Rebuilding Sergeant Peck by John Peck

Author:John Peck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510740662
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2019-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

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Obviously, all of this really put me on a downward spiral mentally—down into what I would call my “dark spot.” I had been blown up in the spring and here it was fall, just four or five months later. No wife; no life. Despite everything, I hadn’t even considered suicide before. My attitude from the start was that no matter how screwed up things were, I was going to own this problem. I was going to figure this out, whatever it took. I guess it was Marine training and childhood survival skills that kicked into high gear.

But the dark spot kept getting bigger.

I began to seriously contemplate killing myself. What did I have to live for? Who would ever love me again? In my despair, I figured out how a guy with no arms and legs, who wasn’t even able to feed himself, could do it. This would be the one and only time my core will to survive—to overcome, to move ahead—would waver.

At the end of my hallway was a doorway leading to a flight of stairs. From the stairs side, to enter the hallway, there was a conventional latch that a person would need hands to be able to open. But from the hallway side—my side—there was a push bar. Press on that, the door opens, and the stairs await. So, my plan was that I would ram my chair through the door and throw myself down a flight of stairs and, with luck, break my neck.

Good plan, right? Well, there were a couple of drawbacks. At that stage, I could still barely lift my arm up off the bed. I didn’t have a motorized wheelchair yet. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have been capable of getting myself into it and maneuvering it down the hall to the doors.

But I really didn’t care about the drawbacks at that point. I had it all figured out. I was going to do it. Mentally, I just gave up, on therapy and everything else. Of course, they still made me go, so I was there physically. But I just didn’t care. At best, it was a means of making me strong enough to lift myself into a chair, run it down the hall, ram the door, and fling myself down those stairs.

Kyla became my stand-in psychologist during my time in the dark spot. She and the other therapists knew about the divorce—I complained often enough—but of course there was nothing they could do about it. So, they stayed focused and kept pushing me forward. And while down there at MATC, I’d talk to Kyla about what was going on. I could be right in the middle of my mat, in one exercise or other, and start crying. I even told her that I wanted to kill myself. “No, John,” she just said. “You can’t do that. Because if you kill yourself, then you won’t be my little playtoy and we won’t be able to work together anymore.

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