One Friday in April, 2006, I spent the afternoon and evening pacing the roof of my apartment building in Brooklyn, climbing down the fire-escape ladder and hanging by my hands from the railing, then climbing back up with sore palms and lying on the roof, in a ball, or stretched out on my back or on my stomach, peering surreptitiously over the ledge. The roof is painted silver. The building is four stories tall. A group of my friends, each of whom had been on the phone with me, one after the other, all through the morning, when I’d been alone and dialling wildly, had got busy calling one another. Janice owned a car, and she and Nicky were coming across the bridge from Manhattan, but there was traffic, and no one knew where I was.

From the roof, the world seemed to scream. I heard sirens—police, ambulance, and fire. What agency would come for me? A helicopter was flying overhead and circling back. The woman I’d just run from, the woman who had rushed over from work ahead of the others, who had been with me downstairs in my apartment, Regan, my partner then, my caregiver, thought that I’d gone to the street. We had been fighting over something I’d done. I’d hurt her, and we were both in anguish. She spoke harshly, and I ran away to die and end her burden.

The sun was setting, and the sky over New Jersey was orange, and I was in my socks, shivering. I was afraid, not anxious or scared but afraid for my life. I didn’t know why I had to fall from the roof, why that was mine to do.

Or, rather, I did know. I was in psychosis, a fatal emergent illness, and I knew what the suicide knows. I knew that I would die. I felt that I had been dying all my life.

When telling the story of my illness, I try not to speak about depression. A depression is a furrow, a valley, a sloping downward, and a return. Suicide, in my experience, is not that. I believe that suicide is a natural history, a disease process, not an act or a choice, a decision or a wish. I do not understand suicide as a response to pain, or as a message to the living. I do not think of suicide as the act, the death, the fall from a height or the trigger pulled. I see it as a long illness, an illness with origins in trauma and isolation, in deprivation of touch, in violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging. It is a disease of the body and the brain, if you make that distinction, a disease that kills over time. My dying, my suicide, lasted years, through hospitalizations, through more than fifty rounds of electroconvulsive therapy—once known as shock therapy—through recovery, relapse, and recovery. It can seem recent in memory, though at times it feels ancient, far removed, another lifetime, another life and my life.

I was hanging from the fire escape. I kept a slight toehold. The sun was low; the air was cold. I was wearing socks but no shoes, and my palms were scraped and beginning to blister from letting go a little, one hand at a time, falling out at an angle, sideways or backward, then grabbing fast for the rail and clutching tight. I gazed down at the concrete patio and the chain-link fence surrounding the back yard. The yard was inaccessible, small, and neglected. My apartment is on the third floor, and windows in my kitchen and bedroom overlook it, though you’d have to stick your head out to see much. I’d never looked at the yard for more than a minute.

Below me was the small patio area littered with trash, and a stairwell leading to the locked basement and the boiler. The rest was hard ground. Since that time, since 2006, new people, a family, have moved into the first-floor apartment, and they’ve replaced the old chain-link fence with one made of wood and put in a barbecue and a picnic table; I can hear their children when it’s warm out, along with, on school days, even in the cold winter months, older children, neighborhood kids, playing and screaming on the rooftop playground of the private school a few doors down the street.

Recess was over; school was out; night was falling. I had no children. I held on to the railing. It was less dizzying to look down than up. Clouds crossed the sky. Here and there, I could see people having after-work cocktails on private decks on neighboring roofs—it was the beginning of a spring weekend. Now, remembering that day, I wonder what those people might have thought of the man scrambling from fire escape to rooftop and back, letting go with one hand, flopping down on his belly to crane over the edge. Did they imagine that he was doing work, maintenance or repair, some job they couldn’t clearly make out? If they had known the man’s troubles, had known the man, would they have understood that he was about to die? Or would they have imagined that he was trying to live?

It was getting darker, and I could hear traffic on the street below, people driving home through Brooklyn after work. I was cold; I’d been up there a long time. I didn’t know that it had been five hours. It could have been any amount of time. I had on pants, a shirt, and socks. My hands and clothes were dirty from the rooftop. I remember how loosely my pants fit, how thin I’d become over the winter. Where was my belt? I shoved my hands into my pockets and squeezed my arms against my sides, holding up my pants, trying to get warm.

“Oh, man, I got real confused by the mirrors in here.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

I’d written about my mother, her alcoholic life and her resignation in death, and my role as her son, savior, and abandoner. I began writing the year after she died, too soon for writing to be safe. The book, “The Afterlife,” is divided into seven parts, the number of years, in classical myth and literature, that is considered an appropriate period of mourning, and the number of years it took me to complete the manuscript. It is an accounting of the death of my family. Writing the book had been an excitement, but publishing it was an ordeal. I didn’t know that the book wasn’t about me, that it was about something shared between writer and reader. It was a movement from exposition to scene, defense to acceptance, mortification to love. But my old worlds—Florida, Virginia, the places of my childhood—were costly to rebuild. I was engaged in betrayal: mine of my mother, hers of me, mine of myself.

When I was in my early twenties, out of college and living in New York, on East Eighty-fifth Street, I returned again and again to Miami to rescue my mother. My father had left her and precipitously remarried, and she was drinking herself to death.

One night, back in New York, back behind the lines, as we say, I was with friends at the Madison Pub, a dark old bar on Madison Avenue in the Seventies, up from the old Whitney Museum. The panelled walls were scarred with the carved signatures of literary men—Walter Winchell’s was the biggest. I was drinking a Manhattan. There was a pay phone at the back of the bar; I left my drink on the table, went to the phone, picked it up, called my mother, and listened to fifteen rings, twenty rings, twenty-five. There was a sound, someone picked up, but there was no voice. “Mom, Mom, Mom,” I said, and then hung up the phone, picked it back up, and dialled my grandfather, my mother’s father, in North Carolina. He worried over his daughter all the time. I told him that she was in trouble. I told him that I had to go to Florida. I stopped at the table and told my friends that I had to go, and then walked uptown to my apartment, where I packed, checked the stove, turned off the lights, locked the door behind me, and hurried down the stairs, onto the street and into a cab that just about ran over my foot when I opened the door before the driver had stopped; from there, east on Eighty-sixth Street, left on the F.D.R. Drive, and across the bridge.