Promises Made

My husband and I have a pact regarding suicide. No, it’s not a suicide pact of the kind you read about in the newspapers. This is a pact aimed at preventing suicide.

Dan and I both have brain illnesses. He has depression, and I have bipolar disorder. We both take meds for them and are reasonably stable a reasonable amount of the time.

That wasn’t always true, however. At one point or another, we each have considered killing ourselves.

Dan’s episode happened when he lost a job that had started out successfully and well, but devolved into chaos, disappointment, and bad feelings. On the day he was let go, he was so upset that the people where he worked called an ambulance to meet him at our house and take him for a psych evaluation. But Dan has worked in some psych units, so he knew how to answer their questions without setting off any alarms that would cause them to keep him there.

Much later, however, he told me that he really had been suicidal at the time.

My brush with suicide came after my mother died. In the aftermath, Dan did something I thought was dishonest (I won’t go into details), and I catastrophized. I didn’t approve of his action and was alarmed when he said he would do it again in the same circumstances. I felt that if that happened, I would be compelled to drop a dime on him. Then he would be disgraced, lose his job, maybe even be subject to legal consequences. I couldn’t live with the thought of that, so I decided the only thing I could do was fix the situation and then kill myself.

If it seems like those are crappy reasons for suicide, well, they are, but they didn’t seem like it at the time. That’s the insidious nature of suicidal thoughts.

We didn’t just have thoughts, however. We had plans for how to do it. (When we were able to talk about it later, it happened that our plans were almost identical.)

What stopped us? I can’t speak for Dan, but I kept postponing the act until I had settled on a method. Then my meds kicked in and I didn’t feel the need anymore.

Now we have a pact. If either one of us thinks about suicide in the future, we’ve agreed to tell each other, generally by saying, “I’m having bad thoughts.” That’s our code for it. (If we have lesser bad thoughts, we say, “I’m having bad thoughts, but not the really bad ones.”) That’s our pact. We will let each other know if we’re feeling bad enough to consider it so we can get help for ourselves or for each other.

And when we say those words, we know to take them seriously and to talk about what we’re feeling and why. We help each other consider other, less lethal, responses. Fortunately, we have both abided by our pact.