Stop the World, I Want To Get Off

Los Angeles, California

Karen and I stayed up until after midnight, talking. Greg had gone to bed hours before, and I knew Karen was exhausted. But still, I talked. And I cried. Do you need a hug? she asked me. I did, and she provided. And that's one of many reasons why I love Karen.

I keep doing this. With Karen and Connie and Diana. With Cathy, a lot. With Lisa, and Keith. Even, for I guess the last time, with LOL last year in Arizona. And, with Lynnette, more often than I wish to own up to. It is a release for me. I am a human pressure cooker, with emotions barely below the surface. When cracked open, a lot of pent-up anger and mournful despair escapes. I feel better, calmer, afterwards. But then the guilt, that I am burdening these people, steps in. When are we going to stop doing this? I once asked Keith. And he responded: We're always going to do this.

The night after Karen and Greg left, before the week fell apart in a downward spiral of plumbing and other repair issues, I watched the HBO documentary about Robin Williams. Drawn like a moth to a flame, my dark interest in why people take their own lives leads me to articles, stories. Documentaries.

In a reduction of it all, it seems that whatever demons drove Robin Williams, he found relief in his own kinetic (indeed, manic) comic performances. As his career descended and his neurological illness progressed, that outlet was fast diminishing. I am reminded of Kevin and the loss of his ability to do his work. But mostly I think of Tom.

Tom was Billy. Billy, of the happy partnership and marriage I wrote about for many years here. Or maybe Tom wasn't really Billy. Maybe Billy was the idealization, or compartmentalization of a part of Tom that I hitched onto in the hopes that it would take up all of his space in our marriage. I used to feel that there were two of him. And the Billy part was amenable and companionable. We shared dialog from films, and played gin rummy together for five hours on flights to and from Kona. We shared a love of Carmel, and of Sandra. Just four of a thousand and more memories of him. And when I am flooded with these, I miss him in a way that defies expression. But there was another part of him that I have long struggled to understand. It begins with a family of members who are remarkably disassociated from each other. He was additionally burdened by a learning disability that was not addressed by his parents, in spite of their knowledge of it. And was further weighted by the parents most of us had: The ones who did not allow us to express, nor learn to process, our emotions. Not anger. Not frustration. Not any.

In the same way that Robin Williams needed his frenzied work to keep the demons at bay, Tom turned to behavior that took down our marriage. But it didn't take it down right away. We had been married twenty years when I learned that he had been arrested. It was impossibly hard. Driving into a block wall, hard. And I didn't know if I could stay. But I did. And so, instead of a dramatic parting at the time, the marriage died by a thousand cuts over subsequent years. I have struggled, for two decades, to understand why he did what he did. Even more since his death three years ago. I often asked him why he had done this, and the best answer I ever got was: Because I could. But maybe, maybe he ended up in that place, doing what he did, because it was the only thing that brought him respite from his demons. It was the only thing that worked. That even though it was wrong, and destructive to our marriage, and even more so, destructive to him, he couldn't not do it. After he was found out, that door was closed. So he drank too much. He withdrew, and dropped out of the relationship. He sat in front of the TV, with vodka his constant companion. Seven years later, after he refused to attend couples' counseling, I began to dance salsa.

Guilt is a terrible thing. If I feel guilty for burdening my friends with my grief, what guilt did Tom suffer for all of the pain that he caused? He once said that not a day went by that he did not think of it. I know that if he could have changed one thing in his life, it would have been to rewind and not do what he had done for so many years. But we don't have that ability in this life. Maybe he lacked the emotional wherewithal to face life squarely; get the help he needed, and be the man I believe he really wanted to be. To be Billy, 24/7, instead of Tom... or Kevin or Robin or Kate or Anthony. There are many ways to escape from the darkness of the soul. But, evidently, they all saw only one way out of their big empty. They were unable to keep living until maybe one day they would want to, once more.

I too live with guilt. Guilt in my constant rumination that, had I left him after that block wall crash, maybe he would have been able to survive it all. Instead, I clung to the part of him that I saw as Billy. I suffered the curse of being a romantic, with the romantic's faith that if you made a commitment, you simply stayed with it, worked at it. Honored it. My faith that the commitment was the most important thing, and would triumph over what had been dropped into the center of it, was misguided at best. But, in an attempt to make this work, I divorced the darkness from the person who had brought it, refusing to accept that this evil was within him, even if it were only a part of who he was.

So, after it happened we each stumbled along, one blindsided by grief and the unaccountable knowledge that the person they had married could not be the person who had done this; the other simply blinded by insurmountable guilt. Guilt in a titanic mountain, never to be scaled nor eroded. We moved separately and circuitously through days, weeks, months, and a decade until we could no longer see each other within the relationship. Separately blinded; the marriage was no longer in sight.

Watching the Robin Williams documentary brought me a greater sense of understanding of Tom. An unconditional compassion for him, and for all that was dark within him that he could not control. The phrase own worst enemy certainly applied, for I believe the marriage was important to him. I think that he loved me enough to take a bullet for me. Yet, sadly, he loved himself more, enough to take the bullet that took him out of his misery and out of this life, in spite of what it did to those of us left behind. I don't question anyone's right to take their own life. It is their life, and they have an absolute right to do what they want. But I wonder if, in all the pain that they are feeling, they have any capability of compassion for their survivors and for the endless, lifetime pain that their act will cause. That, in choosing to end their pain, they leave a legacy of pain behind.

I am no longer the woman who married Tom. Nor the one who partnered with Billy for all of the events and episodes I wrote about here. I am embattled by bitterness and anger, and an ineffible sadness most of the days of my life. But I look for the spaces between the more intense bouts. I look to Joel, to my friends, my writing, my dancing, my home, and yes, to my scotch, for the joy and respite that brings relief.

So watching a documentary about a man I did not know, who took his life out of despair, brought me some clarity about the man who was in my life for more than half of my lifetime. His mother used to say Life goes on. And it does. But you carry their sad end forward with you always, and while you are sometimes provided with insight, and answers to the never-ending questions, you will never understand it all. And, the greatest truth you will discover is that you just have to go on living with that.