Best-selling author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People
SYNOPSIS
Waking Up opens with 35 year-old Terry Wise's graphic recollection of her near-fatal suicide attempt following the death of her husband from Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS). This gripping story invites readers behind the closed doors of a therapy office.Speaking from the rarely-heard perspective of the patient, Wise shares unique insights about the entire process of recovery—for people who sit on both sides of the couch.
Expounding upon a rare combination of first-hand experiences, Wise articulates pivotal lessons and strategies to navigate the road to emotional health. Alternating between riveting narratives and quick-paced dialogue with her therapist, each chapter offers an intimate look at the work of therapy and the resiliency of the human spirit. Several chapters are devoted to how to cope with the impact of long-term care-giving, grief, and the aftermath of loss. As Wise’s journey unfolds, she and her therapist continue to explore the accumulation of events underlying her depression, including a history of child abuse, while providing a unique look into suicide as can only be told by someone who has survived it.
Waking Up is both captivating and educational—teaching professionals from many disciplines, as well as inspiring a broad spectrum of laypersons who have experienced adversity themselves or with family or friends. Specific coping skills and therapeutic techniques are interwoven throughout a journey that teaches us how hope and a thirst for life can be restored. Waking Up is in use at Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, Northeastern and St. Mary's Universities, and has been endorsed by prominent experts in related fields. It has also been adopted for use in Crisis Centers and in the suicide prevention training materials for the National Competency Skills-Based Curricula Training Program developed by the American Association of Suicidology.
For those in the helping professions, Waking Up is a must read. For those struggling with depression, grief, illness, or suicidal thoughts, this book is a reminder that even when you think it impossible, you can find meaning and a purpose for living when life is not ideal. Regardless of the differences in life experiences, the lessons captured by Wise provide a powerful story of hope and personal triumph.
I’m not sure but, I think my husband committed suicide. On December 25th, just fifteen months later, I sat alone, cross-legged on our bed in the very spot I felt his last pulse. The day was going to become quite different than how I had customarily spent Christmas mornings. It was a day that now bears the distinction of my attempt to be the next in line.
With the tip of my left finger pressed on the cap, I used my right hand to spin the jug of morphine like a top. I stared at the black print of Kurt’s name on the prescription label and the date it was filled—the day we were discharged from the hospital—a date that was as surreal as my current decision to take my own life before nightfall. This was not what the hospital pharmacy had in mind when they provided me with more than enough doses to keep Kurt comfortable.
“A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h,” I had begun. I felt Kurt squeeze my hand when I got to the letter “h.”
“H?” I asked.
“Yes,” he signaled with a single, confirming squeeze.
“A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o,” and another squeeze on “o.”
“O?” I continued.
“Yes,” he indicated again.
Muted by total paralysis, decoding the remainder of Kurt's words became the defining moment of our stay in the hospital.
“C-a-l-l H-o-s-p-i-c-e,” Kurt spelled through eyes of pain.
I climbed onto the edge of the hospital bed and nuzzled up alongside of him. Kurt managed to turn his head my way, smiling his signature smile. I slid one hand beneath the collar of his hospital gown and the other through his hair, leaned over and kissed his forehead. Seeking a momentary escape, I paused to inhale his scent, hoping it would carry me on an excursion back to the shelter of healthier times. Yet, even the weight of my memory could not anchor me.
“Are you sure?” I quietly gasped, struggling to catch my breath.
The affirmation of Kurt’s single squeeze lasted longer than the usual “one for yes, two for no” signal. Blood drained from my face.
We both knew what his refusal of nourishment would entail. Hospice would supply the morphine. It would be administered by me to quell hunger pains while we waited through an indeterminate period of days or weeks for starvation to take his life. “Call hospice” signified his decision to go home and die. Early the next morning, we drove out of the hospital parking lot to begin his descent.
“You are not the one killing him; Lou Gehrig’s disease is killing him,” the doctor volunteered days later, as I pumped another dose into Kurt’s unconscious body. I refrained from voicing the retort about to spring from my tongue, “Call it what you want, but it looks and feels to me like I'm helping him end his life.” Instead, I kept silent and listened to the doctor's attempts to reassure me.
With authorization to increase the dosage, I hung up from the 3 A.M. telephone consult and returned to my bedside post. It was my job to prevent his pain, it was my job to respect his wishes, and it was my job to see him through the end of the four-year neurological battle we had been fighting. However, I did not realize at the time what was in store for me: Kurt would soon leave me alone on the “post mortem battlefield” to continue waging the war without him. Fifteen months after I watched him take his last breath under the dim lighting of our bedroom, I sat shadowed in the same light, defeated by the taunting reprieve of surrender.
I closed the book I had studied on assisted suicide and poured what remained of the morphine into a glass, wondering if I could speedily gulp down the thick syrup as instructed. The blue colored liquid had not lost its menacing appearance since I last laid eyes upon it just after the funeral more than one year earlier. We hadn’t needed much to get through the five days it took for Kurt’s suffering to come to an end. Caught up in the frenzy following the mortician’s departure, no one thought to dispose of the leftover narcotics that filled my drawer—except me. His medication instantly transformed into my poison as I stored it away for later use.
I began another count: 60 doses of morphine, 200 Percosets and a large glass of gin. A plastic bag lay next to my pillow. As though sifting through sand, I lifted the pills into the cups of my hands and let them trickle through my fingers back into the pile on the bed. What was the correct amount? What was too much? Too little? Should I use the plastic bag?...
(Prologue continues)
CHAPTER 20: White Rage
Scuba divers are instructed to follow the direction of their air bubbles if they ever become so disoriented that they can’t figure out which way is up. I felt as though my oxygen tank had burst, and while I was frantically swimming upwards to the surface, I noticed that my air bubbles were going sideways...
CHAPTER 26: The Swirl
...The web of intersecting roads that Dr. Joseph and I had charted over the course of almost two years had begun to converge. Despite the recurrent tug and pull over accepting new perspectives, we refined what had become our routine dance, as my initial, stubborn oppositions often learned to follow the rhythms of her tenacious lead. Our rapport had become forgiving enough to tolerate the expected tussles and missteps along the way. Although many ideas were not yet on board, our work continued to focus on the roadblocks to my destination of emotional comfort. The remaining therapeutic lessons were the bulldozer.
CHAPTER 28: Quotas
...I soon accepted that I had been traveling throughout my life on a freight train filled with a personal gang of monsters—monsters of loneliness, anxiety, fear and destructive self-images. With an increasingly receptive stance, each new understanding unloaded another unwelcome passenger, making room for the new companions on my journey...
