GRIEF | MENTAL HEALTH

Cigarettes, Psychic Melvin and the Unknown Neighbor

The strange signs surrounding my husband’s suicide and the power of the little things

cw: suicide

“They are telling me to tell you, ‘Remember the little things.’”

I was sitting at a small table with a man named Melvin. He was probably in his early sixties, balding, looking very average other than his glistening and attentive blue eyes. His voice was soft and hesitant as he delivered a message from the other side of the veil.

I was at an outdoor festival in a park near the water where I live in Florida. When I saw the ad for the “Second Annual St. Pete Fairy Festival,” I thought it looked interesting and invited a friend to come along. There were vendors selling a variety of new age items such as crystals and hula hoops, and one section had about 20 intuitives giving readings for a small fee.

Melvin was among them.

I chose Melvin because that was my dad’s name. My father had passed away several years prior. Also, Melvin did not look very flashy or imposing in his button-down and khakis.

My master’s thesis was a documentary video about a town full of psychic mediums, so I had some experience. My work there led me to believe that there is some truth to this unexplained art, but finding it is very rare.

He started the reading looking very worried and said that spirit was telling him to let me know there was an urgent health concern with someone close to me. That it involved cigarettes. Immediately, I assumed that meant the problem was due to the cigarettes, a natural deduction, all things considered.

When I returned home from the festival, my husband, Mark, was struggling to put together a piece of Ikea furniture. Apparently it had taken him all day. This seemed slightly unusual as he was pretty handy, but still, that, combined with the slight glaze to his unusually large-pupiled eyes seemed to indicate something was off.

Now I know I should have trusted that first whispered suggestion from within my psyche.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Mark had been a smoker. After years of on and off quitting, he had finally stopped. I relayed the message from Psychic Melvin to him; I couldn’t shake the feeling that it might be related to Mark’s former habit.

“Maybe I should go get a stress test?” Mark flung out casually, as I reached for a stem and poured myself a glass of red wine. I explained that the message was disturbing, as Psychic Melvin seemed pretty urgent in the telling and implied the person was going to die.

As I reached for my now-full glass and my fingers neared contact, the glass seemed to jump away from me as it shattered, sending a cascade of the red fluid down the edge of the wall.

It leapt even though I hadn’t actually made physical contact with the glass.

I still replay this moment in my mind trying to fit those pieces together.

I had spent Thanksgiving with my family and was preparing to leave the next day to visit my childhood best friend in rural Oregon. This was no small feat. I was flying across the country with my 1.5-year-old son and my 85-year-old aunt, who was also going to Oregon, but to visit her son. My job was to get everyone there safely and not lose my mind in the process.

A little Xanax and mission accomplished.

My son and I spent a week there, hiking the woods and enjoying early winter with my dearest friend and her family. I spoke with my husband several times while we were gone, but not much. No need. He was doing his own thing at home and I was reveling in my getaway.

The plan was he would pick us up at the airport upon our return.

Three connections and nearly 24 hours of travel with a toddler, I was done. So done. I excitedly got off the plane, picked up our luggage and called my husband to let him know we were ready for pickup. I expected him to be waiting for us.

He was not answering his phone.

He was not there.

After a few more tries I reached him.

“Hello?” he said sleepily, as if coming out of a fog.

“Where the fuck are you?” I responded.

“Oh, shit. Okay, I will leave now.”

In the hour I waited for him to arrive, I grew increasingly agitated. When he finally got there, we did not speak. The drive home was silent except for the innocent chatter of our little boy.

He apologized profusely, explaining he had stayed up late and overslept. I was still fuming. There was no reasonable excuse for missing that boat.

When we finally arrived home, I walked into the kitchen. We were at the point of slightly amicable conversation, and the ice was started to thaw somewhat. But I could not shake a feeling in my stomach that something was terribly wrong.

I went to throw something in the trash and when the lid flew up I saw an empty pack of cigarettes within. My instincts flew into overdrive.

For Mark to be smoking again meant he likely was engaging in other activities that had gone along with his smoking, including drug use.

Immediately, I went to our safe. Inside it had been close to $1,000 I had placed there for emergencies. The money was gone.

I confronted Mark, “Did you take the money I had in the safe?”

As soon as he looked at me sheepishly, I knew. The rushing blood sang a banshee song inside my head and my stomach became birds in flight.

With a deep sigh, he started out, “I saw Eric and picked up some coke.”

Mark would work on Eric’s computer in exchange for weed. I had no problem with Mark smoking a little pot, but this was an entirely different matter.

In the years before we had our son, we had partied. Mark had occasionally bought coke from Eric. I had left all that behind when we chose to have a baby. I thought Mark had, too. Obviously, I was wrong.

The combination of stealing and using the money to buy drugs was a lot to take in. Especially given my current state of mind.

In a blur of exhaustion, rage and betrayal, I ordered him out of the house. I needed to be alone to figure out how to react to this and what would come next. I called Sadie, also one of my closest friends, and told her what had happened. Honing in on the sense of immediacy beyond the theft, understanding the situation on my end, as someone betrayed by my spouse and looking out for my child, she said she was leaving town for a few days and suggested he stay at her place with her roommate, John.

I called Mark and asked him to leave, explaining that Sadie said she could stay there. He picked up his basics and left.

In retrospect, the next few days are a blur. At that time in my life, red wine was my way of coping with stress. I realize this was a dysfunctional way of dealing with my worries. My only job was as a mother to our son. So I spent most of my time at home, seeing to his needs, drinking after he went to bed, and talking with various friends about how to handle what had happened with Mark.

In retrospect, I was relying to heavily on alcohol to make life easier to live. When I drank, I would call people and get caught up in a loop of self-pity instead of resolution. The reality that I am now aware of is that it is important to feel the pain, to sit with it and be present. Coming from a family rife with addiction, in a culture of wine-drinking, it was a go-to mechanism. Now, I realize my decisions would have been clearer if I had been able to wake up with a sharp mind instead of a head throbbing and hungover.

I believe that when times such as this come calling, our deeper intuitions kick in to help preserve us. We are given a choice to listen or turn blindly away. While I tried to quiet the pain with alcohol as my numbing agent, a part of me stayed open and receptive, most likely my deeper parts pawing at my brain, striving to find reason in the unreasonable.

So the day after I kicked Mark out, I called Eric to do some sleuthing. Those deeper instinctual voices were telling me that Mark did not get the coke from him. To this day, I have no idea where this thought process came from, but it was correct.

I only knew Eric peripherally. He was an unsavory, Florida Man-esque sort of character, with a gray mullet, cut-off jean shorts, bad teeth and a bitter attitude. I had seen him from time to time, but avoided it as much as possible.

“Hey, can you come over to our house?” I asked. “I have a friend that needs some help.” This was code for “I have someone who is interested in buying your weed.”

When he arrived, I mentioned the coke. “That stuff Mark bought from you was really good,” I said. He looked really confused. “The coke,” I said. He continued to look perplexed, then said, “I didn’t sell him any of that. As far as I know, he hasn’t done that since you guys used to.” In another of those weird internal voice moments, I knew he wasn’t lying.

The mystery deepened and I grew more anxious.

When I confronted Mark that evening with the new information, he again lowered his eyelashes, looked up at me with a deep breath and said, “It wasn’t coke. I ordered ecstasy online and had it sent to a post office box.”

So he had lied to me about his lie.

At this point lies were becoming so commonplace that today it amazes me how unphased I was. Again I ordered him to leave and he went back to Sadie’s house. I knew she would be home the next day, so my time alone to make decisions about the future, was running out.

As always, I scooped up my son and went to the quiet of the beach to do some thinking. I know the areas on our gulf coast island that are less-populated, free of tourists and only filled with the sounds of wind shaking the sea grass and the gentle surf sliding along the shore.

As I write this now, I realize I am jaded by the fact that I am a different person today than I was then, so it is difficult to even think about how I was processing my thoughts. All I know is when I came home that night and put my child to bed, I was grateful to be alone in my house and drank more wine to silence the voices that were screaming at me to take action, as only action would truly make those screams become songs.

That night, Sadie called me in a panic.

“I need to talk to you RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!! We are on our way over,” Sadie said with urgency.

My stomach flip-flopped, “What could possibly be happening now?” I thought to myself.

About twenty minutes later, she and John pulled up and met me on my porch, the place where we gathered at night for talks after my son was asleep.

Sadie told me that John had been at the house when Mark rolled in. John said he wasn’t acting himself. My usually polite and subdued husband was cocky. And bragging about his threesome with two prostitutes.

Apparently he met them at a hotel after he dropped me off at the airport. He bragged about the difference between a cheap hooker and those that were hired through private means and big dollars.

I had known my husband for many, many years before we started seeing each other. I knew that he had battled depression since puberty, had been treated for sex addiction, was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, and had previously attempted suicide twice.

I am not sure if it was arrogance, naivete or a combination of both (as most things usually are) that led me to believe all of that had been fixed, either by me, with me or before me.

In this moment I knew I had never been more wrong.

My shock, horror and sadness transmuted to rage. I picked up the phone and called him, telling him what I had just been told.

“He’s lying. I am going to come to the house right now and punch him!,” Mark responded uncharacteristically, cornered in his lie. I told him not to set foot on our property. Then I did something I have never done before or since.

I screamed, “I hate you!” and hung up, then threw the phone as hard as I could, shattering it.

Killing that phone was the closest I could physically come to smashing my current reality and making my inner muse shut the hell up.

Then came the silence.

I barely remember what happened next. Since Sadie was back, Mark had relocated to the house of another one of my family friends. The parents of my other childhood best friend, whose mother was a psychologist, had said he could stay there.

I am pretty sure I did not sleep much that night. The next morning, Mark sent a group text to me and the few people in his life that simply said, “I love you all.”

Anxiety turned to panic as no one could reach him.

I kept myself busy taking care of my young son. I was grateful for this need, as the drive to keep him happy and secure was the only thread of reality holding down my sanity.

It was about mid-afternoon when the police car pulled up to the curb in front of my home. My heart reached crescendo and felt as though it was trying to escape my chest.

The look on the officer’s face said everything.

“Ma’am, I am so sorry to have to tell you this…”

He had jumped off the top span of the bridge.

Later I found out he moved in one swift motion to the ledge, never even shutting the car door behind him.

Mark’s death was on the front page of the local paper, so you might imagine all the implications that went along with the public knowing something that should have been so private.

In the wake of such an intensely personal, yet so broadcasted moment, life became strange.

I never knew who knew what had happened and what judgments they might have formed. I learned much about people and my reactions to them.

About three months after Mark’s death, I met the man that was to become my second husband.

Interestingly, he is the only person I have ever met because he was a peripheral friend of Mark’s. They were on the same ball team when they were little and had briefly worked at the same company. More of an acquaintance. With my first husband, most of “our” friends were my friends. He reached out to me on social media in the wake of Mark’s death to tell me how sorry he was and suggested we grab a coffee. Then we grew closer.

The morning after our first kiss, about four months after Mark passed, a woman showed up at my front door. This wasn’t that odd as I had a variety of unexpected guests in those months.

This woman lived in my neighborhood. She had known Mark when he was a little boy and of course, had heard the news. She said she had something for me, but was concerned about giving it to me as it was somewhat unusual.

This woman had recently lost her husband of forty years and, in her grief, had been seeing a psychic medium to reconnect with his spirit. She told me the medium had given her a message from someone named Mark, and she put together that it must’ve been my Mark and meant for me.

She pulled out a booklet of paper made from scraps that had been stapled together.

The writing looked as though it had been scrawled hastily and with force.

“Listen well to what is told!

You can extract meaning from even your greatest suffering!

This is what you must do if you are to leave sadness and find hope and joy.

And remember joy is not merely incidental to your spiritual quest, it is vital!

Know that nothing is as liberating as joy.

It frees the mind and fills it with tranquility!

Losing hope is like losing your freedom, like losing yourself.

Depression does tremendous damage.

Use every ploy you can think of to bring yourself to joy.

If you feel down, draw strength from happier times gone by.

Eventually, joy will return.

Never despair! Never!

It is forbidden to give up hope.”

I still call Psychic Melvin for a reading every few years. He accepts my phone call and is happy to hear my voice. It has never been directly stated, but we both silently acknowledge the bond we share from the first reading he gave me all those years ago.

He told me once in his fifty years of doing this work, it was the hardest piece of information he ever gave anyone.

I never again saw the lady that delivered the second message.

I no longer drink wine to numb the pain and I have divorced myself from lies.

I let the voices that reside in my gut spring forth and sing their serenades, no longer screaming for release.

And when those times roll in when life seems too much to handle, I instinctively turn to the little things — the memory of a gentle hug from my son, an inside joke, or a smile on a loved one’s face — to bring myself back to joy.