Falling Through Trap Doors

After a friend’s suicide, I wonder what I could have said. Is there ever one right thing? On navigating the far boundaries of acceptance

“Road Less Traveled” (Queensland, Australia, 2015) © Martha Nichols

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Trigger warning: sensitive topic.

I heard about my friend’s death on the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving, and since then I’ve been thinking about luck. I wonder if any of us ever really have it. I’ve been thinking about guilt and the road less traveled and when we decide to take a path snaking off it.

Close to a decade ago, when I lived in Australia for a few months, I liked to snap photos of paths curving into empty landscapes. I liked the emptiness yet wanted to stay on the familiar trails along the Barwon River where I walked every day, where I’d see trees of squeaking lorikeets and the occasional blue flash of a fairy wren.

Those empty paths are on my mind now, on a rainy gray day in early December, when I’m thinking about what words can do and what they can’t. I can tell you, in words, what it’s like after a friend vanishes so completely — or I can try. But it’s not enough.

One recent morning, I woke up dreaming about a road full of trap doors, a checkerboard of dark squares I had to hop over. If I were running down that road, how brave would I be, moving into the gray void? When the darkness falls, would I keep walking? I see myself spinning and stumbling, playing blind man’s bluff. Or I’d hunker down, head between my knees.

So dark and unholy, the chittering little voices in the bushes, not birds but stick-like demons, and there are always bushes, shivering with life of their own. I’d leap up, because terror brings fire, too, and the horrible feeling there’s something I have to do — I’d jump and run, cutting my bare feet on gravel, fists shaking, crying, screaming for help, raging at the ruin.

On that Saturday, I found out my friend had died on Thanksgiving morning, taking her own life in a hotel room. She was glorious, charismatic, a wonderful and beautiful writer, but I never thought she was lucky. I want to call her death what it is, yet I could be wrong in that, and I won’t name her here. Suicide is a word with the power to hurt. Maybe too much power, but it’s a judgment call, one embedded in belief.

So, I won’t quote from her books or recount the help she offered those in need. This isn’t an obituary, with the formal structure that can bring comfort in writing or gathering facts. I’m not after comfort, which is part of the problem. I’m obsessing about what I could have done, what I knew and didn’t know, because a lost life is not only a collection of facts and public achievements.

There were no blue flashes along the road you ran. No rainbow feathers. There were trap doors every few steps — there always have been — but you ran wildly over uneven terrain, eyes on your feet and then the clouds, which were turning, twisting, fingering forever. Maybe you longed for the trap doors to open. You called to them, you shouted, but no one heard, and then one door opened straight down into darkness.

“Empty Path” (Victoria, Australia, 2015) © Martha Nichols

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In a recent New Yorker essay, Zadie Smith writes about “The Fall,” which is ironically apt, although I read her piece after dreaming about trap doors. It’s the kind of synchronicity in reading that means everything and nothing. (Smith would probably nod with a cheeky grin.) She describes falling thirty feet from her bedroom window in north London when she was seventeen. An angsty bookish girl, she had climbed up on the windowsill to sneak a forbidden cigarette, with Prince, her musical idol, blasting in the background.

Smith survived the fall in April 1993, but endured years on crutches and many more years of wondering why it happened. As she writes at age 48:

“So did I fall or did I jump? Was it an accident? A subconscious choice? A decision? All of the above? What do people mean when they say they chose something? Or that they wanted to do something and willed it to happen? I get that willing and wanting things in a sequence is how we make and tell a story. But not everything is a story.”

My friend’s feelings could spit and chew the sky, too. Yet it wasn’t a neat story. She spoke of her bipolar disorder honestly, of how the meds affected her memory, but she didn’t talk about emotional ups and downs like Zadie Smith, who looks back humorously at teenage extremity she no longer feels. For me, there are vast lacunas in my friend’s life, decades when we were rarely in touch, when we lived in different cities — so many missing details and early trauma I’ll never know except that this wasn’t her first suicide attempt. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t really surprised when I heard the news from her partner, but still, I wanted to wail. I wanted to know.

She was not alone. She had a family and many friends who loved her, a new relationship that might have blossomed. I was far from her closest friend, but we were getting to know each other again. We joked and laughed; we were the same age. But reality is not part of this. The darkness can stain your whole being, like spots of ink spreading in a glass of water. You are alone. My friend thought she was alone.

Maybe I can speak to the balm there might be in seeking the void. The mental quiet to be found. I’ve experienced enough depression myself to know the downward pull. At this season, it’s hard to avoid It’s a Wonderful Life, with George Bailey leaning over a bridge in the snow, contemplating the dark water below. My friend didn’t have an angel telling her, “You really did have a wonderful life. Don’t you see what a mistake it would be to throw it away?” There’s a moral, a happy ending, but it’s a movie. A story. And sometimes a real body falls through the door or off a bridge, is gone.

I keep hearing Lucinda Williams sing “Sweet Old World,” a song I’d long assumed was about her brother, although it turns out not to be. Reading “Lucinda Williams Sets the Record Straight,” a 2011 Chicago Tribune review of her album Blessed, I feel more shivers of synchronicity. The song began when she learned that a poet she’d met at a conference had killed himself: “A mutual friend called with the news. Williams asked why. The friend responded, ‘Well, he was just too sensitive to this world.’”

Here’s how Williams recalls her own response:

“My immediate thought was, ‘B-------!’ . . . I’m sensitive, too! I’m just as sensitive, and I didn’t kill myself! . . . We all have our big, dark days. I certainly had my God-can-you-just-take-me-now-I’ve-just-had-it-I’m-checking-out-let-me-off-the-train-I’m-done kind of thing. But, you know, I would never actually do it.”

I wonder if Williams would say that now.¹ Her song evokes unfathomable grief more than blame. “Look what you lost when you left this world,” she croons, “this sweet old world.” Her plaintive voice falters: “Didn’t you think you were worth anything?”

I’m left faltering, wishing I could have said one right thing, knowing my words would never have such power. “Didn’t you think anyone loved you?” the singer sings.

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I saw my friend, in all her lively sparkle, just three days before she died. We had lunch in a fancy restaurant in Harvard Square — “Nice!!!!! We need a break,” her text enthused — and we sat together for more than two hours, drinking cappuccinos with oat milk. We talked about her father being bipolar, what she would do with a book manuscript that had been rejected, the nature of resilience after trauma. She ordered shrimp cocktail, eating all six shrimp.

The fact that I remember what she ate means I was worried she’d eat nothing. But I didn’t give that worry breath. I noticed her hands shaking, but assumed it was a medication side effect. In hindsight, I know she was manic, not because of her shaky hands or the stories she told about her father — but in the way she flitted from one question to another and stared back, as if my answers meant everything.

I felt pressured to get it right, to be calm, to hold the fort. Perhaps it was the wrong response — here comes the guilt, down its relentless track — but that’s who I am. Wild tears might have made more sense to her, us running down the same hopeless road, leaping over trap doors. She wondered if she should give up her office space, “because I’ll never write again.” I told her she certainly would write, she needed to write. I told her how much I admired her activism. “I never do anything I don’t want, Martha,” she said.

I do many things I don’t want, I might have said. I try so hard to get it right, and I fail.

There would have been no one thing to say, I know that. I may have told her I loved her when we hugged goodbye outside the restaurant, and I hope I did, but I alone couldn’t save her. I never do anything I don’t want, Martha. She was smiling when she said it, but I saw the shadow then. I didn’t want to recognize it, but it was in her eyes, the strained set of her jaw.

Yet I can’t help imagining doing more, matching her emotion for emotion. I’d grab her by those slim, bird-like shoulders, hugging her for longer when we parted. I’d remember what she wore, not only six shrimp or the old-fashioned restaurant paneling. Me saying the right thing would break through whatever she might have planned, her need to shuck off all complications so they became thistle down dispersed on the wind.

My foolish need to be her savior, the appalling ego of it: guilty as charged. This angel is earning no wings. But how easy it is to keep writing the story from my own perspective, as a hero rather than a terrified, imperfect observer.

That’s the dark morsel I’m left with, the ability to feel how much easier it might have been for her to fall through the door — how no one could stop her. Not because she wanted to make it harder for us, but to silence all the stories that couldn’t be told, the intensity of feeling unloved at her core. If a friend’s suicide reveals anything, it’s how much pain they hid.

My mother was also “manic depressive,” a term that’s lost its official cachet, but made sense of her moods, the rage that would lurch out of nowhere like a zombie clutching for any victim. She once had to convince a psychiatrist she was manic. The doctor refused to believe her, until I described the way Mom had limped around the music section of an old K-mart, piling stacks of CDs in her arms. This one is good, and this one, I need this one, don’t you know Andrea Bocelli, Martha, he’s GOOD, you should listen.

After I gave a precise account of this incident, as if I were a fellow clinician, the psychiatrist nodded. She turned to my mother and said, “Okay, fine. You’re manic.” It was so condescending — I hated that doctor — but my mother, disabled as she was, punched her fist in the air, whooping.

I saw it then, just as I’d seen it during my time working in a psychiatric hospital decades before, sitting with patients on suicide watch, the bright gleam when a person listened to them. The way they’d lean toward me, as if to breathe in my words and to tell me more. Then how quickly their eyes would dull, disappointed once I pulled back to takes notes, to quiet my own pounding heart. They’d retreat again to an inner anarchy in which everyone is shrieking and laughing, maybe guzzling from towers of champagne, but the people in their real lives are the equivalent of shadows.

My mother didn’t kill herself, although she was a creative person, a visual artist who flung all her emotions on canvas. Well, maybe not all. The pain and darkness for those who descend is as individual as a fingerprint. A decade ago, she died in a care home; I’ve since discovered that Lucinda Williams’s mother was bipolar, too. So many synchronicities, even if I’ve never thought art requires such suffering.

Then again, none of it adds up, unless I force meaning into this story, an occupational hazard for writers. Can you exorcise trap doors in a dream if you paint them or sing away the grief? That isn’t rhetorical. I’m back on the road less traveled, where you never know what will happen next and it’s easy to stumble, yet all those stars glitter above, and you —no, me, only me now — feel meteoric joy along with sorrow.

Going through my friend’s recent texts can still reduce me to tears, but I smile when I track our debate about David Brooks, the columnist at the New York Times. Sometimes I like his writing, but she loathed what she considered his false piety. And with one cringy Brooks line — “Ancient wisdom has a formula to help us, which you might call skepticism of the head and audacity of the heart”² — I had to agree, texting her that it belonged on a Celestial Seasonings box:

Her: You’re the best, Martha. But I love the Celestial Seasonings sayings!

Me: Here’s one tailor-made for Mr. Brooks on our current box of peppermint tea: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication — Leonardo da Vinci”

Her: I love it! When I lived in NYC, the Chinese fortune cookie I got most often was: “Simplicity should be your theme in dress.” Really! It was odd. I took it to heart, black pants, black skirts. I dress like a nun!

And there she is, alive in my mind, arguing and laughing and flinging out her exclamation points. She wasn’t a nun; she was thoroughly herself. She is. The string of words is another path to follow, a flash of the person who was.

Not everyone is healed by storytelling, something she taught me, so I keep words that glimmer with our connection. Words aren’t the same as touch, but I hold them close. Maybe that’s what words do — connect us in the moment, conveying the gleam of everyday life and spirit, ephemeral as breath.³

Her last text to me? After I’d sent a message saying I was running late for lunch, she wrote: I’m in a comfy seat. No rush.

“Looking Up” (Queensland, Australia, 2015) © Martha Nichols

1. In her 2023 memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, Lucinda Williams reflects on a difficult childhood with a mentally ill mother and her wild life on the road: “Music was my therapy for the many traumas I suffered as a child,” she writes.

2. The Celestial Seasonings line is from “How to Stay Sane in Brutalizing Times” by David Brooks (New York Times, November 2, 2023). Here’s a better column in which he confronts a friend’s suicide: “How Do You Serve a Friend in Despair?” Oh, yes, synchronicity.

3. If you have thoughts about suicide, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline — text/call 988 —and see these resources.