Between Not Wanting to Live and Not Wanting to Die
If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line.
Shortly after 2 p.m. on January 31, 2019, I left my Dartmouth College office to kill myself. It was 11 days after my 57th birthday.
At my desk, I had written and torn up numerous letters to my wife, Glennis, and our daughter, the essence that they remained my be-all and end-all, above and beyond any actions I might take. I realized that no suicide note could alleviate their grief, but—always a perfectionist—I kept polishing drafts. Then I texted and emailed my closest friends and family to say that I loved them, and sent Glennis a more explicit note, asking her to “come home to hold our daughter.” Ten days earlier, my psychiatrist had emailed my psychotherapist to say, “Jeff appears very depressed with suicidal ideation, thoughts of jumping from something high.”
Outwardly, I was surrounded by everything I could possibly want: a happy marriage, a rebellious teenager, a stimulating job, a warm home in rural Vermont, friends near and far. I bathed in love and enjoyed financial security, along with very good health insurance. I wouldn’t have changed anything, except my soul-eating depression.
By January 2019, I had lost all hope for recovery. So many treatments had fizzled. Clinical depression and ordinary life stood across an impassable ravine. When well, I could barely imagine being depressed, and when depressed, I couldn’t remember ever feeling well. In Inferno’s final circle of hell, Dante’s sinners freeze instead of burn, trapped in an icy lake. Depression feels like that. While in a catatonic stupor, I spent months doing crossword puzzles and watching tennis highlights. Anything that helped squeeze the hours forward—time marked by the death of the senses, a quashed libido, the same dirty khakis and T-shirt.
It’s strange how much our minds can hurt us. Each night, as sleep overtook me, my last thought was the hope that I would not wake up again. Any way of dying that would hurt my family less than suicide. But I did wake up, again and again. “In late January,” my medical record states, “Jeff had his first episode of suicidal thinking and related behavior.” From
