Goodnight, Pamela
“You have been a good friend to me”, she all but whispered with uncharacteristic calm, “possibly the best friend I ever had. I love you, Honey. Take care of yourself… go and try to have beauty and joy in your life.”
A few surreal moments before, I had hugged her tiny body close to me as she joked- in her deep, smoky voice- about how glad she was that she would never have to listen to Led Zeppelin ever again. I searched for appropriate words, incase this was really real… told her I was proud of her, as fucked up as that might seem to some, for how long she fought her depression, addictions and grief… ten long years… and those were just the worst of them. “I am so, so sorry for all the pain”, I said. Studying her face for what would be the last time, in a soft blur, through welling tears- I whispered softly “Goodbye, Pam”… she closed the big orange door to her Honda Element with her tiny hand and began to back out of the driveway. As she put the car in drive, she looked at me one last time and waved a tiny goodbye.
Because she obsessively chewed her nails down to nubs all day, every day, those diminutive hands were capped with rounded fingertips. They were the appetizers to the snarky Reddit threads, and CNN news reports pumping toxicity into her home like a never-ending round of energetic chemo. She might take an occasional break to read on her Kindle or play Sims in her sooty home office- a tiny back room in her home, stuffed full of too-big furniture. From sunrise to sunset and into the wee hours of each morning, she would stare at one screen or another, either consuming the darkness of the world or distracting herself away from it by creating new digital worlds of her own.
I waved back at her like a pageant queen. A perfectly improper farewell for a fifty six year old woman off to end her life. She smiled at me the way you'd smile at someone you love if you knew it was the last time you'd ever lay eyes on them. Then she turned the wheel, and drove away.
When I picked up her car later that weekend at the Knight’s Inn Motel where I would later come to learn her body still lie waiting to be discovered, the interior smelled like Opium perfume and Kool 100s. The XM radio was tuned to the 80s station… little pieces of her, like initials carved into the trunk of an aspen, or sharpie on the wall of a public bathroom stall… *Pam Was Here*.
I lingered in the parking lot. A part of me wanted to go bang on every door just to try to find her; to make certain this was real. That this time, she actually went through with it. But in some dark corner of my heart into which I kept choosing to avoid peering, I knew I'd have heard from her, already, if she had changed her mind and decided to stick around.
She had told me of her plan to reserve a ground-level room on the highway side of whichever shitty hotel she ended up choosing as the place where she would spend her last moments alive, so that when the undertaker came to collect her body and the police her belongs, they would be able to do so as easily and quickly as possible without making too great a spectacle. Of the things she knew how to do well, one was worrying about being a burden to others.
It was summer and the wind was blowing, and just behind me, I35 was as busy as ever. But sitting there in her car, in the near-empty hotel parking lot, there was an almost sacred silence, as I looked at each door, one by one, fantasizing that I might suddenly develop x-ray vision and be able to see through to her. It was the silence of the stilled heartbeat of someone you love… I swear your heart can feel it.
Later, the undertaker would inform me that she had left money for the cleaning staff at the hotel: “Never in over thirty years of doing this have I known anyone to do that… and it speaks to the kind of person she was… she knew she had made more work for them and that it might be quite upsetting. She cared about others to the bitter end.”
Folks will often say “suicide is selfish” when the topic arises. I don't necessarily disagree. But if your life felt like a landfill of trauma, and the dump trucks just kept coming; unloading more and more pain on top of decades-worth of rotted, festering suffering- and if you had the means to leave peacefully; painlessly… would you choose to stay? If one of the few inalienable human rights we have is to decide when and how we go- which I believe with all my heart it is- then maybe it was her right to be selfish in the end; to finally say “That’s enough pain for one lifetime.”
There is still a heavy stigma sewn to the coattails of suicide, even in this land of rabid individualism and obsession with rights and freedoms. People say things like “it will get better if you just give it time” or “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem”… or just that “suicide is *never* the solution”… and of course “think of the pain you will leave behind”. Then there are those who believe suicide is a sin that will automatically land you in the Lake of Fire. I used to be one of them… I will give that perspective all the consideration I now believe it deserves… exactly none.
Pam was born in California in 1961 into a highly dysfunctional family brimming with narcissism and sharp intellects. Her paternal grandfather, a physicist, worked with Albert Einstein. He and her grandmother did not approve of Pam’s mother, Nadine. Her father, Anthony, had also become a physicist. He worked on the atom bomb. And he loved Nadine; his very own “bombshell”, as Pam described her. Nadine had come from a poor family in east Texas, but was intelligent in her own ways, and impressively resourceful. She invested well, she kept a tidy house and well-groomed children. But she had a cruel side. And Anthony was unable or unwilling to shield his children from it.
Over decades, from Pam’s first to her most recent memories, she was emotionally and mentally misshapen by constant criticism, power struggles and manipulation. Even though, on the surface, she seemed to have been given all the tools society deems necessary for “success”, she was given none of the tools necessary for self-regulation, finding contentment or for processing grief.
Save for a few fleeting, comparatively stable adult years during which she and her second husband opened the doors of a long-held dream: a small bookstore she decided to name “Another Roadside Attraction” (after a novel by her favorite author, Tom Robbins), Pam experienced a never-ending stream of betrayal, abandonment and heartbreak. And then finally, in her late forties, she witnessed the agnozing death of her thirty nine year old younger brother to cancer followed swiftly by the death of her father, who was taken by dementia. Her second marriage was also lost to crushing incompatibility and increasingly severe addictions, and her little bookstore went under due to soaring taxes and the dynamics of a racist, functionally illiterate small-town community who couldn't give two shits about a bookstore, let alone a bookstore owned by an interracial couple. Then her mother got sick… After Nadine died, Pam was a tiny, busted dingy on a deep, stormy ocean- small, exhausted and excruciatingly alone. All she wanted was her shitty, dysfunctional family… but she was left, instead, with a swiftly dwindling trust fund, a computer game and a cocker spaniel to whom she clung for dear life. She would say that when it was time to put ‘Nali down, she hoped they'd do a “two-for-one” and put her down, too.
She dated a couple times. Went back to work at the bank where we had been coworkers for a little while. Even tried therapy. But after about seven years of mostly living off of her mother's investments, addiction along with the greed of those who claimed to care about her took the money, a degenerative eye disease took her distractions, and the reaper took her beloved ‘Nali.
Standing in such unbearably heavy, lonely shoes, she began to contemplate her own end. She began to desire it. She began to plan it. For two years, she painstakingly researched the best ways to end her life. Guns were out. Razor blades, too- “too painful and too messy”, she would say, when she finally began to speak openly with shocked and reluctant-to-listen loved ones about her feelings and plans. She just wanted to fall asleep and never wake up.
When ‘Nali’s suffering was ended at home, by a swift-acting chemical coctail, and Pam felt like it had been a beautiful, good and rightly-timed death, I thought maybe somehow it would help her move forward. I hoped that feeling good about how ‘Nali died would help her step into a space of some kind of redemption, so-to-speak, as she had always felt she didn't do enough for her family when they were ill and dying. But her determination to choose her own end only intensified.
She had decided on death by overdose. She bought Nembutal- a substance used in lethal injection procedures- from an illegal online “pharmacy” out of China. She even tested it to make sure it was real and effective by taking a small amount, which induced a long nap, proving she had what she needed. During the several days before her death, she had been preparing by taking anti-nausea medications. As I sat with her the day before her quiet exit from her life, and mine, she was experiencing the side effects that can accompany these substances- muscle stiffness, particularly in her jaw, neck and shoulders. It made her talk funny… She took a hot shower, used her heating pad, and finally took a half a Klonopin to calm her muscles down.
As we talked, I thought about how strange it seemed for her to take so much care… to plan and go through this process so methodically and with such attention to detail, as one might reaearch and prepare for their wedding day, or another equally momentous occasion. She had told me of a calm that came over her when she thought about dying and that she had recently had a powerful dream. She described a long, shiny, black limousine that had come to pick her up. She was a young girl, walking out of the front door of a childhood home. The door to the limo opened and she walked toward it sensing it was death coming to take her. She walked with a feeling of serenity she hadn't felt in her waking life since she was lying on the beach next to a campfire with her first husband, Walter, at sixteen. She'd come home early from work, one afternoon, to find him wearing a pair of her panties and one of her blouses and skirts, and she was too young to know how to handle the discovery with compassion or curiosity… so she left him. She wished she'd known then that it was something they could probably have figured out together. He was a good person and she regretted leaving him so hastily.
As she talked about her exit plan, she said the only thing she felt anxiety about was the possibility of failing and becoming a vegetable. She asked me if I knew what to do if that happened. I assured her I did, as she had explained it to me several times before, although it took me so long to wrap my mind around supporting her in her desire to die, I was certainly not prepared to inject air bubbles into her IV should she fail at ending her own life and end up in a vegetative state, chiefly because I knew it was illegal and pubishable by years of imprisonment.
It wasn’t until after her death that I realized the magnitude of the responsibility of being chosen for this role of “Best Friend to the Suicidal”. I think she understood it somewhat better than I… but she was afraid to scare me with it and thus would try to be as gentle as a Miller and a daughter of Nadine could be when discussing it with me.
On a Thursday, we watched some of her old favorite movies, including “Goodnight, Mother”, which inspired the title of this entry, and which is a film about a woman who decides to end her life and who matter-of-factly shares her intentions with her mother who tries desperately to change her daughter’s mind throughout most of the movie but who fails to do so. Her daughter locks herself in her bedroom, ending her life with a gun, her mother pleading with her from outside the door. Every moment with Pam was so surreal, and most of me was sure she would change her mind at some point before all was said and done.
We also watched a wretchedly dark documentary the night before we said goodbye for the last time. My mind wouldn’t allow me to bathe in the hopelessness of it, or even remember the title, and thankfully, I fell asleep for most of it. When she asked me what I thought when it was over, still half asleep, I told a half-truth and said something like “It was depressing as hell, and mostly true.” I had tried for ten years to get her to feel the sunshine on her face- the sunshine was “intrusively and painfully bright”, she would say. I had told her “yes- there is pain and suffering and darkness in the world… and there is also joy, beauty, and love”. But only the pain, suffering and darkness visited her… It was all she recognized and therefore all she would let in… so she began to believe that joy, beauty and love didn’t exist anywhere but in a delusional mind. I was delusional or simply naive in her eyes, and therefore, nothing I said or did put a dent in her desire to go. She told me, at one point- if you go against my wishes on this, I will see it as a betrayal of our friendship. I loved her… I didn't want to be one more betrayal… I had to tread carefully.
The next day, the day she would drive away to die, I had to leave her for several hours to dog sit for a friend. I came back that afternoon and she was watching The Lion in Winter- a film to which she introduced me- and a film which will forever remind me of her velvet, sarcastic wit. “Be sure to squint when you approach; you may be blinded by my beauty”, one of Katherine Hepburn’s lines, was one Pam quoted often.
Another friend came over that day and was there for part of the movie. I remember reading it as an intrusion… and I use the term “friend” loosely… maybe co-enabler is a better term. I was both annoyed at and glad for the distraction as I could tell this may not be just another date that would pass by with my friend and me still breathing the same air. This “friend” of Pam’s had one job to do, according to Pam: to keep her plans a secret from his wife, Pam’s ex-best friend of 35 years. He did not do his job.
The next day, as I waited for word on Pam's whereabouts and status as living or not, the ex-best friend showed up at Pam’s door, a sweaty bottle of Coors, lit cigarette and crocodile tears in tow. True to style, she rang the doorbell and knocked- loudly- several times, shouting my name into the small, rectangular pane of etched glass between us. When I opened the door she swiftly moved past me without invitation, and threw herself down on the couch. “Where is she?” she demanded. She lit up a cigarette, popped her Coors open, and plunked the bottle down on the wooden coffee table in between sips, proceeding to interrogate me. She asked for my help finding Pam “so [she] could say goodbye”. I told her I couldn’t help her. I also had a pretty good idea that it was too late for her goodbye… If Pam had been alive at that point, I’d have heard from her.
She proceeded to tell me how she met Pam. How her children used to be in Pam’s will… how one of them loves Pam, one of them hates her and one of them could care less. How this “isn’t about [her]…. OK, maybe it is”… and how she hadn’t done anything wrong two years prior when Pam “cut her off” and out of her life after decades of toxic interactions. I couldn’t help but think of the front door she’d barked into moments before. It was a replacement for the original door which had a beautiful, large, oval pane of etched glass which this woman had broken beyond repair upon blowing out of the house in a tornado of drama after a particularly heated argument with Pam and slamming said door with all her might.
Before she stormed out this time around, she strode angrily over to the dining room table where Pam had organized and left all her important papers, including her will. The only thing at which she chose to look- this “best friend” of three and a half decades- was the will. And of course, the only part she read (aloud, no less) was the part that said Pam had left everything to me and that if I didn’t survive her, all was to go to a man named Chris. Chris is this woman’s husband and the co-enabler mentioned earlier who had been carrying on a secret but platonic relationship with Pam, coming to hang out with her and drink and smoke and talk shit about the world behind his wife’s back under the guise of “walking the dog”, or “taking a walk”, himself. Occasionally he would bring Pam Klonopin or some pill or another, in exchange for being able to keep his whiskey bottle in her front yard.
There was devastation of finality in the woman’s voice when she read those lines from the will. Pam had written goodbye letters to every important person in her life. But not to this woman. Pam told me she had no words for her… that silence would say everything that needed to be said. I remember thinking about how harsh that seemed. That when my death was upon me, I wanted to make sure any bad blood had been bled out and the wound healed over as much as was in my power to facilitate.
Sometime after 6 pm on Friday the 28th of July, 2017, at 56 years old, my friend of over fifteen years would make a pallet with blankets and pillows on the bathroom floor of a motel, down a bottle of wine, carefully weigh out a precise amount of powdered Nembutal, mix it with just enough water, and swallow it down. She had bought a numbing agent to spray down the back of her throat to help her cope with the bad flavor of the Nembutal, and because- in her own words- she would have to consume a “fuck ton” of it. The throat spray is intended to help folks give better blow jobs by relieving the gag reflex. She had joked about how funny and perplexing it would be to find a dead middle-aged woman with “Oral Pleasures” throat numbing spray at her side. She eventually took the sticker off before she headed to the hotel- the thought of being found with it was more than she could bear. She would already have to endure- though not for long, of course- the embarrassment of knowing she would be found donning an adult diaper… but all in the name of compassion for the cleaning crew who would inevitably discover her.
We had laughed about the diapers while shopping at HEB the day before. She walked up to me with the diapers in hand and as she casually tossed them in the cart she said “Fourteen bucks… and I’ll only use one.” I replied “Well, you could always get your money’s worth and wear a bunch of them all at once.” I will not soon forget the way she laughed… she bent forward at the waist a little and kicked one foot out in front of her the way she sometimes would when she laughed heartily… a beautiful and child-like way to express with one’s whole body.
She used to laugh like that when we worked at Cattleman's National Bank together and a particularly funny customer would tickle her into a good chuckle. It was such a genuine expression, and I couldn’t help but laugh with her, there, in the grocery store aisle- she hadn’t laughed that way in a long time… she later referred to that moment with gratitude… as if to say “Even now, you will laugh with me… even now, you will understand this is my choice and this is my wish. Even now, you will love me, and I'm grateful for it.”
When she died, I was homeless, unemployed, newly single in my thirty seventh year and feeling like life had left me behind. I moved into the house she left to me and the man I love cleaned up the dusty, unkempt grounds and planted food in the yard. We planted a variety of turk’s cap called Pam’s Pink Turk’s Cap, and when the time is right, and we have a piece of land somewhere to call our forever home, I will use her ashes, along with the ashes of ‘Nali, Pabu (a dog she rescued and saw through to her own death), her kitty Elliot (named after one of her favorite authors), the ashes of my precious dog, Little Girl, and of my dear friend Elijah (who also took his life) to enrich the soil in which we will grow love, beauty, joy and food. I will also take a portion of her ashes to be spread at Bonny Doon- a beautiful beach just outside Santa Cruz, California… that's where she spent time by the fire with her first husband- that's where she felt loved and safe. Hopeful. Bonny Doon is also where I fell deeper in love with the Pacific and with myself. We were never there together, but I know she will be with me on the day I release part of her back to where the ocean meets the land.
When I tell people about this experience, inevitably and understandably, they express pity for her and sympathy for me… “how awful”, they say, or “I’m so sorry”… but they have no idea how painful it was to watch her struggle to climb out of the “dark, slimy hole”, as she called it, for over a decade, only to slide hopelessly back into the shadowy depths. They didn’t see the relief on her face and hear the gentle calm in her voice when she spoke of dying. They don’t understand the strength and bravery it must require to make a decision like that and to see it through. But I did… and I do. And I’m not sad anymore… not for either of us. I still feel her… and she feels incredibly Light. Such a contrast to the heaviness that surrounded her in life. Heavy emotions, heavy smoke-filled air, heavy layers of dust and nicotine on every surface of her neglected home. Heavy stains and heavy furniture crowded with items of heavy sentimental value.
She kept her inventory when she closed the bookstore. Her house was a library- shelves lining the walls of almost every room but the bathrooms- even the garage. I kept many of her books, but there were hundreds and hundreds of them, so I spent hours and hours sorting through them. I kept many, but gave the vast majority to a young couple in San Marcos trying to run a reselling business. They had a precious little girl. Pam would have loved contributing to the success of their little family.
When I moved into the house, I began bringing the light back in. I cleaned the neglect off the walls and the floors and even the ceiling… I did my best to bring life back into a place once covered in filth and suffocating in a longing for death. In fact, to that end, I even painted the walls sunshine yellow. Pam would have hated it. Or at least said she did.
The string of questions, answers, epiphanies and synchronicities that have bubbled to the surface of my life as a result of my friendship and this experience with Pam is seemingly unending, unbroken and invaluable… my own lust for life has been renewed… I cling to this life with a new-found enthusiasm, grasping the tether she so willingly released. I have love and hope. I have some pretty unbelievable resources compared to what I was working with before. Her death resulted in a flood of gifts in my life that allowed me to feel simultaneously more free, more grounded, more burdened and more safe than I had in years. Her death gave me a life.
Now is good. And what’s next will be good. And Pam will be there for all of it, tucked into a warm and comfortable and pain-free corner of my heart. I love you forever and ever, Sweet Friend. Thank you for everything you were and everything you gave to me. I hope that now you understand what a gift it is to love you. I hope you're with your family and that you're all whole. From the deepest, warmest places in my heart- Thank you… Goodnight, Pamela.
