The Best They Had On the Ranch

You keep telling me I've got everything
You say I've got everything I want
You keep telling me you're gonna help me
You're gonna help me, but you don't

-- “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight,” written by Michael Rutherford, Phil Collins, and Tony Banks, performed by “Genesis” on the album “Invisible Touch” (1986)

["Senator" is me: I have found it helpful to distinguish myself at 17 from myself at 60. The names used in the essay are not the real names of the persons involved.]

After the fact they will say it was because a girl broke up with him. Failing that, they will say that, because the half-finished composition paper on the table dealt with the Kent State shootings, that he was morbidly obsessed with the shootings. Failing that: well, they will find something.

They certainly will not find it in the 80 percent of the one-page suicide note that emphasizes being worn out and washed up, because that suggests that possibly he didn’t get the emotional support he needed, and fuck that.

They will never know that it isn’t the girl friend or Kent State that pushes him over the edge. It is the fact that he realizes he will not be able to finish the paper by the time it is due in the morning.

And they will never ask the obvious question: Why was Senator unable to navigate the stresses and challenges common to a teenager his age?

Time rolls back not quite a year. It is 3 p.m. on Monday, May 31, 1976, and Senator cracks open Notebook Eight. At the top of the first blank page—page 226, he numbers it—Senator notes the day and time and writes, “Christ am I ever depressed. Last night I cried alone hysterically for about ten minutes, till I could get ahold of myself; but after that I felt so mortified & ashamed that I was worse off than when I started. . . . I hope this passes soon. I find myself continually looking around the house for ways to ‘do away with myself.’ Of course I’ve no real intention of suiciding myself, but it’s a reflection of my general attitude. Man I must be crazy.”

The next day at 10:52 a.m. Senator writes, “During the Korean War, when the artillery screamed too hot for the grunts in the foxholes, it was a common practice for them to ‘bug out;’ that is, hightail it to the rear via tunnels especially designed for that purpose. I’m here at Otterbein [College Library] now, having bugged out from the uncomfortable realities of my present situation. In other words, I just found out that I’m a coward.”

He continues, “I can’t think of a time since I was old enough to embrace the foolish doctrine called courage that I have ever run from an enemy. Nope, it took a friend to make this grunt bug out. Or more precisely, several friends.”

Senator says that he is tempted to put friends in quotes, but he won’t. “My friends have been as good to me as they know how. Trouble is, they don’t know how.” Over the next four pages he describes reaching out to three friends, only to fail to make himself heard. In none of these instances is it intrinsically a big deal. For instance, he calls Kimberley and she gets on the phone and he wades through “her preliminary barrage of small talk, but before I could really start communicating with her she had to get off the phone.”

In the evening—he is describing the evening of the 31st—he gets a call from Maureen. Maureen wants to talk. Maureen has gotten fired for refusing the advances of her boss. Maureen is having problems with her two boyfriends. Maureen goes on for quite a while. But Senator doesn’t mind. “I knew she had to be cheered up, so I got out my Bozo outfit & did a workmanlike job of it. But the thing that really lifted my depression and set everything in its place was when I asked if I could drop by on the morrow. I mean I was really looking forward to that visit.”

He goes on to say that he didn’t have great expectations and didn’t need them. “What I wanted was to spend a couple of quiet hours chatting amiably with a friend. That would’ve been nice. That would’ve been just what I needed.” They agreed to meet at 3 p.m. the next day.

Trouble is, in the morning—this morning, maybe 90 minutes earlier—Maureen tells Senator that he’d best forget about the visit because she might have to be elsewhere. Fine, Senator says. He can come later.

“Senator,” says Maureen, with a frozen tight smile, “I’m trying to be nice.” It transpires that she just plain doesn’t want to see Senator or anyone else.

Senator thinks this is understandable but if Maureen only knew the importance. “I’d like to speak to you after class,” he says.

She doesn’t want to speak to him after class. At all.

Senator muses to his journal that he should have bought a clue at that point but he didn’t. There were classmates getting up from their desks, chairs scraping, several of them so close that he could whisper and they would still hear him. Maureen wouldn’t talk to him in the hall. So, right then and there he said as evenly as he could, “Maureen, when you needed me I was there. Now I need you—“

“Go talk to Kimberley,” Maureen snapped.

And that’s when Senator left the school and made the 25-minute walk to the Otterbein College Library and took a seat at a table on the second floor. He puzzles things over. He thinks he has been a good friend to the friends to whom he has reached out. “But one by one my friends have proven unable to help me weather my own times of trouble and weariness. The worst part is that they don’t realize, can’t realize, that I need them…. I can’t believe they’d intentionally hurt me. They just plain don’t know any better. They’ve been as good to me as they could…. I chose my friends from the best they had on the ranch. Can I really expect unknown others to be better than they?”

Three days later—Friday, June 4—Senator will swallow four lithium carbonate capsules, the capsules his mother uses to control her manic-depressive illness. Too much lithium carbonate is toxic, which is partly why people who take the medication must have regular blood draws. But four capsules, he knows, are about as lethal as four green peas.

So it’s a token effort, a proverbial cry for help. Except that he fails to cry out. He feels too ashamed. Of the whole thing: his depression, the way he feels weak for reaching out, the fact that his friends are too busy with their own lives (and have their own problems), the fact that he humiliated himself by reaching out to Maureen.

In his classic study, “The Anatomy of Courage,” Lord Moran suggests that courage “is will-power, whereof no man has an unlimited stock; and when in war it is used up, he is finished. A man’s courage is his capital and he is always spending.”

The analogy applies to civilian life as well, except that the capital is what might be called emotional energy and there is an assumption that this capital will be replenished by the support of family and friends. But without that support, or enough of it, the capital gets used up. The coming year will be filled with ups and down, but each event will require an emotional expenditure, because both positive as well as negative developments can be stressful.

By mid-winter 1977 the funds in his account are getting dangerously low. He intuits this and goes to his mother for help. Thursday, February 17: “I talked with Ma, briefly, about the mental peculiarities that have plagued me since June: how I often seem to live in unreality, suspended in twilight; how my decisions & actions have not been of the first order. She dismissed the surrealism as melodrama, and the ‘decisions & actions’ by saying I had never been much of a decision maker & the ones I’m making nowadays are as good as or better than any I’ve ever made. Also that, on balance, I am outwardly better adjusted than ever before. I could not make her see that *inwardly* I feel chaotic.”

The suicide attempt is now less than three months away.