Ever since November 25th, 2014, I have been writing this Diary. I could not even manage to start typing it out until a couple of months ago. This is the first day that I could actually finish it.
Approximately 9:30 AM, on November 25th, 2014 my son, Curtis Webb Caine III succeeded in killing himself.
Every day since, I relive it multiple times. Sometimes its just a snippet of a feeling. An agonizing loneliness that can never be filled. But at least once during the day, I replay in my head the moment I went into his bedroom to wake him with his mocha in hand to the point he left the house in a blue bag on a gurney.
I intended this diary to be a biography of his life and everything that led up to the point I and everyone else that knew and loved currently are. However, that is a project taking considerably more time and will than I had earlier surmised. I am still working on it and it will be published either later this year or possibly next.
It involves not just his telling the story of his life but that of my own and his mother. As only understanding those aspects can anyone even come close to understanding why he made his decision and how everyone missed it until after it was too late.
So for now, I am writing a brief article when compared to what is to be published later. Ever since that day, I have felt the imperative to write about it and him. To have him still be alive in more than just a few people's memories.
It is a cruel twist of fate that has brought clarity to me and profound respect of the parents of Trayvon Martin. I now know for a fact that I could not have withstood what they went through and still display the courage and compassion that they did. I do not know if, and actually doubt, I could have mustered the self restraint that they have.
To this day, I am still broken and though some healing has occurred, I still can not conceive of the concept of ever being whole again.
Curtis, like his father, me, lived with one foot in poverty and the other in wealth. I named him after my Grandfather and Uncle, Dr. Curtis W. Caine Sr. and Dr. Curtis W. Caine Jr. My father didn't, and still doesn't, understand why I designated him as the III rather than what is more properly supposed to be the II.
It starts with Curtis's Great Great Grandfather. Dr. Ansel Caine was an early pioneer in the field of Anesthesiology at the beginning of the 20th century. When he started his practice in New Orleans, LA, ether was still the anesthetic used to prevent patients from dying of shock during surgery. It was primarily administered by nurses and relied upon the surgeon to monitor the condition of the patient. Dr. Ansel Caine invented a valve necessary to the usage of pressurized containers of gaseous anesthetics such as Halothane. It would warm the gas without igniting it so that it could be used without freezing the patient's lungs from the cooling effect of rapid expansion.
Dr. Curtis W. Caine Sr. was a younger son of Dr. Ansel Caine and would accompany him making house calls during the Great Depression as a child. Between the Great Depression and practicing in the deep South, most of the patients were living in extreme poverty. However, their pride often would not allow them to accept medical care as charity. So frequently, Dr. Ansel Caine would accept payment as barter instead of money. Sometimes it would be a bushel of produce from the patient's garden. Sometimes it would be some form of make work, such as painting a shed. All of this had a great deal of influencing Dr. Curtis W. Caine Sr. later in life.
When WW II started, Curtis Sr. had just finished high school and was starting college. Because of the necessities of Doctors to treat the war's wounded and his desire to assist in it, Curtis Sr.'s college experience was accelerated. There were no breaks during the summer quarters, so he got his Bachelor's Degree in 3 years and immediately went into medical school to become a Doctor of Anesthesiology, just like his idol, his dad. That program was accelerated as well and what normally would have been 2 years he finished in 1. Ironically, he finished his Internship and Residency just in time for WW II to be over. Its effects upon his psyche, however, were firmly imprinted. He then set up his practice in Jackson MS as the first Anesthesiologist to practice there.
Curtis Sr. married when he was 18, in his first year of college and in just under a year his wife gave birth to a daughter that unfortunately was stillborn. Devastated, the couple quickly worked on having another child. That child was Curtis Webb Caine Jr and a year later my father was born. It would be almost 10 years later before another son was conceived and then about a year later a daughter to replace the first one.
My father and Curtis Jr., other than sharing the trait of extremely high intelligence that all members of the Caine brood shared, were drastically different. Curtis Jr. was always overweight and had to wear coke bottle glasses in order to see. His idea of a good time was to read indoors and had a passion for the burgeoning genre of Sci/Fi & Fantasy literature. His dream was to be a thespian but felt a familial obligation to be a doctor like his namesake. My father, on the other hand, had movie star good looks and was extremely athletic. His path, oddly enough, had him pursue a Doctorate in Marine Biology and was a college professor for the majority of his life.
When I was born in Jackson MS in 1967, my father was in the Army Reserve. He enlisted in order to avoid being drafted when his first foray into collegiate life contained too much fun partying with the frat he joined and was about to flunk out. Curtis Jr., had just finished medical school and was interning as a Pediatrician. I was born with an APGAR rating of 1 and died 3 times in the first day of my life due to being born jaundiced because somehow some of my mother's blood had somehow infused into my system. It took 5 full blood transfusions over the course of 3 days for me to stabilize. Curtis Jr. never left my side throughout. Even to the point of sleeping in the chair next to me so that he could monitor the equipment and react immediately if something happened.
My parents divorced when I was 3 with my mother getting primary custody and my dad getting weekend visits and the summer. My mother was a Yankee, born in Wooster Ohio. Her family had moved to Mississippi when she was just entering high school because with the money from selling their small farm in Ohio was able to buy much larger dairy farm near Tupelo MS. They had met in Jackson, where my mother was working in a bank directly out of high school that was training her on the new field of computer programming on the computers they had just bought to take over in managing the bank customer's accounts.
We were now living in Tallahassee Fl, my father had just finished his enlistment in the Army Reserves and was pursuing a joint Bachelor's/Master's degree in Marine Zoology. He enlisted with an MOS as a medic trainer and was assigned to train Green Berets on field medic techniques. So in order to train the Green Berets he had to also go through Green Beret training, all to avoid being drafted and sent to Viet Nam.
This was the first time since they had gotten married that they actually lived with each other for more than a few weeks and discovered that though they cared about each other, they also had enough differences that, by the time the divorce occurred, they couldn't be awake in the same room for more than a half hour without fighting and trying redress previous grievements.
Shortly after the divorce, my mom and I moved to Biloxi MS and started the process where she would transfer to new jobs and promotions frequently in order to make more money and be able to live a life beyond barely making it from paycheck to paycheck. Remember that this would have been just at the beginning of the 70's and primarily in the South. Back then she was frequently making not 70% of what her male coworkers did, but closer to 40-50%. She also was frequently passed over for promotions by lesser qualified candidates with the excuse that the other had a family to provide for. When she would bring up the fact that she too had a family, the response would be that she needed to find a man to marry that would take care of her. She also frequently had the various states' CPS agencies called on her simply because she was a single woman raising a child. It both helped and didn't that she had a body that could have been a Playboy model at the time.
So up until I was a teen, she was the Paladin of the corporate software field. "Know code, will travel." All the time, wolves at the door. From the time of the divorce until I graduated high school we lived in the following sequential locations: Tallahassee Fl, Biloxi MS, Mobile AL, Ft. Lauderdale FL, West Miami FL, Orlando FL, Columbus MS, Tucker GA, Decatur GA, Roswell GA, Huntington Beach CA, Manhattan Beach CA, Bellevue WA, Roswell GA, Chattanooga TN and Venice Beach CA. A couple of cities we had, such as Decatur and Bellevue we lived in different locations as well. Each time, I would go to a new school where I did not have any friends or people I knew, except when we moved back to Roswell. Where there were some people from my 5th grade class that I had played with that were also there for my Sophomore year of high school.
The only constant that I had during my childhood was where I would spend my summers. Somehow, the summer portion of custody that was allocated to my dad ended up with me staying with my grandparents, Dr. & Mrs. Curtis Webb Caine Sr., in Jackson at their house on the Ross Barnett Reservoir (or The Res, as it is now referred to there.) So while during the school year, we would live, at best, a lower middle class lifestyle, during the summers I would attend functions at the local Country Club, fly to Physician Conventions in such places as Toronto, Sun Valley, Hilton Head and even Disney World, to name a few, in Dr. Curtis Sr.'s Piper Comanche and water ski on the Reservoir.
My father, on the other hand, I saw maybe 10 or 15 times during that period. There is a story to go along with that, but this Diary isn't really about me or my childhood but Curtis III. The prior was to explain the significance of Curtis Sr. and why Curtis III was named after him and Curtis Jr. Curtis Sr. was the de facto father figure in my childhood. Also, nearly every summer I would spend time with Curtis Jr. and had very similar interests with. It was Curtis Jr. that introduced me to Sci/Fi and Fantasy books, comic books that weren't just written for children and roleplaying games such as D&D.
I was just under 30 years old when Curtis III was born. I choose that name in order to honor the two men that had most influenced me during my childhood. Just like me, it was a miracle that he survived being born at all. His mother had been sexually abused as a child and that had left significant scarring. Prior to Curtis, we had a pregnancy that lasted 4 months until she miscarried. Afterwards, we had at least 3 more pregnancies that we know of that miscarried late in the first trimester. The scarring made proper implantation nearly impossible. The doctor had to cut Curtis's placenta because it was too thick for him to break through, even though he was over 10 lbs at birth.
When Curtis was born, both his mother and myself were employed in the computer tech industry. I was a game tester and technical support for computer games. She worked as tech support for a cellular phone company. At the time we lived in multiple different apartments and rental houses in the greater Seattle area and at the end of our marriage in San Jose. It was mainly contract labor so for 6-9 months out of the year, we would each make about $15 to $20 an hour and work 40-60 hours a week. We had a friend that lived with us who didn't work and we would pay a small amount as well as provide food & rent for to look after Curtis while we were at work.
Then the contract would run out and for Curtis's mom it would usually take 2-3 months to land a new contract and for me it usually took about 4-6 months. Moneywise it tended to even out as I usually made more than she did and worked more hours. Then we had the point where both of our contracts had run out and neither of us could find work for 3 months straight. Curtis's mother went into a severe Depression spiral and the strain was too much on our relationship. She moved back to Minnesota and I moved back to Seattle. Curtis went with her to Minnesota.
I have not been able to have a job since then. When Curtis's mother moved to Minnesota, I was the one that packed up everything and arranged for them to be shipped to the new living locations. Moving the furniture alone aggravated a shoulder injury that I had from when I was 19 years old and caused me to not be able to complete basic training in the Air Force. It had always been episodic since that point but only lasted a week or two. This time it lasted for a couple of months and kept reoccurring at most a month after recovering until in 2004 it seized up and took 4 years to unseize.
About 3-4 months later, Curtis's mother moved back to Seattle, so that Curtis and I could be close and we finalized our separation. We set up an arrangement where Curtis III would spend one week with me and then one week with her. The divorce would take another few years as neither one of us had an imperative to actually fill out the paperwork and file until Curtis's mom wanted to remarry the person she came back to Seattle with and had been living with. In all reality, everyone involved had been waiting for it to occur as they were living a married life from the point that she had returned to Seattle in the first place. I also remarried shortly afterward to a woman I met at one of the local Sci/Fi Conventions. She was on SSDI due to severe Rheumatoid Arthritis and was pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Communications with a focus on Politics.
I was living with my mother again when I first returned to Seattle. Between the time I left for college and this point, she still traveled in from job to job. But now her job was leading database installation projects for fortune 500 companies around the world. So she was now a similar position to Curtis III as Curtis Sr. was to me and I wasn't able to work so was rarely ever able to take him anywhere. After I remarried, I moved in with my new wife and whenever we started to sink under financially, my mother would help us out. Curtis's grandmother had a second home on Camano Island and, because she usually spent 3 weeks at a work site than a week at home as a rotation, she would rent a car for that week rather than own one. So as far as Curtis saw, she had a new car every time she came back home. She also would pay for ski lessons and gear every year and paid for a 3 week summer camp session with Hidden Valley Camp.
On Curtis's mother's side, she was still struggling with her depression and was having difficulty keeping jobs because of it. Her future husband also struggled in maintaining contracts in a tech field that had now become saturated. So their financial situation was not that different than mine. With her husband's family providing assistance but they could not afford to do much in the increasingly more expensive Seattle area.
From Curtis III's kindergarten to 6th grade, we tried to make it work with both households. During that time, it was discovered that Curtis III had Asperger's Syndrome and from there that he had inherited it from me. At that point a lot of the struggles I had as a teen and in my early twenties suddenly made sense. I also immediately began on teaching Curtis tricks and habits I had developed in order to more easily interact with people.
Unfortunately, Curtis's mom's depression kept getting worse and more out of control. Her husband also had issues with depression and were part of the reason they succeeded where her and I failed because she felt I couldn't understand what was happening to her. As Seattle kept getting more and more expensive to live in and they kept having more and more difficulties finding and keeping contracts in the tech industry. They finally had to admit that the problems there were too much and contributing to both of their depressions to where they were barely functional anymore. So, after consulting with me and my wife, they decided to move back to Minnesota and into Curtis's stepdad's mother's house. Curtis finished his 6th grade year in Seattle, spent the summer with me and my wife and then moved to Minnesota with his mom.
For the next 3 years, Curtis would spend the school year with his mom and the summers with me. The 6th grade was also significant, because that was when his depression first started to manifest. His elementary school years were rough on him. The Asperger's set him apart and the school he went to would have the same 2 teachers follow them from 1st grade to finishing 6th. One of his teachers, that also happened to be BFFs with the school's principal, did not believe in the diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome and constantly singled him out. Whenever there was a problem between students and Curtis was involved, she immediately blamed and punished him for it. I did not find out about the worst offenses until it was far too late to do anything about it as the Principle would not notify me. Instead she would notify Curtis's mother and if she tried to fight for him would have CPS investigate them, which happened twice. Again, something I did not find out about until Curtis was in high school and we no longer lived in Seattle.
So Curtis was excited as he thought the new school with new kids that did not know him would let him start again. Unfortunately, he was ill prepared for exactly how different the school would be. In Seattle, the schools that Curtis went to were in the poorer areas and primarily filled with minorities of one sort or another. Mostly African American and Filipino with a few Native Americans, Hispanic and other Asians. Out of a class of 30 plus, about 3-4 were white, including him. In rural Minnesota, out of a class or 30 plus there were only 4-5 minorities and all of them were Hispanic. He could not understand why none of the Hispanics wanted to interact with him much and why the White kids ostracized him for trying to include the Hispanics.
This was also the point where his mind and nervous system caught up with his body. For his entire life, every time he went to the doctors they would admonish us on him being obese as he was about 30% over the weight that he was supposed to be for his age. His height was also beyond the charts they had for his age, so they would use whatever was the max height listed as his optimal weight. I would ask for them to caliper him but they would always claim to neither have those nor know how to use them properly. Whenever, he would go swimming, he would sink in the water a couple of inches below the top of his head. He probably carried about 5 or so pounds of fat that resided just below the skin but the rest was muscle and bone. Also, because of the Asperger's, he was fairly uncoordinated as a child but that started to change once puberty started up.
He went from being a pinata to being able to toss members of the jr. high football team around like ragdolls over the course of his 7th grade. Thankfully, all of the work that his mom and I drilled into him up until this point stuck. He followed the rules I had laid out. He would never throw the first punch and avoided provoking a fight. The only time he would was when he saw someone else being bullied and attempt to intercede. In this rural town, that was usually when the other was hispanic, homosexual or obviously poor. So after the first year, that became the circle of friends that he kept. However, having most of the rest of the school not liking him, even if they were too afraid to do anything about it, did not help in dealing with his depression that also developed with puberty.
By the time he finished 8th grade, he hated the school and most of the people in the town. He considered them to be racists and contemptible. When Curtis's mom and I initially broke up with her leaving to Minnesota the first time. I promised her that I would not take Curtis from her and would not let my family do so either unless her having him was harming Curtis. It was then and still was a major fear she had. While picking Curtis up for the summer after attending his jr high graduation ceremony, I screwed up. I asked him if he would prefer to stay with me or his mother through high school.
At the time, we were having a casual conversation and it came out as a natural part of it before I even realized what I was doing. I immediately knew what I had just done but he became so excited about the prospect, I had to bring it up with his mother. She took it better than I thought she was going to, partly because she saw that I didn't mean to and partly because she was feeling guilty about taking him away from me when she moved to Minnesota. She also knew how miserable he was in small town Minnesota.
When Curtis moved in with us we were living, with Section 8 assistance, in Sammamish Plateau in what they considered the slums, an apartment complex. My wife had finished her degree and even interned on Darcy Burner's first congressional campaign as the assistant to the Communication Director. Unfortunately, it exasperated her RA and by the end of the campaign it was obvious that she could not keep up the pace. The a bit over a year before Curtis moved in with us, my wife had also been diagnosed with cancer and it was only a few months since her chemo treatments had ended. I was still unable to work because of my shoulder and was filing my 3rd appeal with Social Security over SSDI benefits, so our entire income was my wife's SSDI.
Curtis's first day at his new Jr. High School was marred by a severe panic attack. The scholastic rigor and pace at his new school was over a year ahead of what he was being taught in Minnesota. At home, the pressures of finance and fighting to get an extra bedroom allotment from Section 8 took its toll on my wife's and my relationship. It became a rather vicious circle where her insecurities and depression butted up against my Asperger's and both of our inabilities to sustain physical activity along with the external pressures of having to fight every government assistance agency to provide what they were required to provide by law. The constant battles and their effects on my wife, who started to get very depressed because of them, along with difficulties with his grades at school aggravated Curtis's anxieties. By Christmas, he moved back to go to school in Minnesota with his mom. Ironically, that was the point where he had finally caught up in school and went from failing to finishing the semester with a B-.
The beginning of the next summer saw my wife and me separating, with me going to live with my mother again in Buffalo. On the way there I picked up Curtis. It was at that point that I found out about what had been happening to him in Elementary School and how CPS had been called by the school to keep his mom from fighting them. He also talked about how because he hung out with the Hispanics that his High School Principal (they did not have the Jr. High system but instead the Middle School so he was in his first year of High School there) accused him of being a gang banger because as far as the Principal was concerned all the Hispanic students were members of gangs. The school administrators were not happy with him because whenever they would try to accuse him of wrongdoing in some way or another he knew exactly where and what number the cameras were and would demand to review the tapes. Exonerating him from whatever vandalism or petty theft they tried to pin on him.
By the end of Summer, I decided that I could not send him back to Minnesota and the toxic environment that he had at school there. So he we began attempting to enroll him into the public system in Buffalo. It was far more difficult than it should have been, but that is a story for another time. Suffice to say that by the end Winter Vacation we had managed to get him into one of Buffalo's better criteria based college prep high schools. The end of summer also marked the reconciliation of my marriage and had me racing across the country in a 24 foot rented moving truck in order to arrive before Curtis started school with my wife and our three cats in under 2 days of straight driving.
Scholastically, Curtis excelled. His school shared a campus with a local private college and had a program where its students could take a college course in addition to their regular high school classes. Personally, Curtis struggled. Curtis's anxiety and depression both continued to cause issues. Back in Seattle, we tried the conventional medical route in dealing with his anxiety. All of the meds had significant side effects on him and made it difficult for him to stay awake during school. He also developed an issue that I had growing up and that was difficulty sleeping at night. After much trial and error over the course of the 6 months that he was with us in Seattle, we discovered that the best method of controlling his anxiety was marijuana. My wife, due to her RA was already a medical marijuana patient so access was not a problem.
New York state, on the other hand, still does not have medical marijuana available. So access for both of them became more problematic. In order to minimize and control Curtis's anxiety we had to acquire the pot illegally. Luckily we live next to Bidwell Park and he was able to find some people he could buy from. We weren't happy with the situation but neither my wife or I were able to establish a steady connection for even her own needs for a couple of years after moving to Buffalo and it was better than him having daily anxiety.
He also started having another medical issue start causing problems. Pilonidal cysts are a common birth defect that for most people are a minor surgical procedure and fixed. His was a pocket about the size of a baseball in the very awkward placement of starting a few millimeters from his anus in the crack of his butt. Not only was this very painful post surgery but it was so large and where it was made healing slow and, to but it bluntly, extremely pungent. It took a couple of surgeries with each one needing at least a month to heal to the point where he could regularly attend class and his school was not consistent in providing class notes and assignments so that he could keep up. So he was constantly struggling his entire Sophomore year and only managed to maintain a B average.
After returning from visiting his mother over the Summer, since I now had him during the school year we now had him visit his mother for Christmas and Summer Vacation, his depression went from being an annoyance for him to more and more of a struggle. Near the of Fall it became so bad that the school counselor called me. We had been trying to find a counselor that handled adolescents since the beginning of the year but few accepted medicaid and the ones that did had no openings for new patients. We finally stopped being honest about who paid for his insurance and just gave the provider that New York state paid to provide medicaid thru. We went from being told that nothing was available for us to having someone that seemed to fit not just his depression needs but his Asperger's as well. We had just managed to get an appointment scheduled for the end of the week an hour before we got the first call from his school.
The day of his appointment, Curtis's depression was so bad that the school called us again. This time we went straight from the school to his new counselor's office. She spent a bit of time talking just to him and then called me into the office. First she said that he needed to be immediately admitted for an inpatient evaluation and stabilization and that either I promised then and there to do so tonight or she would call an ambulance. She then said that she could no longer see him as she did not accept medicaid.
We took Curtis to the local county hospital ECMC, arriving just before 5 o'clock. Around 2 AM, we said our good byes as they took him to the adolescent psyche ward for what were told was a 3 day observation. What wasn't mentioned was that since this was a Friday night, his observation would not start until Monday. When Monday arrived we were told that we couldn't start discussing discharge until they finished evaluating him. On Wednesday they said the soonest they could schedule a discharge meeting was Friday. On Friday, they said that the doctor was not available so it would have to be postponed until next Monday. On Wednesday of the next week we were finally able to get his discharge meeting scheduled where it was told to us that because he had been there for over a week they had to have till Friday to finish the discharge procedures. In the meantime, we were there everyday during lunch visiting hours and everyday during the evening visiting hours. Starting the first Wednesday, when it started to become obvious that he was going to miss more than just a couple of days from school, I started stopping by the school every afternoon to pick up his schoolwork. Only his math and science teacher ever had any assignments for me to bring to him. So that after spending a little over 2 weeks in a psyche ward for severe depression, he goes back to school and is in trouble for falling behind and given no time to make up the assignments that he missed while in the hospital. Curtis finished that semester with a B- average.
Because of the hospitalization and state requirements, we were able to finally get Curtis a slot in a clinic that handles non-adult psyche and mental issues. Curtis was on the upper end of the age group that they handled. He was assigned to a counselor and a psychologist. In the hospital they started him on some anti-depressants but his psychologist thought that, partially due to his issues with sleep, he was more likely to be bipolar and started giving him a different set of meds. All of them would seem to work for a little bit, after an adjustment period but after a month or two he would go further down than when he started them. Each time, the response was to increase the dosage. Then in March, we got another call from the school. By this point, we were probably getting a call every other week and sometimes even twice a week. The call in March was different, because this time, rather than just having one his teachers send him to the counselor because he was appearing to be down, he had gone on his own and had admitted to trying to figure out how to kill himself.
This time we decided to have a plan before just showing up at ECMC. It was a Thursday, so we kept Curtis home from school Friday and Monday morning, after waking up at 8 AM and having mochas, we went to check Curtis back in. Since we had a better idea as to how it would work and what was needed. I spent Friday at Curtis's school, lining up and extracting promises from the staff on getting his assignments. We managed to get him admitted around 2ish in the afternoon and went straight to his school to get his homework. When absolutely nothing was there for me to pick up, I went ballistic. Two of his teachers claimed that they had the assignments available online so that there was no need for them have me pick anything up. The only problem was that they was only one computer that the 20 odd teens there were allowed on and had to sign up for time on it that only occurred between 4pm and 6pm and there was no printer attached to the computer as well as a nanny program that did not allow access to any site that might cause agitation. So not just porn, but also any site that dealt with current events of any sort and no access to youtube or facebook either. I never did get through to those two teachers that he was unable to get access to their assignments, because they were able to do so when they or a friend of theirs was in the hospital.
The rest sporadically would dump whatever had been missed over the last couple of days. So that when he got out, this time not just for severe depression but for suicidal ideation, he was still behind and still getting flak for asking for time to catch up. This time my wife and I scheduled a meeting with the school's Principal and managed to negotiate a timetable that while still overly strict he was able to accomplish. Somehow, he not only managed to end the semester with a solid A average but pulled his Junior year average up to an B+.
When he came back from spending summer with his mom in Minnesota we had all of his appointments already in place for his counselor and psychologist. Unfortunately, both had changed over the summer as they had taken positions elsewhere. Prior to him going to his mother's place, they had moved from the town of Moorhead in the NW corner of Minnesota to a suburb of Minneapolis. Curtis had spent time in both Minneapolis and, since as of Christmas he had a driver's license, visited the few friends he had in Moorhead. Talking one friend, who was a lesbian, down from killing herself. We were glad we had already set the groundwork for continuing his psyche care, because it was obvious that he was struggling with his depression even more than he had the year prior.
Shortly after October started, we again got a call from the school's counselor. This time one of his friends looked over his shoulder during class and saw him working on a suicide note. An emergency meeting was set up with his counselor and it was decided that he would again be checked into the hospital to be stabilized. This time we wanted to try a different setting, but none of the private hospitals had beds available currently. One hospital would have one available the next day however. So my wife and I agreed to wait for that one to become available. Curtis as not allowed to close the door to his bedroom and someone was always awake, either my wife or me or both of us until he was checked into the new facility.
Sometime in the third week of being there, the staff noticed some red marks around Curtis's neck. Apparently the night before, he had taken off his pajamas, tied one end of the pants to the door handle and made a makeshift noose with the other end. Fortunately, every time he would pass out due to lack of oxygen to the brain, he would fall over and the noose would loosen and he would wake up a few minutes later. After a few attempts, he gave up on that route. Just as his stays in ECMC, my wife and I would visit every chance we had. Unlike ECMC, this facility only had visiting hours during the evening but they lasted for twice as long. So every night we would sit around and play some game, usually a card game, and talk with him. I would then log on to Skype and fill his mother in one what was discussed and how he was doing. Curtis's mother, my ex-wife, started making arrangements to come over immediately after hearing about it.
Curtis, my wife and I all live in the finished attic of my mother's house which has two bedrooms, a bathroom with clawfoot tube/shower and a central living area where my wife and I have our computers, a couch and the TV. The second floor has a guest bedroom, my mother's office, the master bedroom w/ensuite and a full separate guest bathroom. The first floor has the atrium, living room (where Curtis would spend most of his time when he had his girlfriend over), dining room and kitchen. Generally, it is possible to have everyone home all day and never see each other. Curtis's mother stayed in the guest room.
The week before Thanksgiving week Curtis was released with everyone sure that his depression was back under control. He announced that he wanted to go back to Minnesota with his mother but before he went he wanted to show her Buffalo. He made quite a few requests about wanting me and my wife to go to a church that one of the staff at the facility he was at happened to be a pastor of, after he went to Minnesota and a few other requests. All of them in the nebulous future of after he went to Minnesota. He also wanted his mother to invite some of his friends from Moorhead to spend Christmas with them in Minnesota, most especially the one he talked out of suicide. I spent as much time as I could with him for the next few days. Then on November 25th, 2014, I came up to the attic from the kitchen to wake him up and remind him to take his meds. When I went down about half an hour earlier he was snoring but between then and when I went back up he finally succeeded in his attempts to kill himself.