ONE FRIDAY IN APRIL
A Story of Suicide and Survival
By Donald Antrim
On a chilly spring day in 2006, Donald Antrim ascended to the roof of his four-story Brooklyn apartment building and climbed onto the outer edge of the fire escape. When he looked down, he felt himself fall out of time; he saw the trash-strewn concrete patio below and an orange sun sinking to the west. He heard a helicopter overhead and wondered whether it was coming for him. Before he climbed to the roof, he had called a couple of friends. He knew they were on their way. He also knew they would hit traffic. Suspended from the fire escape, he released one hand, then reached back up and grasped the railing. He did this with alternating hands numerous times until his palms became sore. Darkness fell. He grew cold. He did not know why he had climbed to the roof, hung from the fire escape, loosened his grip — “why that was mine to do,” Antrim writes in “One Friday in April.” But he knew it was not an impulsive act. “Up there on the roof, I felt as if I had been dying all my life.”
Antrim was 47 that afternoon. He had built an enviable career as a novelist and short story writer who published regularly in The New Yorker. But he wrestled with memories of alcoholic parents, a childhood of abuse and neglect, and failed romantic partnerships. Previous bouts of therapy and medication had not lessened his pain. After his suicide attempt, he envisioned a terrible future: “poverty, abandonment by my remaining family members, the inability to write or work, the dissolution of friendships, professional and artistic oblivion, loneliness and deterioration, institutionalization and the removal from society.”
He knew he had exhausted the patience and pity of his loved ones and he was terrified of mental hospitals: “The doctors would drug and shock me.” Death seemed preferable to a life lived within “stone dungeons.” He climbed off the fire escape and sat against a rooftop bulkhead for a long time. He later learned that he had been up there for five hours. Eventually, he made it down the stairs to his third-floor apartment, and his terrified friends rushed him to the hospital.
He is a survivor of suicide, but not in the way we traditionally understand that designation. Throughout this engrossing, necessary book — part memoir, part philosophical treatise — he argues that suicide is “a disease process, not an act or a choice.” Those who suffer from mental illness and die by (or “of”) suicide do not take their own lives, Antrim says, but have their lives taken from them. There is no will involved when one succumbs to disease. He insists that the language we use to talk about and write about suicide matters, and that when we ascribe agency to the afflicted (“killing” oneself or “committing” suicide), we misrepresent their experience and belittle their struggle. There are obvious exceptions to this understanding of suicide: terminally ill patients, hunger strikers, kamikaze pilots.