Night Falls Fast
by Kay Redfield Jamison
List Price: $14.00
Pages: 448
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0375701478
Publisher: Vintage
Prologue
Summer evenings at the Bistro Gardens in Beverly Hills tended toward the
long and languorous. My friend Jack Ryan and I went there often when I
lived in Los Angeles, and I invariably ordered the Dungeness crab and
a scotch on the rocks. Not so invariably, but from time to time, Jack
would use the occasion to suggest we get married. It was an idea with
such patent potential for catastrophe that neither of us had much of an
inclination to take the recurring proposal with too much gravity. But
our friendship we took seriously.
This particular evening, having hooked and tugged out the last bits of
crab, I found myself edgily knocking the ice cubes around in my whisky
glass. The conversation was making me restless and uneasy. We were talking
about suicide and making a blood oath: if either of us again became deeply
suicidal, we agreed, we would meet at Jack's home on Cape Cod. Once there,
the nonsuicidal one of us would have a week to persuade the other not
to commit suicide; a week to present all the reasons we could come up
with for why the other should go back on lithium, assuming that having
stopped it was the most likely reason for the danger of suicide (we both
had manic-depressive illness and, despite the better and often expressed
judgment of others, had a tendency to stop taking our lithium); a week
to cajole the other into a hospital; to invoke conscience; to impress
upon the other the pain and damage to our families that suicide would
inevitably bring.
We would, we said, during this hostage week, walk along the beach and
remind the other of all of the times we had felt at the end of hope and,
somehow, had come back. Who, if not someone who had actually been there,
could better bring the other back from the edge? We both, in our own ways
and in our own intimate dealings with it, knew suicide well. We thought
we knew how we could keep it from being the cause of death on our death
certificates.
We decided that a week was long enough to argue for life. If it didn't
work, at least we would have tried. And, because we had years of cumulative
experience with lifestyles of snap impetuousness and knew how quick and
final a suicidal impulse could be, we further agreed that neither of us
would ever buy a gun. Nor, we swore, would we under any circumstances
allow anyone else to keep a gun in a house in which we lived.
"Cheers," we said in synchrony, ice and glass clinking. We sealed our
foray into the planned and rational world. Still, I had my doubts. I listened
to the details, helped clarify a few, drank the rest of my scotch, and
stared at the tiny white lights in the gardens around us. Who were we
kidding? Never once, during any of my sustained bouts of suicidal depression,
had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for
help. Not once. It wasn't in me. How could I seriously imagine that I
would call Jack, make an airline reservation, get to an airport, rent
a car, and find my way out to his house on the Cape? It seemed only slightly
less absurd that Jack would go along with the plan, although he, at least,
was rich and could get others to handle the practicalities. The more I
thought about the arrangement, the more skeptical I became.
It is a tribute to the persuasiveness, reverberating energies and enthusiasms,
and infinite capacity for self-deception of two manic temperaments that
by the time the dessert soufflés arrived we were utterly convinced
that our pact would hold. He would call me; I would call him; we would
outmaneuver the black knight and force him from the board.
If it has ever been taken up as an option, however, the black knight has
a tendency to remain in play. And so it did. Many years later -- Jack
had long since married and I had moved to Washington -- I received a telephone
call from California: Jack had put a gun to his head, said a member of
his family, and "put a bullet through his brain."
No week in Cape Cod, no chance to dissuade. A man who had been inventive
enough to earn a thousand patents for such wildly diverse creations as
the Hawk and Sparrow missile systems used by the U.S. Department of Defense,
toys played with by millions of children around the world, and devices
used in virtually every household in America; a Yale graduate and lover
of life; a successful businessman -- this remarkably imaginative man had
not been inventive enough to find an alternative solution to a violent,
self-inflicted death.
Although shaken by Jack's suicide, I was not surprised by it. Nor was
I surprised that he had not called me. I, after all, had been dangerously
suicidal myself on several occasions since our Bistro Gardens pact and
certainly had not called him. Nor had I even thought of calling. Suicide
is not beholden to an evening's promises, nor does it always hearken to
plans drawn up in lucid moments and banked in good intentions.
I know this for an unfortunate fact. Suicide has been a professional interest
of mine for more than twenty years, and a very personal one for considerably
longer. I have a hard-earned respect for suicide's ability to undermine,
overwhelm, outwit, devastate, and destroy. As a clinician, researcher,
and teacher I have known or consulted on patients who hanged, shot, or
asphyxiated themselves; jumped to their deaths from stairwells, buildings,
or overpasses; died from poisons, fumes, prescription drugs; or slashed
their wrists or cut their throats. Close friends, fellow students from
graduate school, colleagues, and children of colleagues have done similar
or the same. Most were young and suffered from severe illness; all left
behind a wake of unimaginable pain and unresolvable guilt.
Like many who have manic-depressive illness, I have also known suicide
in a more private, awful way, and I trace the loss of a fundamental innocence
to the day that I first considered suicide as the only solution possible
to an unendurable level of mental pain. Until that time I had taken for
granted, and loved more than I knew, a temperamental lightness of mood
and a fabulous expectation of life. I knew death only in the most abstract
of senses; I never imagined it would be something to arrange or seek.
I was seventeen when, in the midst of my first depression, I became knowledgeable
about suicide in something other than an existential, adolescent way.
For much of each day during several months of my senior year in high school,
I thought about when, whether, where, and how to kill myself. I learned
to present to others a face at variance with my mind; ferreted out the
location of two or three nearby tall buildings with unprotected stairwells;
discovered the fastest flows of morning traffic; and learned how to load
my father's gun. It was not the kind of education one expected to receive
in high school.
The rest of my life at the time -- sports, classes, writing, friends,
planning for college -- fell fast into a black night. Everything seemed
a ridiculous charade to endure; a hollow existence to fake
one's way through as best one could. But, gradually, layer by layer, the
depression lifted, and by the time my senior prom and graduation came
around, I had been well for months. Suicide had withdrawn to the back
squares of the board and become, once again, unthinkable.
Chillingly, although the privacy of my nightmare had been of my own designing,
no one close to me had any real idea of the psychological company I had
been keeping. The gap between private experience and its public expression
was absolute; my persuasiveness to others was unimaginably frightening.
Over the years, my manic-depressive illness became much worse, and the
reality of dying young from suicide became a dangerous undertow in my
dealings with life. Then, when I was twenty-eight years old, after a damaging
and psychotic mania, followed by a particularly prolonged and violent
siege of depression, I took a massive overdose of lithium. I unambivalently
wanted to die and nearly did. Death from suicide had become a possibility,
if not a probability, in my life.
Under the circumstances -- I was, during this, a young faculty member
in a department of academic psychiatry -- it was not a very long walk
from personal experience to clinical and scientific investigation. I studied
everything I could about my disease and read all I could find about the
psychological and biological determinants of suicide. As a tiger tamer
learns about the minds and moves of his cats, and a pilot about the dynamics
of the wind and air, I learned about the illness I had and its possible
end point. I learned as best I could, and as much as I could, about the
moods of death.
Excerpted from Night Falls Fast © Copyright 2009 by Kay Redfield Jamison. Reprinted with permission by Vintage. All rights reserved.
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