by Mark Bowden
Mike came to believe that there was only one way out. Those closest to him in the last months understood.
Janet left him alone the afternoon he killed himself. She knew the state he was in. She had stayed home with him all morning. Their arguments over suicide were constant. Janet would insist she needed him, she and the baby couldn’t make it without him. She would fight until she was emotionally spent, and then, sometimes, she would lash out self-protectively, telling him she couldn’t take it anymore, that if he was so damned determined to do it, he should just get it over with. Then, seeing her distress, he would apologize, weeping, somehow sadder still, and Janet would realize she had been turned around. No matter how hard she fought, suicide had come to seem inevitable.
“Just promise me you’ll go peacefully,” she said one day last June.
On the afternoon of June 14, Mike was supposed to go riding. His neighbor, an old cowboy, had promised to teach him how to break horses. So instead of leaving the baby home with Mike as she usually did ( Janet saw it as a hedge against the worst; Mike would never harm or abandon the baby) she took her daughter with her to the office.
“Don’t do anything rash,” she told him before she drove off.
“Don’t worry, I won’t get any rashes,” he teased, a glimpse of the old Mike.
They kissed.
Part of her, she says now, knew it was for the last time. “I thought love would be enough to save him,” she says. “I learned different.”
Marilyn McConnell was a little girl in Princeton, New Jersey, on the night her mother woke up screaming, the night the family remembers as the beginning of this long nightmare.
There was commotion down the hall in her parents’ bedroom. Marilyn’s older sister, Annalee, crept down and looked in. The family doctor was there. He and their father, Ed, were sitting on the bed talking to her mom, Jeanne, who was laughing hysterically. But nothing about the scene was funny. Annalee didn’t know what to make of it. In the morning, Mom was gone.
“She’s in the hospital,” their father said, without further explanation.
“Who could explain?” asks Ed McConnell now. “She was a perfectly lovely, normal wife and mother until that night. She woke up screaming and incoherent. This was back in 1957. She was thirty-two years old…They gave her electroshock. That was about all they had to offer then. She worked her way back to almost normal, but every six months or so from then on she’d fall off the wagon.”
Explanations for mental illness were hard to come by in those days. People just had “nervous breakdowns,” they went “over the edge” or just “cracked up.” People assumed that something must have gone wrong in Jeanne’s childhood, or that she just wasn’t strong enough to cope with life. There was the unspoken assumption that, somehow, it was her fault. She just needed to pull herself together.
She tried. Over and over again. Jeanne was a musician, a fine pianist and singer. Even with four young children, and then a fifth, she taught piano and founded and managed the fifty-member Hopewell Valley Chorus. Many of the old family pictures show her at the piano with children alongside. In periods of calm, she was clear and fine and a full-time loving mother. She would teach and bake bread and make meals and clean the house. That was when she was healthy.
When she “fell off the wagon,” as Ed puts it, she lost interest in everything and everyone. She would lie in bed all day. It was embarrassing and scary. Ed would come home from work and ask the children, “Well, is she out of bed yet?” It could last for weeks. An older cousin came to help out for a while, and an aunt stayed with the family during one stretch. Mostly the kids learned to take care of themselves. The older girls took charge.
“It was always a little awkward when she came back from the hospital,” recalls Annalee, who was eight when her mother had the first episode. Marilyn and Mike were, in turn, younger by a year. Barbara was still a baby. Bill was born in 1960. “We’d have settled into a routine that would start to feel normal, basically taking care of ourselves when Dad was at work, and then Mom would come home again, usually a little spacey from the electroshock, and it wasn’t always easy to just work her back in.”
Jeanne would come home altered. At one point she was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. That was after she started following people around the streets of Princeton. She would scribble down the license numbers of passing cars, convinced they were clues to the plot against her. More common were memory lapses, like the time she packed up the kids and drove them to the store and, once there, was suddenly bewildered.
“She kind of blanked out,” remembers Marilyn. “She couldn’t remember why she was there.”
There were suicide attempts. Numerous overdoses were followed by hurried trips to the hospital, stomach pumps, and long absences. One time Ed wrestled a large knife out of her hand in the kitchen where she stood ranting, threatening to stab herself. Another time she crashed the family car.
Barbara has no clear memory of the early episodes. But as a child she had a recurring nightmare. In it, she would see her mother covered with blood, her throat slit. Barbara would awaken terrified. She had the dream one night when she was staying with a cousin, and told the cousin about it.
“Barbara, that’s not a dream,” he told her. “You know that big scar on your mom’s neck?”
Later Mike would say that during those years he was looking hard all the time to find the right words to say or the right thing to do. If he only could, he was convinced, his mom would pull out of it and be okay. But he could never find the answers.
Later, of course, he understood.
On June 20, 1984, Jeanne McConnell crawled into the bathtub of her apartment in Williamsburg, Virginia, and shot herself in the head.
She had been living alone for years. She was fifty-nine. Her children were grown, and the illness had driven her husband away. She had long since given up leaving her apartment. She paid a boy to bring groceries and run errands. She killed herself the day she got notice that the divorce from Ed was final. She left a letter downstairs, telling where she was to be found, and noting apologetically that the bathtub probably would have to be replaced.
Shortly after that, Mike McConnell stopped showing up at work.
Michael Baime, his supervisor, was shocked. Mike wasn’t just a dependable performer in the residency program at Graduate Hospital, he was a star. He’d been “Best Intern of the Year” the year before. At thirty-two, he was older than most residents, older by four years than Dr. Baime. He was a striking character, fair-haired, square-jawed, athletic, brimming with confidence, enthusiasm, and personality.
There was no edge to Mike’s confidence, no hauteur. To the contrary, he acted as though he had made mistakes, seen hard times, and had been both strengthened and drawn closer to others by the ordeals. He was a skilled listener.
If Mike had a problem as a doctor, Baime thought, it was caring too much. He gave patients his mind and his heart, which can wreck a physician. The same quality endeared him to his colleagues. If Baime hadn’t liked Mike so much, he would have been intimidated by him.
“He wasn’t just talented, he was brilliant,” Baime recalls. “He was always breaking the rules, but in ways that made you step back and scratch your head and say, Now, why didn’t I think of that?”
The road to medicine had been longer for Mike than for most. Out of high school in 1970 he had gone to Cornell University, uncertain of his bearings. Those were days of protest against war and a corrupt establishment. Mike moved in with a group of students and ex-students who shared his idealism and impatience for change, and after two years of spotty attendance in classes, he dropped out. The decision was more personal than political.
“I am not interested in stepping out of life, freezing it, analyzing it,” he wrote to his sister Barbara. “I want to learn by doing, by tasting, touching, feeling what’s in the world. In short, I want to learn to live in the real world by living in the real world.”
With that, Mike’s family lost tra
ck of him for almost two years. He surfaced in Chicago, living with a Guatemalan named Yolanda Heller, who had two sons. They married in 1973. Mike was twenty-two, working in a Ford factory, reading the works of Chairman Mao, and helping to raise two young boys.
“He was pretty close to being a Weatherman,” says his father.
“Mike was never really as radical as Yolanda, but he was into it,” recalls Barbara.
As Mike’s zeal for revolution waned, however, his relationship with Yolanda grew strained. One of their arguments turned violent when Yolanda was pregnant, and she was injured seriously enough to require surgery on her spleen. Months later came an even more severe reckoning. Their daughter was born sickly, and failed to thrive. She lived only six months.
Mike was shattered.
Yolanda called Barbara from Chicago, complaining that Mike had locked himself in the walk-in closet he used as a study, and was refusing to come out. He’d been there for days. That’s where Barbara found him when she flew out. He had lost weight, and his face looked like a tragic mask.
“All he could do was cry,” Barbara recalls. “He couldn’t seem to shake the overwhelming feeling of sadness and guilt. At the time, I didn’t associate any of what he was going through with mental illness, or with my mother. It seemed to be a rational response to losing the baby, even though the mourning was so severe, and lasted so long. Eventually, he pulled himself together and came back out.”
His marriage never recovered. Yolanda and Mike went through a bitter divorce. Determined to salvage something from the sad experience, Mike decided to go to medical school. He had been inspired by the doctors who tried to save his daughter. He reconciled with his family and returned to the East Coast, enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania, and accepted a National Health Service Corps loan to help pay the tuition.
He thrilled to his classes at Penn. By the time he began his residency at Graduate Hospital in 1983, he was an admired young doc with a promising future, ruddy good looks, and abundant charm.
“I met him walking down the hallway at Graduate one afternoon,” recalls Janet, who was working as a neurological intensive care nurse. She was a star in her own right, a woman with a sharp mind and a warm, patient manner. She was also slender and blond, with big blue eyes.
“With me, it was love at first sight, although, with Mike, I always say it was more like lust at first sight,” says Janet, who kept her last name, Jones, after they were married. “Mike would just come by my nurses’ station after that and just sit there and watch me, saying nothing. So I just started talking to him. It was wintertime then and I was wearing these big yellow boots in every morning, and I started finding these romantic little notes stuffed in them at the end of the day.”
After dating for a while, though, they stopped seeing each other because, as Janet recalls, “Mike was not ready to stop seeing other women then.”
That June, Jeanne McConnell committed suicide, and Mike stopped coming to work.
When Baime couldn’t get Mike by phone, he and a few of the other docs went looking for him. They found him lying in the bathtub after the landlord let them in his apartment. He refused to even make eye contact.
Baime had never seen such a transformation. Here was the brightest star in his medical class, this man who inspired everyone he met, reduced to someone emotionally and intellectually inert.
Janet found out about Mike’s state at a party. She hadn’t seen him in weeks, and when she was told, she walked to a back room immediately and phoned him. Mike always said that ring was one of the only ones he happened to answer during that dark time.
He wasn’t exactly thrilled to hear from her, but Janet was determined. She stopped by every day, whether he wanted to see her or not. She got the phone number for Mike’s nearest sister, and Marilyn flew to Philadelphia the next day.
“He got really angry when I walked in,” recalls Marilyn. “He was lying in bed. He looked terrible. He told me he didn’t want me there. He refused to get out of bed. I was hurt, and angry, and I expressed some of that. But none of it connected. He just kept telling me to get out. It was the first time I ever made the connection between Mike and Mom, and it scared me.”
It scared Mike, too. The 1975 depression after his baby daughter’s death had not been the only episode. He had been through another bout of depression in 1982, and had sought medical treatment. Now the cloud was back, worse. He grew convinced that what had happened to his mother was now happening to him.
He told his friend Stephen Ackers, another resident at Graduate, that he had been practicing sticking his head in the gas oven. Eventually, Mike’s friends ganged up on him and talked him into a stay at the Institute, Pennsylvania Hospital’s psychiatric division.
Mike was never sure what pulled him through that time. Neither the drugs nor the counseling seemed to reach him at first; then, suddenly, he was better.
A few weeks later, Janet got a call.
“Something lifted,” Mike said.
In their first three years together, Mike and Janet took glorious vacations. On advice from his doctors, Mike had abandoned his specialty in internal medicine because of his tendency to grow too attached to patients, and concentrated on emergency room work, where he could work regularly scheduled hours, swoop in, save lives, and send patients upstairs for long-term treatment.
At Graduate they called him “Vacation Man.” He and Janet planned adventures, sailing trips to the Caribbean and on Lake Champlain. They learned to scuba dive, took skiing trips, hiked, biked, and climbed.
Mike launched himself at life. Activity and adventure were antidotes to poisonous thoughts. He and Janet bought two houses in Manayunk and rehabbed them. They helped revitalize his grandfather’s family campground in Vermont.
Mike confessed to Janet an ambition to turn his adventures into his lifestyle, to “live on a mountain and not work a nine-to-five job.” Janet had a fantasy of living on a farm, raising animals, maybe starting a business. They began to scan want ads in the back of his medical journals and note exotic locations. In 1987, there was an ad seeking an ER doc for Yakima. “This one sounds good,” said Mike.
They got out a map. Up in the high desert in the eastern foothills of the Cascades, it was a city of 95,000 or so, just a scenic ninety-minute drive from Seattle and Puget Sound. They took a trip west, rented a big, black Caddy, and drove it into the mountains. Mike accepted the job at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital, and they found the perfect house: on a mountain, wraparound deck, lots of windows, a hot tub, stables. It looked over hundreds of miles to the north and east, an expanse rimmed in the distance by snow-capped Cascades. You could sit in the hot tub and look down on hawks swooping over the valley. They moved in 1988, and celebrated by getting married.
Mike worked in the emergency room, and Janet raised sheep and started a health-care consulting business, which took off. Mike bought a forty-two-foot sloop, and they explored Puget Sound up to the San Juan Islands. They were young, beautiful, well-to-do, energetic, and in love—the envy of everyone they knew.
If anything, Mike’s deep depression in ’84 appeared to have altered him for the better. He was extraordinarily empathetic. He seemed to see every new day of his life as a triumph of light over darkness. His energy was infectious.
One morning he called his sister Annalee, who was working in Anchorage, Alaska, as the city budget manager.
“I want you to meet me in Yosemite,” he said.
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
Annalee laughed. She had meetings all that day and the next, loads of work to get done. Mike wouldn’t buy it.
“Okay, I’ll let you go to your meeting tomorrow, but I want you to get on a plane the day after tomorrow, meet me in Yosemite, and we’ll go backpacking together for a week.”
Hooked by the sheer whimsy of it, Annalee couldn’t refuse. They met outside the park, loaded up on groceries, and hiked up into the mountains. They moved so fast Annalee got altitude sickness and cou
ldn’t eat dinner. Then a bear ransacked their provisions as they slept.
Determined to reach the famous Halfdome peak the next day, they hiked without food, and made it. They snapped pictures of each other in front of the otherworldly view, Annalee’s blond hair brightly catching the sun, and Mike in flannel shirt and shorts peering out with binoculars. When they got down to civilization that night, thirsty and starving, Annalee put some coins in a soda machine and punched up, of all things, a Diet 7 UP.
“My God, Annalee, you haven’t eaten in two days!” Mike said, and they laughed until it hurt.
Months later, when Annalee was going through a hard time, she got a card from Mike with an Ansel Adams print of Halfdome on the front and, inside, their pictures at the summit. The note read:
I remember hiking with you to Halfdome, hypoglycemic; and your diet soda before dinner at Mono Lake.
You’re on the trail now, hungry and tired. Mourn but do not despair because you will see Halfdome again. And dinner awaits.
Make it a regular soda this time.
Love, Mike
“You can see why we all loved him so much,” says Annalee.
On sailing adventures with Marilyn’s husband, Peter Miller, Janet and Mike spent long hours talking about life—and death. Peter remembers how moved Mike would get at the beauty of a sunset, of a dazzling night sky, or the way moonlight softly rounded the wave crests of the ocean. The sudden appearance of a school of porpoises thrilled him as if he were a small child; it meant chucking all plans to follow them for hours, with Mike hanging off the bow of the boat. At such times he seemed “like a force of nature,” Janet says, “something wild.”
The cloud descended again in the fall of 1992. Mike was still under obligation to the National Health Service Corps, and it was threatening to force him to relocate. He would have to quit his job at the hospital and drag Janet, whose business was just getting on its feet, to some distant locale.
