by Mark Bowden
Janet noticed Mike start to slip, then slide headlong. He didn’t want to get out of bed. He wouldn’t eat. He obsessed about what a mistake it had been to take the NHSC loan in the first place. How his poor decision was destroying their lives.
It had been eight years since the depression in Philadelphia. It was back.
Janet called Annalee, asking for help. She was worried Mike would kill himself. His doctor had prescribed Prozac, but it would take weeks to take effect. She didn’t want to put Mike in the hospital because it was where he worked. The humiliation might push him over the edge.
Annalee flew to Yakima the next day. Mike met her at the airport.
“He was not pleased to see me,” she recalls. “I mean, in the past, when Mike saw me he’d sweep me up off my feet with a hug. This time he just stood there glaring at me. He was about forty pounds underweight. His face was just blank. Sadness seemed to harden and distort his features. It was like Mom all over again. He said he didn’t want me or anyone else from the family around. Then he said something that really scared me. He said, ‘But maybe it’s a good thing you’re here, Annalee. It will make it easier on Janet when I kill myself.’”
She felt woozy with fear—terrified that she had done the wrong thing by coming. Back at the house, Janet told her not to take it personally. These days, suicide was nearly all Mike talked about.
They hid the car keys, for fear he’d drive himself over a cliff. They hid the medicine for Janet’s sheep.
They kept a twenty-four-hour vigil. If Mike arose at night, either Annalee or Janet would get up, too. The blackness of his moods would ebb and flow, but despair colored all.
On mountain hikes, Annalee positioned herself between Mike and ledges—“I knew no matter how self-destructive Mike might be, he would never do anything to hurt me.” Annalee stayed three weeks, and then Barbara flew out from Vermont for a three-week shift.
It was dreadful. The Prozac was having no effect. Mike was skeletal. He was like a very old man. Each day was something to be endured.
Janet became convinced she was going to lose him. Mike had built a prison of his own dark logic. One morning, as he and Barbara walked down the long gravel drive to the mailbox, he sought his sister’s permission.
“Mom did it, Barbara. It’s okay,” he said.
“No, Mike. Mom did it, but it’s not okay,” said Barbara. “I loved her dearly, and I was so sorry to see her go. I know the pain she went through. But it’s not okay. What Mom did is not okay.”
“When would it be okay?” he asked. “Suppose I had an accident and lost my finger. Would it be okay for me to kill myself?”
“No, of course not.”
“Okay. Now suppose I lost my arms and legs. I was just a torso; would it be okay then?”
“No, Mike,” argued Barbara, explaining that there were many tragically maimed people who had adjusted and found happiness in their lives.
“Okay, I’ll buy that. Now suppose I was just a head, and they had me hooked up to all these machines. Would you let me go now?”
“No!”
“You aren’t getting the point,” Mike said.
“I am getting the point! You are trying to box me in! You are trying to box me into saying it’s okay to kill yourself. I guess next you’re going to ask me if it’s okay if you’re nothing but an eyeball on a tray! Nothing you can say would make me say that it’s okay. Nothing!”
“What if there’s no way to bring me back?” he asked, pitifully.
“Mike, you came out of it the last time.”
When Prozac failed, Janet checked Mike into the hospital at the University of Seattle to try electroshock. He went glumly, but willingly. The doctors there, who see a lot of depressed patients, said Mike was the worst case they had ever encountered.
Then, miraculously, the day after his first shock treatment, he was okay. Completely well.
“I came to see him in his room and he was sitting on the bed smiling,” recalls Janet. “He said, ‘I’m back!’
“The results were immediate. He had not only bounced back, it was like he had bounced too far back. He was just exhilarated. All traces of the depression were wiped out, so much so that he didn’t even remember much of it. He kept asking me the same things over and over again. He didn’t remember Annalee coming, or Barbara. He kept asking me, ‘What was I saying?’ and ‘What did I do?’ I’d tell him, and two hours later he’d ask me the same question again. He apologized profusely. I think he was really horrified when we explained to him what he had been like. He went out and bought me an Audi. He said it was for putting up with him.”
Early in 1993, Mike got a job at the Yakima Farm Workers’ Clinic, so he could satisfy his NHSC commitment without moving away. The clinic served the area’s growing Mexican population, most of them poor. The job paid next to nothing, but then, Janet’s business was thriving. It seemed perfect—and something happened that made it more so, as far as Mike was concerned.
A pregnant young woman came into the clinic, early in her term, who didn’t want to keep her baby. She had checked “abortion or adoption” on her chart. Mike and Janet had been through all kinds of hell trying to have a baby.
Mike was determined to handle the matter discreetly, and ethically, but he wanted that baby. He didn’t mention his interest to the mother during her clinic visit. But once the young woman was sold on adoption, she eventually selected Mike and Janet to be her baby’s parents.
The clinic put up a fight, claiming Mike had steered the baby his way. But he wouldn’t budge. He wrote off the job (even though that meant resuming the long-running battle with NHSC) and hired a lawyer to push on with the adoption. He had lost a baby once; he was going to save this one.
“On November fifteenth I got a phone call, real scratchy,” says Annalee.
“It was Mike on the car phone. He and Janet were on their way to pick up the baby. He was so excited. All through that period, he was just so thrilled. I flew down for Christmas. It was the first time in years Mike had even wanted to celebrate Christmas. Dad flew out. We hiked up into the mountains and cut down a tree and brought it home. We decorated it together. I was just entranced watching Mike with the baby. He was just wonderful with her.”
They named her Daniela. Happily unemployed, Mike became Dr. Dad. All through that winter he was triumphant. He toted the baby everywhere. When he stopped in the emergency room to show his friends, he held Daniela in both arms over his head, beaming, so joyful it moved some of his friends to tears.
In May, abruptly, that joy began to fade. Mike said he felt bad living off Janet. He missed being a doctor. The NHSC battle was roiling again, with the cost of relocation even greater now that Janet’s business had taken root. With Mike, rational worry tilted readily into irrational darkness. And the cloud rolled back in.
Mike’s doctors already knew he did not respond to conventional drug treatments. Janet didn’t know if she could face another ordeal like the one two years earlier. Their hope was down to electroshock. It had worked before.
This time it didn’t. In all, Mike went for seven electroshock sessions in Seattle in May. He would rally after some of them for a few days, then slip right back into despair. It was the same story. Losing weight. Unable to rouse himself from bed. No pleasure in anything. Eventually, Mike resisted going to the hospital. “What’s the point?” he would ask. Each time a treatment failed he was plunged deeper into depression. He obsessed over past mistakes, missteps that had hurt others.
Mike’s ghosts were real. Like most people who live more than four decades, he had accumulated lasting sorrows and regrets. Healthy people keep such memories in perspective; they build a context that enables them to acknowledge error, learn, and go on. Mike could not. Locked in depression, he became convinced he was a terrible human being.
Janet worked out a system with Mike’s doctor, Ray Silves, to have him involuntarily committed if things got too bad, and at the end of May she made the call.
The Ya
kima County Sheriff’s Office dispatched a squad car, and Mike was carted off in handcuffs, crying, shouting angrily, begging Janet not to let them take him in.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my life,” she said later.
Annalee flew down from Anchorage two days after Mike was committed. As she walked into the hospital lobby, Mike was waiting, arms folded, skeletal again, scowling severely.
“I heard a rumor you were in town,” he said, shouting so that everyone in the lobby could hear. “I am being held here against my will. I don’t belong here. They have no right to keep me here.”
For nearly an hour, Mike ranted about the injustice. He said he would never have another thing to do in his life with the medical profession. It was an outrage! He was a doctor! When an orderly came out to tell him dinner was being served, Mike shouted, “I’m on a hunger strike. You can put that in my chart!”
“I will,” the orderly said.
“See how it works?” Mike asked Annalee. “They lock me in here unjustly, saying I’m sick, and if I get angry about it, that’s used as evidence to prove how sick I am. Will you help me get out of here?”
Annalee felt confused. Mike did, in fact, seem sane. If she hadn’t known anything about what had led up to his commitment, or Mike’s history, she would have sided with him in a minute. But she did know.
“I had to leave when visiting time was over, and I just left him there ranting,” she says. “It was scary. It was enormously hurtful to see him there, so utterly humiliated. They had strip-searched him when the sheriff brought him in.”
He got out. Mike had a lot of friends in the medical community. Some came to his aid, challenging Dr. Silves’s diagnosis. Janet had desperately wanted to keep Mike in the hospital for the full two weeks allowed by law—“Frankly, even if they couldn’t help Mike, I needed the break,” she says—but she was reluctant to side openly against her husband.
He came home cheered by his victory, and within fifteen minutes was talking again about killing himself. He sat in the big wicker chair in the corner of the living room before his bookshelf, facing out over the valley, locked inside the pain.
“You could see it in his face; you could always see it in Mike’s face,” says Annalee. “His mind was just churning, churning, churning.”
“I just don’t know how I can do this anymore,” he said, and broke down sobbing.
Mike tried to smile when Annalee flew home the next day, but it was more of a grimace. Then he went back to the hospital for more electroshock. It didn’t help.
On Friday, June 10, Dr. Silves gave him a new drug, a thyroid medicine called thyroxan. The doctor said it would take three to four days to know if it would help. They would know by Tuesday. If it failed, they’d try another round of electroshock.
Mike left the office, drove to the hardware store, and bought plastic tubing, duct tape, and clamps.
When Janet came home from work that night, Mike told her, “I want to have a good weekend. Just the three of us here together.”
They passed a quiet night with the baby. On Saturday, Janet got a call from a client, and Mike sat and listened quietly to her half of the conversation. When she was done, he started to cry.
“It just seems like I’m from another planet,” he said. “I listen to you sounding so professional on the phone. There’s no way I could have a normal conversation with someone like that. I listen to you, and I can’t even imagine anymore what it’s like.”
It had been a frightening fall. Just eight years ago he had been the most promising resident in his medical class in Philadelphia; now he wasn’t even working. It was a struggle for him to make it through the day.
“For you, I’ve become this drogue,” he said, referring to the small anchor used to slow a boat at sea.
He told Janet that she had saved his life more than once, and shouldn’t have bothered. Janet pointed out all the wonderful things he had brought to her life. A loving relationship, the dream house in Yakima, all their wonderful adventures, her thriving business, their baby girl.
“You’ve helped me make my dreams come true,” she said.
The conversation wound on all day. That night it grew fierce.
Janet told him she couldn’t take it anymore. Mike acted hurt. “I feel like you’ve just given up,” he complained.
“Mike, I haven’t given up,” she said. “I’m tired of just putting out and putting out all the time and not getting anything back. If you don’t love me, you don’t love Daniela, and you don’t even love yourself, there’s just nothing I can do about it!”
Mike apologized, and cried, and tried to console her. Sunday he was morose. He talked for a long time on the phone with Annalee. He was crying. They were both crying. He said he felt it was hopeless.
“It scared the shit out of him that the electroshock treatments weren’t working,” Annalee recalls. “He thought that would be what would save him. He said he was feeling worse than he had ever felt before. He felt terrible about what he was doing to Janet and the baby. He was convinced nothing was going to get better for him, that it would be just like it had been with Mom. He didn’t think he could go on.”
“Why don’t you go somewhere else,” Annalee suggested. “Look for some cutting-edge treatment. Anything.”
“I don’t have the strength,” he said.
More to the point, he didn’t have the hope. Mike read and understood the medical journals. He knew that a small percentage of bipolar patients could not be helped, were doomed to deepening spirals of despair.
Annalee didn’t know what to tell him. Truth was, she was haunted herself by her mother’s last ten years. Annalee had found Jeanne once in 1974, half dead from a deliberate overdose. She had phoned the ambulance, and, in effect, saved her mother’s life.
“But for what?” she asks. “When I looked back at her last ten years, it was sheer hell! What did I save her for?”
Annalee believed she was talking to her brother for the last time. What could she do? Finally, sobbing, she tried to say and yet not say what he most wanted to hear.
“Mike, if you can’t keep doing this, I love you, I admire you, you’ve been such a wonderful influence in my life.” She knew he wanted her to say it was okay if killing himself was the only way out, but she couldn’t say it. Instead she said, “I want you to stay. But no matter what happens, I’ll understand. I could never hate you. No matter what.”
Mike called her back a while later and told her not to worry.
“I’m going to make it,” he promised.
Annalee hung up the phone and shuddered. She wanted to feel relief but didn’t dare.
On Monday, Janet went to work, and Mike took Daniela to the hardware store, to buy plastic guards for the electrical sockets. She had begun to crawl; it was time to baby-proof the house.
He spent part of the afternoon with his daughter by the pond out back, and caught a trout, which he fixed for dinner. He and Janet had a long, slow meal with a bottle of wine, then watched a videotape of Remains of the Day. At the end, as the old butler allows his last chance for happiness to slip away, Mike burst into tears.
Still, it had been a good day. Mike went to bed hopeful. Maybe the thyroid pills were taking effect.
He woke up Tuesday feeling awful.
“I can’t even put together two good days in a row anymore!” he complained bitterly, wailing that he would have to keep going through his nightmare “again and again and again!”
Janet stayed home all morning. She figured he’d be okay in the afternoon—he was supposed to go riding.
His brother-in-law Peter Miller called, just to check in.
“I’m having a tough time right now,” Mike said, and started crying.
“Look, this thing passes, you know it does,” said Peter. “All you have to do is ride it out, man.”
Mike told Peter that he didn’t think he could. “It’s so painful. It’s worse than having your legs broken or having your toenails pulled out on
e by one.”
Eventually, Peter got angry at Mike, as he often did. “You kill yourself, goddammit, and I’ll come out there and dig you up and fucking piss on you,” he said. “First of all, for what it would do to your family and to me. I’m your friend. And think of the message that sends to the kids.”
“But it’s just so painful,” Mike said, in tears. “You don’t understand.”
Still, Peter felt no special urgency about this conversation. He had talked to Mike about suicide so many times that the subject no longer alarmed him. He assumed Janet would have Mike in the hospital if that’s where he needed to be. He told Mike he’d call back that night.
Janet left for work at two-thirty. Mike tried to say good-bye at the car, but Janet had learned to avoid good-byes.
“I won’t get any rashes,” Mike said. “See you later.”
When she was gone, Mike called his neighbor and begged off the riding lesson. He fetched the tubing, loaded up the Nissan, and drove up to the ridge.
Janet knew as soon as she turned south on Forty-second Avenue early that evening and saw their magnificent house straight ahead in the distance, alone high on the ridge. It just looked peaceful, and suddenly…empty. When she drove up the winding driveway she saw that the horses hadn’t been fed. Then she saw the car was gone.
Stuck to the front door was a tiny yellow leaf of memo paper, on which Mike had scratched in tiny script:
On a small road
On Ahtanum Ridge
That turns north from where
We gather rocks for terracing
Love Always,
Mike
Mike McConnell’s decision to kill himself drove a second stake through his family’s heart, already scarred by his mother’s suicide. Mike’s choice dramatically divided them.
Annalee and Janet were one faction. For Janet, who had worn herself to exhaustion trying to keep Mike alive, grief was tinctured with relief. She understood. More, she respected Mike’s choice, even romanticized it as a final, loving gesture. So did Annalee, who had grown so close to Mike during the struggle and had promised not to hate him if he succumbed.
