I had made the executive decision to commit myself to that place because I knew with utter certainty that I would end my pain by taking my life. In the days leading up to my passage from the edge of the end to the doorway, I had twice been talked back down by a volunteer from the free, national suicide hotline (1 -800-273–8255).

But that night. That night I had just fucking had it.

My earlier plan was to take a decent quantity of a sleeping pill that I’d been prescribed. It seemed painless enough. No, not for the people around me, but for me. Swallow 60 or 70 of the little white tablets and solongseeyawouldntwannabeya. Except I could not do that to my daughter or D: one of them would find me in my bed and I could not bear the idea that I would be responsible for killing a little piece of them, along with myself. So I had devised a new plan: get hammered and take my car out for one final spin. The busy road near my house has a few steep hills and some trees that make a fine target. No one would have to know that I’d done it purposefully; the area is thick with deer and it could be safely assumed I had swerved to miss a buck and got unlucky. Sure, a tox screen would show that I was drunk, but that, I figured, would be a more palatable ending for my family. Stupid Heather, What was she thinking, drinking and driving? My daughter would inherit a not-entirely-small sum, enough for college and grad school and a little something extra. And she would not be saddled with the knowledge that her mother had chosen to end her life. A stupid, preventable death, to be sure, but one that would not leave behind a trail of guilt.

Did I mention that I know this was a stupid idea? Because it was. I know that now, and I knew it then. And yet I also knew with utter certainty that I would crash my way out of this life. If not that night, then the next day. Maybe sober, maybe on my way to work, or coming home from the grocery store. It would happen: deliberately yet impulsively. It scared the shit out of me, because I felt as though the decision had already been made for me and I was powerless to stop it.

M y late night/early morning arrival at the hospital was precipitated by months of a spiraling depression made worse by alcohol addiction. The cheap wine was an attempt to shut off the hurt and pain, to stem the tide of racing thoughts, soothe my anxiety, and metaphorically check out. Oh, and blackouts. Did I mention those? Yes, not remembering whole evenings or conversations was the relative norm for me.

As it turns out, wine is a very poor substitute for therapy and adherence to an anti-depressant regiment. Who knew?

The hospital — I’ll just call it Golden Meadows — is a campus with more than a dozen buildings spread across forty acres of prime New England real estate. There are specialty units for people with mental illness, or addiction; or mental illness and addiction; for those with behavior disorders or eating disorders, or those with behavior and eating disorders or some other co-disorder. Well, you get the picture: this isn’t the type of hospital you wheel up to to treat your broken arm in the ER. But, if your mind is broken, and you have really good insurance? Come on in! (appointments appreciated, btw.)

I’d been there once before, a handful of years ago in which I’d gone to the detox part of the hospital, after a year of drinking like a fish, a nasty addiction I’d acquired after a particularly brutal betrayal sent me reeling. I’d shown up drunk then, too. Only that time, I drove myself. I was drinking wine out of a plastic Starbucks cup, sucking on the straw like a baby on a nipple. Yes, I drove drunk because I was a selfish asshole. Trust me. I know.That was a brief stay: four days, 8 or 10 AA meetings, some ativan and life skills training, and I was on my way back home. As it turned out, it didn’t take. I was sober for a while and got my meds under control. But like a lot of people who live with clinical depression, I convinced myself that I could be fine without my medication because hey, I felt fine! Yes, silly fuckwit of a girl, you felt fine because you were, oh, MEDICATED.

The nurse dispensing my meds smiled at me. “How are you doing?” she asked. “Are you feeling better? Because you look better.”

“Yeah. Yes. I’m…I mean. I feel safe here. I’m getting there,” I said. “I really like my psychiatrist. And the nurses. The nurses are really nice. I don’t want to leave. I’m not ready yet.”

My thoughts were like that: a bit disjointed and quite a few non-sequiturs. The fact was that I was absolutely terrified of being let out. Well, not “let out.” More like pushed out, by my insurance company. My social worker was trying to send me home, while my assigned psychiatrist wasn’t. To her, I was a case to be debated with my insurance company; to him? I was a hurting person at risk for suicide.

The locked doors of the acute unit represented to me safety: from the still-strong desire to end my life. The locks prevented the outside coming in: too many people, the void that was the ‘real world,’ where I would be expected to work and parent and shop and drive and make decisions and cope with loss and anger and disappointment and memory of trauma. Forced to live inside a head that, I was certain, if my skullcap was peeled back it would reveal a brain that looked like a blender, whirring the pages of a dictionary into small, spinning bits of letters and words into a vortex.

“Well, I’m sure you’re going to be able to stay as long as you need to,” she told me.

It was a lie made in compassion. In the four days that I’d been there, another patient who said she wasn’t ready to leave the safe confines was discharged to her family. A second woman and her family managed to convince their insurance company to foot the bill for the hospital’s residential outpatient transition program, but only after insisting the insurers sign a document stating that they would be liable for her suicide. Because I will do it, she told me, her eyes unblinking.

I had confided to another patient my fear about being booted too early because I did not feel safe inside my own skin. He was in for his third or fourth serious episode of depression, and had returned after only a couple of weeks after his most recent discharge because he was self-harming and had attempted to kill himself. Tell them you’re not ready, he told me. Tell every nurse, your psychiatrist, the techs: tell them that you’re afraid if you get out, you’ll kill yourself.

And so I did. “I hope so,” I told the nurse. “Because I really don’t want to kill myself but I think I might if I don’t get my head on straight.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” she said, before handing over the small paper cup with my anxiety med and the seroquel that would knock me out.

I tossed the pills back and washed them down with a cup of water. I opened my mouth wide, and moved my tongue up and down and side to side so that she could see. All swallowed.

“Good job, Heather. Have a good night.”

Her approval of me, swallowing my medicine instead of trying to hide and horde it, pleased me probably more than it should. But I craved approval. For far too long I’d felt like a fuck-up: unable to concentrate or get any real work done; isolating myself and drinking into stupor; short-tempered or weeping. Pretending for the outside world that everything was just fine, until I couldn’t.

The acute care unit houses no more than 18 people at a time. Bipolar, clinical depression, extreme anxiety: we were, in my mind, people struggling with garden variety mental illness. No one heard voices or was violent against others; the violence was reserved for self-harming, like cutting, but not all of us did that.

Still, the doors to our private rooms and bathrooms were the only ones in the facility without locks. Well, most rooms. There was one patient room where the bathroom door was locked and required a staff person to open it.

Laces were removed from shoes, along with strings from sweatpants and hoodies and pajama bottoms, before you were delivered to the unit. I was given two small strips of velcro to secure my sneakers around my feet, until D brought me a new, laceless pair a few days later.

If you’d thought to bring your toiletries, like mouthwash, razors, shampoo, conditioner, hairspray or gel, you were SOL: those, too, were taken. If you wanted to shave, you had to ask a nurse who had to clear your access to a razor. And you certainly weren’t just handed a disposable razor; all shaving was supervised in a bathroom by the nursing station. I never asked; I figured hairy legs were the least of my problems.

I’d brought a book with me, though I’m not sure why since I’d been largely unable to read more than a few paragraphs at a time. The book, “a f*cked-up fairytale,” by my friend pan ellington, was confiscated along with my hair conditioner and some makeup I’d brought (yeah, I don’t even know) and my medications.

Our first names and last initials were posted on a white board across from the nurses station, along with our psychiatrist’s name and our social worker and the tech assigned to us. We ranged in age from late teens to early 60s, most Caucasian, mostly middle-income or more well-off. We were college students, retirees, professionals, each struggling with an organic brain disorder.

The one thing that we all shared? Suicide ideation: the desire and will to stop our thoughts and pain Forever, through whatever means necessary.

But here’s the rub — and the testament to our strength: to a person, we had voluntarily committed ourselves to this place, recognizing that our individual lives, as painful as they’d become, were in fact worth saving. That the blackness of our wishes wasn’t real; that our brainsbodiesbiologies had betrayed us by trying to convince us that the end of life would equal the end of suffering. We had checked out of society and into this hospital because there remained in each of us the belief that good things do happen. That good things will happen at some point if we could just shut that uglydark voice down.