Post #45 – Women’s Memoirs, ScrapMoir – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
by Bettyann Schmidt
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” The Rolling Stones
A best friend is sometimes someone who has known first hand the agony you’re experiencing. People around you, who may love you unconditionally, cannot always feel your pain. They’ve never known it in their lives, or even come close to seeing it.
Such is the case with my dear husband, Gary. Looking back now, the sharp blades I hurled at him, thrown to pierce his heart, were aimed to break through his quiet saintly composure. This man should have had no reason to stay with me. What enraged me most was that he didn’t know how to help me. I only knew one person who could. So one morning in the third week of April 2009, with my last bit of energy, I told him I could not stay in the house another minute and quicky gathered my few necessities–clothes, books, laptop computer– and headed to my friend Debbie’s new condo in Nashville.
Experience is Believing: A True Friend
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. Anais Nin
Debbie had sold her farm just a few months earlier and purchased the condo. She’d left her lifelong memories at the log home in the peaceful countryside, and I’d left my hiding place of the last several years as well, bittersweet memories that would travel always with us.
On January 25th, 2005, four years prior, Debbie’s world had brutally bled out on the old wooden floor of her family room. It took three pistol shots to kill her cherished existence of nearly two decades. That was the day her sweet husband Mike, who had become plagued with mental torture, walked out of their bedroom, arms wildly flailing, and tried to point the gun to his head. Debbie, unable to react quickly, watched him fire a shot into the bottom of the kitchen bar, and then high into the paneled wall. At that same moment, a UPS delivery man had walked onto her front porch and laid a package close to her door, turned and began returning to his truck. Debbie screamed, as she ran to the door, “He’s got a gun!” And that’s when she heard the third shot. The one that ended Mike’s pain and spilled his dark memories in spashes of blood.
In March 2009, I helped Debbie clean out the house for the new owner. We swept and scrubbed away the old life she was leaving and mourned again as we cleaned the same floorboards, the corners behind doors, where brown blood stains remained as testament to a violent death. The next morning, Debbie entered a new, fresh world of condo living, an old restored factory on the fringes of inner-city Nashville.
This was now my escape, where I felt returned to my childhood, where I felt I belonged after all. As I’d once fled the inner-city streets of Cincinnati, now I returned. The blood in my veins again ran German in the Over-The-Rhine district. I now understood why my father and grandmother never wanted to move to the suburbs.
I try to teach my heart not to want things it can’t have. Alice Walker
I knew there was no permanent retreat for me, however. My youngest child, Jeff, at age 20, the child of my 40’s, born with Down syndrome, was the reason I’d held on so long. I couldn’t take him away to a new life. He was as much a part of the farm as his father. It was his life. And without his daily presence I couldn’t live. Nor could I continue to live on the farm. I couldn’t live.
That night on Debbie’s sofa, I stared at the ceiling. I craved sleep. I’d taken one of my sleeping pills. My doctor said, “Take two if needed.” I took another. And then I did a startling thing and was aware that it was startling as I did it. I went into Debbie’s office and Googled “Lethal dose of Restoril.” Several sites listed persons bragging that they’d taken as many as 12. They obviously were still alive. I swallowed another two. I closed my eyes and wondered if because I weighed only 110 pounds it might only take four pills for me. The terror of inflicting another horror on Debbie, a woman who could never have it happen to her again, sunk in. Despite this awareness, my consciousness began slipping, and I gave in to the sweet, seductive drowsiness.
Bella, Debbie’s boxer puppy, was licking my face. Morning had come. I smelled coffee brewing.
The last thing I remembered was taking the pills. I sat up. Debbie turned from the countertop and said, “Good morning.” She asked if I’d slept well, and I told her about the pills and my website search. I will never forget the shock in her eyes. Or was it terror.
I knew immediately what had just happened between us. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Debbie,” I said. She shot back, “Oh, where would you do it then?” My answer was already a fantasy I’d had for several weeks. “The park.” I loved Centennial Park, where the replica of the Parthenon stood. With the shade of the park’s trees keeping me cool, I’d spent many hours in my car, writing and reading books over the years.
The conversation turned to a one-sided command. “Pack your bag. Now. I’m calling the doctor.” I did as she said. I knew she was taking me to the hospital, the same one she’d taken her husband to so many times.
The idea of being in the hospital was not a bad one. I envisioned lying in a bed, where energy was not required, reading books, seeing no one but nurses and maybe a doctor or two. Besides, what else was there for me to do? One thing I knew for sure. I did not want to wake up one more day anywhere else. I was willing to surrender and let someone, anyone, take charge. It was the easiest choice I could make. “All you do is hurt people,” I thought. It was time to get out of everyone’s lives, Gary’s, my children’s, my friends’. My whole life, I tried to hold life together, to stay in charge, the life with my parents and siblings, the years in my first marriage, the life with a new husband and his family, my children’s lives. No more, I thought.
I knew how Mike felt then.
He turned and walked slowly down the stream for twenty yards, splashed across it, and walked slowly back on the other side. Then he looked at himself in the water again. “As I thought,” he said. “No better from this side. But nobody minds. Nobody cares. Pathetic, that’s what it is. A. A. Milne. From Winnie the Pooh
The short drive to the hospital, I kept thinking, “No more.”
Debbie said, when we drove up into the hospital parking lot, “You will end up hating me for this, but it’s what I need to do.” I couldn’t imagine hating my dearest friend. On the contrary, I was thankful to finally give up.
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In Part 4, the finality of my story of depression, you’ll read from my point of view inside the locked doors of Nashville’s Parthenon Pavilion, what I had to do to get out, and where I finally found peace.
If you missed Part 1 or 2, here’s the link.
Bettyann Schmidt
http://journey2f.blogspot.com
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