Living With Crazy: He can't really be thinking about killing himself

Your husband has told you that he has been thinking about killing himself every day for about a year. Wouldn't the most safe and sensible thing be to get him to a psychiatrist or to the emergency room?

Yes, of course.

But, I wasn't being safe or sensible.

What? John kill himself? It just didn't seem real. He could be moody and withdrawn sometimes, but so desperately unhappy he wanted to die? We had a good life--or we seemed to up until he arrived home from work a few minutes before--in the middle of the day--and announced that something bad had happened.

I had never dealt with someone who was suicidal, or anyone who was in this kind of crisis. Again, I couldn't believe it. John?

Not only was he the smartest person I knew, he was the guy everyone went to if they were having troubles with work, family, romantic relationships. He was a great listener, and he had been a lifelong volunteer for different nonprofits, where he was often in the position of helping people with problem solving. This included, when we first started going out, working on a crisis hotline in San Francisco, talking people out of taking their lives. Before, our baby was born, he had volunteered at San Francisco's Zen Hospice, tending to people who were dying. Surely, someone with with this sort of background had to know himself pretty well and to have a pretty healthy sense of self.

How could he be so incredibly depressed he was suicidal? I just couldn't believe it.

In any event, the longer we sat there on our sofa, the more my mind turned to his news he was under police investigation.

The investigation must have been on John's mind to, because he announced he wanted to call the Humboldt State University police. He got up, went to the phone, and was put right through to the chief, whom he knew from working around campus. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry," I heard him say.

Then he made an appointment to go in and meet with the police in a few days.

I absorbed this news, and then thought, shit, he can't go into the police and just tell them everything he did--whatever it was he did.

People under police investigation are not supposed to talk to the police. I didn't just learn that from TV shows or movies. In a former life, I had been a newspaper reporter--a crime reporter to be exact. That's just how it was. A suspect risked a lot. As the Miranda warning goes, anything a suspect says--even something seemingly benign--could be interpreted in certain ways and used against a suspect in a court of law.

I was also aware of the phenomenon of false confessions. Yes, people do confess to crimes they don't commit. Residents of the San Francisco Bay Area might remember the highly publicized case of Bradley Page, an Acalanes High graduate and UC Berkeley student prosecuted for the 1984 murder of his girlfriend, Roberta "Bibi" Lee, also a UC Berkeley student.

Well, in the year or so before becoming a mom, I had written about Page's confession--having gained access to the transcript of it. Fascinating document; it showed clearly how a mentally distraught, eager-to-please suspect could be led by persuasive detectives, after hours of interrogation, into saying things that could come off as incriminating. With an absence of physical evidence, and in the era before DNA testing, Page was convicted in his girlfriend's killing solely on the basis of this so-called confession, in which, I recall, he never actually said anything to the effect of "I did it" but "If I were to do it, this is how I would."

I saw my husband as being sort of Brad Page-like--mentally distraught and eager to please.

John was also anguished by guilt. Yes, it was clear he had been caught doing something wrong, something illegal. He had been escorted out of his office by campus police after being confronted.

Hearing that he was going to go meet with police, I envisioned him spending hours with detectives and perhaps taking responsibility for things he didn't do.

After the interview, I thought, he'd be taken into custody. Jail. What about our child?

I was suddenly angry. What did John mean he was just going to walk into the university police department and talk to detectives? No, I told him, you're not going to do that.

You're going to get a lawyer.

If only I had thought about getting him to the hospital.

Living with Crazy: Something Bad Has Happened

As I write this, I realize it has been nearly 10 years since the occurrence of the life-changing events I have begun to describe. Ten years.

Ten years ago, I was a stay-at-home mom to a 2-year-old. My husband, child and I lived in a spacious two-story rental house in the middle of the redwoods, just outside the college town of Arcata. My husband was bright, personable. He was a loving husband and father, and he seemed to be doing well at his job. He was giving our toddler and me a nice peaceful life

My days were filled with looking after my child, feeding him oatmeal in the morning, changing his diapers, getting him dressed. We'd go to this fitness center in town, where I could exercise and he could play in a baby sitting facility known as Kids Korner. After the gym, we'd go get me a mocha at this Whole Foods-type, locally owned grocery store which had a cafe. The barristas would whip up extra milk foam for him. The two of us would sit there together, chatting in the way you can with 2-year-olds. I would drink my mocha; he would devour his foam.

We might to go a playground, or meet friends from my moms' group, and he could run around a playground with some other kids. Or he and I might go for a walk along any of the trails into the redwoods that surrounded Arcata. Sometimes, on a nice day, I'd take him to one of the beaches a few miles west of Arcata and up north along 101. The beaches in Humboldt County are gorgeous and varied. One might roll with amazing sand dunes we'd roll around it. Others held huge logs, bleeched by the water, that had swept back to shore. They made for excellent climbing.

The beaches were almost always empty. We'd be the only ones there. Outside of the towns, Humboldt County represents one of the most remote parts of California.

After the playground or the beach, we'd go home, have lunch, and then it would be naptime.

My husband usually would come home around 5:30 p.m. We lived close enough to the Humboldt State campus that he could walk home. However, on a rainy day, my son and I would go pick him up--we only had one car. We would bring my husband home, and altogether, we would eat dinner.

Evenings were spent playing with our toddler, running trains around his Thomas the Tank engine set, or actually pretending to be trains, the three of us tearing around the upstairs, in and out of our bedrooms, falling on our child's bed, tickling him, and then running around some more.

I missed the Bay Area. I missed our big-city life in San Francisco as up-and-coming professions. But after our son came in 1998, my husband felt eager to leave. The city, with the dot-com era heating up, was becoming too expensive. He convinced me it would be a good idea to give small-town life a try. A college town seemed like a good place to experiment with a more low-key life-style. There would be some of the culture you get in a more urban area, just on a smaller scale.

That life of small-town bliss came to an end with my husband's big news on March 20, 2001.

But you know, I didn't take it in, the reality of the news that was coming in to me. What he was telling me was frightening, traumatic, life-changing.

But I listened to his words calmly, as if they didn't really mean disaster. No, this will all blow over in a day or two, I thought.

I realize now his news had suddenly thrust me into a state of disbelief, shock and denial--a state that would last for years, and lingers to to this day. When he suddenly appeared at home on that Tuesday morning--a workday morning--and announced, "Something bad has happened," I ran downstairs, hugged him and said something vaguely supportive like "We'll deal with whatever it is together."

I led him to the living room sofa. Somewhere between the hug and the couch, he explained that he had been fired from his job as a Humboldt State University fundraiser. He said he had been caught padding his expense accounts and falsifying documents to make it look like he was more successful than he actually was.

He sagged into the sofa cushion: "I"m sorry. I'm so sorry," he said. And then he told me that he had been severely depressed for more than a year and had, on a daily basis, been thinking of killing myself.

Once again, I said something consoling and stroked his hand. But that strange calm stayed with me. I didn't know what else to say, so we sat together quietly for a while.

Living with Crazy: How It All Began....

Taking a break from Walnut Creek Patch duties this afternoon. I was missing my blog, which I don't get the chance to post on very much these days. The Patch job is pretty overwhelming. Covering Walnut Creek is pretty overwhelming.... So much going on.

I digress ... Events have come up lately that made me think I wanted to write more about how I got to the point in life that I am at now: married to a man I love and cherish but whose mental illness has left me often feeling depressed, cursed, hopeless. I end up feeling even more sad because my husband feels so very bad about the misery he has caused other people, as he explains in his blog A Life With Mental Illness This is not how life was supposed to turn out. I guess a lot of us could say that, right? A lot of us go through things.

The thing I went through started like this.

(Actually I'm going to steal some lines, add some, from an article I wrote for Diablo magazine in January 2003. Unfortunately, the article is not available online. )

On the morning of March 22, 2001, an ambulance dispatched by Humboldt County Emergency Services pulled into the driveway of what was then my home in Arcata. My husband, John, and I calmly walked out to the waiting vehicle. As John approached the ambulance door, he looked at a police officer who had been sent along to make sure this 5150 call took place without incident. Despite John's calm demeanor, something could still go wrong. After all, he had minutes earlier been threatening to cut himself with a knife. But as he saw the officer, John turned to me and asked with a faint hopeful smile "Do you think he will shoot me?" John then climbed in the ambulance and was taken away.

I had never before expected the man, to whom I'd been married for nearly 10 years, would ask me such a terribly sad, desperate question. But over the previous two days, my life had been turned upside down. This was just the latest in a quick series of shattering blows to my comfortable image of us as a husband and wife, the parents of a 3-year-old child, educated professionals, with pretty much everything going fine. And so much to look forward to.

Just two days before, I had taken my son to preschool and was in our bedroom upstairs when I heard the garage door slowly grind open. It had to be John, but I couldn't understand what he was doing home in the middle of a workday morning. I remember walking out to the second-floor landing and looking down into our living room, with its two-story high ceilings and banks of windows that let in views of the redwood forest surrounding our large back yard. The sky, which I could also see from those windows, was overcast.

John, a tall, slender man with glasses, was emptying his keys and wallet onto a kitchen counter, his ritual upon arriving home.

Hearing my footsteps, he looked up. In a quiet, urgent voice, he said: "Something bad has happened."

More to come, when I get a chance...