Drowning

I recently read an article entitled “Drowning doesn’t look like drowning”.   The article asserts that a drowning person doesn’t thrash and call for help as one might expect---those behaviors are a sign of aquatic distress, but drowning is quite different.   A drowning person makes very little movement and is almost fully submerged.   She is physiologically unable to call out or wave for help.    The thing to be vigilant for is a noticeable subsiding of activity.  

In the weeks leading up to her suicide in 1996, my boss DJ (Dorothy Jean) became increasingly mechanical in her daily activities, not present, preoccupied.  She was disheveled, possibly not sleeping or bathing.  When I expressed concern, she replied, “Oh, please don’t worry about me.”  She was the sort to always take care of others, putting herself last;  we’d  become accustomed to her being there for us, more like a mother than a manager---she remembered our birthdays, helped us move, drove us to urgent care, attended our special events and touted our accomplishments.  Once when my boyfriend’s name appeared in a newspaper article, she cut it out of the paper, stapled a routing slip to it, and sent it around the office with the notation: “This is Tracy’s Mike!!”  She always noticed, always praised.  But in those last weeks, when I mentioned to her that it looked like Mike and I might be splitting up after 13 years together, she looked at me blankly.  This was so unlike her that I didn’t know what to make of it.  In contrast, she took pains to show me how to find all of the support documentation related to a project we were working on, when she was not one to delegate such things.  On the last day of her life, she placed sticky tabs around her house---noting when library books were due and when plants were last watered.

I discovered her now-yellowed obituary in the keepsake box that holds my childhood diaries.  I was going into the keepsake box looking for earlier shadows, but this one was right on top, so I read it.  I saw that she was 47---the age I am now---when she threw herself off the top level of the parking structure at Fourth and William, after a period of frantic pacing that had caused the parking attendants to call the police, but too late. The obituary ends with a quote from DJ’s writing, about being the middle child:  “The middle one, who is, without a doubt, sometimes a bother, but who is, hopefully, a source of ideas, aid and devotion, is therefore irreplaceable and unforgettable.”  At 47 I love life, every difficulty that forces me to grow, every chance to learn more about someone or something.  For me there is just not enough time in the day for all that I’d like to do, and it’s never enough, but it’s delightful.  But all of those things were certainly true of DJ too.   She too had a husband and children, a full, busy life, a lot to live for.  For complicated reasons she was drowning, and we failed to understand the signs.  

After her death, I dreamt that we (her work family) were standing in symmetrical rows before an archway, behind which stood a monolith.  A low-lying mist hung near our feet, and there were no natural features, just white light at the peripheries.  We all faced the archway, standing stoically like those Easter Island statues, humming.  I began to realize that we were intoning the Humming Chorus from Madam Butterfly in a significant ritual.  DJ appeared at the back of the group, and she proceeded to weave among us, looking at each of us in turn with urgency.   We were drably attired, but she was in full color.  We were very still, she was moving.  There was some kind of unspoken law preventing us from touching her or addressing her.   We had to keep singing---it was vital to do so.  She was sad that we couldn’t acknowledge her, and seemed confused and hurt by our inability to respond to her.  We kept humming as a way of trying to help her through the archway, but we felt cruel.