Will's Choice

by Gail Griffith

  This Muslim terrorist stuff is no joke and it’s spreading rapidly. What to do?

  We think about you all the time and wonder about what you are doing and if you have taken some pictures of Montana. Do take some in the fall. The colors should be splendid.

  Give my love to everybody and special hugs for you, Sweetie,

  Love,

  Maga

  “This Muslim terrorist stuff is no joke…. What to do?” My mother was prescient. Who knew as the summer of 2001 wound down that we were about to suffer a national anxiety attack at the hands of individuals who turned the term “suicidal” on its head and used death to make a political statement? What to do indeed.

  Like the millions of Americans who struggled to figure out what had happened on September 11, 2001, the first thing I wanted to do was to track down my kids; I wanted reassurance that they were safe. (They were never in any danger.) But that is what we do, isn’t it? We hear a fire engine racing down the street in the direction of our children’s school and immediately our hearts leap. Our first instinct: our children are in harm’s way. We follow the siren’s scream until we are certain it isn’t aimed in their direction and we hold them close in our mind’s eye until the echo fades.

  9

  CALAMITY AND CLARITY

  Will’s birthday greeting to me, from Marion, Montana:

  September 12, 2001

  Dear Mom—

  Happy Birthday!

  I love you a lot. Don’t worry; Max is really good at music. And none of us were in any airplanes any time this week. Looks to me like everything is just fine.

  Love,

  Will

  Letter to Will from his uncle Joe, from New York City:

  September 13, 2001

  Dear Will,

  Will, I just had an e-mail from your dad, saying you don’t mind school up in Montana too much, and you’ve gotten some pals. That’s great news. I’m keenly interested if you like backpacking at all. When I was your age I thought it was a kind of torture old farts put themselves through, since you spent all your time looking at the trail, making sure you didn’t trip over any roots or rocks. By my sophomore year in college, on the other hand, I took a glorious backcountry backpack trip, and I was a backpacking buff for life. Next time I see you I’d love to hear about your experiences backpacking.

  The bombing of the World Trade Center was so grisly and tragic, I’m not sure how much you’ve followed the story. I wasn’t anywhere near it and never was in the slightest danger, but I did get a little catch in my throat, looking at the towers roaring ablaze with fire—in real life—so to speak, after seeing the same images on TV. I looked at the crowd looking at the towers, looked myself and was stupefied at the tragedy of it all. I then dived down into a subway, and not five minutes later the first tower collapsed. I didn’t know anybody who worked up there, and felt lucky all the way around.

  Today as I was teaching…A favorite student of mine from last year came into class late, very agitated. She had to talk so I put my ear beside her mouth and she told me her father had been working on the 97th floor of Building #2. This little girl is only 13, even though she’s a sophomore in high school. She’s as bright as anything, but young and sensitive and she and her mother and sister were out of their minds with worry for their beloved father. Who made it home alive. He had made it down the stairwell and crossed the plaza just minutes before Building #1 collapsed. He went directly home, his nose streaked black with smoke he’d inhaled in the stairwells. His head covered with powdered cement dust. Alive, after all their worries about him.

  What happened to that little girl today? Some moron stuck his head in her face on her way to school and hollered, “Kill all the Muslims!” Hot tears glistened down her cheek as she told me this last bit: “We’d worried so much about my father, we couldn’t take it, but then he came home and was all right. And now this.” She had come to my class straight from a counselor, to whom she’d also told her story. She was heartbroken. It’s a hard, hard world, isn’t it Will?

  Fortunately, from what I know of this girl from teaching her all last year, I know she’s going to be all right. Pete Hamill said (as I think I’ve told you before), “Being Irish means knowing the world is going to break your heart.” This little student of mine didn’t know that until now. But in a little while, with her loving parents and sister showering her in love, she’s going to be good as new.

  If your heart is a bit broken, Will, with the struggle and confusion of wrestling with your depression, I hope it heals—at least a little bit—everyday. Your father and mother’s love for you is boundless, Will. And little Kate loves you fiercely, as does Steph, and Aunt Chris and Bill. And Grandpa and Grandma love you as tenderly as they’ve loved me every day of my life. I’m part of this vast loving constellation, Will. I think of you and my heart leaps.

  I look forward to seeing you soon, Will.

  Love,

  Uncle Joe

  Letter to Will from Bob, from San Francisco:

  September 14, 2001

  Hey, Will—

  Quite a wild time of it for all of us this week, what with several thousand Americans killed on their home ground. Airports closed. No stock market for now. No baseball or football, out of respect. Suddenly, all Americans are unabashedly patriotic. Tearing up at the sounds of tunes they might have joked about a week before. Irony is suddenly out of fashion. That’s not as bad as it sounds. We were all getting a little heavy with it. Suddenly we’re trying a lot harder to care about one another. I’m sure there are still people who are unaffected by all this, but it’s a little difficult to see who they might be. I guess smaller kids might qualify.

  My friend Jane in Brooklyn wrote to say they are all fine. Her son Jim (the kid who climbed all over you that time we stopped by to visit) looks at the whole event in terms of its impact on “The Simpsons.” Sitting home for days with the New York schools closed and little but news on TV, he concluded that they must have produced most of the cartoon shows at the World Trade Center.

  Big news at home is that Max decided to drop out of Berkeley for a while. He was having a hard time getting his head back into it and he wants to work and push on his band for the time being. He may have warned you when we visited that this was a possibility. It certainly didn’t spring out of the blue. I, of course, have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think that you get a lot more out of school when you really want to be there—and I suspect that time will come again for Max. Not to say I can remember a time when Max really wanted to be in school. On the other hand, I think he’s at an age where he really needs to be pushing himself in a lot of directions at once. School, music, friends—but school should be one of them for now, in my view. But this is Max’s life, not mine. And it’s also important that people make their own decisions.

  So lots of changes on all fronts. I often feel that change is good. It keeps us fresh and on our toes. One change I know I like is that you can call us up, at least briefly, every Tuesday night. Hang in there.

  Love,

  Dad

  Letter from Will to Bob, from Marion, Montana:

  September 2001

  Dad…Hi,

  Nothing very new here. I’m reading Lonesome Dove. It’s good and I like it a lot. My friend Brad says that he read the prequel, Dead Man’s Walk and he says I should read that first, but if I’m going to read any of them it might as well be the original one because it won a Pulitzer Prize or whatever.

  I got a letter from Uncle Joe. He had some pretty good stories and stuff about the terrorists. I read something the other day from one of the survivors of the buildings’ collapse. Said he saw amongst the wreckage a body seat-belted into an airplane seat and the body of a flight attendant. Crazy stuff. Be careful out there in the real world. Crazy shit happens.

  Love,

  Will

  Letter from me to Will, from Washington, D.C.:

  September 18, 2001

  Dearest Woo,

  It’s been so
hard to write because I don’t know what to say. I got your wonderful birthday note yesterday—you’re so right—none of us died in an airplane crash and Max’s music is good (and getting better; I understand from Dad—they’re moving in a more bluesy/rock direction these days), and I am banking on everything being all right. But right now, I feel as though the world has changed fundamentally and all of our baselines have to shift, too. I am heartbroken to have you so far away. But what is most important in my life (as you know) are you and your brother. (Yes, I have to admit certain affection for “Log Ass.”) And given that there’s no way around that, the second most important thing to me is your getting well. That’s your job right now—while the rest of us are worrying about the Taliban and whether or not we should bomb Afghanistan even farther back into the Stone Age than they already are—your job is to get well, finish high school, and get well some more.

  I’m so disappointed in the world right now. I thought we were building a better life for you guys, and now it all seems to be going into the tank. It bears out the notion that the nature of war has fundamentally changed from soldier on soldier (like the good old days) to indiscriminant attacks on innocent civilians. So all bets are off. But I’m trying to focus on the small things for now—like Michael Jordan coming back to play for the Wizards, or plans for Christmas or painting new colors around the house. I can’t wait to see you in a few weeks. We’re planning to stay in Whitefish where we were before. We can drive to Missoula to see what it looks like, unless of course, you’d really like to spend the weekend hiking. (Ha!)

  I’ll talk to you Monday night. Meanwhile, know I love you like crazy and think about you every minute.

  Mom

  Letter to parents from the directors of Montana Academy, Kalispell, Montana:

  September 23 2001

  Dear Parents:

  Delayed by the nation’s recent tragedy we write—more or less as usual, at block end—to summarize campus innovations, to communicate policy and anticipate key events.

  We were glad to reach you in the first hours of that awful Tuesday. When we gave the student body the news during Tuesday’s lunchtime community meeting, we were able to tell them that you were all right. We recorded the network news, and after lunch we plugged into a monitor and VCR downstairs in the Lodge so we could share the nation’s first grasp of these attacks. Then we held team groups. Afterwards, we got together again to watch a couple of hours of network feed. We watched our students (and staff) absorb the frightful news, study the facts quietly, console one another, ask intelligent questions, and we thought you would have been proud of their grace, tact and kindness. Over the weekend, we brought more recorded feed, but left the monitor downstairs, so as to preserve in the lounge and at meals a quiet space—free from the networks’ shrill perseverations—for conversation.

  Our Fall Workshop will take place Thursday—Friday October 25–26. We have delayed this announcement—and this letter—to be sure the airlines would be flying. They seem to be.

  John McKinnon, John Santa,

  Rosemary McKinnon and Carol Santa

  In mid-October 2001, all parents of teens at Montana Academy arrived for a weekend of mandatory seminars and group therapy sessions at Lost Horizon Ranch. Bob, Melissa, Jack, and I returned to our now familiar haunts in Kalispell. This crop of parents arrived from all points on the map and from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and it quickly became evident that our experiences and our children were as varied as our histories.

  Some of us had busted the bank to enroll our children at Montana Academy; for other families the program was an unanticipated deviation from prestigious private schooling. There were divorced couples, struggling mightily to retain a solid front for their children, and there were “intact families,” whose sons or daughters had deviated from a succession of siblings who had made the transition from childhood to adulthood without incident. I only met one or two parents during all of our visits to Montana Academy I would characterize as utterly lacking in parenting skills. For the most part, a family who cared enough about a child to muster the wherewithal to enroll their teen in the program truly wanted their son or daughter to be well—happy, healthy, and well. Each of us was heavily invested—emotionally and financially—in this goal.

  During the two-day parent workshop, we traded our terrible stories of out-of-control teenagers: drugs, drinking, theft, academic failure, sexual promiscuity, depression, eating disorders, and downright bad behavior, each story more awful and heartrending than the last. We resembled the dysfunctional family version of the 1950s television show Queen for a Day, vying for the coveted Amana Defroster Refrigerator by assembling the most heartbreaking inventory of personal statistics and putting our catalogue of woes to an audience vote.

  As we revisited our personal family histories, it quickly became apparent that no matter whether our teenage children suffered from substance abuse, eating disorders, or behavioral problems, an underlying problem for almost all of them was depression. The stories were different but the constant was depression.

  No family, however, had a story quite like ours, like Will’s—a kid who suffered a precipitous descent into a biologically based, major depression absent all of the mishaps their own children had suffered: no declining school performance, no scuffles with authority, no transgressions involving drugs or alcohol, and no ostracism from peers—just a hot-waxed slide into the abyss of depression topped off by a near-fatal suicide attempt.

  We could see our story frightened other parents (“You think your kid’s in trouble, you should hear…”) From their point of view, his illness came out of nowhere and had no bottom. I am sure some of the parents wondered if they were getting the full story. Certainly there must’ve been more to it than we were revealing. “Must be the divorce,” or the weird extended family setup. (I admit we were a curious anomaly—two parents and two stepparents getting along and enjoying one another’s company.) There had to be something we weren’t sharing with the rest of the families.

  In the afternoon of the first day’s session, the parents of the eight boys in Will’s team met in one of the campus log cabins normally used as a classroom. Dennis Malinak, the lead psychiatrist, who treated all of the boys in the team, and Greg Windham, the team leader, ran the group meeting. The object of the session was to foster a frank and open vetting about our sons’ progress—or lack of it—at this point in the program. The group setting offered parents an opportunity to get to know one another and share our thoughts about raising our troubled children.

  As anyone who has ever taken part in group therapy knows, individuals form bonds in groups, often born of shared experience. In the best of circumstances and with skilled facilitators, therapists, or clinicians, the atmosphere allows for a heightened degree of openness and revelation. Certainly, by confessing our most heinous failing—our failure as parents—and by revealing our darkest fears for our children, a bond held us, the eight sets of parents, despite our disparate backgrounds and our children’s individual issues.

  Will was far enough along in the program to begin anticipating his return home. Seated in a circle on hard wooden chairs, I confessed my biggest fear:

  “I worry that despite all the work Will’s done here, and all of the therapy and medication, that Will might make another suicide attempt, without warning…much like the first one.”

  The group fell silent. Dennis appeared to be weighing his response before voicing his opinion when one member of our group, a mother of a child in the program and an emergency room physician, threw out a flippant remark:

  “Well, if someone’s bound and determined to commit suicide, there’s not much anyone can do about it.”

  The good doctor might as well have uncorked a vat of toxic waste in the middle of the classroom. I was dumbstruck. Other parents shot me sidelong glances, part empathy, part horror, before redirecting their vision to their feet. I wanted to leap out of my chair and grab the woman by the throat. Instead, I shrugged and looked a
t Dennis, who tried to dispel the vitriol by launching into another topic. Jack took my hand and squeezed it comfortingly, but as far as I was concerned my engagement in the remainder of the day’s session was over.

  The point of writing a memoir as candid and as painful as this one, and the reason I am willing to risk exposing my son, his former girlfriend, myself, and my family, is to challenge the wickedly misguided notion that(1) a person suffering from depression “wants to die,” and that (2) there is “nothing anyone can do about it.” Think about it: A person with terminal cancer seldom talks about wanting to end his or her life prior to the onset of pain; most want to live as long as they can pain-free. When the cancer patient says, “I want to die,” don’t we interpret the statement as “I want to be pain-free” or “I don’t want to continue to suffer”? On the other hand, if the patient has a treatable form of cancer, shouldn’t family and friends do all in their power to support a treatment regime to sustain the life of their loved one? Suicidal depression must be addressed, just as rigorously as a treatable form of cancer would be attacked by an oncologist. You will never read a suicide note that doesn’t state the obvious in one way or another: “I don’t want to die; I just don’t want to live with the pain anymore.”

  At the cafeteria-style dinner served later in Montana Academy’s newly constructed lodge, we sat, hunkered down like an embattled clan. Several parents approached and cautiously offered their sympathy for the callousness of our cohort’s remark. But it was a low point in our experience at Montana Academy. And, placed in a larger context, it underscores the failure of the medical establishment to train its practitioners to recognize and understand depression. If an emergency room doctor could offer an opinion so uninformed and insensitive, how can we expect the rest of the population to address depression and suicide thoughtfully and with compassion? But if the first day’s session was the nadir of our visit, the second day brought us profound joy.