How I Suicided Not

By Mary Weldon

How I Suicided Not is a story about the authors life and experiences, from birth until her early thirties. It tells about how she went from a mostly happy childhood and young adulthood to depression, anxiety, and poverty, which didnt help. Her mother nearly died when the author was 9, and the 1976 Swine flu shot was the culprit. Mary Weldon put herself through college, got a scholarship, studied in France, and developed depression and an eating disorder. Ultimately, self help books and the local clinic as well as a few hospital stays helped her to choose life. Some relationships faltered and didnt succeed, but she kept her chin up and kept her faith in God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514474501

Mary Weldon

My name is C. M. Andries, and I am from the Syracuse area. I have been writing fictional stories since I was twelve to fourteen years of age. I started off writing about Greek mythology but destroyed the manuscript because I thought it substandard. My teachers and friends thought I was foolish and called me a perfectionist. Ultimately, I triumphed and started the final book. This story is loosely based on the life of someone I love. I live at home with a fiancé. We have one child together.

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Copyright © 2016 by Mary Weldon.

ISBN:      Softcover        978-1-5144-7451-8

                eBook             978-1-5144-7450-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 08/09/2016

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Early Years

Chapter Two: High School Years

Chapter Three: College Years

Chapter Four: Welfare And Disability

Chapter Five: Alone Again

Chapter Six: Better Jobs And Hope, Finally

Chapter Seven: Getting Some Rest And Help For An Eating Disorder

For M., my soulmate and the love of my life, to my sisters, to our families and friends, including my sisters who mean the world to me, and especially to the one I have known all my life who has been my friend and confidante. I dedicate the song by Francis Cabrel, je t’aimais, je t’aime, et je t’aimerai which means I have loved you, I love you, and I will always love you. For my special sibling who will remain nameless because of privacy reasons. She has always offered encouragement and support and been my cheering section. I do not know how I would have made it without her. RD, C. and E., his daughters; Katy, a friend who died of suicide, M.’s kind family and friends who have been great, who first along with M. saw this book and heard me read it to them and were supportive about it. For R, my aunts, uncles, and cousins. This book is dedicated to all of you with love. Thanks to Nazareth College of Rochester, NY, and all the staff and students that I knew; to Rochester, NY; Liverpool High School, Syracuse, NY; the people at church, Watertown, NY, New York City, and Rennes, France, and the friends I made there in 1993-1994. For 12 step groups everywhere such as Alanon for friends and family of alcoholics. God bless you all.

INTRODUCTION

Depression and suicide were not talked about much in American culture when I was young. It is different now in the spring of 2015. Everyone seems to have know someone who has thought of and or talked of depression and suicide at one time or another. It is comforting to know that people are learning to discuss treatment options for depression, because I hope that people will get help. Depression is not a hopeless illness. There is help out there for everyone afflicted by it. People can discuss things with a therapist, a doctor, a family member, a friend, or even a stranger on the internet in a chat room. There are support groups and people can learn coping skills. That means they can come up with ways to hang in there and things to do to help pass the time while they are waiting to feel better. Just as people with depression can work, people with other mental illnesses can too. Work often helps heal depression. Grief, which is what is felt after a loss such as a death or a divorce, can be assuaged gradually over time. Grief can cause suicidal feelings. You can work through unpleasant feelings. It is very painful to confront unpleasant feelings of any kind, and to deal with loss and death and suicide, whether someone you know has died, or whether you yourself feel like dying. My personal philosophy is try to make time to cheer someone else up at some point, even when you are down. Focusing on someone else’s problems and not your own is the best way to get over depression, in my opinion. Or one of the best ways. I like to watch the news to cheer myself up-I say to myself hey this starving farmer in this country has this problem, look how lucky I am not to be going through the same thing. You can take what you like and leave the rest from this book. That is my personal motto, and I obtained it from another source. Also, I did not feel suicidal very often-it was more like fleeting thoughts of it, which is what they call ideation, or having the idea of it in your head, but not wanting to act it out. I hope to educate people about depression, suicide, and attitude somewhat. You can get through almost anything if you break it down into small steps. As they say, you can eat a whole elephant one bite at a time.

In addition, I had PTSD, panic disorder, anxiety, dysthymia, and anorexia nervosa at least once each. My eating disorder was not severe, it was fairly mild, and I was able to overcome it on my own with the help of therapy and a doctor’s help. I had nurses I talked to and they helped me with this. I was on a pediatric ward while I had an eating disorder and those around me felt it was more of a depressive state than a true eating disorder. I was kind of a nut case about religion, always have been, and it took three months once I put my mind to it to gain back all the weight I had lost-just twenty pounds. Some lose much more. I was no Karen Carpenter. I weighed 85 pounds for four months and had to leave school, and that killed me, so I finally ate and ate and ate. My friends called me a spaz but later on they called it anxiety. I became a sufferer of post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, due to a chronic fear of the worst happening. I suffered the worst I had ever suffered in my whole life from that illness. I did not have a clue how badly the military veterans suffered until I developed PTSD after an encounter with someone who was a rapist. This man did not realize I had a boyfriend and was not interested in my feelings on the subject of what his sexual wants were. So… just the kind of person I cannot stand. Unwilling to suffer in silence, I made a complaint and was listened to. I considered pressing charges. By the time I found the right kind of help to get over this, the man had moved on and was no longer interested in me. But I had learned what it was like to fear and hate. That was new for me and I did not know how to deal with it in a positive way. But slowly because of the constant pain I was in, I made an effort to move on and was beginning to become successful. It was painful to examine the feelings I had about rape and abuse but I had to do it. I felt so sorry for victims of these kinds of things all over the planet. Boy was I seeing how lucky I had been. I had pretty much always known peace of mind and joy and happiness. I had had friends with much more serious mental issues than I had ever had and now, I was one of them. It necessitated frequent hospitalizations. It may be said that those in hospitals have more serious issues temporarily, but I learned much from these times even though sometimes it was not much fun and I cried without my loved ones. But early on my life was good and without pain. Later on I put myself through college and it was fun but I was not good at being independent. I had to support myself financially and emotionally and it was not easy. Then came times of even more hardship, but eventually a few good jobs. Then book writing. And then a finished book finally after 45 years. This is my third attempt at a book. One was when I was 12-14 years of age, when I had completed 300 pages of short stories. I still plan to rewrite those. I hope you enjoy the book. Some of the content is somewhat serious, but much of it isn’t, and I think you will like it. God bless you. Peace to you and yours.

CHAPTER ONE

Early Years

In 1970, when I was born, my father was a lawyer and my mom was a legal secretary. They lived in Queens, New York, in Flushing-Bayside, in a modest town house. My grandparents lived in Flushing, Queens, at 33-17 162nd Street, in a big brick house with small, green, Irish three-leaf-clovers in the shutters. Their last name was Weldon, which interestingly enough, means hill with a well in Irish Gaelic, the original language of Ireland, where Dad’s side of the family came from. There were small black buzzers to ring for servants, but Dad’s parents did not have any; they were not that rich. My Dad’s father had a law practice, and for two years, he was president of the Queens County Bar Association. My father later worked with Grandpa in his office. Dad went to Notre Dame in Indiana (the well-known football college), and had a 3.5 grade point average in his sophomore year-which is almost an A+ (a 4.0 is an A +). Dad had attended a well-known prep school in New York City called Power Memorial Academy, run by the Christian Brothers. The school no longer exists. After college, he became an officer in the United States Navy, and he stayed in the reserves until he was 60 years old as a commander (a commander is second in command of a large ship). Dad went to Hawaii and Japan among other places while in the Navy. Amazingly enough, Dad passed the bar exam, the examination to become a lawyer, without going to law school. He must have studied law books that his father owned, and Grandpa coached him. His big brother Bill may have done the same for him. For about thirty years, Dad worked as a court appointed lawyer for the family court division. This meant that he was an attorney, or lawyer, for many people who were poor and could not afford to pay for a lawyer, so the county paid for him to defend them in whatever the case was about.

Grandpa died two years after I was born, so unfortunately my little sister and I were never able to get to know him. My grandma, my dad’s mother, grew up with her cousins, because her mother died when she was 2 years old. Grandma’s last name was Tully and her family came from Ireland. The last name Tully means at peace with God. Some of her ancestors listed here came from County Cavan. Her mother’s name was Annie Hyland, and they called her Nan. Nan’s mother (my great-great grandmother) was Mary McGovern. Her husband died after they had 3 children; later on, she married James Fay and had ten more children with him. It must have been difficult for my poor grandmother, who had lost her mother when she was very young, and for the rest of your life she had no mother. Her aunt replaced her mother. I saw pictures of my grandmother when she was young. She was beautiful! Dark, curly hair, big eyes, and pretty. One picture was taken in the late 1920’s or early 1930’s, judging from the flapper style outfit she wore. She also had a few fur coats, unfortunately for the animals. Many do not exactly like fur being used as clothing when we have synthetic materials, and I agree, but in those days they did not know any better. But I do not believe in animals being killed for fur. After Grandma Weldon married my grandfather, she was often involved with Catholic Charities in New York City. They often worked to help the poor. Grandpa and Grandma’s parents both were from Ireland; Grandpa’s grandfather Patrick Weldon came from County West Meath in Ireland in 1872 and he was a shipwright. He settled in Boston and afterwards near Martha’s Vineyard, in a house where actress Geena Davis (who starred in the film: A League of their Own, along with actresses Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell) used to live with her family before she became famous. Great grandfather, Grandpa’s dad, though I am not sure of his name, was kind and gentle and tall, and he worked as a shoemaker. He and my great grandmother lived in the top floor of the big house in Flushing, Queens.

On my mother’s side, her parents had varied origins. Her parents were born in 1900 (Grandpa) and 1907 (Grandma). Grandpa Endress (the last name is a German version of Andrew) was born in a neighborhood that was called Hell’s Kitchen in New York City to German immigrants. His father was Johan Endress from the city of Bayreuth in the province of Bavaria, Germany. Grandpa and his brothers had to leave home and enter the military when they were old enough because his parents had a large family, and there was a row about it before they all left home. It was just a little argument that they all soon forgot. Meanwhile Grandma Mahon (her maiden name was Mahon-my mother pronounced it May-hun, which is derived from Mahoney, and her father’s first name was Thomas), Grandpa’s future wife, was working doing laundry, walking three miles each day to get to and from work. She lived in Huntingtonville, outside of Watertown, New York. It was very cold there in the winter and a long walk twice each day. Watertown’s winter temperatures varied between around 0 degrees with a wind chill to 35 degrees above zero. Grandpa and Grandma, mom’s parents, met at a dance and fell in love. Her father had died when she was twelve, and she was the oldest. The younger siblings all came to Grandma for advice. She was very nice and sweet. I resemble her in size- she was about 5 foot 2 inches. She and Grandpa wanted to marry, but she knew he would have to move around the country since he worked for the army. So she asked him to leave the army; this way, she would not have to leave her family. Grandpa had gone to school at the Wharton School of Finance, which became a part of Harvard. So he left his army officer post and went to work at various jobs in Watertown, New York, for many years. They had 9 children, but the first three died before they went to school, so only the older six children were left. They felt sad over the deaths of their little ones for many years. Grandma’s ancestors came from County Cork, Ireland, and Quebec, the French-speaking province of Canada. Her mother’s name was Isabelle LaRocque. The LaRocque, LaRock, and Rock families are all related back in antiquity and they come from France. Our part of the LaRocque family may have been from somewhere near Ottawa-Hull, Ontario, near Quebec, but I am not sure. So that makes my sister and I, five-eighths Irish, to be exact, one eighth French, and one fourth German (two eighths is equal to one fourth). I am pretty good at fractions and math!

My mom was the youngest daughter and the second youngest living child. Her name was Irene Mary and she was born December 29, 1938. She remembered the air raid drills they had in her hometown of Watertown, New York, when she was very young, during World War II. They used sirens and they were very loud and the purpose behind this was so people would practice in case the Germans bombed the United States, kind of like a fire drill in school. She and her brothers and sisters were very scared when the loud alarm went off and they had to draw the dark shades over the windows. They had heard about Adolf Hitler, the dictator from Austria (he was not German, he was from a country next door and spoke German). Mom and her siblings mostly were too young to understand, but they were part German. During the war some people started to wonder about Germany and why there were Jews dying there, and if the Germans were bad people since Hitler turned out to be such a monster. Of course there was nothing wrong with the German people, just the leader. The Nazis bombed England and France and took over several different countries. They ruined everyone’s lives they touched. They were mean and abusive. No one knew until the end of the war, when photos of the emaciated Jews (so thin they were nearly starved to death-you could see the bones under their skin) were in the newspapers and magazines and on TV, what Hitler and the Nazis were really up to. One estimate says there were 12 million Jews, Gypsies, mentally ill and retarded people, homosexuals, and political prisoners (people who had tried to help the Jews or others the Nazis wanted dead, and had spoken out against the Nazis or tried to hide the Jews in attics and cellars so the Jews would not be taken away and brutally murdered) were killed in the concentration camps. There are real pictures of these people in prison camps from the 1940’s. They were used as slave labor, and the ones that were too young, too old, or too sick to work were gassed with poison gas. They were starved and beaten. Some of the Nazi doctors did medical experiments on the Jews, even on the children. It was a great tragedy, and it really happened. In my opinion we should have mercy, and kindness towards each other, as the Bible says. Be kind to everyone, and you will get kindness in return when you see God. That is my philosophy.

Now on with the story about my family. Mom, as a teenager, went to play softball with her friends. She said the boys and the girls used to hurry to the baseball field each Saturday morning, each hoping to get there first. The boys’ team often got to play first. Mom was really good at softball and so were her friends. She obviously was a fast runner, because she told us a story of how her older sister got hit with a snowball hard in the face one day, and she cried, so my brave mom chased the boy in question for half a mile down the street into a yard. When he fell finally, she grabbed a couple handfuls of snow and rubbed it hard in his face to teach him a lesson. He never tried that again around either of them. My poor aunt cried the whole way home-she was so scared. Mom also told us how she got A’s in English, shorthand (sort of a code that secretaries would use to abbreviate words that someone wanted them to type), typing, and art. She wanted to study art but could not afford to go to college. No one in her family could afford college. They went to Catholic schools, but the church paid for it, because they had nothing in the bank. They were lucky if they got new clothes more than twice a year, and often they were hand me downs. Her sisters told us stories of how their grandmother Isabelle LaRocque, whose family was from Quebec (French speaking Canada), used to sit and tell them stories, and they would unbraid and comb her long hair. She was very kind. Great Grandma La Rocque told them that one of her sisters had married a man who drove a Rolls Royce. But they were in Canada and did not see each other often. Grandma Endress’s sister Rose was a lot of fun to be around. I cannot remember the other ones’ names, but I know Grandma’s father’s family had an ice making business out in Huntingtonville and it was very popular. There is a one-room schoolhouse in the area of Huntingtonville, which is further out Huntington Street. My family is buried in one of the Watertown area cemeteries.

Both of my parents were 31 when I was born. My sister was born 3 years later. There were a few antics that involved my cousin and I that are funny to recall. It may remind some people of their childhoods. We used to sneak into the kitchen at night while our parents were sleeping to eat the colored different flavored marshmallows that were so popular back in the 1970’s in the US, and we were rarely caught. The Lucky Charms cereal box was a popular snack food we often sneaked into when our parents were busy doing laundry in the basement or cleaning the house. One night my cousin and I were sleeping at her house and we got up after our parents went to bed, went into the kitchen, where we proceeded to get a cup, the maple syrup and hot fudge sauce for ice cream, and mixed the syrup and hot fudge together in the cup and drank it! We had both wanted to do that for weeks. Then, my mom heard us giggling out there and came out roaring like a lion, are you two kids still up? What are you doing? You little things! She never hit or slapped us though. Mom was a true lady and not nasty, no matter how we acted. I am sure she wanted to spank us a few times, but she never did it, that I can remember. My cousin Liz was my favorite playmate for years until my sister got older. We all had lots of fun. As we got older, we used to write her often. Our favorite times were when she and her parents came to visit.

When my sister was barely a year and a half old, mom left my dad. I think they merely had irreconcilable differences; it could have been that she missed her parents and sisters and brothers terribly, and even though her sister, my Aunt Margret, lived nearby in Queens and was married to Dad’s second cousin, Mom just couldn’t get used to life in crowded and busy New York City. She had been raised in a much quieter, smaller area of upstate New York. The Iroquois Indians of New York State sometimes used this county as a hunting ground before white settlers lived there. Mom may have wanted to be more independent, and be on her own again. I feel bad still for my dad who must have come home expecting to see his beloved wife and daughters, and they were gone for good. So he moved back home to live with his mother. The poor man. He was a great Dad.

When Mom, my sister, and I got to Syracuse and got off the plane, we must have gone to her sister’s house. My Aunt Helen had six kids, all older than my sister and I. My cousins were a lot of fun to play with, we discovered quickly. They liked us. There were five boys and a girl. Two boys were identical twins. All of a sudden, we had many new playmates. My aunt had a miscarriage once, the poor dear. My other aunt’s son died, and then they had their daughter, my cousin that we liked so much.

Mom found a job as a legal secretary and after a few paychecks we moved into our own apartment. We lived in Camillus, a suburb of Syracuse, not Liverpool where my aunt lived. My aunt babysat us while mom worked. They were all very kind to us usually.

One day when Mom, my sister, and I were done playing outside, Mom went into the apartment with my little sister just for a minute, to get some water, and she asked me to wait outside for her. It was 1975 and things were safer than in the 2000’s. Like any other 5 year old, I got up and wandered onto the playground that was nearby. There was a young teenager there, a girl, sitting on the swings, and I sat there with her. Her name was Monica. She started talking to me about something and I began to have a funny feeling about her. I left the swings and began to walk back to the apartment building. She followed me so I ran to the steps. I almost made it inside the door to buzz for my mother (there was a security door and you had to buzz to get in) but Monica was older and faster than me, and she grabbed me and knocked me off the steps into a bunch of anthills and dirt and bushes. Then she left. I most likely only fell a few feet, but I was crying and scared, and rang the buzzer to our apartment. Mom came out with my little sister, who were 2 now, talked to the neighbors, and found out that Monica lived in the row of townhouses nearby. So Mom knocked on her door, and had a polite little chat with Monica’s mother. Like a lady, though, Mom never lost her temper. As it turns out, Monica was frequently home alone and may have been mistreated at home. After all, she went after a much younger child who was innocent and had done nothing to her. Mom ended up feeling sorry for her and tried to be nice to her, after she told Monica that what she did was wrong, and not to do it again. We never had trouble with her again. Mom was kind to her when we saw her at the playground, and asked her how she was doing. She baked her cookies sometimes, and we had her over to dinner sometimes on the holidays with her family.

We soon moved back to Liverpool to the Grenadier Village Townhouses. Mom worked 40 hours a week as a legal secretary, and at one point she worked for General Electric and had special government clearance. My sister and I went to my aunt’s during the day, and I went to kindergarten at Elmcrest Elementary, but then halfway through the year, I changed to Wetzel Road Elementary. This latter school was right out back of where my aunt lived, near a large grassy area that was next to the area out back of the local high school. Later on, in high school, I would see a social worker at school who explained that my chronic low-grade depression (also called dysthymia) dated from when my parents separated and divorced. Other close friends have since agreed. But mostly I was a happy child.

We changed schools a few times before I graduated from high school, and it was hard sometimes, but I tried to look at it as an adventure. We must have moved about 10 times. I remember in kindergarten we went out to the woods, chopped down trees, brought them inside and made Indian tepees out of them. That was fun. All of the students drew and colored designs on brown paper, and the tepees were covered with the paper.

In first grade, I began going to St. Joseph the Worker school, a Catholic school. I liked it a lot. Sister Mary Brendan was the first grade teacher and we all loved her. She was about 73 years old and very nice. At Christmas time, she taught us all the words to an Italian Christmas carol-it went something like O Bambino, Mio Divino, io ti vedo, qui trema. The first sentence was something like that. I think it means Oh Baby Jesus, Divine Son, I see you shivering in the cold. I took a little Italian in college. We didn’t ever have any homework of course, but one day I was so excited about one of the workbooks, that I took it home and worked on several pages for fun. But the next day I forgot to bring it with me to school! She didn’t scold me very much, but I was afraid of getting into trouble. One day I must have been talking too much in class to my friends, and it was May, the month of Mary, mother of Jesus. Sister Brendan sent me up to the front of the room beside a statue of Christ to pray and ask God to forgive me. I was so nervous but it worked out and soon I sat down. Boy did I not make the same mistake twice. There was a nice girl named Allison and a boy named Dominic that all the girls liked. He was cute, red hair with freckles. One day Sister Brendan told my mother when she came to pick me up that she often couldn’t sleep at night sometimes because of arthritis. We felt badly for her. She told me once when she was older that she used to turn on the soap operas after school because the other nuns were out working as volunteers and she was lonely for human voices, so while she was ironing in the convent, she listened to the soaps.

The next year, in second grade, we all had Mrs. Tucci as our teacher. The other top students and I often got to help the other students. One day in class a few of us made activity books for our classmates. There were math problems, coloring pages, and similar things. Then another time we would do written worksheets, and you had to keep track of how many you did on a sheet of paper. Some of us, in a hurry to be the first to get all of them done, decided to write down that we had done 10 when we had only done 5. We did not realize that the teacher was keeping track. She took me up to her desk and showed me how she kept track, and I was so embarrassed! So all of us had to do our worksheets over and we learned our lesson. One of the boys used to cause problems for others but the teacher told us it was not his fault. We were taught to be