Breakthrough Queen
The night after my son graduated from college, I lay in my hotel room bed and dreamt I failed at my own suicide. As I write this, I am happy to say, the dream had no real basis in my life. My son’s efforts coupled with my occasional input on his papers led to the moment he crossed the stage in the Alabama sunshine to accept his diploma. Despite his parents’ divorce, his mother’s cancer, and the usual challenges of growing up, he became a young man graduating from a competitive liberal arts college. He made close friends and established an exciting career. It was all I wanted for him. Then why in my dream did I want to die?
In an old hotel in Tallahassee, the halfway point between my son’s college and my home in Central Florida, I fell asleep on a lumpy mattress. I had a dream in which I lay upon a metal table. My head had been shaved and I wore a medical gown. I was in a dimly lit room with a one-way mirror. In an assisted suicide procedure, someone administered a dram guaranteed to bring an end to my life. Then they retreated to the little room behind the mirror. But I awoke having changed my mind. Laboring through the effects of the dram, I emerged from the cold room, determined to live.
I awoke in the dimly lit hotel room in Tallahassee, the bathroom light framing the closed door. I stumbled to the sink and filled a plastic cup with water. I could hear the highway traffic outside my window, the highway I would take on my way home to Orlando. I thought about a small black and white cat I had seen wandering in the courtyard outside. She had meowed as she stood beside the garbage can, looking for scraps. She was a survivor. Maybe when I got home, I would write stories about the cat — about a prostitute who lived in that hotel and fed her; about a child who stayed in that hotel and loved her. Maybe the child had been abducted and was being kept against her will and the cat represented her own little soul. Or maybe the child was the daughter of a preacher or hoodoo priest. She kept the cat in her room and fed her. She worked on her school lessons at the desk in her room while her daddy went out and healed people, sprinkling them with holy water, feeding them wine for sacrificial blood. Maybe he cleansed people and their homes with Florida water, readying them for a spiritual encounter.
The hotel in Tallahassee seemed to attract ghosts as well as cats — people who drifted around the property in the humid night, including a man who accosted me in the parking lot while I was bent over the open trunk of my car, pulling out my suitcase. “Got a light?” he said. I jumped. I hadn’t noticed him coming up behind me. I emitted a small shout of surprise. I was a little embarrassed, but I couldn’t tell he noticed anything off about me. “No,” I said, “I’m sorry.” He passively took me in with his dark eyes and then shambled off. The next day, when I left the hotel to hit the road for Orlando, he was still in the parking lot, sitting in his car, a small beat-up sporty vehicle popular in the eighties.
On the road home, I wondered about the dream. Maybe it had to do with my cancer treatment. After all, the treatment was a partial breakdown of my body so I might live, free of the diseased tissue. I had made a vow to do everything I could to be alive for my son, to be there for his graduation and beyond.
I also remembered the story my preacher father had told us the night of my son’s graduation. We were dining al fresco. He told us the story about his journey to the Dead Sea. He along with my mother had taken a group of their parishioners to the Holy Land. At the shore, a group member told his wife: “This has been the fulfillment of my life.” And with that declaration, the man had died, right there beside the Dead Sea. Our family went to our hotels that night, shaken and incredulous.
But perhaps the biggest inspiration for my dream is my experience as a bipolar person. Suicidal ideation is an erstwhile friend, though never a realization, kept mostly in check by medications and treatment. Surviving cancer treatment and bipolar at the same time had been no small feat. And years before, I learned my biological mother had committed suicide. When I passed the age at which she died, I felt relieved, victorious.
In my dream, I had fought through my own suicide attempt. I had emerged by my own will and sense of agency. And yet, why had I dreamed I tried to kill myself? And at such a wonderful time in my family’s life? I wish I had an answer. But no matter, we sometimes sense we have been born into a life we hadn’t anticipated, including a life of our own making. We have rashly made promises to ourselves and set goals, not realizing that even lofty visions and hopes can be limiting. We become more and more opaque to ourselves as the decades pass, and yet we move on, hardly noticing one another, picking up the leftovers from the wreckage, deciding what to do before we clean up and start again.
First published in Cowboy Jamboree’s Townes Van Zandt anthology, “Travelin’ Thru Townes”
