Up and Down Chimney Rock
After a slow, hard slog (I'm 52) of seventeen hundred steps
The stairway climbing over boulders sloughed from the cliffs above
Winding around sheer bluffs with granite pilasters
We summit the observation platform atop Chimney Rock.
I see the handrail jiggying in electric bas relief
Walk to it, grasp it with palms slightly slick
Magnificent view, but what grasps me is
Gravity's suction, drawing my eye downward
To the shearing cliffs and scrabbled boulders
Imagine climbing over the railing
Fearfully trembling, despairing,
Nancy rushing forward, begging me to come back
Let go and begin to lean outward, an inch at a time
Relishing the wind and sun and clouds and light
Leaning into the breeze, into rare space
Thinking, ok, let's do this
I pass the halfway point, surrender to the suction
Leap away, begin my last dive
Ramrod straight, arms wide in a swan embrace
Like I did as a young man
Soaring off the board in the summer before college
The wind growing suddenly harder as I try to
Slice its buffeting, rocks surging upward
In good form I close my eyes . . .
A cloud covers the sun and I blink
Self-consciously wipe my palms on my pants
Silently blaming the sweat on the climb
Step back from the rail, pose for a picture
Start the slow decline
Down the scarp and scree below.
I find these impulses especially ironic since I'm so sure there's no existence after death, so why would I want to rush my oblivion? Depression isn't rational, is what it is. And though, like most people, I've experienced instances, mere instances like being on a height (like the north rim of the Black Canyon, where you can look down 2200 feet to the Gunnison River) when I thought of flinging myself over the edge, I've also experienced two periods of prolonged contemplating death by my own hand.
The worst, by far the worst, was during the onset of my depressive episode of 2002. That winter, while we were building our log home (and sometimes I can't help but view the past ten years of building six buildings as anything but madness) I found myself trying to come up with a way of suicide that would foolproofedly appear accidental, accidental because I would never want my family to know I'd taken my own life. So I thought of having a car wreck (too chancy - I could end up paralyzed and dependent), or breathing a mixture ammonia and bleach (we were using highly concentrated ammonia, 27% versus the 4% stuff you get in the cleaning aisle at your grocery store) though my family would consider me too smart for such a blunder, you see, or simply disappearing and hoping no one ever found my body. But that hard winter, in the basement cutting indoor trim on my Shopsmith, I concluded the best way was an accident with the power tools, just a simple slip of the hand on the table saw and I could sever an arm, bleed out before I could get nextdoor (we built the log home on our ten acres next door to our current home) to get help.
I didn't do it, though I spend too much time staring at that saw blade and weeping. That period passed, and I didn't have another such sustained period until last fall, after my current relapse. This time, I didn't give so much thought to hiding my hand in the matter. My family are hunters, and my dad has about twenty rifles of various calibers. I found myself thinking about taking a rifle, placing it under my chin and ending this for good. Again, such thoughts are not rational, or, better yet, are not amenable to rational treatment. So strong were these impulses that I didn't hunt at all last season, simply refused to go into the woods with a rifle. Hell, I even avoided the rooms where my dad keeps his rifles, watching the football games in the living room rather than downstairs in my dad's man-cave in the basement. That period passed, too, probably by the time football season ended, this impulse simply faded away under the combined weight of meds and counseling.
I suspect that behind suicidal tendencies is a desire for rebirth, for starting over, for eliciting so severe a break in my life's continuity that I can begin anew without the limits of the past, without the mistakes and missteps, the times I did not take full advantage of opportunities, when I half-tried and left my future shallower than it should've been. Of course, without reincarnation suicide is no starting over at all, but an irrevocable ending, yet the impulse to suicide must be otherwise, or have a different dimension, since pure thoughts of suicide should send one screaming away. For me, suicidal thoughts feel similar to dreams I have about starting over, of returning to high school, of playing football, of being in college where this time I do things differently, I import the hindsight I've gained from half a century into a period that has no business having such wisdom, but I do it anyway (in my dreams) and now can look back on a different past from a different future. This isn't rational, either. Rational would be to take fair accounting of my present, see how depression has engendered in me a self-destructive tendency that has thwarted my ambitions at several key points in my past, then realize that I have engendered a break, a significant break in my life over the last four years, and that I am at a place where I can start a new future, that my path forward can be different than the self-negating path that has brought me here. I want this to be real. Thank you for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment