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After Her Sister Committed Suicide, Ruthann Robinson Learned To Accept Her Family's History Of Depression
By Ruthann Robinson
After her sister committed suicide, ruthann robinson learned to accept her family's history of depression "Hello? Is this Ruthann Robinson? Are you Susan Carr's sister? This is an officer from the Hartville police department. Susan is dead." I sank into the chair behind me, cries of grief coming from a place that had never before been touched. I was vaguely aware of David, my 11-year-old son, and Sarah, my 15-year-old daughter, staring at me. "Mrs. Robinson, would you like to come down here?" "NO!" I screamed. Walk into Sue's home where she lay dead? My God, no. "OK, Mrs. Robinson, the Stark County coroner needs to talk to you." The coroner? My stomach seized with cramps. "Mrs. Robinson, are you Susan's next of kin?" "No, my parents are." Oh, God! My parents! How can I tell Mom and Dad? Fear gripped me as tightly as the grief.
"Mrs. Robinson, we'll secure everything down here. You don't have to come down. I'll call you back in about an hour. You'll need to be thinking of a funeral home." A funeral home? My God. How can this be happening? Oh Susan, How could you? Like a slingshot, that June 17, 1995, call sent me hurtling down a path toward healing on which I had just recently set a tentative foot. Along the way, my harsh view of life mellowed. I learned to appreciate and embrace my own unique personality traits, and, in turn, relax my grip on perfection. That hot summer Friday started out like any other. I got up early to run errands. I bought Father's Day cards, rose bushes and had work done on my car. It was 1 p.m. when I got home. My son, Rudy Benjamin, whose high school graduation we had just celebrated the Sunday before, was watching TV with Sarah and David. I had to work that night and was going to try to sleep. Then the phone rang. Sarah answered it and with a puzzled look, handed me the receiver. That's when my world came crashing down. My oldest sister, Susan Lorraine Carr, Suzy Woozy, my best friend, my confidante, my soul's twin, had killed herself. The coroner didn't need to tell me. I knew. I'd been through dry runs with her countless times in the past 25 years. In fact, on one of our first dates, my future husband Rudy dropped me off at a hospital to visit her in the psych ward. She'd taken an overdose. Sue's bouts with depression were just a part of her. Frantic calls from college or work, while not commonplace, were a part of our relationship. She'd tell me she wanted to give up, that everything and everyone would be better off if she just wasn't around. I'd tell her that wasn't true and remind her how special she was, how much we loved her. We'd pray. Somehow, she'd get through it. Sometimes she'd take an overdose, but she always called someone and went to the hospital. But Sue's depression and suicidal thoughts hardly defined her. Growing up, she was my most fun, older sister. The one with all the good ideas who took me and my sister Jeanette and brother Andy on high adventures. We spent hours exploring and getting into trouble on my paternal grandparents' farm and the surrounding mountain forests in West Virginia. Sue loved her brother and sisters very much. During all of the talks we had together, she never once blamed or sounded angry with them. They were her world. If not for them, she would've committed suicide long ago, maybe even in high school.
When Mom's anger and the problems of my young life were too much to bear, Sue's attic bedroom was a port in the storm. She rarely turned away my request to come up and listen to her records. In the quiet acceptance of her love, I'd put on her headphones and listen to her vast collection. Sometimes she'd put on a Bill Cosby or George Carlin comedy album, and we'd laugh together, temporarily forgetting the tempest raging below. Looking back, I realize only two things kept Sue and me from living a content life free of mental illness - environment and genetics. Environment
My parent's first-born was Gary. On Dec. 23, 1947, Mom and Dad left their precious 6-week-old with her mom while they did last-minute Christmas shopping. On the way home, they passed an ambulance. As she'd been taught by the Catholic church, my mom said a prayer for the person inside. When she got home, she learned it was her son. Her mom had checked on him and found him face down in his crib. When my parents got to the hospital, the doctor met them with the news. He told my mom that God must have wanted another angel in heaven for Christmas. He told my dad the best thing he could do for his wife was to get her pregnant again. Sue was born 10 months later. When Sue was 2, Mom delivered a premature boy whom they named Larry. He lived an hour. Within a month, my maternal grandmother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Mom nursed her mother until she died three months later. I've always felt that Sue's intelligence and fierce spirit would have been a lot for an emotionally healthy woman to deal with, let alone one crippled with grief. Sue and I discussed this often because she wasn't one to wallow in her depression. She fought it and analyzed it to death. We concluded that neither Mom nor Dad ever dealt with their grief. But who did in the '50s? Counseling and group therapy were hallmarks of the '70s. Ignoring pain and putting your nose to the grindstone was how their generation got through hard times. My mom and dad lived through the Great Depression and fought in World War II, he in Paris with the 82nd Airborne and she in Akron, as Rosie the Riveter at Goodyear Aircraft. But their pain surfaced. Mom's fierce anger at the slightest infractions. Dad's vacant helplessness in the face of her wrath. Sue was the common target. Sue and I went to the same college in West Virginia. We weren't just cousins. We were good friends. But as well as Sue and I got along, I think in some way she disliked me. I was one of the younger grandchildren who were pampered and loved. Everything I did was cute and worthy. I think she was angry and jealous, because she was just as smart and creative, but she rarely got the attention she needed.
Once Sue became a teen-ager, she no longer willingly accepted my mother's beatings. She would run up to her attic room, Mom fast at her heels. I remember lying in bed wishing Sue would just quit aggravating mom. She was the family scapegoat-the target of years of misspent hostility.
Genetics
We spent every summer in West Virginia. My grandma baked bread, tended her vegetable garden, sang gospel songs and always had the grainy, old black-and-white TV tuned to a fire-and-brimstone, faith-healing preacher. It was heaven. Except when it was time to go. She would get weepy, wring her hands and pace back and forth. When we hugged her good-bye, she dissolved into tears. When I got older, I realized this was a sign of depression. Her mother died in a mental institution. Six of her eight children, as well as several grandchildren, suffered from various forms of depression as adults. The disease ravaged her son, Alfred, rendering him unable to function in the world past the age of 30. Uncle Alfred was in and out of the state mental hospital, depending heavily on his siblings to support him. He would run off into the mountains; they'd bring him home. My dad didn't escape the family curse. In his late 50s he began suffering blackouts that forced him to retire from truck driving. Since then, he's been through one wave of depression after another. I didn't escape, either. While Sue's depression came frequently and early in her life, mine lay quietly hidden under layers of acceptance and success. I was the third child. Sue and I used to say that our parents were tired by the time I came along, so I flourished under their relaxed expectations while Sue took most of the heat. I did well in school. Unlike my sisters, I dated in high school. I was thin and pretty. I got married. I had children. I did everything right. It was a lot of work. Like many women, I swore I wouldn't be the kind of mother mine was. But the longer I parented, the more I saw her in me. I had sworn to never hit my children in anger, but I still raged at their childish antics. I knew something was wrong. Like Susan, I began seeking answers for my problems. The journey took me to Bible studies, prayer groups, and eventually into counseling. Once, during a particularly bad time, Sue suggested that I might need an antidepressant. The thought nauseated me. All I could think of was she and Dad fighting to hold on while their doctors tried different prescriptions that rarely seemed to work. And when life became unbearable, Sue's suicidal modus operandi was to overdose on her hoarded antidepressants. Nope, no drugs. Not for me. I plodded along. I kept a prayer journal. I sought answers, and I sought God as I grew weary of Susan's needs. The year before she died was particularly trying. Her job as a medical lab technician at Akron City Hospital had soured. She was relegated to a high-pressure, lonely position in the blood bank at a time when she was once again, battling severe depression. And Sue's debts were threatening to sink her. She had always been a big spender. Her closets bulged with clothes; her bookshelves groaned under the weight of books, cassettes, CDs and videotapes. She would buy an artist's tape just to have one song to add to her tape of favorites. She made many different ones meticulously labeled with artist and song title. Then she labeled them with names like "Fabulous Females." Sue actually had ones titled, "Favorite Songs," "More Favorite Songs," "Still More Favorite Songs" and "You guessed it! Even More Favorite Songs." My sister was a lovable loon. Over the years, Sue bounced back and forth from being financially independent to relying on my parents for shelter. It was a sick dance of codependence. During the last two years of her life, Sue lived in a condominium in Hartville. She loved it. The townhouse was away from the city overlooking a meadow. Best of all, she was on her own. When Sue told me she was moving out to her own place again, my two thoughts were a paradox: "That's a good move for her," and, "It'll be the end of her." Somehow I knew that if she got in too deep this time, she'd be too proud to go back.
Sue's depression kept her from taking care of herself as her high blood pressure and diabetes demanded. She was a "noncompliant" patient. I always felt that an unmet childhood longing to be cared for was the root of Sue's problems. Toward the end, she'd been off work for three months and was $10,000 in debt. She faced eviction. Where was I? Frantically swimming away from the sinking ship. Dad was depressed. Mom was still angry. Sue was failing and needed help - again. Rudy Benjamin was graduating and getting ready to go to Ohio State. I just started a new job and was planning to go back to Kent State to finish my degree. I didn't have time. I couldn't be bothered. Ruthann was struggling with how much to get involved. In the past she jumped in and rescued. She was in graduate school in helping and saving people but in grade school when it came to taking care of herself.
Sue's landlord came to evict her and found her lying face down on the floor beside her bed. Next to her was a note she'd written in a counseling session. It read, "I'm free from suicidal thoughts." I barely made it through the funeral. Silly things like selecting flowers for her casket and rearranging the funeral home furniture to meet my exacting design kept me going. I'd never seen a corpse look like the person did alive, and I had no desire to see Sue spiritless, either. We decided to keep the casket closed. My sister, brother and I spent hours pouring over family photographs to display. The bear she'd slept with since childhood sat on a table next to her casket, next to her Bible, which we opened to an underlined passage I knew she had memorized. My older sister, Jeanette, went through and compiled a selection of Sue's tapes to play as background music during calling hours. She dutifully labeled it "Songs for Sue's Funeral." We wanted Mike McCartney, Sue's former pastor, counselor and friend to deliver the eulogy. We felt lucky to have someone speak about Sue who was not only a man of God, but someone well-versed in mental health issues and who knew Sue so well. When I looked at those gathered at the funeral, I could see a million question marks in everyone's faces. I wanted to erase those question marks. I wanted especially to get a message to her dad. I started talking about manic- depressive illness and how it can permeate your life. But that even with this disease, Susan accomplished quite a bit. She graduated with dual degrees. She was a counselor at Cleveland's Billy Graham Crusade. How many of us who are mentally healthy have the guts to go into a stadium full of strangers and share our faith in Jesus Christ? Sue was an incredibly intelligent and gregarious person.
The next day, we drove to West Virginia to bury Sue in the mountaintop cemetery next to Bright's Chapel, the church we attended as children with our grandma. It is the quintessential country church: a one-room, white-clapboard, building with a steeple directing God's praises toward heaven. Sue's friends spoke. The preacher gave a salvation message and an invitation to accept Jesus Christ's free gift of everlasting life. We put on the tape and her uncles and cousins carried Sue to the grave site to the strains of Jimmy Buffet's "Cheeseburger in Paradise." We laid her to rest at grandma's feet. Sue remembers her as the only one who stood up to mom on her behalf. The rest of that year was a fog. We got Rudy Benjamin off to college, and I started college myself. And more like my mom than I'd want to admit, I overachieved. I got straight A's. I continued to see my counselor. Spring came. I wrote in my journal: "A part of me revels in the fact that there are no tragedies to face this summer. Who would commit suicide and turn my world upside down?" I'd overlooked the power of other problems. Less than two weeks after that journal entry, Rudy Benjamin, who'd been back from Ohio State a week, got a letter saying he flunked out. The next day, he was fired from the landscaping job he'd had for three days. Outwardly, I was understanding and supportive. Inwardly, I was dying.
In August, Sarah came back from a church mission trip in the Appalachian hills of Kentucky. She was a zombie. Her friends said she cried the entire trip. Sarah said the whole thing reminded her of spending time with Sue in West Virginia. A few months before, Sarah had started seeing a counselor because I suspected she hadn't dealt with Sue's death. Shortly after the mission trip her counselor said Sarah had something to show me. It was a letter she had written to Sue. I had forgotten Sarah was also away on a mission trip the year before, when I had Rudy Benjamin's graduation party. That party was the last time we saw Sue alive. Except for Sarah. She felt cheated. And worse, while I was telling my mom about Sue's death, Sarah had to break it to her dad. After seeing my mother fall apart, I saw my father and older brother, the men in my life, weep like babies. It shattered my reality in every sense of the word, yet rather than let myself break down, too, I buried everything, a skill that had become second nature to me. I tried to comfort everyone else in the family. That was my job, to make sure everyone else was OK. No one wanted to see me cry, or so I thought.
Sarah wasn't sleeping and suffered terrible headaches. Her counselor suggested an antidepressant. That was it. I'd failed as a mother, a sister, a wife and a daughter. I had anxiety attacks. I could barely function. The idea of my daughter taking an antidepressant was more than I could bear. Susan had taken her life by overdosing on hers. I worked in an emergency room. Teen overdoses were commonplace. I couldn't let my daughter go down that road. My counselor encouraged me to tell her how I felt, but to let her make her own decision. With some guidelines firmly intact, I accompanied her to the psychiatrist. I can remember thinking that I had to act crazy enough for the doctor to put me on medication because it was my last hope. I was tired of only having enough energy to lie on my bed and stare at my overhead light. I thought to myself, "This is your last chance at a normal life, so you better at least get THIS right!" The doctor did put me on medication, and the storm clouds that had covered my life for the past year finally began to part.
A month later my insurance company insisted I be evaluated for depression by a psychiatrist. The company reviewed each case to see if treatment was working. Because I'd been seeing my counselor for two years with no obvious improvement, the company wanted to see if I needed medication. I was scared. But the day of my appointment, I felt great - healthy, on top of everything, functioning. I passed all the little tests with flying colors - counting back from 100 by sevens, remembering lists after being distracted. I thought she would send me on my merry, drug-free way. But the doctor surprised me. "Ruthann, your family history of depression is very strong. I think you'd benefit from a long trial period on Zoloft. Like Prozac, Zoloft is a seratonin reuptake inhibitor. Research shows that a depressed person's brain reabsorbs the seratonin before it can be used as it should. The medicine just allows your brain to work more efficiently." Though I decided before I went in there to go along with her recommendation, I kept that prescription in my pocket for a month. I couldn't bear to get it filled. My dad never liked being on medication for depression. I told him for years that needing to take his antidepressant was no different or any more shameful than needing blood pressure pills or diabetes medication. Now my words came back to haunt me. That first pill went down hard. It was the end of November. I had a photography portfolio, an in-depth story and a term paper due within a week, as well as finals and my job. I was worrying over all this as usual when I said to myself, "Relax, Ruthann, you'll be fine. You are smart. You are a good student. Just figure out what needs to be done tomorrow and take care of that. You'll be fine." My God, who was that? I turned around looking for the person speaking. Through many years of therapy, Sue and I learned the value of positive self-talk. We'd tried it, but it never seemed to help. I now realize that it was because when I told myself positive things like, "You're a good mother," or "You're pretty," there was always a little voice inside of me saying, "Yeah, right. Are you going to believe that drivel?" Somehow it was easier to believe the mean voice over the sappy one. But not anymore. It took me a while to get used to the new voice. In the past I spent so much energy trying to figure out my problems, but now I was free to just live life. I began thinking this must be how normal people lived! I don't know why medication worked for me and not Sue any more than I know why she was plagued with suicidal thoughts and I'm not. I don't have all the answers. All I know is, when you're depressed, it takes all your energy just to get by, let alone accomplish anything. Sometimes it bothers me that my daughter and I take medication for depression. But this past spring, Sarah graduated as her high school's salutatorian and gave a speech before hundreds of people gathered in the Akron Civic Theater. I sat in the audience next to Rudy Benjamin, who was now back in college. Going through Sarah's graduation brought back sad memories for all of us. I knew all along I wanted to share how Susan's death affected me. Before graduation, I had to give my speech to the senior counselor so she could look it over to see if it was appropriate. She told me it sounded too much like preaching, and that I shouldn't say Sue committed suicide, just that she died. I didn't listen to her. I told them: We've all been through tough times. Hopefully, they've helped us grow. The most difficult time for me was when my Aunt Susan killed herself. But through her death and bouts with depression, I learned that I had to talk about what was bothering me, to seek help for my problems, even if no one wanted to listen. Because if I didn't, I might end up just like her. During that hard time, God gave me a verse that kept me going. I still read it every night before I go to bed. Because I know He didn't intend it just for me, I'd like to share it with you. It's from the book of Philippians 4: 6,7: "Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."
Like Sarah, I refuse to let our family illness embarrass me. I've come to realize that the tendency toward mental illness is as much a part of my genetic makeup as my blue eyes and broad hips. And joyfully, I'm still the same person. I didn't lose myself to the medication as I feared. The same things make me laugh. I still like to read, write, swim, garden and play games with my family. And the same things still make me cry. Just not as often. |
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