The Last Time

I was seven years old, and my family was picnicking at Will Rogers State Beach in Santa Monica, California. While I played in the shallow, rocky surf, my brother and sisters jumped over the swells farther out. Between us was the “ditch” — an underwater trench probably only a few feet deep, but an impassable barrier to me. I asked my dad to carry me over it, as he had done many times before, so I could float in the gentle swells.

This time he refused. “Cross it yourself. You can swim. You’ll be safe.”

I attempted to cross several times, but in each instance fear swept me back to the shore. I whined and pleaded for help until at last my father said, “If you don’t cross by yourself, I’ll never bring you back.”

Desperate, I plunged into the ditch, gulped salt water, and reached the other side. I was proud. I had been carried across for the last time.

Dad is now eighty-eight and succumbing to Alzheimer’s. Shuffling steps have replaced his once-confident stride. On a recent visit, he held my hands and looked fearfully into my eyes as I led him toward a ramp to go outdoors. He stopped at the threshold, unable to will his feet over. With a trembling voice he said, “I’d better go back inside.”

If I can’t get you across today, I thought, I’ll never be able to take you outside again. But it would have felt cruel to pressure him, so I let him retreat to his chair.

Tim Brandy
Ashland, Oregon

My friends don’t understand why a missed cellphone call at dinner from my sister-in-law Jenny has me so panicked. My brother Matthew, Jenny’s husband, suffers from depression and has been suicidal. I try to call back but can’t reach her. Throughout the meal I eye the phone on the table beside me, willing it to ring again.

When I finally reach Jenny later that evening, I am relieved to hear that my little brother is still alive. Jenny is in Pennsylvania, and Matthew is at their home in Washington, D.C., but she’s managed to extract from him a promise that he won’t commit suicide this weekend.

I drop my plans and fly to D.C. On the plane, to calm my fears, I assure myself that Matthew has to stay alive to pick me up at the airport; he wouldn’t leave me there all alone. When I see him waiting for me, I burst into tears.

Since Jenny is out of town, Matthew and I have the whole weekend to spend together. He laughs in the morning when he finds me asleep on my back in the sofa bed, legs together, arms out to my sides. “You sleep like Jesus,” he tells me as I sit up groggily. I am just happy he’s here to laugh at me.

Matthew’s been depressed since he was about twelve years old, but he’s always had a biting sense of humor and is the one person who has unfailingly looked after me. Lately his medications have quit working for him, he says. He’s trying new combinations, which cause stomach problems and headaches. It’s enough to make a healthy person depressed.

We spend Saturday at the museums, keeping our minds busy so we don’t have to talk too much about our emotions. In the east wing of the National Gallery of Art, we stand together and look up in wonder at the Alexander Calder mobile, creaking in the sunlight. It’s not until we get back to Matthew’s house that evening that we discuss why I’m there.

I ask him not to do it, but he won’t promise me anything. I tell him I could have him committed to a hospital, but I also know my little brother could convince the doctors he’s sane, then come home and kill himself anyway; the only difference would be that he’d hate me first for having betrayed him. I try to pull rank on him as his big sister. I try to set conditions: not until after Thanksgiving; not until after his thirtieth birthday this fall; not until after my wedding. (He laughs at the last one, as I am perpetually single.)

Then I start in on the reasons to live: the next Harry Potter book; afternoons at the museum beneath the Calder mobile; our mother’s chocolate desserts. Matthew humors me, but I have suffered depression myself (the medications worked for me), and I know that the pleasures of the world are not enough to relieve it. As his big sister, I have beaten up bullies for him. I have done everything I can think of to make his world more bearable. But this I can’t fight.

On Monday Jenny is back from Pennsylvania, and we all go to group therapy together. Then on Tuesday morning I have to go to the airport and return to my job. Though I know we haven’t changed Matthew’s mind, Jenny is hopeful. It’s sunny out. Matthew is headed to work. “I wish you wouldn’t,” I whisper in his ear as I hold him close.

Matthew committed suicide the following Friday.

Katharine L.
Boston, Massachusetts

I spent the better part of my senior year of high school under the influence. I’d start drinking or smoking pot first thing each morning and continue well into the night. I made bad decisions, had run-ins with the law, and experienced blackouts, yet I have few regrets. Any time that I spent drunk or high was time I didn’t feel the psychological pain of my childhood. And, being a shy and lonely girl, I had a lot of fun that I never would have had sober.

One night that spring, my sister Laurie and I were driving around with our friends Pete and Deb in our parents’ red Ford van with the tinted windows. We listened to music and passed bowls of dope. (If anyone had bothered to vacuum the carpet in that van, they would have heard a tick, tick, tick as hundreds of dope seeds were sucked up.) It was one of the first warm nights of the year, so we had the windows open, and the blossoming trees and bushes smelled good. My usual worries — an unrequited crush on Pete; what I was going to do after graduation — weren’t troubling me that night.

Then it started to rain, hard. Up ahead, at the bottom of a hill, the street was flooded by the heavy downpour. The water was at least three inches deep. One of us — it wasn’t me — suggested we stop and get out.

I stepped hesitantly from the van and into the huge puddle. The rain continued to come down, and in an instant we were soaked, hair plastered to our heads, clothes clinging to our skinny bodies. We danced and laughed and splashed one another, not caring whether we looked cool. Nothing mattered, but in a good way. All of our adolescent worries were released in the deluge. I lay down on my back and let the cool water fill my ears. It was a moment of pure ecstasy and joy. I had the strange sensation of knowing who I was and rejoicing in it.

In the months that followed I would lose my virginity, go through a bout of depression, and start the first in a series of meaningless jobs. That night would be the last time I felt truly free.

Anne K.
Rockville, Maryland

My girlfriend Kathleen’s mother escorted me to the guest room for the night, explaining that, even though her husband was away, I still had to obey his rules and not sleep in the same room with their daughter. I made knowing eye contact with Kathleen as I thanked her mother for letting me sleep over. By morning the snowstorm would have blown through, and I’d be on my way back to the military base.

After Kathleen’s mother had gone to bed, I waited two hours, then slipped out of the guest room and followed the light of the television down the stairs. In the living room, Kathleen was alone on the couch, a long t-shirt pulled over her knees. Her face lit up when I appeared, and she cast an imaginary fishing line and reeled me in. She hooked her fingers into my jeans and ran them back and forth along the inside of the waistband, brushing against my erection. Then she unbuttoned my fly and lifted her shirt, and we rolled onto the floor.

Kathleen and I had broken her stepfather’s rules many times before and had never been caught. We weren’t caught that night either. At dawn I was in uniform and on the road.

That was the last time I crept down those stairs, saw the enthusiasm in Kathleen’s eyes, and felt the power and pleasure of ejaculation. A few weeks later I was injured in a freak accident and permanently paralyzed.

Name Withheld

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