The Year I Didn't Kill Myself by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun 

The rule I made for myself most days was that I had to leave the house and smile at least three people that I didn’t know. I had to make eye contact and just say hello, which is to say even if I was shaking or had been throwing up from all the anxiety all day long I still needed to walk out on Claremont Blvd. and face the world.

This was the rule on weekends but also on weekdays after I’d get home from teaching at Stanford. I was doing great at Stanford. The students were fabulous, I was busy, I could make it through the day teaching my ass off and if I felt my heart start pounding I could breathe my way through it. I could get in my black Jetta and drive all the way home: over the Dumbarton bridge with its deep smell of algae, along the 880. By the time I’d get onto the 24 I might really be sweating or maybe crying a bit but it was okay, I could make it. I could get up the wide craftsman stairs and into my apartment and just make the bathroom before throwing up. I’d look up to see our sweet cat, Clemente, who had started to wait there for me to come home.

No matter how bad the day was or if it was dark I still had to walk back out the door. Turn right on Ashby and walk to College or keep walking down Claremont and go into Star Market and just say hello. To Nick, the owner. To the butchers. If I was on College I could go into Manpuku and get some miso soup and say hello to each person behind the counter. And then I was allowed to go home and throw up a few more times before going to bed.

This was my hard time.

Once I said hello to three people I needed to make my way home. Which was harder than you might think. I was so afraid I was going to begin hearing things that all I did was hear things. The doctor said, “You haven’t gone crazy. You’ve had a panic attack. You’re perfectly sane.” One of the branches on a giant rosemary bush would scratch my jacket and I’d have to sit on the ground with my head in my hands and beg my God not to have this be the start of the end of me. I remember how the eucalyptus trees smelled even in the coldest months in Berkeley. I remember how huge the spider webs were. Those were the things I focused on and breathed while saying to myself, “You are healthy and full of light. You can do this. You can get home.”

I needed another rule. Or I needed a companion. When I tell my students that I am terrible at memorization I’m not kidding. I can’t remember ten lines if I say them one hundred times over. It may be something to do with my nystagmus. I’m not sure. In other respects my memory is muscular and accurate to the point of distraction. I’m not sure how I came up with the notion that memorizing poems by Emily Dickinson would be the way to get myself home. And in the end there was just one poem, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun.” It took all the months of my shaking and not killing myself to get the poem down. Took the distance from College to Claremont and along the fire trails and up the hidden staircases in the Berkeley Hills. Over and over, “It is as a Vesuvian face” as I walked back from my analyst’s who said, You have to be like the bamboo. “It is as a Vesuvian face” at the bank and in the movies and with the steam from the soup dumplings hitting my cheeks. One poem for a year and now like a friend in every dark time.

Why did my mother kill herself and I didn’t that year and have not? This is a question I ask myself almost everyday, though never during moments of despair. The thought never comes to me then. I ask myself at the farmer’s market when David shows me the black radishes that I use in risotto or when Sarah takes me to the ranch and the horses press in on me so I’m nothing but warmth and breath and their snot on my hair. Is it this? Is this the reason? I ask myself at the rodeo and the rowdy square dance when the rain starts to fall. I don’t mean for it to sound romantic. I have questions about what keeps us alive. I don’t believe it’s a phone call or trying harder. I don’t believe it’s an act of cowardice to take your life. Or that it’s brave. I think it’s the most natural unnatural thing in the world. My analyst said, You have to decide her story is not your story. Even if it’s the last place you know to find her and you really have to say goodbye.

Over the next year, instead of writing the Sports Desk, I’ll be writing about the year I didn’t kill myself. Which is every year so far and one specific year and I think we probably all have one. And I’d like to start a conversation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun (764)

By Emily Dickinson

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovreign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him
The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial light
Opon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let it’s pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master’s Head -
’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I’m deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without - the power to die -

This week Gabrielle Calvocoressi will be writing every day. After that the column will appear on a bi-weekly basis.

Comments

[JC]

It's almost three in the morning and I've sat now for a half hour trying to find the words to respond to your words, in which there is such pain and bravery and cost. Conversations consist of deep silences, too, in which one absorbs what the other is saying. Please continue to say what you need to say. And thank you for this, though my words pale in response.

[Esmé Weijun Wang]

I found this through Elizabeth McCracken; I'm glad I did.

1) Many of my writer friends loved your class at Stanford. You probably already know this, but you had a truly beloved reputation there as a wonderful teacher. Though I minored in creative writing, and went on to get my MFA, you were already gone by the time I had transferred there.

2) I would have appreciated this at any time, I especially appreciate it now — I had an ECT consult yesterday, as I am currently in the throes of a particularly bad episode of schizoaffective disorder, a condition that I write about on my website as a mental health advocate.

3) "To have this not be the start of the end of me" perfectly sums how I've been feeling lately. Twenty years of living with mental illness has not prepared me for this. But reading writing like yours assures me that there is art, and there is something that looks like hope. Thank you for that.

Respectfully,
Esmé

[Marsha Recknagel]

The last line made me close my eyes and shudder, for you, for her. After reading this I felt the need to respond, to respond and to respond. Then I realized that is one of the gifts this essay gives us, you the writer gives us, the desire and the example to respond to you --with compassion--and to say or write "Yes, yes I have trembled, I have considered, I have wanted dearly to die. And I have not." We have not.

[Michael Klein]

Somebody called after reading my book about horse racing written so many years ago that I don't even remember to remember it and he wanted to talk about how he had been on the track, too – gyp tracks, mostly – the way I was in all those same places at the beginning of something that took longer than I ever thought it would take in life. Especially in my life. And he wanted to know the real names of people in the book. Some of them. The daredevils. And, most of all he wanted to know whatever happened to Richard, my racetrack lover – the man who got me hitched to that dying star in the first place. So we talked a little and eventually I was feeling sort of put upon because – here comes the reason for the call, which is always the reason for a call like this – he’s written a book about the racetrack, too. And he's not really a writer, etc.,etc. And before he could officially ask, I said, of course, I'll read it – but only the first 20 pages. And if I like it, I'll finish it. Is that fair? And he said, yes, it was fair. And then he said, I just want you to know your book blew me away. And I said, how sweet of you to say. And, then I said, as though I was looking into a beautiful room I hadn’t been in for years: God, that was a long time ago. And then I said it again in my mind until I couldn’t really hear what he said next. Finally, I said, I really appreciate the call. And I did appreciate it. I heard in the man’s must-have-been-75-year-old Tallahassee drawl the soul of someone who was in love with a kind of life that wasn't there anymore. And he was my brother there, in that ago life, no matter what racetrack he was working on or what bar they had to kick him out of because last call had been called and called and called. He was my brother in life, calling to tell me that he stayed alive, too.

[americanist]

Lovely post. That photo is not, however, of Emily Dickinson.

[Mario]

Dear Gabby,

You were my teacher one summer at Stanford, while you were a Stegner fellow and I was all of 16. I remember you in a Rodin sculpture garden, explaining to someone something about the turn of a sonnet, and I remember you and Brian teare with us and all of our youth at half moon bay. The brain is a weird thing, and I look forward to reading about the year your life stood, loaded. But I just wanted to say, as a former student, thank you. I'm still writing poems because of what I learned from you.

Best,
Mario A. Ariza

[Jeneva Stone]

Your intention seems primarily to be the question of what keeps us alive. On a secondary level, your discussion of a struggle with severe anxiety also resonated with me. And, lately, my anxiety has become a force unto itself--an amorphous thing--that strikes without warning, that engulfs, that paralyzes. That's extreme anxiety. Low-level anxiety is a state of indecision, the recognition of contradictions, a daily course of living with uncertainty. My own severe anxiety comes ultimately, I think, from an actualization of what so many suppress: that very terrible things do in fact happen, can happen without reason or justification, and may happen again.

So, in an odd way, that anxiety (low or high) keeps us alive may be one answer to the question. Anxious, we do not act. We live with uncertainty, are willing to accommodate uncertainty, like Keats' negative capability. Paralyzed, we do not move, act, do, perform. When someone becomes certain, that provokes action. Certainty, while a virtue of right action in texts like Beowulf, myths, heroic stories, is considered a generator of right action, certainty may also be the driver for wrong action, zealousness, conflict, strife. Beowulf and Grendel are both very certain--one stands for goodness, the other evil. Everyone else at Heorot is anxious, uncertain, afraid. Certainty itself creates violence, perhaps.

But at a personal level, outside the realm of literature, severe anxiety can be a turning upon the self: the experience of amorphous terror so severe that any escape seems preferable to enduring it, even death. That's the kind of anxiety Plath writes about. Her poems about motherhood and her children are filled with uncertainty--especially "Tulips" which seems to me an expression of the anxiety and fear of motherhood, a genuinely terrifying poem. However, her work is so often dismissed as "crazy." Bidart also writes about anxiety and fear.

The question might be for writers, how to express the human concerns of anxiety, terror and fear? How are those communicated or universalized or given place or decentered (pick your theoretical drive) and yet keep them from stereotype connected to destruction and death?

[suzy]

Thank you for starting this conversation. I have 4 varied comments to share:

1. Thank you. I will be sending this to a beloved friend for whom I think it will be of great value. She was just teenager when she found her older brother after his suicide and some of her days are much like you describe yours here.

2. I myself was suicidal regularly when I was younger and for over 25 years now, I have only to look at my daughters to KNOW why I didn't!

3. I think it bares noting how very lucky you are to have found such a wise and truly useful analyst. The words you quote are so unlike what is voiced by many professionals in similar circumstances!

4. I wonder if you think it is true that "we probably all have" a year we didn't kill ourselves? I don't think it is a universal human reality. I do, however, believe it is often true for great artists.

Many blessings to you, brave artist. Thank you!

[D. Cross]

Never took a writing class, but tried my hand at an autobiography. Your shared experience, I believe, can enlighten all who read it.
D.Cross, Silent Screams