Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [61]
“They'd be happy,” she said. I remembered feeling exactly that way in the past.
“No, they wouldn't,” I told her firmly. “They would never get over it.”
And on and on I talked to her, telling her about hope, and the future, and living. I told her how valuable she was, about the good times she had ahead. I was using all the words that had been used with me, all the messages that people had tried to ram into my own depressed brain.
It seemed to comfort her. At any rate, she didn't kill herself, and after a while she was discharged. She must have believed some of the things I had told her. The problem was, I didn't quite believe them myself.
15
Lori Scarsdale, New York, April 1985—October 1985
Suicide was on my mind again.
One of my favorite movies was Frank Capra's It's a Wonderjul Life. I watched it all the time. My parents were so happy to see me engrossed in such an upbeat, wholesome movie that they bought me my own copy. I guess most people find it makes them feel good to watch Jimmy Stewart playing George Bailey, who is rescued from despair by a sweet guardian angel. That's not the way I felt. The part I fixated on was the scene in which Jimmy Stewart/George Bailey decides he'd be worth more dead than alive. That's just what I felt. I had put a tremendous burden on everyone. I would be better off dead.
My head swarmed with suicidal fantasies.
The Voices in my head were using megaphones. They called me waste, rubbish, junk, bile. “You're nothing but a piece of shit,” they screamed at me. I told Dr. Rockland what they were saying. To try to tease me out of believing in them, he made up an acronym for their message: I was LOWPOS, he said: A Lazy, Obese, Worthless Piece of Shit. I think he meant to make fun of the Voices, but it seemed he was making fun of me, and I felt worse and worse.
I felt hopeless. I was never going to get better. All I was doing was spending time that was really wasted since I was ultimately going to get done what had to be done. Put your finger in a bucket of water and pull it out. The hole left is how much I'd be missed.
Killing myself was my job, my responsibility. I mentally punished myself each day for not having done it yet. The notion that suicide is against the law always preyed on my mind. What were the authorities going to do? Put my corpse behind bars? Handcuff my wrists with no pulse? Me-Murder, I called it. Would they take my lifeless body, peel it off the pavement and make it stand trial for that Me-Murder? Hah! Let's see them try to stop me.
Several times I tried to get a pistol to blow my brains out. But for someone who had been as sheltered from violence as I had been, it wasn't easy. You can't just go to Bloomingdale's and charge a revolver to your account.
I didn't want to just take an overdose or slit my wrists. I wanted something powerful that would reflect the despair that haunted me every day of my life. As the pressure of these thoughts built, my imagination went wild seeking ways of accomplishing my aims. I thought about jumping in front of a car, or better yet, a truck; or even better yet, a train. I thought about jumping out of a moving car onto the highway. I thought about standing on a bridge, pouring a can of gasoline over my head, lighting a match, and jumping in flames to my death. Splat. Rocks in a bathing suit, then into the ocean? How about jumping into a vicious animal's cage in the Bronx Zoo?
I tried desperately to dodge these fantasies. Planning on jumping off the top of the Galleria Mall? Then keep away from it. Don't even drive by it. Thinking about dumping all my capsules into a McDonald's shake? Never go to McDonald's again. Not even for French fries.
As frightening as the scenarios were, however, they gave me a chance at eternal peace. The Voices would alternately chant, “To die! To die! To die!” and then, “Peace! Peace! They are waiting to give you peace!” There was only one route to peace. The pressure was