MORE, NOW, AGAIN by ELIZABETH WURTZEL

Author:ELIZABETH WURTZEL
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2002-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

On Sunday, a woman in Main House kills herself. She is a doctor, a pediatrician, and just the day before, her husband and two children had come to visit for a family session. She was dark and petite, and beyond that I hardly knew her. Somehow she got through the night, and in the morning, she woke up and hanged herself. I’m guessing it was from her shower curtain rail, because what else could it be? No one gets specific, so I’ll never know. Even the rehab rumor mill doesn’t come up with any theories.

Sunday afternoon, one of the staff psychiatrists comes by to talk to us, the K-House residents, as a group. The first thing I notice about him is that he is young and handsome. I wonder if he is married, and I see a wedding band on his left hand, so then I wonder if he cheats. This is ridiculous. I’ve got to get romantic games off the brain. Focus on myself. Focus on my recovery—I have to keep saying this in my head like a mantra. I need to meditate on this idea, sit Indian-style on my bedroom floor or in a semilotus position, some Wyndham Hill music playing in the background, some strawberry incense burning on the windowsill, and while breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth as they say to do in the Transcendental Meditation handbook that I read in some college religion course, I must keep telling myself: Keep the focus on me, keep the focus on me, keep the focus on me, over and over.

After telling us about this woman’s suicide, the doctor asks if we have any questions, if any of us wants to share our feelings about this sorry event. No one says anything, because really this does not affect us at all; we hardly knew her. She was in the mental ward, not the addicts’ unit. But he won’t let it go at that, because he needs to make this into a therapeutic process for all of us.

“No one has anything to express?” the psychiatrist asks.

I feel sorry for him; he is trying so hard. He looks like such a mellow guy. He probably goes hiking in the Connecticut woods on the weekends. This is the last thing he needs. I decide I’d better say something, because it seems like a responsibility. I always take that upon myself—I’m the one who fills in any lulls in the conversation, which people mistake for mindless chattiness, but it is actually a form of insecurity mixed with politeness.

“Well, I’m just wondering, I guess,” I try, “how she managed to do this. Not to be insensitive—I’m not looking for gory details. But we’re all so carefully watched here, I can’t imagine how anyone allowed this to happen.”

“I don’t know,” he answers. And I’m sure that’s the truth. She turned the shower on; for fifteen minutes someone looked away; that’s all it takes. Murderers of the self are crafty. “But suicides have a special language,” writes Anne Sexton in “Wanting to Die,” one of my favorite poems.

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