Suicide Prevention Week is Sept 8th-14th; This is my story plus a link to another's (Father Nathan Monk) [TRIGGER: Suicide Ideation/Attempted]
Please share with a teen, especially if you know one who is queer or non-binary
TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE
One of every five teenagers considers suicide. So do two in five LGBTQTSGNC1 and/or nonbinary teens. That's not far from half. I made it past my teens but did not come out of the closet until I was 23 years old and still a virgin.
I was so beat down by Catholicism that though Pope John Paul II would libel me intrinsically evil for being gay, I cheered him along with 19,000 Archdiocese teens at Madison Square Garden in 1979.
*
At 25 I first ideated climbing stairs to take flight from the 15-story high roof to my 1 BR sublet in Stuyvesant Town, NYC.
As I walked to start my climb, I found a note slipped under my door from a best friend at the time, Tanaquil.
Angered yet understanding my desperation she knew what path I contemplated. Her handwritten note I have here in my current home but cannot find it as I write. Below is my paraphrase of what Tanaquil, never one to beat around the bush, wrote to me knowing somehow what I contemplated as my "final solution":
Dear Tony:
Go ahead. Take your life if you want, but you will be accomplishing by your own hand the lynching so many White folks want to be our final solution.
Tanaquil ended with how she would be there for me—always. She wanted to help.
That did not stop my suicide ideation.
That lasted for weeks, but it stopped me that day from taking the road taken by my Aunt Mary about a decade before.
In or around 1978, Auntie, bipolar at 38, leapt to her death from her tenement's roof.
*
In 1989, I was 25 when my first lover and then ex, Stu, would die.
Pock marked by Kaposi sarcoma—the “AIDS cancer”—Stu hacked in vain to expel bacteria from pneumocystis carinii—"AIDS pneumonia"—shutting down his lungs.
Trashed modern-day lepers no matter HIV status, many a gay man considered suicide painless as did I.
*
My contagion?
Not HIV but my sexual orientation.
That's what the Catholics of my youth taught me. At my baptism they deemed me saved based on no more than words whispered—and water blessed—by a priest.
Decades later my Church would canonize a bigot, John Paul II, who via a papal edict literally declared in God's eyes I was "intrinsically evil."
Today, I tack atheist.
*
I think it was Bill, another ex who, in 1989 or thereabouts, opened the door and found me unbathed in a dark room after pleading with the landlord to give him a key.
But it was a village that saved me.
My newish friend, Ann, invited me to Boston.
“Tony,” she said, “Your only task is to get on a bus to Boston. Our basement apartment is yours for as long as you need.”
Her offer reminded me that to both of her kids, Alex (10) and Liza (8), at that time I was not just friend but some kind of hero after helping to lead an anti-apartheid pro hunger strike and blockade at Columbia University.
What final solution might I offer to Liza, to Alex?
Suicide—though painless for me—was not pain free for others.
*
Suicide prevention week is nigh—Sept 8th-14th.
Share the below story with a teenager, perhaps a queer one.
1989 would not be the only year I’d yearn to disappear myself to oblivion, so to speak.
After spending some time in Boston, I had my worst, and final bout with depression in San Francisco.
It DOES get better.
*
Surviving San Francisco
©2004 by Tony Glover
(published originally in Can I Get a Witness: AIDS in Our Incestuous Black Communities)
It was 1994, a fortnight plus one week had passed May 5th—Cinco de Mayo, a day of revolution and freedom for the Mexicans, whose culture engulfed me in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Approaching June, Gay Pride Month, wishing freedom from AIDS for those brothers “in the life,” I had just accepted, on behalf of the Brothers Network, an award as co-executive producer of “Brothers,” a safer sex multimedia driven video game I helped update for Black gay and bisexual men.
On stage, I thought of Grandma Pearline, who nurtured and ushered—with grace, love, and exquisite attention—her two youngest children as they passed to their deaths, succumbing to the wasting diseases associated with AIDS.
Backstage, I rush to the phone to share the joy of this moment with my sister, Andrea, who still lives in New York, my birthplace.
Punctuated by sobs and serenity, my sister forced to her lips the devastating news: Grandma Pearline, not 24 hours before, passed on to the Other Side.
Grandma Pearline believed in the “Upper Room” of her faith, where in fellowship, she would meet her Jesus and her ancestors among The Saints.
There, I imagined her in happiness.
Still, at the end of the day, I could not help but weep in my hotel room, dark curtains drawn, lights out, and my life now off-stage.
***
I flew away the next day to New York. Andrea, in whom Pearline entrusted her funeral, asked me to speak about “The Lady” we loved.
Through song, poetry, and eulogy I paid tribute to Pearline’s past, and to her presence, in each of our lives.
She, long ago, had prepared us—sat each of us down, in the bosom of her prescience, and willed to her grandchildren a wisdom that had escaped her own children.
“Never,” she said, “be a part of your own undoing.”
Grandma Pearline’s gift was to weave her wit and wisdom through any life in despair. For her grandchildren, most motherless and fatherless due to drug addiction and AIDS, she wove a quilted mosaic that connected each grandchild both to the past life of their parents and to the promise held by each of our futures with each other.
After the funeral, I decided to stay in New York for a few days.
I love the heat and humidity of New York summers that force men to go bare-chested on even the grimiest of streets.
Still, I couldn’t stay long. I was due back at work, and on June 6th I returned to California.
***
When I arrived, it was some thirty degrees cooler beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, enveloped by clouds as the fog rolled through San Francisco bay.
I frequently walked the black-sand beaches of Marin County’s bayside when I needed to be alone with my thoughts. Breezy brine and brisk winds swirled about me as mist in the air.
Here, wistful, I dreamt and lost myself in swirling ocean sounds, eddies, like dusky holes in space.
I loved this spot on the Pacific.
Here I found peace and solace in the splash and whoosh of the waves, attacking, then caressing the sooty rocks, sabled by black velvet moss, freeing tiny pebbles which in turn fell to the beach as dark sand stones that lay cooled beneath my feet.
Refreshed by the bay, I was eager to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and return home to the samba sounds of the Mission and dance my blues away. Then, up in the morning, hopefully grounded, I would resume my workaholic routine.
***
At 7:00 am, I would always awake, shower, drink some milk, throw on a shirt, and leap into my pants.
Searching for paired socks, I’d grab, instead, a plaid and a solid, and step into my shoes — kicked off my feet the night before as I hurried to bed the man who helped me through the night.
He’d hold me close, his scent still lingering in my room the morning after. His name would escape me.
Without thinking, I’d reach for the banana perched in its usual place, high atop the fridge, and rush out the door.
***
As was my custom, and sometimes preference, I arrived late to my job as Director of the Brothers Network, where I created, financed, and directed HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs designed to keep African American men alive.
There, I had convinced myself, I could save more than a life or two. The rest, most destined to die, left me stressed.
Far away from Grandma’s death in New York, I whispered to myself, “you’ll be fine,” trying hard to push away the melancholy I knew encroached my soul.
I needed to leave behind the death of Pearline, the alcoholism of my mother, the insanity of my childhood.
***
I had raced from New York, hoping to forget the deaths of my mother’s siblings from suicide and AIDS, plus the assumed impending death of my mother, who had shared with me her nightmares of graveyards and tombstones.
She had imagined not only herself, but her gay son buried in their stead.
I desired to escape death, and I took a job creating programs for people with AIDS.
All my life I had been destined to such self-subterfuge.
So, instead of hope, I find myself surrounded by dripping lesions, hacking coughs, and terrifying dementia.
Though I could attempt the rescue of others with ease, I never really knew how to save myself.
Always, my own salvation depended on the kindness of others.
***
For two weeks in June, I hold my routine.
I leapt out of bed, by day exhausted my mind at work; by night I exhausted my body with sex, sometimes hidden in the hills among the bushes of the Castro.
That’s San Francisco’s “lavender light district,” a gay Mecca, where men from all over Northern California on bended knee praised each other’s bodies.
We were each other’s pleasure gods, but rarely did the sex nurture my spirit.
Each night, I returned home to the Mission District, kicked off my shoes and wept in the comfort of the TV’s glow, an enveloping melancholy blue.
This was my refuge, my room, and the lower earthly contrast to Grandma Pearline’s Upper Room.
Even as a child, I rarely fell asleep without the TV on.
How could I forget the crashes, the wails of my mother—wading through the midnight air after my father’s fist “caressed” her cheek with the open hand punch that usually left neither blood nor bruises.
Amid such familial, and familiar, childhood tempests, I was fostered to too many a group home.
There, I was forced to connect and learn to love too many white parents.
***
Instead—
Well—not instead, but more comfortably—I trusted as a constant in my life, the familiar deep drones of the male TV news anchors whose voices, at 11:00 pm, would be the lullaby that guided me to sleep.
The third week in June 1994, the 17th day to be precise, my alarm clock rang 7AM.
I tried to rise, but my feet would not move.
They had been cemented in place like this before, but I reasoned I was just too tired for the day.
I called in sick to The Brothers Network and stayed in bed the entire day.
On the 18th, the sun, rose across San Francisco’s bay, cued my alarm clock, which in turn chimed me awake. This day too, my feet refused to move. I knew I was in trouble.
This pattern had happened upon me once—no twice—before.
This was not simple fatigue.
***
Many weeks passed me by; I had stopped counting the days.
The sun rose and set, forced light then darkness through my Venetian blinds, drawn to keep the world away.
***
Many nights had I spent alone in my room.
Three phone calls rang with concern.
Alex, my best friend: “Tony where are you? Please pick up the phone; I want to be there for you.”
Bill, my ex: “Tony, Alex called me here in New York and is worried, please let us help you.”
Andrea, my sister: “I haven’t heard from you in a while and when I call you at work, all they will tell me is that you have called in sick for the past couple of weeks; you know I love you; call me when you can.”
***
Only my sister’s concern makes me smile then cry.
We are, I imagine kindred spirits, luckily placed in the same family. I remember visiting my mother at her home on Faile Street.
One day, lying half-awake on the sofa, I remember Mommy asked me whom I would marry when I was grown.
My answer was swift.
“Andrea,” I said, with an innocence that made Mommy laugh.
***
My sister and me.
I was not even 10 years old, but knew it would be my sister and me.
Even then I felt a closeness no poet could capture in words, and warmth I could never express without loving tears.
But tears are okay.
I know why they come.
Too often were the times we were kids without a home, my sister and I. Fostered to too many houses that could never ever be a home.
Though it seems so long ago, I’ll always remember, wherever we had to make that home, together we survived, my sister and me.
***
Still warmed by her phone call, I thought about the times we spent together, about how we have changed, how far we have come, how much we have grown.
And I thought about Mommy and her question to me about marriage, and with whom I would make my home.
***
Andrea was 3,000 miles away, and though I could hear only a tinny sound through my answering machine, which could not quite capture the warmth I knew to be her sweet, singsong voice, in my reflection and through my tears, it came to me.
My sister’s love was one of the places I could now call home.
I long to be with her in New York.
She was the one constant in my childhood.
While foster homes separated me from the rest of my family, Andrea and I were always together.
We became each other’s parents.
I trusted her more than my mother.
She made me feel safe and not so alone.
***
“Together forever,” I was thinking when, left to irrational thoughts of the deepest isolation, I turned down the ringer on my phone.
Barely audible, it should no longer awaken me.
***
I felt safer in my depression and preferred to be alone.
I felt at home surrounded by the blue light of my childhood.
My television’s voices anchored me to my childhood and lulled me to a dysfunctional peace of mind.
Still, it’s a place to sleep my troubles away.
And I needed this space.
For when awakened by the sunlight, I was alone with my thoughts of self-hatred.
Lost, I drifted to a faraway place, where time and space and earth did not reside.
That Upper Room in My Mind.
***
There’s a place my mind races when I am depressed and alone with my thoughts.
I never know where its flight from the present to the past will lead me.
However, I do know some days, in fanciful flight from my present, somewhere in my past, I will find my way to salvation.
In that place, where neither time nor space resides, I find I can unlock the doors to my soul and connect myself to the spirit and strength of my ancestors—especially my confidant, my grandmother, Pearline.
But it is also lonely in this place.
I have no need for human interaction.
* * *
Each day my thoughts raced ahead, uncontrollably, jumping logic, switching between fantasy and reality.
I imagined my brain a television possessed by my childhood demons clicking the remote.
Control locked onto my brain and refused to let go. Click.
Remember your father’s flight from your life at four.
Click.
The man who raped you at 10.
Click.
Your Aunt’s suicide at 14.
Click:.
Your mother’s threatened suicides, like clockwork, at 12, 13, and 14 and beyond, each Christmas Eve.
***
Click.
One more time, and finally, my demons returned me to the eerie glow of the television amidst the darkness of my room.
In the depths of this Lower Room, I was too far-gone to rescue myself.
Like a child who cannot let go of a comforting lullaby, I sang to myself the popular songs of my childhood, especially the songs about escape.
As a child I cherished songs about flight: “I’m leaving on a jet plane, I don’t know when I’ll be back again.”
This lyric, recorded as mantra, taped inside of my brain, would forever surface in my mind in times of momentary and extended depression—even today—and I know why.
***
“Why’s” were not important there in my room.
Instead, I played the tape over and over again.
Play, Stop, Rewind.
Play, Stop, Rewind.
Play, stop, rewind.
The catchy tune and its lyric refused to let go and I surrendered to its constant presence in my mind.
“Oh babe, I need you so. My bags are packed and I’m ready to go.”
***
The lavender black nighttime sky was where my dreams of flight would always take me.
As a boy I would dream I could fly through the sky on moonless nights.
As a man, alone in deep purple, and, hazy, my thoughts turned to suicide.
***
The unlikeliest of saviors, Oprah Winfrey flashed on my TV screen.
I liked Oprah.
She, likes me, I reason, and, she had been through so much.
I liked to hear her voice, her pop solutions; so, I turned up the volume.
Like all her shows, the lack of self-esteem arose as the problem and the solution became simple.
“Love yourself,” she implored. “If you can’t do this,” call a friend, she demanded, “Who will love you for you.”
Attempting to save me with proffers of self-love and self-help, Oprah advised,
“Call a friend.”
I talked back to the TV and talked back, literally, to myself,
“but I cannot move from this bed.”
The phone rang silently a fourth time.
As Oprah sang songs of self-acceptance, I cried softly.
Softly to myself.
Myself to sleep.
***
I was awakened by the NBC TV tone that marked the end of the television day.
Its high pitch seemed to belong in the din that sometimes-accompanied stark silence, distant, yet loud in my ears.
The tone merged with the voices of my childhood, and I listened carefully.
These inner child voices spoke to me with a hatred I could not control.
They existed to haunt me, scare me, and taunt me.
I covered my ears and thought of my mother.
***
She, too I remembered, would hear voices in the middle of the night.
Her mind also raced with the madness of depression.
However, such commonalties of experience gave me no comfort, for, I always feared I would become my mother, repeating her patterns of alcoholism, abuse, and self-hatred.
To prevent the former, I became a teetotaler.
More willingly, I became a workaholic.
This buffered me from raging and hazing with alcohol, but nothing could shield me from the anger I turned inward — only to be released through hateful ghostly voices.
***
I was more than scared.
I’d rather be drunk like my mother.
Fuck these voices and mood swings.
Chains cranked and creaked as if lifting, weighty mind tricks, back and forth, throwing me over the fence and high past sanity.
Incessant and loud, high-pitched and barking voices flagged me a faggot, named me nigger, and flushed out, as foxhound, each one of my failures.
***
Lost, desperate, all I could think of was arsenic and cyanide, third rails, and a flight from atop the Golden Gate Bridge.
Which suicide would be most painless?
Which more instant?
To hasten me to hell or to the heavens of my grandmother, ever a Believer.
***
The voices, incessant, ping-ponged against the sides of my head.
Skip. Stop. Start. Rise. Fall.
When you’re alone with self-hatred, creativity can be a dangerous thing.
I willed myself buried alive by an earthquake.
No, perhaps, I would drown in the Pacific.
In my childhood I always dreamt I could fly with the jet planes, so the romantic in me thought it proper to climb the ferrous red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.
With the ease of a first step, I would then float through the clouds, ‘til the water rose to my feet and choked my troubles away.
***
I cried in my sleep—or was I awake?
I prayed for the earthquake.
I was a coward.
And this way, the deed would not be my own doing, and I would find myself not with Hades but with my Grandma Pearline, whose death but a month ago, after all, had awakened the demons that pounced upon my soul and never let go.
***
Then into my thoughts leapt the gods of my grandmother to remind me of the gift she left not a month before her death.
Grandma knew I was prone to depression and loneliness.
On this day, her voice in The Upper Room connected to me below as I remembered her gift of solace to me:
“Tony, just reach into your pocket and feel my presence. Remember what I told you. You will carry me with you—Always.”
***
Naked beneath my covers, I still reached for a pocket.
Instead, I stroked my thigh, caressed the warmth of my legs.
In the depths of a prison, this lower room, Grandma Pearline touched me with the thought of her presence.
Connected in time, but not space, with only my grandmother, still, I gave thanks to her Jesus.
And promised myself and her spirit I would never, again, be part of my own demise.
Before I let you go…
That other story I mentioned from Father Nathan Monk:
A birthday letter from forty-year-old me to my inner child: a car is no longer your home…
LGBTQTSGNC = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Two-Spirit (Native American term) Gender Non-conforming.
Thank you for bringing awareness to this important topic and more importantly sharing your story. I went through life untouched by suicide until a few years ago when my son's classmate ended his life. Although I didn't know this young man, I saw how it impacted my son. It was the first funeral he ever had to attend, the first loss in his life, and it forced him to grow up a little bit faster than I would have preferred. My son had just spent time with him at school the day before and said that nothing seemed out of place. I've since educated myself on suicide, and this is how it can show up - as if nothing is wrong on the outside. Bringing awareness to it and normalizing the conversation will hopefully help people realize how sneaky it can be.