On Suicide

The last time I sat down to write, I had every intention of complaining about how my class reunion was coming up again and the organizers wanted a senior picture for the name badges, and I never had a senior picture made so I wasn't sure if I could go.

Instead I wrote about how I hadn't seen anyone since my stroke and I threw in a line about how my prom date had died and a year later I didn't even know how.

One of her friends messaged me immediately and told me she had killed herself.

It was a shock.

My friend went on to say that she was fragile and she had been for a long time, and the family didn't like to talk about it.

Which explains why the very first email message I sent after the stroke (and after I was verbal enough to write a coherent email) went unanswered.

Her death is also one of the reasons I started this blog. When I was getting physical therapy at Cardinal Hill she was the one person I kept thinking about - not romantically, but because she had been a licensed Physical Therapist. Her funeral was the day I got kicked out of the hospital, and I was in a wheelchair, couldn't talk and Robin didn't want to drive me to Frankfort.

I always make a point to say I was "kicked out" of Cardinal Hill because I was asked to leave. The last few weeks I was in the hospital, I was considering killing myself. The reason I didn't was I saw how much my stroke and subsequent hospitalization had done to Robin, and I didn't want to put her through the strain of a funeral.

It scared me that I was contemplating suicide. I had only done that once before, when my marriage was going badly and I found myself on the third floor of the University of Kentucky library looking down at the lobby floor and wondering what it would feel like to jump.

It wasn't even half a second of contemplation, but it was enough to scare me. Years later when the marriage counselor asked me if I had ever considered suicide, I thought about that moment and said yes, which promptly got me a closed door session with the counselor who seemed almost disappointed that I didn't have plans to off myself.

Up until the hospital, I considered the thought of suicide ridiculous. Once in the dorm I disappeared for a few hours and when my friends Angie and Kim found me a few hours later, Angie said to me, "We thought you had committed suicide."

I actually laughed the idea was so ridiculous.

It wasn't so ridiculous ten years later when I was in a hospital bed and couldn't move, could barely think and was having to watch my wife come in every morning. I wasn't allowed out of bed but I had a plan. I would transfer to my wheelchair, scoot to the bathroom and hang myself with my belt. I hadn't figured out how to secure the belt but the belt was my only option.

I thought about it day and night, and I was awake all night, watching the clock tick.

I decided to get myself thrown out early, so I started throwing myself out of bed, threatening nurses and generally making a nuisance of myself. My speech therapist told me that even if I apologized, they wouldn't keep me.

I was happy to be going home; Robin wasn't.

She would have to take care of me and she wasn't convinced she could do that. The hospital staff trained her on transfers and scrounged some equipment. We had to buy a wheelchair and toilet seat and they couldn't find a shower chair but my parents picked one up at Goodwill. It smelled for a week or two, but it worked.

Home Health worked with Robin on the transfers and the first question they always asked was, "Has he fallen since our last visit?"

For a while the answer was yes, then it became not since that one time I told you about, and then finally the day came when we couldn't remember the last time I had fallen.

Eventually I moved to a cane instead of the walker and recently back to my Chuck Taylor All Stars instead of a bulky brace.

 I still had a dead spot in the center of my brain but I could think again. I could do math. I started making connections between seemingly unrelated things. I was happy.

Then I found out Amy Farmer committed suicide.

I called her my prom date because that was the simplest term for what I was. I had asked her to prom and she said yes, and we went. I took her home early because she said she felt uncomfortable and I drove around the backroads of Franklin County in my grandparents' Buick until it wastime for the party we had been invited to attend afterwards.

I changed out of my tuxedo doing ninety miles per hour on the road to Peaks Mill. I didn't turn fast enough when the road turned and ran straight into someones front yard. It left visible ruts. I backed out and went to the party without Amy. They watched Steel Magnolias and I slept on the floor by myself.

We both ended up at the University of Kentucky in the fall. She majored in Physical Therapy and I majored in drinking. I took a lifeguarding class that her mother taught and that's how I became a lifeguard. I did it to impress a girl.

We settled into a rut. She lived in Boyd Hall, which was the honors dorm, and I lived in Haggin Hall, which was in the middle of campus. All of our friends from high school had (with a few exceptions) gone to UK with us and all lived in North campus dorms.

Every night I would hike across campus for dinner at the student center with Amy and the rest of the Franklin County crowd. After dinner I would go back to Amy's room, watch Jeopardy with her then go home.

It wasn't much of a social life, I'll admit, which is why I began to spend all night in the computer lab. I would walk from her room to McVey hall (where the computer lab was) and work on the computer all night. I wrote short stories and played games, but mainly I tried out new Unix commands.

UK was using a computer network called UK Prime and instead of actual computers, one had to log in from terminals. The internet was entirely text based then, and jpegs and gifs wouldn't become widespread until the World Wide Web and html were invented.

Pictures were limited to ascii art, which was pictures made up using text characters. Also, you could crash a server by mailing the screenplay to Monty Python and the Holy Grail which was apparently a popular prank since I heard of it being done twice.

The lead programmer/computer guru at UK was a man named Rex, who looked like Lazlo, the guy who lived in the dorm closet in Real Genius. He was almost always in the computer lab in the early morning when I was there. He had written a dungeon crawler for the Prime system and it wasn't text based but the characters were all punctuation marks.

I saw someone ask him once if he had really written the game, and he responded by asking who else was playing. The student said his friend and him were playing and Rex said,"Watch this."

The friend, who was still playing shouted something about a dragon, stood up in the middle of the computer lab, shouted something about it killing him, and started to have a nervous breakdown in the middle of the computer lab. Rex hit a few keystrokes, and the guy who's character had just been killed said, "Wait a minute it's all back," and sat down and played for another half an hour.

Rex was God, as far as I was concerned.

Later, when UK lost their license to the Phone chat program, he coded a new program called Bone. The people who had used Phone were called Phoners, so when they switched over to Bone they became Boners.

Which is where I met my new batch of friends.

The old friends fell apart very suddenly. While I was in Jamestown at Lake Cumberland State Resort Park as a lifeguard, Amy and three of our friends were in a car wreck and Suzanne Elam was killed. The fence post that decapitated her scraped across Amy's face on the way and left her scarred. The last time I saw her she still hadn't learned to drive, and would only ride in the middle of the backseat.

I blamed myself for Suzanne's death. A few weeks before I had meant to invite her to a concert and even called information and wrote down her phone number. If I made that phone call, I thought at the time, she would still be alive.

And Amy wouldn't have been in the car. We had a falling out. After months of hanging out in her room, she finally agreed to go on a date with me. The only thing was, I wasn't allowed to tell her mother. Hopeless romantic that I am, I made the date for Valentine's Day.

Which is also Robin's brother's birthday, which means when my Eagle Scout Court of Honor was snowed out they moved it to Valentine's Day. I had to cancel my date.

But it worked out for me. Robin was at the Court of Honor and she was wearing a blue dress she had borrowed from her mother to try to impress me. I went to Kroger the next day to buy Amy a flower, but it was the day after Valentine's Day so all they had were the discounted bundles. I bought 3 or 4 bundles, picked out the best carnation and took it to Amy's dorm room.

The main surprise was that Amy's lesbian friend from down the hall had also brought her a single flower for Valentine's Day. I was heartbroken so I eased my wounded spirit by gathering some friends and handing out random flowers up and down Euclid Avenue. We took what was left and planted them in the snow outside of Boyd Hall. As we went inside I heard someone shout,"Hey, there are flowers IN THE SNOW!"

It totally made the whole day worth it.

So basically, my one shot at Amy Farmer was ruined by my future wife and I don't regret it. What I do regret is letting Amy and I become so estranged. The summer, after Suzanne died, when I asked our friend Ginger how Amy was doing, she blurted out, "She has a boyfriend," then apologized. I said, that isn't what I meant, but it was still nice to hear. She had moved on with her life.