Early on in my internet research, trying to learn more about CSF leaks and my strange constant headache, I came across an interview with George Clooney, in which he mentioned the strange constant headache of his own CSF leak, and reported that the pain was so bad he wanted to die. I remember feeling relief, as though his admission finally legitimized my own pain. “Even George Clooney wants to kill himself. And he’s George Clooney!” I wrote in the text I sent to my husband.
It would be easy enough to do. Probably any one of these bottles, taken all at once, would be enough to make all of this stop forever. It’s not a terrifying thought at all. It reminds me of the acceptance I felt in the midst of that intractable labor pain, in that it feels strangely comforting. I’m okay with this, I can go now. I close the mirrored cabinet and know that my mirror self and I have come to an understanding. For a moment, we both feel the relief of knowing there’s a way out.
“Shouldn’t you be dead?” a friend texts. “I mean, if your brain isn’t working?”
It’s a fair question, and I know the answer, but it floats away from me, a note in a bottle, bobbing in the ocean. My brain works well enough to keep going, I explain. It does the basic things it’s supposed to do. I can breathe, I can walk, I can talk, I can function physically, aside from the small weirdnesses I have begun to notice: the way that lying on my left side brings on a panic attack, my heart flubbing weirdly in my chest, a strange rush of adrenaline burbling inside me; the way that once I’ve been upright for too long, my eyes stream tears, but not from sadness; the way everything feels odd and disconnected, as though my body is moving of its own accord, without my brain to tell it what I want it to do or where I want it to go.
It’s like being very, very, very drunk, I explain. I have never actually been very, very, very drunk, I have only ever been tipsy; but that is what this feels like, except more so, the whole world tipping over while my mouth still moves, my legs still walk, the way a drunk person can talk and walk and think that they are fine.
“So you’re fine, then,” this friend says.
I am not. But also, I am. Because he has a point. I’m not in a coma. I’m not paralyzed. I’m not on life support. I’m just in pain, stuck in bed, my brain in a fog.
“Everyone feels foggy like that,” he says. “Part of aging.”
“You’re right,” I say. “That’s true.”
My brain agrees with everything.
This must be a coping mechanism, this agreement, a small part of me thinks from way back in the recesses of my brain. It’s as though the me who is Me is just a tiny seed of a me, swathed in cotton, far, far away, and every once in a while I can hear some kind of distant echo of a thought that makes sense. But of course these thoughts will make sense: My brain is eminently agreeable, and so it welcomes all thoughts with the same dumb enthusiasm. A coping mechanism! Yes! Brilliant!
The second time I wanted to die also involved my children. It was not the pain of deliverance, though, not the surrender of acceptance. It was the powerlessness all parents are confronted with at one time or another. The guilt of a split-second of inattention. The general parental agony of being unable to protect your child from the harm inherent in the world, and the specific parental agony of having been responsible for it.
Nate was three, Emi was six. It was President’s Day, the children home from school. I was getting ready to take them out to some activity, to break up the monotony of the morning inside our small apartment. Nate and I were in the bathroom, he washing his hands, me putting on makeup. It was a normal day.
How many times did I go over this sequence of events after what followed? How many times did I live these moments?
He slapped his hands on the towel in a simulacrum of drying them, and ran off to retrieve his cars, which he’d been in the middle of racing up and down the bed of the treadmill that stood in our living room. I leaned into the mirror to better see what as I was doing as I put on my eyeliner, and I heard a strange, loud grunt. It was a sound not unlike other sounds I’d heard my children make when they fought—and yet somehow immediately I knew this was not a fighting grunt, not a grunt about someone hogging space on the table for coloring or someone taking someone else’s favorite car.
“Nate?” I called from the bathroom, still looking at myself, frozen in the mirror. But then I ran, because everything in my body felt wrong, a sickening rush of adrenaline flooding me with panic.
I ran around the corner from the bathroom to find him slumped against the living room wall, behind the treadmill, near the couch, his mouth open, his eyes wide. As I ran to him, calling his name, his eyes widened even more, and then rolled back in his head, and then he seemed to fade away, the life falling away from him, before his body started shaking with seizures. He gripped his toy car in one hand as
