They were teenage sweethearts, studied together, worshipped together, so inseparable that they married at 19.
Rachel Powell and her husband Andre Dozier went to the same university (Colorado State) the same church, the same high school even. Rachel became a nurse, Andre took a PhD in civil engineering. They had four children in their care, including adopted nieces and a nephew and their own daughter.
They were devout and gave much of their life to the church and its ministries, including a mission trip to Guatemala, where they worked in an orphanage. “Andre was very popular,” Rachel tells me. “He had such a gift for connecting with people.”
Life was busy, and things were perfect.
Until they weren’t.
One cool summer night in 2019, after a row about his pornography addiction, Andre walked barefoot out of the bedroom, down the stairs and out of the door.
“I can still see him in the lamplight, walking out of the cul-de-sac,” Rachel recalls. “I had a sense that something scary could happen. But I still deeply believed he wouldn’t. My last words were ‘Andre don’t do anything unsafe, you don’t have to’.
“Then he turned the corner and I never saw him again.”
Suicide is a powerful meme in the original sense of the word, a transmissible idea that is highly contagious for those closest to the victim.
It rips through families like a rogue gene, sons following fathers, daughters emulating mothers and grandmothers1. It was for this very reason that I tried to keep it at bay when I was ill (if you haven’t already, do read my piece from last week, the first in this series).
But it’s only partly genetic. Adversity, grief and life circumstance play a role too. As does familiarity: once you have known suicide, brushed up close to it and felt its deadweight cloak, it feels less alien. Despite the horror it inflicts, it paradoxically feels more plausible.
Rachel was a case in point. “People close to someone who has taken their life are at a much higher risk of suicide,2” she says in a video call from a library in Fort Collins, Colorado. “I was in unbelievable pain. I had a lot of guilt and blame and shame. I felt I wasn’t mothering well, or doing anything well in life.”
Twice she tried to copy what Andre had done. Twice she was interrupted.
“The second time, even my body knew, and didn’t want to die. I was shaking and vomiting and in such distress. But my mind was just dead and thought this is my only way out.”
It was a turning point.
Rachel would continue to visit the site where her husband died. One night, she says, she had a vision: an audience of women just like her. Suicide widows, all in the same psychological pain as she was.
Her Christian faith told her to keep going. To try to make a difference.
A few months ago, I wrote a piece asking whether religion can insulate the believer from mental illness. Research conducted by psychologists was interesting but inconclusive3. My instinct is that whether God exists or not, faith can be a great comfort to a lonely species marooned in a hostile universe.
For Rachel, religion was a double-edged sword. It is clear that her belief in God has given her courage and fortitude over the years. But it is also clear that the church she belonged to was oppressive and even abusive.
When Andre’s pornography habit came to light, the church took his side. Elders bizarrely insisted that Rachel stand by her man, even as his addiction spiralled. Somehow, she says, they made it her problem.
“A lot of really unhealthy things can happen in the church,” Rachel says. “It wanted to be biblically sound. There was a lot of inappropriate oppression of women, telling me to give him grace.”
But she was struggling to reconcile this scriptural pontification with the everyday problem of a father gripped by a sex addiction in a house full of children.
Rachel insisted on a ‘safety plan’ including a trial separation if he didn’t confront his cravings. That made Andre angry. He began quoting passages of Corinthians at her to argue his case that a wife should never leave a husband. She urged him to seek help; church pastors kept telling her to submit.
On the fateful night, she read him a letter. About how devastating his behaviour had been for her. About how he needed to accept her safety plan, her ultimatum. “He had a dark, scary shroud over his face,” she remembers. “He said, ‘wow, what a death blow, what a death blow’.” And then he left.
It wasn’t until much later the following day that Rachel learned of Andre’s fate. She had remained hopeful. She never thought of him as suicidal. And besides, he’d done this before. Disappeared for hours, walking endless loops of their city, Fort Collins, until his feet were bleeding and blistered.
But when she woke the next day, the front door was still locked, his phone still in the house. She got the children ready for school and decided to report him missing. And when officers arrived at the house later that day, she knew.
“They said he didn’t make it. I melted down.”
It took Rachel months to get over her death wish. But like all suicidal people that I have spoken to, she is enormously grateful that she did.
Antidepressants helped, once she had ditched a lifelong aversion to taking medicine. Her mission to help others gave her some purpose and meaning. Now she spends her time as a suicide prevention advocate, trying to help suicide widows overcome their trauma and rebuild their lives.
“I’ve have widows say to me, ‘how can my husband have been preparing to live and preparing to die at the same time? Preparing a retirement trip, but also with a search history of how to hold the gun?’”
She has some compelling ideas about this, drawn from her own experiences. She believes people subside gradually. They don’t suddenly feel suicidal one day. It is an idea that slowly takes shape.
“It goes from being something we would never do, to something you think about, to something that becomes a possibility, to something that becomes a solution, to something that becomes your only solution,” she says.
She calls this slippery slope the ‘black box’, and if we crunch the two metaphors together, perhaps it’s a slippery slope inside a black box. Rachel believes it can be resisted if people can be made aware of it before they get too far in. Knowing something about your pathology can often be a major step in confronting it.
“If we refuse to enter this black box, refuse to go there, you wage war on it instead of yielding to it, then I think that is how more people’s lives are going to be saved,” she says. “I believe we can help people understand.”
She also tries to help the bereaved reframe thoughts about the people they have lost. To stop thinking in terms of ‘how could they do this to me?’ ‘was it something I did?’ And think instead of their loved one as like the people who jumped from the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
“When you are on fire and in excruciating pain it’s the only way to get it to stop. That is what suicide can be,” Rachel says. “It has nothing to do with whether anyone else was loved, or was enough for you to stay.”
“Your mind is not in the right state.”
If you feel the black box is nigh, please speak to someone or call the Samaritans on 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Braindrops - a weakly teaser to test the mind (#15)
More wordplay this week.
These two words differ in spelling only in the letter shown. Can you guess them from the clues?
_ _ _ _ _ _ Holds office (6)
_ _ S _ _ _ _ Leaves office (7)
Last week was another fairly easy lateral thinker. I asked:
A man drives a long way down a valley - and then proceeds to walk across the ground he has just driven over. Why?
The answer: he is playing golf.
Until next week
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2440417/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-020-0850-6
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16924349/