Five Minutes

I haven’t shared this story with more than one or two people. I don’t know if I’d be sharing it today, if someone battling mental illness hadn’t challenged me for hiding my own struggles with depression.

End of November, 2000

I pulled the knot tight in the green rope and then secured it with an overhand hitch knot. I put my weight on the rope. It held strong around the rafter.

The white chair wobbled beneath me. I opened the noose and tested the length of the rope. It would be about an eighteen-inch drop. Perfect.

I shifted my leg brace down and stepped off the chair. I went downstairs to write a note.

A rational mind struggles to comprehend suicide. Those of us with depression or another mental illness struggle not to comprehend it. The sick brain self-destructs by sending out waves of overpowering chemical and electrical signals. It’s similar to how the bone marrow of someone with leukemia creates abnormal white blood cells bent on destroying the body.

My world had collapsed over the course of six months. An injury in Ranger School shattered my military career and left me crippled. My fiancée had betrayed me while I was at the Office Basic Course and Ranger School. It seemed that everyone I knew on the island had kept that betrayal from me.

I’d suffered from depression before and this combination of events more than set it off again. I couldn’t see how I could make it through another day. It felt like being trapped in a dark room where suicide was the only door. I fought not to open it, but eventually the darkness overcame me.

I stopped on my way down the stairs and prayed. “God, I love you, but I just can’t do this any more. If you have some reason that I should stay alive, I’ll give you five minutes to show me a sign.”

I didn’t expect an answer. I hobbled around the kitchen and pulled together a paper and pen. I wrote and then threw out two suicide notes. The final one just said, “I’m sorry, Matt.”

That summed it up. I hung the paper on the wall and went back upstairs

I stepped up on the wobbling white and blue chair. I slipped the noose around my neck and had a few final thoughts. One thought wouldn’t go away.

I needed to pay the rent. It would probably take a week or two for my unit to send the police to my apartment. It would probably take two or three weeks to clean it up and get rid of my gear. There was no way that they could have it rented again before the first of the year. The least I could do was pay them for the month of December.

There was one problem. I didn’t have any checks. I’d ran out of checks the week before and was still waiting for the new ones to arrive. I’d tried to take the money out of my ATM the day before, but had hit the daily withdrawal limit well short of what I needed.

I’d looked through the checkbook multiple times for a spare check that I may have missed among the duplicates. There was nothing. My irrational mind was battling with my irrational mind. Go look again versus get on with it. Go look again won.

I took the noose off my neck and got down to look through the checkbook again. I flipped through the duplicate checks once, nothing. I flipped through them again, nothing. I flipped through them one last time and found a check.

I filled it out and then walked outside to drop it in the mail. The mailboxes were in the center of the complex. On my way there, I said hello to my neighbor Jeff who was sitting on his porch.

I said hi. Jeff said hi back. We were amicable, but hadn’t said more than a few words over the two months that I lived there. Jeff was a Hawaiian native and I was a lily white haole from the mainland. The insider and the outsider. A cultural barrier left over from the island’s colonization.

I dropped the envelope in the mail slot and turned back towards my apartment. I heard a soft whimper from across the street. Jeff was crying.

I walked over and sat down next to him. We began to talk and didn’t stop for the next two hours. Jeff thought he was about to be laid off. His marriage was already on the rocks and he was terrified about what that meant for his children.

I didn’t have any answers, but we talked until he felt better. Somewhere along the way I began to feel better too.

We hugged and I went back to my apartment.

I’d forgotten how much peace can be found through trying to help someone else. It was a lesson I’d learned as a child while trying to help Darcee battle her eating disorder.

It was another door out of the darkness. A door that I wouldn’t have found if something higher hadn’t planted the idea in my brain that I couldn’t say goodbye to this world without paying the rent.