The Day I Tried To Live: On Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicides and Postpartum Depression
I was 34 weeks pregnant when Chris Cornell died by suicide. I woke up to the news, as it seems we often do with celebrity deaths, and then I spent my day immersed in reactions on social media and Chris’s music, which was playing nonstop on KEXP.
I’d liked Soundgarden since I’d seen the video for “Rusty Cage” on MTV’s 120 Minutes or Headbanger’s Ball. It could have been either one. They were on the more metal side of grunge, which I appreciated, especially in seventh grade. They weren’t one of the bands who defined or changed my life though. Nirvana had been one of those bands, and of course, their lead singer also died by suicide.
My thoughts definitely turned to Kurt that day. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. I couldn’t help but think about the darkness in my early adolescence — a period soundtracked by songs like Soundgarden’s “Like Suicide” and “The Day I Tried To Live,” and Nirvana’s “Lithium” and “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle.” The indelible impact of Kurt, who’d brought voice to my pain, and been silenced by his own when I was fourteen. The fucking battle it had been to live for me to sixteen, to eighteen, to twenty-one, to and twenty-seven and beyond.
The afternoon after the news of Chris Cornell’s death, I roamed around Capitol Hill with KEXP streaming in my headphones. I walked into a record store and bought the PJ Harvey and Mark Lanegan records I’d been meaning to buy. I wandered through Cal Anderson Park. I was killing time between work and therapy. I can’t recall why there was time between work and therapy. Like had I just left early? Was therapy scheduled later than normal? In my memory, it was really hot and sunny that day, but that might be wrong. Maybe I’ve conflated with another day when I was grieving or maybe I was just wearing sunglasses because I was trying not to cry.
I remember trying to put my finger on why this death was hitting me so hard. I wanted to explain it to my therapist without sounding stupid, which is kind of silly because therapists aren’t supposed to judge you for things like being a little sadder than you think you should be over the death of a rock star you liked when you were a teenager. I did figure it out by the time I got to her office though:
Chris had lived. He’d survived battles with depression and addiction. And then he stopped. This was an unpleasant reminder that depression wasn’t just a hole you climbed out of. That you didn’t just arrive in a meadow and frolic for the rest of your life. There were more holes in that meadow. There were landmines.
I’d spent most of my early twenties climbing out of the dark place I’d fallen into during my teenage years. When I’d moved to Seattle in my early thirties, it was because I’d caught myself just before falling into another one. And I was in therapy because my struggles with fertility had had me staring into darkness yet again.
So, as my therapist pointed out, I knew this already. I found it frustrating and unfair, but I knew that for most of us, depression is not a one-time thing. Chris’s death had been a harsh reminder of the worst possible outcome. And now there was someone else in my life who the worst possible outcome would impact — he was in my belly, kicking and moving around to the Soundgarden songs on the radio.
My teenage journal entry from the day Kurt Cobain died was short. It was pure heartbreak and anger, but not for myself. “What about your daughter?” I’d asked him in it.
Almost two decades later, when I had officially outlived Kurt, I watched footage of him with his daughter in a documentary, and had the shocking realization of how young he looked. I’d been battling depression and addiction at that same age, but he was also a parent, a husband and leading the biggest band in the world. No wonder he had collapsed under the weight of it all, I thought. And I believed that I understood then, that I could answer the question I’d posed in my journal at fourteen: it was too much, he didn’t have the right tools, and he couldn’t save himself, not even for her.
Chris Cornell was 53 when he died. He had three children. It brought that question to the surface for me again, but instead of scrawling it in a notebook, I explored it with my therapist.
It was and still is hard to put into words what depression feels like at its absolute worst and maybe it’s different for everyone. For me, the first word that comes to mind is numb. I self-injured as a teenager and I did it to try to feel something. In my childbirth class, they had us hold an ice cube for an extended period of time as a way to practice coping techniques for labor. Depression was a little like that. Holding ice. Not being able to drop it. Trying to cope because, weirdly, ice burns. Freezing really fucking hurts. And then it hurts so bad that you can’t feel it anymore. You know it’s wrong — you’re not supposed to not feel — but you’re used to it. And unless you were really thrashing around during that part when the ice was burning, no one will notice unless you say something. There’s no blood. No screaming. It’s easy to freeze to death, to simply slip away.
I hadn’t gotten to that degree of numbness in a long time. I’d learned to alert others, to ask for help. And I’d actually done it because of a child. She wasn’t mine by blood. I hadn’t carried her in my body, but I loved her that deeply. The times I’d asked for help, I’d done so because I’d managed to think of her and didn’t want my pain to become her pain. I was sure, though, that Chris Cornell loved his children the way I loved that child. So did Kurt Cobain. So did the parents of my friends who’d committed suicide. What this signaled to me was that depression could get even worse, even colder and darker than I’d ever experienced. That it could get so bad that I wouldn’t be able to signal for help, to use the tools that nearly two decades worth of therapy had given me — tools that Kurt Cobain might not have had, but I guessed, Chris Cornell did.
This was fucking terrifying. Up there for me with things like SIDS and school shootings and the megaquake that could destroy Seattle. It was dark and insidious, the idea that my depression could strike at any time and destroy my family.
Like living on the Cascadia fault line, all I could do was prepare. My therapist advised reviewing the handouts on postpartum mood disorder with my husband and trying to think about how they might manifest for me — how they had manifested in the past. I talked to my two closest friends, the women who’d been by my side since my teenage battles with depression and asked them to describe what I was like for my husband. I made sure he had their numbers in his phone along with that of my therapist. I made sure that they would check in with him because he might be so exhausted that he wouldn’t know what he was looking at. My postpartum depression toolkit was stocked better than our disaster supply bag, and that was a good thing.
I was depressed from the moment my son was born. The birth did not go as I hoped or planned. It could have been a lot worse. It was not an emergency, and for someone who didn’t have my history, it might not have even felt traumatic, but it did for me. It triggered old pain. I disassociated. Truth be told, I didn't even want to hold my son when he was born. I didn’t feel like I deserved him and I did not feel connected to him. I was immediately panicked by his existence. I felt completely and totally out of my depth.
Then came my struggles with breastfeeding, which only deepened my feelings of unworthiness. I closed my eyes and wished myself dead one night as my son screamed and my husband begged me to come out of the state that he’d never seen before, which had to be really scary for him.
My best friend visited, and on the day before she left, I broke down, triggered as I recall, by more breastfeeding struggles and the paralyzing fear of being alone with the baby. I curled in fetal position on the couch, she or my husband held the baby and talked to me — or as they probably quickly came to realize, over me because while I could could hear their voices, I could not process their words.
Unlike my husband, my best friend had seen me like this before. She let me lay there for a while and then she made me contact my therapist. She also called another friend to make sure I would have company on my first day without her and she made me promise to go outside every day and send her a picture to prove I’d done it.
Things got a little better after that — at least for a while. I was not immediately diagnosed with Postpartum Depression the moment I walked into my therapist’s office and shared what those first few weeks had been like. At that point, it could have simply been a bad case of “baby blues.”
I have always had a tendency to minimize my own pain or dismiss it as situational. It was problems with friends that made me depressed when I was thirteen, the aftermath of an abusive relationship at sixteen, addiction and a codependent relationship at twenty-four, disappointment in my career at thirty, inability to get pregnant at thirty-five. I internally chasitized myself for being weak and emotional, for not being able to deal with these things.
I did this for months after my son was born too. Breastfeeding should have been easy and I shouldn’t be making such a big deal about it. Millions of people have dealt with being this sleep deprived, I should be able to handle it too. Going back to work sucks, but everyone does it. It’s just hormones. It’s just a new form of stress. I just need to power through. Besides, I am in therapy. I am processing it. It will get better. It will be fine.
And sometimes it did seem fine. There were so many sweet moments that I obsessively photographed as if to prove they were real and to make sure I could remember them. (Because I don’t remember well when I’m depressed. Part of me knew this.)
On Kurt Cobain’s birthday, my son was almost eight months old, and my husband and I were watching him rock back and forth on hands and knees, trying to crawl. I was so swept up in how much I loved him that I said to my husband, “Kurt must have been in so much pain, to leave his child. I can’t imagine being in that much pain.”
And I couldn’t in that moment. But two months later I could.
Two months later, I truly and completely believed that my family would be better off without me. Two months later, I simply didn’t want to exist and when I confessed as much to my therapist, she told me that it was time for me to see a specialist.
I was mad at her at first. I remember thinking, Why is she telling me this now, this thing about needing more help, when she knows I don’t have the time or the energy to seek it? That’s the problem, can’t she see? A lack of time and energy.
A part of me was still certain it was situational. My son had been sick practically non stop since Christmas. I was sick, too, and out of sick time and work was busy and other people could do this so I should be able to fucking do this.
But I couldn’t. I was tired. Bone tired. Soul tired.
When I got home from the appointment, I went upstairs to the bedroom. I cried in the dark. I called my dad, telling him I was too tired to find a specialist and figure out insurance. That all I wanted to do was sleep.
I still don’t know how I did it, but I forced myself to reach out, to tell others that I was hurting. If I hadn’t battled this kind of pain as a teenager and found solace in other teenage girls, I might not have.
When I was sixteen, I was part of a listserv, and that was the place where I shared the dawning realization about my boyfriend’s abusive behavior. I both did not want to believe it and I felt stupid that I hadn’t seen it earlier and been strong enough to get out. The support I got via email helped me work through those feelings and begin to talk about them with other friends.
At thirty-eight, I was part of a Facebook group of moms that a coworker had invited me into. It was here that I admitted that there was something more going on than “the first year is hard and I am very tired.” I also beat myself up for it. Why was this getting to me nine months postpartum? Was I weak? Flawed?
“No,” these incredible women said. “You are strong and you deserve help.” They shared their stories of their own diagnoses with postpartum mood disorder s— and many of them hadn’t been diagnosed until their baby was a toddler, or until a second child was born.
Bolstered by them, I reached out to trusted local mom friends. Through the conversations I had via text and online, I navigated my way to the Perinatal Bonding and Support Center in the hospital where I’d given birth — a hospital that was across the street from work so I knew that I could actually get regular treatment there without adding another layer of complication to my life. Getting my insurance on board was easier than I thought it would be — I said I needed a specialist and pointed out that they had sent me to see other specialists at that hospital — but at the same time, all of this was more difficult than I can explain. Those puzzle pieces may have come together nicely, but they were out there, scattered in the fog and I was fumbling around on my hands and knees for them, fighting the urge to curl into a little ball and never get up.
I was officially diagnosed with Postpartum Depression on my first visit to the specialist. She recommended that I see her weekly and that I make an appointment with the center’s psychiatrist. I had a month before the psychiatrist could get me in which gave me plenty of time to consider how I wanted to proceed — and to reflect on how therapy was going.
I’d been diagnosed with depression before, but I’d only attempted medication once. Wellbutrin, I think. It upset my stomach so I stopped taking it. I was also nineteen and an alcoholic, who was convinced that psych meds would kill her creative muse. I romanticized my depression and tried to give it a purpose — like the members of the 27 Club, I thought that purpose was my art. At some point in my thirties, I got over that — or at least I told myself I was over it, but it had never actually been put to the test as my depression had continued to be manageable with talk therapy.
Even though I’d asked for an appointment with a therapist and not the psychiatrist first when I’d called the Perinatal Center for Bonding and Support, I was pretty sure I needed meds. I hadn’t felt this bad since I was sixteen and fresh out of the abusive relationship, when quite frankly, I probably also could have used meds. I wanted a professional to confirm this, though, and when she did so by stating that in situations like mine meds had been helpful and asking if I’d be willing to try them, I agreed without a second thought.
I wanted to be whole for my family.
I wanted to be whole so I could enjoy my life, the one I’d worked so hard for and wanted so badly.
Any lingering questions about my creativity were, one, outweighed by those things, and two, null because I was too depressed to function let alone create.
I started Zoloft a little over a year ago. I got very lucky that the first medication at the first dose we tried worked for me. It worked relatively quickly for me, too. I was seeing a difference within a couple of weeks, and that difference was earth-shattering to me.
“There’s a space now,” I told my therapists — the new one and the one I’d been seeing for a couple of years. “A space between me and my emotions. A space where I can evaluate the situation or use the tools I’ve learned in therapy.”
I marveled over that space. Is that space there for most people most of the time? Have I been getting swept away by the undercurrent of my emotions simply because I didn’t have the normal amount of buoyancy — of resilience? Which by the way, I know is not my fault — normally I would be beating myself up for this perceived flaw, but shit, now I have this space that allows me to go, Oh, not a flaw. My brain is just different. It just needs some help.
There are still situations — the month I started Zoloft was the month that our beloved eleven-year old cat, Lars started acting strangely, was diagnosed with lymphoma, and then mere weeks later was gone. There is still the constant battle of wills that is life with a toddler. There is still the very real struggle and very deep burn-out that comes from trying to balance motherhood with work in an unsupportive society. But having this space to pause, to feel my feelings, consider my needs, to look for tools within and ask for help when I need it — that space is everything, and I am writing this today because I was lucky to get to that space. I had support. I had resources. I had insurance, and miraculously managed to summon the strength to advocate for myself. I can’t imagine the number of parents who this goes unseen for — and the number of children and families that harms.
I hate the fact that my son’s first year was blurred out for me in that distinctive way that numbness and depression blur things — I wish desperately for the opportunity to relive some of those moments in this better mental state — but there is a part of me that is actually grateful for my postpartum depression because it led me to a medication that I clearly need. The medication and the few months of intensive therapy both gave me skills that will make me a better parent, a better partner, and a happier person. We need to make sure that everyone who needs those resources has them.
