapped up tight in gauze and more tape, and got a bucket of water and some towels and went to work on the floor.

I still wasn’t thinking, there was no mind. I didn’t care about existing, I didn’t care about not existing. I was blank.

I finished wiping the floor (one nice thing about hardwoods, they’re a lot easier to clean than carpets). Then I just sat on the floor. My cats came and went. I opened the sliding door so they could go out. And sat on the floor just inside the sliding door. I didn’t go into the back yard, I just sat on the floor, staring blankly out at the day. Seriously, it was a mentally blank day.

Then I did what I always do on Sunday afternoon, ever since I went to college. I called my parents. I didn’t tell them about anything, agreed that I was hanging in there, talked about Deby and the hard time she was having over Joel, heard about the goings-on in Arkansas, said “I love you” like always and hung up.

I went through the motions, made a sandwich for dinner, some water with the antidrepressants, took a shower, put on a clean Artie t-shirt and boxers, and went to bed. Mizzou came up and plopped into the curve of my left arm like he’d always done, and Kingsford curled up on my feet. I couldn’t sleep. I had finally started wondering what the hell was going on.

I wasn’t asking myself why I did what I did, I was asking myself why I didn’t do it more properly. I’m not an expert, but I have definitely seen enough movies to know more effective cuts to make and with what instrument.

It didn’t even take the whole night to figure out, once I started thinking about the day, the blankness, the automated going-through-the-motions. And talking to my parents. Saying “I love you.” Hearing them say they loved me. And I knew.

Why I Was Alive

The reason I was alive was the love of my family. I couldn’t leave them. Once I figured that out, I told myself to cope, just get through the night, then get through the morning, the afternoon, another night, another day, another and another, and eventually another month passed. And I called my parents every Sunday afternoon, just like always, ever since college, ending every call with “I love you.”