The Two Reasons You Wear a Black Suit to Church
By Storey Clayton
You don’t yet know that Rachel has broken all the dishes in the kitchen she shares with her three roommates, all of whom are on the debate team you coach. You don’t yet know that someone called the cops, who came, who asked her imploring questions through the cracked front door, who she talked into retreating as though everything was fine. You don’t yet know that she has downed almost all of her antidepressants at once, swallow after tormented swallow, the bottle almost full, the prescription new. All you know at this point is that she is here, suddenly, in the car, and something is not quite right.
You turn to your girlfriend, Alex, who knows all of these things. She speaks in a tone you will come to know as her kindergarten teacher voice, full of beguiling authority and placatory calm. She asks Rachel where she would like to go. You thought you were going home. You have been driving home through most of the night. Home from a vacation you needed that failed to satisfy, home through a migraine that is starting to hammer down the left side of your skull, that makes each of the streetlamps scream a discordant howl behind your eyes, shooting up to your temple. You are within a few minutes of being unable to see straight. When Alex said she wanted to stop by to check on Rachel, you had no idea she’d be coming with.
“I don’t care,” Rachel emits meekly, an uncharacteristic deadpan. You turn, expecting the sparkle of mischievous eyes and find them missing. Rachel has always been small, but in your worn fabric backseat, backlit by the sodium orb outside, she appears ready to crumple. To fold in on herself, disappear. You try to mentally push the migraine from your brain.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” Alex asks, her voice unwavering, like she’s offering to buy a pizza, and even though you can sense that something’s amiss, this jars you. You glance at Rachel again, unable to help it, craning your aching neck over your shoulder. She is whole, unbleeding. You know she is prone to threats, like everyone. You know she has recently finally lost her relationship with the guy who has been routinely cheating on her at debate tournaments. You feel the familiar pang of guilt, of not knowing when it’s right to interfere in the unfaithfulness that looms between your mutual friends. Has she said something to Alex? Has she said she feels unsafe? Now you are awake, your blood churning chilly against the purring car heater in the New Jersey November night.
“Can we just go...” her voice trails off, weary. “To your place? Is it far?"
Alex signals to you with an urgency you can’t read, shielding herself in the front passenger seat from Rachel’s languid view. You catch a helpless shrug, a desperate uncertainty, a creeping panic that belies her tenor. You lack the understanding to reciprocate, unable to ask the questions that would clarify the situation.
Wordlessly, you pull away from the curb.
--
Nearly six and a half years later, you will be driving with Alex, who will then be your wife, up to a parking lot, late for a wedding. And you will catch sight of the bride about to enter the church, glowing in white, and fear you’ve arrived too late. Her green-decked bridesmaids will scurry about her, adjusting and giggling, in the same color the bride wore to your wedding with Alex eighteen months prior. And you will want to hold this moment, this snapshot, to freeze it in time, a postcard. Not just so you can get ahead of it, to sneak into the church before her, not be late and have to hang in the back of the Catholic ceremony in this surprisingly contemporary sanctuary. But so you can send the postcard forward, or back, in time. So you can remember before it begins.
You needn’t worry. They will only be just arriving at the church to make adjustments, to smooth out nerves and hems before the big reveal. They will duck left into the back rooms as you and your wife take your seat in a pew to wait for old friends you weren’t sure you’d see here. You will take an inventory, a quick audit, confirming your corporeal presence in this hard wood bench. This is your new blue tie you just bought today to replace the old stained one. This is your black suit you brought for the black tie (optional). These are your veiny weathered hands, long thin fingers nearly forty years old. This is the ring on your finger, grooved in silver-colored gold. Check your fly. Straighten your tie.
There are two reasons people wear black suits to church. This is the better one.
--
When you unlock your front door to hold it open for Alex and Rachel, the latter says thank you with a small exhale and you briefly believe that everything must be better than it seems. You collapse on the couch, letting yourself endure the full depth of head pain you’ve till now deferred through adrenaline and will. Rachel joins you on the kitty-corner couch, perching like a cautious bird, like she’s afraid to take up any space at all. Alex asks if she wants something to drink and then makes a hushed phone call in the kitchen while you try to be a less appalling host.
“How’s it going?” you ask absurdly, for wont of a conversation starter.
And Rachel turns a face full of tears, tears you realize were there all along, but now the sobs accompany them and you can’t miss the signs any longer. “Not so good,” she offers, “not so good at all.”
And you nod as much as your throbbing brain will allow, wishing you could table this headache, trade one now for three in the future, sensing that you will remember this night for the rest of your life and the migraine will be a circumstance that won’t feel exculpatory later. You have tried to explain migraines to people who don’t get them, the pulsing surge of blood emphasizing all stimulus to the point of hypersensitivity until any sound, light, even thought is drowned in acute pain. Alex gets them, which you at once appreciate and would do anything to change, both grateful for her understanding and thus heartbroken that she must also endure. Migraines are poorly understood by medical science, but most seem to be caused by the brain misinterpreting triggers (such as bright light, loud noise, or certain foods) as a threat to its existence. The brain demands extra blood from the rest of the body to help it fight off the threat. The blood surges through veins in the side of the head, bulging against the sensitive nerve endings in and around the temple. Just before the pain becomes excruciating, you often feel an almost euphoric clarity as though your brain is operating perfectly, optimized, superpowered. As though you can see the future.
“Do you ever?” Rachel starts and stops. She’s hesitant, the way she was when she first started debating, when you first began coaching her. She was timid and nervous and to the untrained eye would seem a strange match for public speaking. You’ve coached enough college kids by now to know that the best of them often begin nervous, that these are the driven students who come through the door because they know they are afraid and want to be here anyway. “Do you ever not want to live anymore?”
You think of the pain consuming your head and the trumped-up investigation you’re facing at work, of the marriage you lost and the pain you know you’ve brought from it into your relationship with Alex, all these years later. You think of the moment two months ago in the bedroom behind you when you rhythmically smacked the back of your head into the wall, nine, twelve, sixteen times, before she stopped you and called your parents to say you’d given yourself a concussion and she was scared. “All the time,” you tell Rachel truthfully.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”You hadn’t gone to the hospital that night. You’re still here.
--
You hadn’t gone to the hospital for that the whole summer your first wife left you, either, though you weren’t letting yourself be alone. You couch-surfed, trying not to drown. You stayed with your best friend in his girlfriend’s ill-advised twelfth-story DC apartment, the one with an all-glass wall overlooking a wooded patch of the city, wrestling with gravity’s siren call. You moved on to the modest two-story corner house of another close friend, Ben, who spent days trying to talk you off the proverbial ledge. You were calmer, more circumspect, but also more resolute:
“I don’t see why you can’t all see that suicide is my best course of action,” you told him undramatically. “I would like it to be a really nice event. I could invite everyone I care about, everyone close to me. We could have the funeral right there and I could hug everyone goodbye and you could all feel at peace.”
“I don’t think that’s how we’d feel,” noted Ben with admirable restraint.
“I think one of the saddest things about suicide is that because there’s this taboo against it, people have to die alone. I mean, there’s doctor-assisted suicide in some states now, but you have to be terminal. And I really feel terminal. But don’t you think that’s what’s truly sad about suicide?”
“I think,” Ben breathed in heavily, “what’s sad about suicide is that it happens.”
You had been frustrated then. Felt that he just didn’t get it. He was thinking selfishly. Everyone was. You had just weighed all the pros and cons and decided that dying was preferable to living. The person you would have to become to live through this cataclysm, this utter destruction of your personality and identity, was not someone you cared to be. You wouldn’t even be recognizable to the friends who said they’d miss you so much. Why couldn’t they see that?
But then he’d surprised you with evidence that he understood you better than you thought.
“So let’s say you do this, you kill yourself,” he said, not quite gulping on the last three syllables. “What happens next?”
Most of your contemporaries are atheists, so this question wouldn’t make sense for them. But you have a sophisticated spiritual theology about afterlives on different planets punctuated by replays of each life guided by an unflinching but gentle spiritual Advisor who makes you re-examine the hard decisions in your life and assess your actions. Ben is one of the few people who knows most of the details on this set of beliefs.
But you hadn’t thought about it much in terms of the suicide. Suicide felt like such a good solution for this life that you hadn’t thought about the next. “I guess I meet my Advisor.”
Ben smiles, subtly. “And what do you think he has to say about this?”
You shiver involuntarily. “I don’t know. Hopefully he’d understand?”
“Okay,” he says. “So how do you explain it to him?”
“I can’t live with this reality, so I have to get out of it. I can’t go on with trying to be someone who has survived the loss of this marriage.”
“Great, say he understands. Then what happens?”
You sigh, realizing the corner you’ve painted yourself into. “I. Start watching the tape of my life.”
“Not much of an escape, is it?”
Years later, on the eve of your second wedding, Ben will tell you how frustrated he was before that night, how many circles he’d run through with you about your commitment to killing yourself in the days and weeks prior. “That night,” he’ll say almost wistfully, “was the first time I felt you move.”
--
Alex is off the phone with poison control and doesn’t even bother with an excuse to drag you into the bedroom and catch you up. The staccato information hits you on each temple-throb like waves lambasting a crumbling pier. Plates. Police. Pills. Poison.
“What’d the poison hotline say?”
“They don’t know much about the drug, but they said we should bring her in. And I don’t know how many she took. There were a lot of pills on the floor, so hopefully...”
Involuntarily, you glance up at the closed bedroom door through which you’re almost sure Rachel can hear.
“What?”
“Should she be alone in there? I mean, we have knives in the kitchen.”
“I don’t think she’s a knives kind of girl.”
“I didn’t think she was a pills kind of girl either.”
“Should we take her to the hospital?”
You genuinely don’t know how to answer this question. You can’t help but project yourself into the situation. After all, you relate. You have never been hospitalized for your suicidal tendencies, not even for your genuine attempt decades ago. You have always feared being committed, medicated, shocked against your will. You have never even seen a therapist for fear of being honest about this issue. But you have also never ingested a whole bottle of pills, never been in this kind of danger. And you like Rachel more than you like yourself, feel a greater responsibility – as both a friend and a mentor – to make sure she’s okay.
“Let’s ask her if she wants to go.”
The two of you return to the living room where Rachel remains pensively perched on the slightest sliver of couch cushion. She is starting to shake. You cannot help but feel like her parents. Alex is no older, but you are, and she is so small, sitting there, helpless, in your hands, in your care. You do not want her to die in your apartment. But you also don’t want her to die alone.
Alex speaks first. “Hey, you want to go for a little drive?”
Rachel’s almost inaudible. “Where?”
“Just out? Maybe see a doctor? Make sure you’re going to be okay?”
“I’m not okay.”
“So how about that ride?”
There is a lingering hesitation, an ambivalence you can smell as fear. If she’s afraid of dying, she needs to go. She is scared.
“Maybe.”
“C’mon, get up. I’ll get the car.”
The two of you help her up, like basketball players, an arm each, and she is fragile and translucent and weightless in your grip. She shivers and asks to borrow a coat and then Alex is there with the car and you apologize for being unable to join them at the hospital, feeling like your head has already split open to ooze out on the floor. It takes you an hour to get to sleep, manually pressing the pulsating vein back into your skull with both hands while you pray that Rachel lives through the night.
--
The night of the wedding, you will dance deliriously, determined to fling yourself into the moment. The happy couple opening the dance floor will bring you to involuntary tears, not happy wedding tears but wracking, full-on crying. You never thought this day would come. God, you hope she’s happy. You need to unbridle the joy this night can hold, uncork it and pour it everywhere, to keep the demons at bay.
You will dance the Hora (despite the Catholic ceremony, Rachel is half-Jewish) and Brown-Eyed Girl and Sweet Caroline and Hey Ya! while the DJ revels in the pulsing crowd. You will drag Alex out again and again, stay out after she retreats to the table for water and cake and conversation. But she’ll be in the bathroom when Bruce Springsteen’s “Rosalita” threatens to bring the entire monstrosity of a grand wedding venue down to its Jersey floorboards. The bride and groom and their parents will jump on chairs dragged from the nearby tables and belt out the Boss’s bouncy serenade.
About two-thirds of the way through the seven-minute song, you will finally reach that recognizable transcendent crescendo when your soul fuses with the music, willing your body to melt into irrelevance.
“My tires were slashed and I almost crashed but the Lord had mercy
And my machine she’s a dud out stuck in the mud
Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey
Well, hold on tight, stay up all night, ’cause Rosie I’m comin’ on strong
By the time we meet the morning light I will hold you in my arms”
Can this possibly be real?
--
The Children’s Hospital at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital looms high above New Brunswick, roughly dividing the college town from downtown in one direction and the seedy low-rent neighborhoods in another. While desperate Rutgers students sometimes cross into these neighborhoods to save some future debt, walking by the hospital still feels like the end of the line. Its edifice is adorned with the inevitable hopelessly cheery hand-drawn renditions of children by children, behind a fountain with life-size statues of kids playing therein, surrogates for the youth who stare, trapped, from high windows into the wistful abyss.
A gorgeous new atrium climbs through the center of the building, with a railing curving up beside the spiral ascent. The first time you see it, all you can think is the railing was built too low. The underlying presumption of this place is that everyone who comes here is fighting to live.
On the fifth floor, though, they know better. Here they keep watch, at first constantly, then every half-hour, peering in and initialing a little clipboard with an endless series of affirmations. You’re here to help. Rachel has survived the night, her stomach pumped, her shoes and clothes confiscated, her bed piled high with extra pillows and blankets to compensate for the indignity of her crinkly paper-thin robe. Alex is exhausted, came home around 4:00, just after they wheeled Rachel away to the stomach pump. Nonetheless, you’ve both come back to stay, with blankets and pillows of your own, books and board games to spare. It’s technically against the rules, which prescribe a specific range of visiting hours. But the nurses could use the extra sets of eyes, knowing the will to live is stronger when one’s not alone.
You will spend the bulk of the next three days and two nights in this room, taking turns to return home only briefly to shower and get a stint of better sleep. Alex will take the two comfy chairs, wedged end-to-end into a makeshift bed. You will curl up on the cushioned bench next to the window, your back chilly against the November night the few minutes you manage to rest. You spend the bulk of these nights reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom while peering up periodically to make sure the highest blanket atop Rachel’s delicate torso is fluctuating with her tenuous breath. It will leave you cold, the book, its frivolous stakes and poppycock characters out of step with the reality you’re living. But your breath will catch on a particular line: “There was no controlling narrative; he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive’s sake.”
It at once seems to capture everything you worry about life and also the fundamentally self-preserving instinct you feel you lack. What is wrong with you, with Rachel, that you diverge from this innate goal? Does it mean you see things more clearly or less so? You peer into the night, past the insipid fountain, to the homeless man shivering at the foot of the parking garage. He is too far for you to be sure his cardboard cover is rising and falling in steady time.
You will bring Rachel books you like better, sprawling DeLillo and epic Wallace. You will wince with your hand on the spine of the latter, remembering how he ended things, but you will persist with the knowledge that she finds his other works relatable and moving. Now is no time to spare feelings or pretend that everything is okay. To counterbalance, you will also bring a plush lemon wedge with a permanent smile that looks for all the world like someone snapped off half the sun and made it cuddly.
Alex will bring you a stuffed animal, too, one of the rare moments you are both back in your apartment, where Rachel might have died. It will be after one of your worst fights, the predictable result of the simmering tension that roils beneath caring for someone this long, like a child, and bringing her back from the edge. It is an adorable but slightly grumpy-faced gray rabbit, extra fuzzy with an oversized white tail. It comes from the giftshop in the hospital’s ground floor, where it sat waiting for a father to sneak away from his terminal daughter sleeping in the cancer ward, not knowing how to cope, hoping a bunny can say what he cannot. The second Alex hands it to you, you will dissolve into tears, because you’re exhausted, because it’s perfect for you, because it’s both an apology and forgiveness, because Rachel, twenty-one, hasn’t died but could die and is in a building with six-year-olds who will never make it that long, because there’s no time to be so angry when there’s so much sadness in the world. Over the years that follow, this will become your most cherished stuffed animal as a couple, the one you bring on roadtrips, the one that stays on the bed. It is a totem, a time machine, a monument to your survival, a testament to your tear-stained love. Its ears will lose their rigidity and flop over sideways, its fur will lose its fuzz, and when your friend reads that eternal passage from The Velveteen Rabbit at your wedding, it will have another layer of meaning all your own.
Rachel is not your child. Her actual parents will come back that first afternoon and hug you and Alex too long and too hard right there in front of Rachel. Now that she’s out of immediate danger, they will be frank with her, asking her what’s up, why she almost threw it all away, and you will learn, slowly, that this is no one’s first bout with these feelings, these actions, even the stomach pump. Outside the room, quietly, they will hug you even longer and say there is nothing they can ever do to repay you for driving her here that night, thank you, oh God, thank you.
--
You will be in a black suit, hugging Rachel’s father while he sobs softly on your lapel, more than six years later. And all you will want is to send a snapshot of this moment back in time, to the same you and her same father hugging and crying in the hallway outside her closely monitored room. It would have to be a wide angle shot, to capture the white tablecloths and the disco lights and the revelers, for you are both in black suits and weeping. She made it, oh God, thank you.
--
You will follow her progress through the intervening years, from the depressing understaffed facility (that enforces visiting hours) where Rachel is transferred from the Children’s Hospital to the same apartment where her fretful roommates will have restocked the kitchen with fresh new dishes. From Rutgers to taking some time off, to eventually returning to give a TED-style talk at the Ignite Conference on being a survivor, shortly before graduating.
“Three years ago was my last suicide attempt,” she will declare on a stage before a packed auditorium. “And in and out of consciousness, I saw my dad cry for the first and only time. And it was that moment I vowed to never again attempt suicide. Yes, I’ve struggled so hard, hospitalized three times since then, psychosis, suicidal thoughts. And though it’s not on my resumé, I’m so proud to say I have met that promise. And it fuels me every day.”
The crowd will erupt into cheers and applause.
--
But three weeks after her wedding, Rachel will send you a Facebook message. It will read:
So I fell down the Internet rabbit hole and ended up landing on your 2014 post about Robin Williams’ death. Wow, just wow. Hit home so hard. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about the topic that I’ve identified with this much.
“For the suicidal, it is always an option. The issue is keeping it at bay long enough to delay it until the option doesn’t feel as wildly present anymore.”
Yes. To be honest it never crossed my mind that others felt this way too. It’s one of the hardest things to convey to people. I’ve had many conversations “Well yeah I want to die but I promise it’s not a crisis. I don’t actually want to do it and I’ll probably always feel like this. However, me talking about and asking for help is actually a good sign!” I too have utilized all 7 of those tactics. I would make little bargains with myself.
She will be talking about something you wrote, a frustrated blog post trying to get the unsuicidal to understand what it was like to live with feeling otherwise. You were seething at the time, upset with the media’s desire to whitewash Robin Williams’ suicide and squander an opportunity for a public discussion of the topic. In response to well-intentioned but ultimately misguided media guidelines about pretending celebrity suicides were mere unexpected deaths, you noted that few people talk about actual crisis-level suicide prevention methods, like hiding knives, pills, or even utensils to buy yourself a few precious seconds and deter an impulsive attempt. You had a list of seven intervention tactics, including these. Set an exhaustingly high bar for the quality of your suicide note. Find someone else just as sad to talk to about just how sad the world is so you can understand each other and feel okay about being sad. Quit everything in your life and spend all your time doing the one thing you still kind of sort of enjoy a little.
...I do love the tips about distancing yourself from the easiest option. Sadly all of my attempts were because I for just 2 seconds said fuck this. I then would do something just plain stupid out of impulse. It’s crazy that for as often as I would ruminate about ways to kill myself 0 attempts were actually thought out.
That’s the thing about managing a mental illness. People don’t realize just how much planning goes into it even where you look like HOORAY YOU’RE CURED. Nope. Never will be cured but happy to say I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been! It does come with a lot of work. Pretty much just doing my best to stay super self-aware (moods, health, food, sleep, work balance, all of it). It’s crazy that just one slip up, one time saying “fuck all that” can literally kill me.
She will describe an incident a year prior in which she swallowed more pills, a 90-day supply of three different medications. And on impulse, she turned her guard off, took them, and woke up days later in the ICU with a tube down her throat.
I’m so lucky I’m alive... I genuinely was doing well. The suicidal thoughts were the lowest they’ve ever been and my overall contentment with life was at its highest. But that ONE moment. That ONE impulse almost undermined all of that.
And you will be knocked on the floor because you’d made the same mistake you lament others making about you. Marking them as safe because they’re married, because they’ve made it a certain number of years or past a certain threshold. Wanting that postcard from a future moment because it justifies all the intervening pain. When you know the fundamental truth about suicidalism: it is like alcoholism. It is never over. It is only at bay and it must be kept there, actively, every day of your life.
The wedding is real. It actually happens. It is not a funeral, tears and black suits aside. But it is also not an ending. It is a milestone, a moment, a choice to live now. And now. And still now.
Rachel is fighting for her life and you are fighting for yours and we are all terminal and we choose to live anyway.
END