Suicide and Storm

In October 2002 the Angels were playing in the World Series, and the D.C. Snipers were taking lives, and I was trying to end my life.

I tried to end my life in my usual way: by starvation.

I had booked a flight to Germany and told my brother and law partner that I was going on vacation. Between booking and departure, I decided to die. The timing was favorable: by the time anybody wondered where I was, my track would be obscure.

I packed on the day that I was supposed to leave for Germany. I packed a small tent, a sleeping bag, a gas lantern, fuel, water bottles, iodine pills, a Bible, Don Quixote, a radio, extra batteries, and many cartons of cigarettes.

Then I took a cab toward Forest Falls. I didn’t take my own car, because I didn’t want my parked car to proclaim my nearness. I had the cab driver pull over before we got to the town.

Along the road to Forest Falls, a stream runs behind trees and brush. I hiked along a little-traveled trail next to the stream until I found a flat space large enough to pitch my tent in. The stream ran between my camp and the trail.

I purified stream water with the iodine pills. Since I planned to die, it might seem strange that I bothered to purify the water. But I was particular of my mode of death. And I wanted to die in relative comfort. In my last days, I didn’t want the agonies of giardia.

I passed the time. I smoked. I had calculated how long it would take to die, and I rationed my cigarettes to last to the end. At first, I smoked one cigarette every waking half hour. Then I started to think that I would outlive my estimate. So I cut back to one cigarette per hour. Between cigarettes, I checked my watch often to see when I could smoke my next cigarette.

I remember reading Don Quixote. I don’t remember reading the Bible. That’s not to say that I didn’t read it.

I listened to the World Series on the radio. I would miss parts of the games, because the radio’s reception wasn’t 100%. I was glad that the Angels won.

Death was proximate, but I wasn’t done with the worries of the world. A client’s legal brief was due in the Court of Appeal. One day, I hiked a mile or so to a Christian retreat center that I knew about, and I used their pay phone to call my brother to tell him who he should hire to write the brief. I recall making more than one trip to the retreat center to make calls. I don’t remember what the other calls were about. The walk to the retreat center was steep, and I knew that in time I would no longer have the strength to make the walk.

One day a young woman and her large dog came by my camp. The dog approached me, the woman didn’t. I petted the dog for a while, then they left.

I was calm while I waited to die. I was starving to death because I chose to starve to death. I knew that my strength would dwindle and then I would starve to death because I could not walk to safety. I accepted that.

Then the rain came. It was a huge storm. I stayed inside my tent, except to replenish my water and to urinate. The stream between my camp and the trail grew wider, deeper, and swifter. After a time, I saw that it was going to overwhelm my camp, so I tried to climb to higher ground. But my camp was hemmed in by thick bushes. I later found out they were poison oak.

The water rose. I foresaw death by being swept away in the flood, tumbling in the icy water until my head smashed into a rock. That wasn’t what I had planned, or wanted. I was reconciled to death by starvation, but not by the violence of a swift, cold flood.

So I made a decision. I knew that if I waited, I wouldn’t be able to enter the deepening, racing water without being swept away. I abandoned my camp and strained through the water to the trail. I made my way back to a picnic area and shivered. I had been in the camp for 26 days.

I walked to the road and called 9-1-1 on a emergency roadside phone. I told the operator who I was, and where I was. Deputy sheriffs came. As I sat in the back of a patrol car, the deputy asked me where I had camped, because he had looked and couldn’t find me. This stirred two reactions in me: astonishment that he knew that I was in the area (the trips to the retreat center must have tipped somebody off); and amazement at how lackadaisical his effort to find me had been. I was not all that hard to find if you knew that I was in the area.

I was taken to the county mental ward. It was unpleasant. They gave me a turkey sandwich that was so dry and tasteless that, even though I had not eaten in 26 days, I could not eat it. I was in a large room for hours with other involuntary detainees, while we waited to be screened for admission to the ward.

Two security guards controlled the room. They stood at a lectern in the middle of the room, channel surfing the TV. They shouted at the detainees. Without consulting professionals, they put people into solitary confinement. One young man wouldn’t stay in his chair. He slid out of his chair and lay on the floor in front of it – a crazy guy acting crazy, but not violent and not dangerous. The security guards confined him.

One of the detainees was a former client of mine. He was seriously schizophrenic. When his father was alive, his father took care of him. But his father had died, and he was alone in the world.

But I was afraid that he would see me and want to talk. When he was off his meds, he would babble. Listening to him, you could recognize words in his speech, and you could recognize that his sentences had grammatical structure, but you couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. If you tried to listen to him, he exhausted you mentally with no actual communication to reward the effort. So I sank down in my cushioned chair and covered my face as best I could with my hands. He didn’t see me among the twenty-some other detainees. When he fell asleep, I relaxed.

In time I was screened. I quickly told the screener that I had private insurance. I was eager to leave the county ward for the relative comfort of a private institution.

A privately-run treatment center sent an attractive, nice-seeming woman to collect me. On the way to her car, we left the county lock-up and walked to the front of the building and the glass door. It was still raining hard.

Inside the door, an old man stood looking out. He was homeless. He had feigned being a danger to himself to get out of the rain, to get a few free meals. It’s an old ruse. His ruse had been discovered, and he had been ejected from bedlam. He looked out at the watery maelstrom, unable to make himself walk into it.

God, Madness, and Me

Madness changed the way I see myself and the way I see God.

Madness for me was foraging in dumpsters and looking for places to sleep out of the wind. (Orange groves are bad.  Bushes next to freeways are good.)  It was disembodied voices and a terrible vision. It was lying strapped to a gurney, howling while a hospital staff-member taunted me. It was hard, degrading, and scary.

I’m well now.

I won’t tell much about my life as a homeless lunatic. Not now, at least. Truth is, before today I've told this story to few people, and I've told the whole story to nobody. I worry that people will look down on me.

But if I keep the larger part of the story to myself, I will at least tell you a truth of its effect. This trauma led me to reject some beliefs that I shared with most American Christians. It fundamentally changed my cozy, easy ideas about God. It shifted the earth under me, and it cleared my mind.

My madness did not draw me closer to God. It did sharpen my belief in him. I know that he exists like I know the lines in my hand. But my experience was the opposite of rapture. It brought me no joy.  It deepened me; it sobered me.

My Christianity was not cursory before my madness. I was a long-time churchgoer. I was a deacon at my Presbyterian church. I tithed. I took courses at a theological seminary in Pasadena. I left a career as a public prosecutor to travel to China, where, under an American Christian-service organization, I taught law at Chinese colleges and universities. I spent years absorbing scripture daily, sometimes for hours. I had read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation several times in several translations.

After my madness, I lost my hunger for scripture. Lately, the Bible has seized my attention again. I don’t know where this inspiration comes from, but I welcome it.

I haven’t gone without biblical musings in the years between my trauma and now. Based upon years of study, I could draw upon a pool of knowledge. These musings confirmed an accord between the Bible and what I learned from my season of madness. I believe that still as I test my beliefs by studying the Word.

The Spanish painter Francisco Goya became deaf.  After his deafness, he produced paintings that were literally and emotionally dark, even monstrous.  My theology after my madness became dark like Goya's paintings after his deafness. 

From this dark place, I see a tidal wave coming.  It's like madness taught me to reckon water that pulls back to sea that foretells a destructive wave to come.  I worry for people, that they don't see this, that they don't talk about it, that they don't take steps to live and not to die.

Instead, I sense that America makes happy-talk about God and salvation.  We are an optimistic people, and our theology is optimistic: God is kind, salvation is easy, and Hell is a place for people worse than us.  Our material comfort fools us into a false sense of a benign universe and a tolerant God.  God is tolerant, but only to a point.

This is because the stakes are supremely high.  We want the world to be a pleasure boat, but it's a liberty ship trying to take us to safety through a sea filled with a dangerous enemy that seeks our harm.  A liberty ship demands sterner discipline that a cruise ship.

So I speak out to warn. I feel like the ancient mariner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem. He started on a voyage that seemed at first ordinary. But he and his fellow seamen were swept to a far-away, harsh sea. He sinned grievously. All died on this supernatural voyage but the mariner. He returned to the living to tell his sobering tale. It’s not a perfect simile, but like the "grey beard loon" of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I think my journey gives me something important to tell. I have done this a little in past posts, and I plan to do it more in the future.

And yet:

Come now, ye that say, To-day or to-morrow we will go into this city, and spend a year there, and trade, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. What is your life? For ye are a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that. [James 4:13-15.]

Still, these are my plans.