For many nights after my husband admitted in our first marriage counseling session that his car wreck the year before had been an intentional head-on collision, I could not sleep. I laid awake wondering if our new therapist had processed his revelation. Surely if my smart, successful, charismatic husband admitted to a suicide attempt, alarm bells with strobing lights would sear through the building as clinicians poured out of their offices to guide us to immediate help. But the counselor seemed undaunted. She nodded encouragingly, her pen relaxed in her hand. Our names and those of our three children were the only notes written on her rose-colored notepad. I didn’t know if her steadiness was a professional shield, incompetence, or a worrying combination of both.

Sunbeams illuminated my husband’s head as he calmly unbuttoned his sports jacket to continue his backstory narrative. He described the debilitating episodes of depression he had experienced the past few years, using innocuous phrases like “down time,” “go to sleep pills,” and “slowness.” As if his mood disorder paralleled a toddler on a naptime mat.

“Tell her about the insomnia,” I wanted to interrupt. “And the panic attacks and the out-of-nowhere sadness and the numbness and the time you followed me around the house because you were afraid to be alone.” But this woman didn’t know us yet, and if my panic showed, if I started frantically articulating his symptoms, she might think I was the one with the problem. Not that I didn’t have problems, but mine were not life-threatening.

A few nights after his startling confession, I awoke from a nightmare terrified. I’d dreamt that there were snakes under the ground, they were following me, and I couldn’t see them and couldn’t yell for help. Once awake, my heart raced as I contemplated fleeing the room. Though I was safe, it took several seconds for my brain to shift out of panic mode.

Hugged by the weight of my brocade comforter, I curled over to look at the dark silhouette of my husband’s sleeping head, his muscled shoulders rising and falling with the lawnmower sounds of his snoring. It occurred to me that my post nightmare panic was the closest I had come to having my brain fool me into experiencing an emotion not warranted by the situation. There were no snakes, but my brain still wanted to flee. Could something like this anxiety—sustained over months and years—have driven my strong and generous just-turned-fifty husband to end his life? He’d explained in the session that he knew it was illogical, but in that moment of wanting to crash his car, his brain had thought that dying was the only way to escape his dark thoughts.

I wondered if it might be how I felt sometimes, my children in the back seat of the car, as I drove up to the top of the Mount Hope Bridge, looking over the side of the metal railings at the dizzying distance to the speckle of boats below and thinking, If I sneeze right now I could accidentally knock the steering wheel sideways, crash my hulking SUV through that laughable barrier, plummet head first into the icy waters and panic before I get the windows down, the seatbelts off and the kids and me out of the car. I would put my left pointer finger on the car’s window button when I drove that way to get me through the catastrophic possibility. I wondered if Geoff’s episode must have been a slightly altered version of mine, but rather than a sneeze sending him over the edge, his depressed brain did. I wanted to understand why.

Lying sideways with my toes gently touching the backs of Geoff’s calves to stop his snoring, I wondered if the panicked feeling that remained after my nightmare, if my catastrophizing imagination on the bridge, came close to what Geoff had felt when he yanked that steering wheel toward the semi-truck barreling at him. Somehow, I wanted to believe that if I could understand the reasoning of his dark-thoughts drowning brain I could pull him back to a safe, shallow depth. Empathy was my superpower. I just needed to feel that pain and I would know how to help him get rid of it.

I wish I’d spent more time helping Geoff articulate what his depression felt like. Made him use the scary, ugly words he guarded so tightly inside. I wish I’d understood better that my job was not to connect his thoughts to mine, but to give him a safe space to connect his thoughts to his. But the professional in the room had not pressed him, and so neither did I. I was afraid that asking him about his brush with suicide would make my composed husband contemplate the unthinkable again. I’d recently learned the word “trigger” and was terrified I might accidentally pull it. Instead, I would embody his hurt myself.

And so, I decided to use my serpent-filled nightmare to simulate his depression within my own psyche. After dropping my music-blaring teenage children at school that morning, I drove home in silence, made myself a second cup of coffee and climbed onto my side of our king bed to recreate the torturous dream. With two puffed up pillows behind me and a sprawled-out puppy beside me, I tried to repeat the sense of dread I had woken to that morning. I set the timer on my phone for five minutes, placed it on the nightstand, glanced around the room, and told myself that there was a snake somewhere inside those cool gray walls. Or maybe crawling out of the claw-foot tub in the bathroom to my left. Or out from under the stack of books in my reading chair to the right. I was already feeling the tension in my chest and arms. I smiled confidently at my ability to mind-control tension into my body.

“Ssssssss.” My chest knotted at the sound. This was monk-level meditation.

At the second hissing noise, I realized that it was not willfully imagined, but was in fact my sleepy puppy’s whispered whine at my feet. His face was snuggled into a blanket, but his eyes were fixed on me, not understanding why I was sitting fully clothed in the bed, fearfully looking around the room.

I ignored his whimpers and scanned for more entry points for the snake. I wanted that body tension back. I glanced at the vent high up on the ceiling and pictured a menacing green head the size of a football blasting its fangs at me from above. If one snake could tense my body, conjuring a swarm would push me into panic. A chill crept up my arms as I imagined the slithering approach of a cold reptile invasion. I pursued this thought knowing it was getting me closer to the glassy-eyed stare I had seen in Geoff. The more snakes I imagined, now in the hundreds, the tighter my chest felt. Tears filled my eyes.

“Ting, ting, ting” the gentle alarm on my phone chimed. I was done with my self-inflicted panic attack. My arms and chest released their burden as my shoulders sagged. I tried to imagine Geoff feeling that terror for the entirety of a day. Sometimes for several days. Sometimes for a week. Five minutes was enough to make me cry and doubt myself and my own reasoning. My heart sank knowing that this was what Geoff was combatting daily.

#

A year later, in the months just after Geoff died by suicide, I would have my own glimpse of depression. Lying in our bed one afternoon, now on his side because I felt closer to him there, dreading another night at the dinner table trying to fill the gloomy silence of grieving teenagers, I had a moment of complete and utter disassociation. As if Dementors had sucked a lifetime of vitally stabilizing thoughts out of my brain and left only scattered shards of gloom. I felt as though the daily routine that had kept me moving forward since Geoff’s death had disappeared. Completely gone from my memory were the tiny details that had brought me purpose day by day: walking the dog; finding therapists for the kids; finding help groups for us all; writing in my journal; taking my sister’s early morning calls so I wouldn’t have to face the day alone; asking the ocean why Geoff wasn’t there; pushing lunch food around my plate while out with friends. The nibbles of sustenance in my life were all gone. They’d disappeared, as though my brain had never experienced them. And in that fleeting moment I felt immense hopelessness and loss for activities that, though sad, lonely, and hard, had still brought me purpose. My brain had lost the ability to check itself. Whereas before I had tried to simulate his pain so that I could poke, prod, and fix it, now I felt what a wearying morass the reality of depression was.

I knew then that despite my attempts to hyper-empathize with what Geoff had been going through, a healthy brain is incapable of understanding a suicidal brain. Simulating what happens when the thousands of synapses fueling a functioning mind stop is not possible. I’d been brutally naïve in my attempts to understand. I felt like I had jumped into the pool at our local swim club and treaded water for five minutes to experience drowning.

But that’s not what drowning is. Drowning is not being stuck in deep water, pretending you can’t survive; drowning is losing the ability to control the water overtaking you. Drowning is suddenly finding yourself in a current pushing you down, kicking your feet as hard as you can but still sinking further, opening your mouth to scream, but breathing water, kicking harder but not knowing which direction is the surface and which is the bottom of the ocean, imagining your family’s faces so scared searching everywhere for you, and then, nothing. Feeling nothing. Seeing nothing. Being nothing.

#

I don’t know if my glimpse of depression was the same darkness that Geoff had experienced. But I do know that my flash of bleakness was so much worse than the simulation I had put myself through. There was no working hard to produce a fear — fear was the only option. There was no choosing when and where I would feel the gloom, it chose me. There was no timer going off to end the pretend trauma, there was only an abyss pulling downward.

Because Geoff looked, spoke, and smiled like the strong, reliable person I had been married to for twenty-two years, because he carefully used the past tense when talking about his dark thoughts, I trusted him. I thought he was in control of scary words he could not speak. I didn’t realize that they were taking control of him.

My healthy, tenacious, problem-solving brain could not understand his disconnected one any more than the powerful ocean can understand the root-rot problems of a dammed-up creek. The thing is, my problem-solving brain also could not listen to pain. Or shame. Or fear. I did not probe into the darkness because I feared what talking about it might do to him.

“Why did you want to die?” I should have asked. I should have braved. I should have risked.

But “should” is not a healing word, I learned later from my daughter’s psychiatrist.

“No should,” he would gently admonish the parents in our group sessions when we were beating ourselves up over something we said or did wrong when trying to help our distressed children. My brain heard “no shit” when he said it, as if he was emphasizing the stupidity of whatever fix I had been trying to apply to my anxious child.

No shit a trip to Cancun will not bring her father back.

No shit a pair of Air Jordans won’t keep a smile on her face.

No shit I need to stop shoulding and start asking.

I want to go back and ask Geoff why. Not so that I could figure out the answer, but so that he could. So that he could shine a light on his dark thoughts. So that he could feel safe speaking them. Thinking them. And realize he did not have to act on them.

At the time of his car wreck, Geoff told me he had wanted it to look like an accident. I assumed he meant so that we wouldn’t have to live with the stigma of having a spouse or parent die by suicide. As if a hydroplaning car wreck in the middle of a pouring rainstorm would make us not miss him when he died. Would not traumatize us. Would mean less of a hole in our lives. That him dying the same way that his mother did would not have the same devastating impact on his kids that it had on him.

Google Maps told me that Geoff drove 13 minutes to get from his designated parking spot in front of his downtown office in Providence to the collision spot of his attempted accident. Thirteen minutes. Plus the one minute it took him to walk down two flights of steps in his office building. And the minute and a half it would have taken him to shut down his computer, look under the stacks of paper on his desk to find his keys and grab his trench coat from the wooden coat rack behind his door. He would have stopped to check in with his office mate, the other lobbyist helping him cover the northeast region for the US Chamber.

“What went through your head for those 16 ½ minutes?” I should have asked. “Did you know what you were going to do when you left your office? Did you have a plan? Did you buckle your seatbelt? Did you stop at the stoplights? Did your brain engage at all? Did you change your mind? Is that why you survived?

Geoff did not die in a car accident. He died alone in his office 996 days after that first attempt. One year after the first meeting with the marriage counselor. His brain had zero minutes to engage.

Why didn’t I ask him about his attempt? Why did I go through so much trouble to try to figure out what was going on inside his head, but I never made him voice it?

I know why. Because I was scared. I was scared of what that might trigger in him. I was scared that my saying out loud, “did you really want to die a horrible, bloody death smashed through a windshield?” would send him back to memories of his own mother’s car wreck. To his toddler brain’s witnessing of the worst moment in his life. The moment he never talked about. The moment the universe took his mother’s kindness, care and grinning face away from him and left him strapped in the car watching her shredded body breathe its last breath.

I didn’t want to put that ugly thought back in his head. As if it wasn’t already there.

And who was I to say that the bloody scene watching his mother die by the side of the road was the debilitating event that was causing his deterioration forty-eight years later? If I was writing a movie, it would be. That would be the climax of the film. A two-year-old boy somehow still contained in the flimsy 70s version of a car seat, lying sideways banging the padded bar in his lap, the signal he wanted out. Looking around frantically for his mom and his sister, both thrown out of the car and now bloody on the side of the road. Cut to the mother’s body, her short-cropped Liza Minnelli hair wet with a crimson hue. A single stream of blood snaking down her forehead, diluted by her tears before reaching her mouth.

But was that the cause of his disassociation? Suppressed memories of the accident? Or was it his father’s slow consumption by cancer seventeen years later, just when that toddler was becoming a man? Or was it something else? Some comment someone made about being strong, or being tough, or being so brave because he didn’t cry?

Months after Geoff died, I found a condolence letter that a relative had sent to my twelve-year-old son. “You are the man of the house now,” it began.

What the…Really? The shy football player wanna-be, soccer player gonna-be who just lost his father, his coach, and his chipmunk cheeked grin is going to carry the weight of this mass destruction? How do I even undo the damage that one sentence must have done to his brain? Will I even know if I have? Do I need to wait until his just-turned-50th birthday to find out?

No, I did not know what incident, or memory, or haunting vision was torturing Geoff. Maybe it was a combination of all three. With a few dozen offhand comments thrown in. And maybe a break-up or two. Or a fight or two. Or any of the millions of tormented thoughts my husband’s brain had stored in its vast database over the years and was glitching back at him mid-life. I thought he needed some breakthrough moment. Some “it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault” scene with Robin Williams’ psychologist character hugging the weight of his trauma out of him. We just needed a professional to do it. Who was I to find that bug in the system and yank it out? What if I clipped the wrong wire and the whole thing blew up?

Honestly, I was scared. This is where Geoff would tell me to take the word “honestly” out of my story. He teased me whenever I used it in a sentence because he said it implied all my other sentences were dishonest.

But I’m deflecting. I was talking about my fear. The scary, scary, scary idea that words coming out of my mouth could cause deep pain in someone else. I can’t do it. To this day I have such a hard time saying words that I know will hurt someone. “Non-confrontational” does not begin to describe the torture that sits inside me when I think of having to tell a friend that her breath smells bad. Or a colleague that her sentence structure is weak.

I can’t do it. I can’t hurt with words. The scared little girl that grew up in a precariously broken home never learned to say the wrong thing and still be loved. She learned to always say the right thing if she wanted love. She had sewn that magical empathy cloak so she would know the right thing to say. She spent fifty years learning the art of listening, understanding, forgiving, accepting so she could see deep inside the souls of those around her and give them kindness. Give them the encouragement she could see that they needed. Give them love.

But love wasn’t doing it for Geoff. In some ways it was making him feel worse: what I needed most profoundly, unconditional love, seemed to almost inflict pain upon him because he didn’t feel worthy of it. And no matter how much I empathized, I couldn’t know how much pain there was deep inside him. I only knew something was trying to bubble up out of him and he was losing the battle to push it back down. I wanted to make my husband feel better. I wanted to give him the reassurance he needed. Or the therapist he needed. Or the understanding he needed.

I could not give him the pain he needed.

And so, I made us go to an expert and I sat patiently waiting for her to figure it out and fix him for me. When she didn’t, I went to the tool I knew how to use best. I cloaked myself in compassion. I imagined the most terrifying, threatening, horror-filled place I mentally could and worked my way back out. And thought that in doing so I would bring Geoff with me. I thought the path that pulled me out was the right path. Was the only path. I just needed to give it to him.

But he had a different path.

He should have felt my love, my concern, my need and wanted to live.

I should have felt his fear, his loss, his disconnection and told him not to die.

No should.

No shit.

Pamela OHara, a lifelong storyteller, made her first living writing code and is now writing prose. As CEO of Batchbook Social CRM, she spoke on topics such as woman-owned businesses, social media software and work/life balance at SXSWi, WomanCon and the Small Business Summit. She now writes on various issues including mental health, suicide survival, and parenting through grief (and joy). She has a BA in English from the University of Richmond and is mother to three strong AF teenagers and a dashing dog Beau who breathlessly drools on her every word.