2002, Michigan

By Kathy Passero

When the phone wakes me at 2 a.m., I know instinctively that it is not a wrong number. I mumble a plea to my husband to answer it, and he stumbles to the living room then returns, groggy and disoriented, a silhouette slumped against the doorframe in the hall light’s glare.

After a moment he says, “You’d better listen to the message. Something happened to Valerie.”

I bolt for the answering machine. As I reach for it, I am overcome by the peculiar sensation of taking a slow-motion dive through the air, of floating parallel to the floor and sinking headfirst, inevitably toward the phone. I press Play over and over, struggling to understand what I’m hearing. Then I call Valerie’s husband.

My oldest and closest friend is dead. Early this morning, she took a butcher knife from a kitchen drawer, drove to a park near her home, and slit her wrists and throat. Because she was a white woman living near Detroit, and because there was so much blood, the police suspect murder, and her death made the evening news tonight.

Behind her, she has left a sweet-tempered, soft-spoken 4-year-old son, to whom she was devoted and, on the kitchen counter, a sonogram of the baby she was expecting. She has left parents and a sister and a handful of us, full of questions for which we will never have answers.

A few months earlier, during my own pregnancy, Valerie mailed me packages of carefully wrapped pink baby clothes she’d picked out. Seemingly as excited about the impending arrival of my first child as I was, she tirelessly researched e-tailers that stocked the elusive red crib sheets I’d made my quest for the nursery.

When I learned that she, too, was expecting, I was elated. It seemed natural that we should share motherhood as we had shared so many other milestones.

Valerie and I met as 4-year-olds when her family moved to a house around the corner from ours, and we grew up alongside each other, trudging through endless Michigan snow to and from elementary school, fumbling through Bach’s Brandenberg concertos on second-hand violins in junior high, cramming for algebra quizzes, and suffering through first crushes together. Because I was an only child, Valerie was the closest thing I had to a sibling. I served as the maid of honor at her wedding, and she served as mine.

She was the last person I could have predicted would commit suicide.

Even as a child, she was poised, beautiful, fearless, fiercely independent, and stubbornly loyal. She went to East Berlin long before the wall fell, and when guards detained one of her traveling companions, she refused to budge from Checkpoint Charlie until the exasperated soldiers let him through just to get rid of her. She stood by me in the same way when I was an overweight and awkward fifth-grader, ridiculed by the popular clique that would have welcomed her to their lunchroom table and slumber parties. Her friendship never wavered.

We drive through the night to reach what will be my final reunion with Valerie, my 3-week-old daughter bundled in her car seat, my husband silent behind the wheel. Flat stretches of black road unroll like typewriter ribbon before us, illuminated now and then by semis thundering past, their wheels sparking wildly in the dark. I squint anxiously at the highway signs glowing radioactive green and yellow, struggling to get my bearings. Where am I? I have an odd and desperate conviction that if we can just find the right exit, the right road, we will be able to go back, learn what went wrong, fix it.

I am left speechless when Valerie’s husband tells me shortly before the funeral that this was her second suicide attempt and that she had been on antidepressants for two years. She never said a word to me.

“Valerie prided herself on having everything under control,” he explains. Yes, I think, that was Valerie. Like many women I know, she was her family’s primary breadwinner, child care provider, housekeeper, bill payer, and more. “She was too embarrassed to tell you.”

This baffles me. Living in Manhattan, where it seems that everyone is on antidepressants, in therapy, or both, and happy to discuss it, such discretion seems absurdly quaint and old-fashioned. Yet it is – or was – typically Midwestern, I remember, at least in the time and place where Valerie and I grew up. Stoicism was expected.

There are other stories too. Lurid, horrible anecdotes that I wish Valerie’s husband wouldn’t share. He had her admitted to a psychiatric unit for a week after he caught her trying to swallow half a bottle of sleeping pills, and when she tried to run away from the orderlies, he says, she was tackled and subdued on the hospital grounds.

I shake my head. He must be describing something out of a movie. Not my best friend.

Valerie, who loved children and was our neighborhood’s favorite babysitter when we were preteens, had been trying for several years to have a second baby. When she finally got pregnant again, her obstetrician urged her to stay on antidepressants. But while filling the prescription, she mentioned to the pharmacist that she was expecting, and he read her the riot act. Was she crazy? Did she have any idea what those pills might do to a fetus?

A week later, Valerie’s mother caught her furtively scanning the yellow pages for abortion clinics, and a quarrel broke out. I think now how desperate she must have felt to consider that option for a child she’d wanted.

I search Valerie’s face in photos, reread old notes she sent, hunting for the telltale sign I missed, the moment when things began to crumble. But they are full of hope and promise and references to a future I took for granted. Rifling through keepsakes, I find a sort of microcosm of her life: Here is Valerie with me on the way to school at age 6, missing a front tooth. Here she is at 10, my fat stage, when she looks beautiful. Here, in college. At her wedding. My wedding. Our high-school reunion.

Between long stretches of sorrow come flashes of rage at Valerie for casting a pall, black and unsettling, over what should be a joyous time for me. She barged into my baby’s perfect world and my own postpartum euphoria with something ugly. I leave a blank space in my daughter’s baby journal because I don’t want to write that the first trip she took was a surreal all-night drive to my best friend’s funeral.

I am angry, too, because I was looking forward to sharing motherhood with her. Childhood memories flood back so strongly these days because of my own daughter – and they are so inextricably linked with Valerie – that they are inevitably tainted with sadness and loss. She snatched away my strongest link to girlhood when it seems most important. I had expected her to fill in the blanks in my own memory.

What was the second verse of that old Girl Scouts song about meeting a bear wearing tennis shoes, the one we sang at Camp Merrywood? I want to sing it to my daughter, but now there is no one to provide the missing lines.

I should have been a better friend, should have known, should have intervened. But I was self-absorbed. I look at Valerie’s family, and I know they are tormenting themselves with the same impossible remonstrances. I am heartsick for her son every time I look at my daughter. What could have convinced her that he would be better off without her? Grief makes the urge to blame almost overwhelming.

Mostly, I focus on the pharmacist for having made such callous and unthinking comments, for having talked her out of taking medication that might have saved her life and – I imagine – congratulated himself. What right had he to say those things? What did he know about Valerie?

It seems to me that we are steeped in news of postpartum depression. But what of expectant mothers, I wonder. Doctors are still loath to prescribe antidepressants to pregnant women for fear of malpractice suits if the medications harm the fetus. Pregnant women – at least those I know who are in their 30s and eager to start families – are loath to admit if they feel anything less than the proverbial glow. It sounds ungrateful, selfish, nonmaternal.

Where does such a catch-22 leave women like Valerie? Where does it leave her little boy? Her shattered mother? For me, it leaves a damaged and empty spot, like a badly erased pencil mark that has worn away the paper underneath.

Last week, I opened the baby journal and finally put in the truth. It has taken time to write about it, but I have at last realized that I can’t edit Valerie out or erase her. When my daughter is old enough to read her journal, if she asks about that entry, I’ll tell her about Valerie. One day, I will probably tell her, regardless. Even though she is not here in the way I had expected, Valerie will always be part of my life. Perhaps I will tell my daughter – perhaps she will understand on her own by then – that there are sad lines in every journal.

On my desk, I keep a photograph. It is the first I ever took in New York, snapped on the day I arrived in 1985, when Valerie and I were college sophomores, and I flew here to spend a week with her while she was on an internship. On the first afternoon of our visit, a raw and windy St. Patrick’s Day, we went to the World Trade Center. There is Valerie, standing in front of Koenig’s floating globe just outside the towers. The wind is whipping her hair, and she is squinting at the camera, not quite smiling. Her expression is inscrutable.

If someone had told me that fewer than 20 years later, both of these things that seemed so solid, so indomitable, would vanish, I would not have believed it. I keep the photograph to remind myself of how little is sure in life. I keep it so that I will remember how quickly things that seemed dependable in simpler times can prove capricious and fleeting.

Or maybe I just keep it to remind me of Valerie.

Kathy Passero is an award-winning writer, reporter, and essayist living in Manhattan with her husband and daughter. Her work has been published in a number of national magazines. She is also the author of five nonfiction books.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 | Email This Post

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