Christmas Eve, 1988- Suicide and the after-Celebration
The lights were on in the upstairs bedroom of her house on Converse Drive. She had returned to living there after being dragged back from Texas and that traumatic year with her father. She knew that living in the same hell with her mother’s second husband Kim was almost as bad as her dad, but her options were limited at the moment until she found a new studio apartment and a job.
The house was on a deep slope, and she. had many times forgotten to put up the emergency brake in her 1985 Renault Encore and heard a loud whooshing sound as it ran downhill and into the garage door as she. stood at the front door and watched helplessly. It was a bright blue car, and unheard of unless you were from Europe, but car status mattered nothing to her, as long as she maintained my freedom to flee. when she. wanted. She. did this frequently to the beach, with her vodka in the floorboard and Deep Purple blasting on the tape deck. She remembered Jill, who came to visit from Denton, laughing at her for having a “Turbo button”. It was actually the Air conditioning control, which made the car go faster when you had to pass someone on one of the many single-lane back roads we traveled back then to get to Atlantic Beach. She can’t recall today how many times, severely intoxicated, they would make the journey to and from the coast, and made it alive. Of course, at the time, she would have never guessed that it would be her alcoholism she would battle, but back then, she just labeled it as an eating disorder. These things tend to go hand and hand as we engage in behaviors that provide a coping mechanism for all of the trauma we had to suffer. So she ate like she drank, and that was a problem for her. The binging and the purging was out of control.
In the house that evening, on Converse Drive, She had run out of options. The glow from her tape deck/CD combo was dim and moody, with. Michael Stipe’s voice. crying. “This is my world, and I am the world leader pretend”. David Bowie and Jim Morrison stare down at her from the. white bedroom wall. She. repeatedly. rewound. the tape to replay the song, since the words resonated with. her soul at the moment. She laid on the floor, doodling in her sketchbook she had formed a habit of doing during. her stay at. the Duke University Hospital. Art therapy was one of the tools they gave the girls. on the eating disorder ward. If you try to quit something, you have to replace it with something else first, but something positive, they say. Victoria’s Secret was brand new then, and the fashion on the Eating Disorder unit was satin pajamas and bathrobes. We paraded our Victorias Secret robes around the ward to show off our style choices with hopes of expressing who we really were inside, other than young girls with body image issues. She. had tried to reach out to her. parents before. looking. up Eating Disorder Treatment in the Yellow Pages of the Southern Bell Phone book. She was working that day at Southern Eyes, the little sunglass booth in the middle of the Electric Company Mall on Hillsborough Street, in the center of NC State campus. She kept this job as she struggled to find her rhythm at NCSU, struggling to take the basic courses while juggling the effects of her many failed coping tools. “Hello?” her dad said on the other end of the phone. “Dad, she said, I really need help. I am struggling, and am in a hole. I can’t pull myself out.” She was whispering in the small booth, watching students whirl by her rushing off to classes, laughing and making plans. “Gina, don’t even think about dropping out of school. You are brilliant on the upstart, but horrible with stick-to-itiveness. Why can’t you finish anything you start?” I mean, “Why can’t you just find SOMETHING to be happy about??? She placed the phone receiver back into its cradle on the wall, waited patiently until 5:00, and closed down the little booth, feeling as she was devastatingly alone in the world, like most kids of her generation, she would learn later. The first generation of divorced and two working parents; to be raised alone and without any internal compass. The latchkey kids.
As she. walked in the front of the big house on Converse Drive, the tell-tale signs of her. stepdad and mother’s presence were observed; the half-gallon of vodka and two liter of 7-up was on the kitchen counter and Ronald Regan’s voice boomed from the large floor model television. She stopped by the kitchen on her. way up to her room to pour herself a drink, and had stealthily been back several more times for a refill. This was a learned response at this point, as she had watched her parents do many evenings. ` Once in her room, listening to her music, a thought came. She was shaking in terror as she. got up and walked into the large walk in closet of the master. bedroom that her mother and Kim shared. The light was already on above the vanity, and she drug the chair from the dressing area to the large walk-in closet. She stood on the chair and began her search of the higher shelves. He kept his gun in the corner on the right-hand side, all the way in the back. She. stood on the chair, looking at it in her hands, surprised at how cold and heavy it was, its small steel frame feeling like dead weight in her hand. She. knew that it would be a mess, but over soon, but decided that she did not have the courage. to pull the trigger. She. stood there traumatized and terrified of the thoughts that were slamming around inside her brain, in full war mode, before remembering that her mother. had several bottles of Xanax in her makeup bag she kept in the vanity. Grabbing the bottles, she returned to her. room. This was good, she thought, she. would simply pass out and it would all be over.
The following morning was. Christmas. She wore her bright red. Limited Express. sweater with the three buttons and the shoulder pads, her matching red leather knee high boots covered the bottom zippers at ankles of her Guess jeans, that she noticed, were. feeling a bit. snug. Her entire. family gathered around the tree. She fought hard to appear normal as she swallowed down the feelings she had around. the evening before. Waking up in the emergency room vomiting charcoal was a blur, and she could see her mother, hysterical in the corner of the little rectangle corner with the curtains drawn around the steel bed as the nurse held the vomit bucket. Seared into her brain were fragments of moments, from swallowing the pills, the hospital, and to the moment she stood on that Christmas morning shocked with the. utter insanity that life could simply continue on as though it were just another day. Years later, she would come across a photo of that day, all of the family smiling under the Christmas tree. The day after Christmas, she would return to. Duke University’s Eating disorder ward. The sun was shining in her. small hospital. room, and she. had a glimmer of hope that this would be a new beginning and she. would finally. be successful on the follow-through in life, since not in death.
