I kept an eye on the Call-Out schedule each morning, to see if the doctor had set me up with an appointment.  But for three days, there was nothing.  So I decided I had no choice but to wait in line one afternoon and wait to see him without an appointment.  The other inmates waiting in that line were usually there to ask questions about their eligibility for RDAP or deal with matters within the program; I don’t believe anyone else in line was there for a matter relating to life outside the prison system.

Finally it was my turn, and I came in to the office and sat down on the metal chair facing his desk.  The walls were filled with bookshelves, but I could see that for the most part they were simply binders and records of inmates in the RDAP program.  The whole room had a very administrative feel; it wasn’t the office of a mental health professional.  But he was the only real avenue I had to discuss Mara’s suicide openly in my situation, so I began to explain what had happened and my feelings about it.

The doctor interrupted me.  “Oh yes, I remember now.  I got your note, and I was a bit confused by it.  Why exactly did you want to see me over this matter?”

“Well, I mean…my ex-wife and I had been married for over ten years, and together for nearly twenty.  Aside from my family, there is really nobody else in the world I’ve known longer.  I tried to nurse her though physical and mental ailments for years, before our marriage finally collapsed when she attempted suicide in 1998.”

“But you were divorced, yes?”

“Yes, when I lost my insurance coverage, and when she wanted to remarry anyway, there was no reason to stay legally married.”

“So she remarried?”

“Yes, and as I put in my note, she and her husband killed themselves together last month, and I just found out about it.”

“So, I still don’t understand.  Why did you want to see me?”

I was starting to wonder if this was some kind of psychological method, sort of like when the psychiatrist asks you “and how did that make you feel” when you’re trying to get them to tell you something.  But this guy’s demeanor was a bit too straight-faced.  “Because I want some help dealing with all these emotions and feelings I’m having about this.”

“What emotions?  Why would this bother you so much?”

“I told you, because I was with her for almost 20 years.  She was my first love, my best friend, and I spent two decades trying to help and heal her.  Now she has killed herself, and I feel…well, I’m overwhelmed with sadness and grief, obviously.  And tremendous guilt.”

“Why would you feel guilty?  You didn’t kill her, she killed herself.  And she was remarried; her husband should feel guilty, not you.  I’m just not sure what you want me to do for you.”

“He killed himself too!  How would he feel guilty?”  This wasn’t going exactly the way I planned.

“Are you asking me to write you a pass to not work for a day or two?  Because I am not really inclined to do that.”

“No, look….I am having a lot of trouble dealing with this.  I just wanted some help, or something to read, or something to help alleviate my emotional issues.”

“Well I don’t know what to tell you.  Try not to feel guilty.  And just get over it.”

In the real world, I know my reaction to this Abbot and Costello routine would have been different.  I could have allowed myself to get angry, to confront him, to ask if he earned his degree from a school he found in a matchbook cover.  But the entire experience was so surreal…and he was the man who, in the end, was going to determine whether I was eligible for RDAP.  I could not afford to act naturally.

So, what else could I do?  I thanked him for his time and left.  Now I felt shitty AND completely confused.

Heather did send me a book about dealing with the suicide of a loved one, and if nothing else that book helped explain the causes of the guilt in more specific terms, and the way the guilt is nearly universal to survivors.  There are just so many “what ifs” and “should haves” when somebody commits suicide.  Life is far too easy to connect on a string…if A happens, and you did C instead of B in reaction, that result changes everything. 

It’s sort of the opposite to the way some people watch baseball; they think changing one hit or one call would mean everything that happened afterwards would work a certain way.  If that guy walked instead of struck out, the next hitter would have driven him in with his home run…but, of course, with a runner on the pitch selection would have been entirely different, the calls from the bench for hit-and-run or defensive player positioning would change…it’s entirely different. 

But in life, when someone is sick and depressed and suicidal, changing one decision, or one action, doesn’t solve the problem.  You have to rewrite the entire script, and when you do that you’re doing it with hindsight, and with knowledge you had no access to back then.  The truth is Mara never got over her years of sexual abuse as a child, or the family situation which allowed it….and, to top it off, the reactions she got when she began to openly discuss it.  I know I did the best I could, even if I was an enabler with her other issues some of the time.  It simply wasn’t good enough…and there may not have been a good enough.

The thing is, despite all her problems, I always cared for Mara, and always loved her in my own way.  I simply had changed my focus to myself, and to trying to improve my own life and make it tolerable or even enjoyable.  She was the center of a huge chunk of my life, but that was no longer true.  Our orbits had changed.  Still, as the song says, I always thought that I’d see her again.  And I’d hoped that when I did, she’d be happy with her life.  I may have hoped for too much.

Much later in my prison experience, my RDAP teacher read a paper I wrote about the relationship and came to speak to me privately.  She had no idea what my life had been like, and I guess the fact that – unlike most of her students – I was willing to discuss such personal aspects of my history shocked her as much as the things I had to say.  One thing she suggested was that I write Mara a letter when I came home.  Talk to her, get all my feelings out, be honest about my guilt, the things I think I did wrong, any suppressed anger at her for not doing more on her own.  Pour everything onto the page.  Then, I should go somewhere peaceful, by myself, and burn it.  In doing so, I’d be purging myself symbolically of a lot of those feelings.