David McElroy

When I was a small child, there were times when my mother didn’t get out of bed in the mornings. I didn’t know why at the time. I understand now.

My mother was diagnosed with manic depression, which we call bi-polar today. I don’t know when I learned those words. I can vaguely remember thinking about them at some point and trying to figure out what they meant. I can remember the vague sense of something being wrong. It was a vague sense of being abandoned and alone.

I suppose I was about 4 or 5 years old in the images I recall. I had two younger sisters, about 3 and about 1. My father would be gone to work and we were at home with Mother. And I felt all alone. In a lot of ways, I’ve never gotten over that feeling of being all alone and abandoned. In a way, I’ve been replaying that script over and over and over.

All of the discussion about depression in the past two days — in the wake of Robin Williams’ suicide — has been really emotional for me, because it’s brought up disturbing experiences that I’ve gone through with people who I’ve loved.

My mother was diagnosed when I was about 5. That was about the time when she started trying to leave my father. It’s also the time when she went into a mental hospital for awhile. (I seem to recall it as about six weeks, but I might be wrong.) I saw her struggle for years to be stable and to be the smart, artistic and happy person she was at her best. I wrote more about her last year.

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The Declaration of Independence is evidence of the ability of powerful men to use beautiful rhetoric of freedom to justify their secession from a political power they didn’t wish to be part of.

The War Between the States less than a hundred years later is evidence that the resulting regime didn’t believe its own rhetoric about secession and self-determination.

Subsequent actions by the federal government are further evidence that following the principles of the Declaration of Independence will get you imprisoned, not freed.

The Declaration of Independence is filled with beautiful, soaring words, but the men who wrote those words couldn’t conceive of letting individuals have real freedom. They could only conceive of groups of powerful white men controlling some specific territory and ruling over those who lived there.

The Constitution is proof that the men of the day imposed their rule on the territory which they seized from Great Britain rather than allowing individuals to rule themselves. It was an experiment in “limited government,” which they believed would somehow be different from all previous attempts at coercion.

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She went to the bridge that night to kill herself. That’s what she said, anyway. All I know is that I believed her.

It was a year ago tonight when I got a text message. She told me that she was on a bridge and was ready to die. She had threatened repeatedly to kill herself during the two years prior to this, and there had been several times when I’d been truly afraid. There were times I talked with her most of the way through the night — on the phone from almost a thousand miles away — just trying to keep her alive until morning would arrive and the suicidal demons of depression would slip away from her. At least until it was dark again.

I loved her. We had a long and complicated history. That part doesn’t matter anymore. But I loved her more than life itself — and I do love my life very dearly. I loved her even more.

She told me in her text message that as she stood there thinking about what she was about to do, I was the only one she wondered about. She was worried about how I would take it. She worried about whether it would affect a film I was working on at the time. She said it surprised her that I was the only one she thought about. She had no reason to lie, so I believed her.

After texting for a few minutes, I asked her if she would talk on the phone. She didn’t reply for a minute, but then my phone rang.

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