Learning to Hope after 30 Years of Depression and a Suicide Attempt
By Shannon Heath Parkin
December 1, 2021
In May of 2015, I jumped in front of a Metro train in Silver Spring, Maryland. I wanted to die. Somehow, I survived.
I don’t remember my suicide attempt or the initial six weeks of my recovery. My first memory is when my daughter, Greta, visited me in the hospital.
Just two days earlier, Greta had turned 14, the age the hospital required before children could visit family. My eyes focused on her as she entered the room. My brave daughter took small steps toward my bed, by the window. I said, “It’s wonderful to see you, Greta. I love you.”
She replied, “I love you, too, Mom,” and leaned in for a hug. Sunrays streamed in the window behind her. In that simple exchange, love and hope shone, as I began my recovery journey.
I’d been badly injured when the Metro train hit me. Doctors had to amputate the front half of my right foot and the front quarter of my left foot. I spent eight weeks on the medical wing of the hospital before moving to the psychiatric unit.
This was my most serious suicidal episode, but not the first. I felt suicidal for the first time when I was 15 and had difficulty relating to anyone during the school year.
My favorite season of the year was always summer, when I attended camp in Colorado. I made life-long friends and learned to ride horses, hike, and backpack. But then, in 1984, at the age of 17, I accidentally fell 25 feet while hiking in Navajo Mountain in Roosevelt Forest. I hit my head twice as I fell.
I’m told that the camp counselor gave me first aid and then ran down the mountain with two campers to call for help, while another camper sat with me on the ledge. Several hours later, a Flight for Life helicopter took me to a Boulder hospital, where I lay comatose for several days before beginning a year of rehabilitation.
I struggled during my college years. My inability to cope with my deficits from my head injury, combined with my family history of mental illness, led to my developing depression and anorexia. I went to graduate school, got married, and had children, but the depression and anorexia never really stopped. Finally, in 2015, I jumped in front of the Metro train.
I was hospitalized in the psychiatric unit for four months, until the end of 2015. From there, I moved to the first of several assisted living facilities. For the next 18 months, I received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) at a local medical clinic twice a week.
With each session of ECT, my senses opened to experience more of life. One day, as I watched squirrels scamper across the trails of the local park, I felt joy. Birds called amongst the trees, and their melodic songs beckoned me to join in the wonders of nature.
In 2016, I started working with a recreation therapist named Debbie Marcus, CTRS (short for Certified Therapeutic Recreation Specialist). I told Debbie I wanted to walk outside as much as possible, because I’d spent so many months in the hospital.
Together, Debbie and I walked for hours in parks in Silver Spring. Walking with no toes gives me a duck-like gait. At first, I walked with a leg brace. After a surgery in 2017, I was able to wear tennis shoes. Debbie and I laughed as I told her I celebrate that I’ll never wear heels again.
With Debbie’s encouragement, I reconnected to activities that I’d once enjoyed, like reading children’s books. I attended training through the literary council to teach adults how to read. I met weekly with an Egyptian woman who wanted to learn to read in English, so she could share children’s books with her grandchildren.
When Debbie learned I swam competitively in high school and college, we went to a local pool. My swimming skills returned quickly. In 2019, I went swimming with my teenage children. My son asked me if I could still swim the butterfly stroke. I nodded and swam butterfly the length of the pool and back. My daughter and son told me they were proud of me. I couldn’t ask for any better affirmation.
Getting Back on the Train
All this time, I met with my psychiatrist regularly and continued taking my anti-depressant medications. In April of 2018, my psychiatrist told me that he thought I was ready to ride the Metro again. I’d thought riding a train again was impossible. The possibility both scared and excited me.
We agreed that Debbie would ride with me. By coincidence, Debbie and I both wore orange T-shirts that morning. Once we had passed the fare card turnstile, she asked me “Do you want me or you to go up the escalator first?”
From her decades of experience, Debbie knew that allowing me limited choices even in this context enabled me to feel more in control of my emotions.
“I want you to go first,” I told her.
“Ok, but you are going to follow me, right?” Debbie replied with only a hint of a question in her voice. I nodded, even though the roar of a train entering the station filled me with fear.
I held tightly to the escalator railing with my right hand and focused on the back of Debbie’s bright orange T-shirt. When we reached the platform, I looked at her face, not at the tracks, as the train pulled into the station.
Debbie took my hand, and we boarded the train. We had agreed we would ride only one stop before turning around and returning. We found a seat close to the door, because my partial feet didn’t give me the balance needed to stand on a moving train.
At the next station, my confidence rocketed when the door opened. As we stepped off the train, I reached my hand back for Debbie.
“Let me just switch my bag to the other shoulder, so I don’t trip you,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, “that would not be something you’d want to put on your resume.”
As we laughed, standing on the platform, I saw a white bird with outstretched wings sail across the blue sky. I still focused on Debbie’s face as I heard the train approach the station, but this time I didn’t have to fight the urge to cover my ears.
Debbie and I rode the Metro together every week for the next month. On our third trip together, as we stood on the platform, I told her about the phone conversation I’d had the previous night with Greta that had ended when I said to my daughter, “I love you very much.”
Greta had replied, “I love you very much, too, Mom.”
As I told Debbie about that conversation, I saw a mother bidding goodbye to her own daughter, a toddler, in a stroller by making a heart-shape with her fingers. By focusing on the paired images of the heart-shaped fingers, and the echo of my own daughter’s words, “I love you very much too, Mom,” I was able to watch the train arrive at the station with a smile on my face, something I hadn’t dreamed possible.
By using that same imagery on our next trip, I found I could watch the train arrive at the station without fear. Two weeks later, in May of 2018, my psychiatrist gave his full approval for me to ride the Metro independently. I happily shared the news with the congregation of Silver Spring United Methodist Church, where I had been a member since 2008.
Finding Community and Family at Church
My church is located only a half mile from the Metro station where I jumped in front of the train. A fellow church member had been on the train that morning. She went to worship services immediately after getting off the train and offered prayers for the person who had been struck, without knowing it was me.
As pastor of visitation and reconciling ministries, Reverend Michele Johns led the prayers. She also led the prayers three years later, when I told our congregation that I had gained approval from my psychiatrist to ride the Metro independently.
I was friends with an older couple who joined the church at the same time I did in 2008. Over time, I began calling them Mom and Dad, because I saw them as my church parents.
They visited me every week throughout my 6-month hospital stay, including the four months in the psych unit. This wonderful couple also supported me throughout my five years residing in assisted living facilities, even helping me move when I was transferred from one facility to another. These consistent, caring relationships enabled me to see a hopeful future.
Growing up, I lacked a sense of home. I switched schools, states, and sometimes parents and countries every year from 4th to 12th grade. Both my parents were married three times. I was the only child of both of their middle marriages. My friends have joked with me that my family could best be described through an elaborate flow chart.
In the years after my suicide attempt, the Silver Spring United Methodist Church provided me a caring community and a surrogate family. I was standing in our church chapel on a Sunday in early 2017 when our lead pastor at that time looked me at me directly and said, “Shannon, you will always have a home here.” That sense of home grounds me as I walk forward into the future.
While I resided in different assisted living facilities, church members drove me to and from worship services and smaller church gatherings. During these rides and at church, I felt validated by my fellow church members. They listened to me and showed they truly cared about me. Once when a woman from a small church group drove me back to the assisted living facility where I lived, she turned to me after she’d pulled into the driveway and said, “Shannon, you were gone, but now you are back.”
At one church service, when I was walking up to receive communion, my church mom said to me gently, “Your shoe is untied. Would you like me to tie it for you?”
I was so proud to be wearing real tennis shoes instead of the brace up to my knee that I had worn before that week. I’d forgotten that tennis shoes need to be tied to be effective, but my church mom was there to remind me.
In the spring of 2018, when our church prepared for the Christian Lenten practice of foot washing, Reverend Michele arranged for the two of us to have a private ceremony in the lead pastor’s office, where the two of us would wash each other’s feet. I took off my shoes and socks, and Reverend Michele didn’t flinch or hesitate when she saw my partial bare feet. She washed my feet, and then I washed hers. It was an extraordinarily meaningful ceremony.
Two months after I’d begun riding the Metro independently, I learned the church member who had been on the train I jumped in front of would be leading a group from our church to go to a baseball game. The group would be riding together on the Metro. I wanted to go, but I was worried my presence on the train would cause church members to be uncomfortable.
Very tentatively, I asked the leader if I could join the group. Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “Definitely. I’ve got your back. Always have. Always will.” With those words, and a successful trip to the ballgame, I knew I would never walk alone again.
Learning Gratitude in the Pandemic
When the pandemic began in early 2020, I still resided in assisted living. My life was confined to a small bedroom, a tiny kitchen area, and a bathroom. I was more anxious than ever to move and live independently in my own apartment, but my psychiatrist and therapist had to approve the plan. I resolved to prove to them that I could remain positive even in these difficult circumstances.
I began keeping a daily gratitude log that I’d learned about through the support groups and the volunteer work I did with the National Alliance on Mental Illness. In this gratitude log, I kept track of every phone call and online interaction I had with my children, friends and church members.
During these early months of the pandemic, Reverend Michele called me every week. In one phone conversation, as I described my journal in detail, Reverend Michele appeared unusually quiet. I asked her why. She replied that she didn’t want to interrupt me.
I told her, “Please don’t worry about interrupting me. You, of all people, should know there is no way you can ‘step on my toes.’”
We laughed together. This conversation was one of many examples of caring people supporting me as I learned to find humor in my situation. I recall the friend who encouraged me to walk “on my own two feet.”
“How much is one half and three quarters?” I jokingly asked the friend, a math tutor.
My wise friend replied, “One and one quarter, but you need to find your own answer.”
Caring people who talk and laugh with me empower me to realize that one half plus three quarters will always equal infinity, pandemic or not.
In October of 2020, after five years of residing in assisted living facilities, I was given approval by my psychiatrist and therapist to move into my own apartment. Church members helped me move. Reverend Michele gave me a wooden plaque that reads The Best is Yet to Come. I strive to live up to these words each day, envisioning a future of light and laughter. A year after moving into my apartment, I continue to keep my gratitude journal. Initially I started it only to prove I could live on my own. Now, maintaining this log is as much a daily practice for me as taking my anti-depressant medications.
Today, December 1, 2021, I mark Day 600 in my gratitude log. One of the things I am thankful for is this journal itself. It gives me the opportunity to chronicle the gifts I receive, and the lessons I learn as I work through challenges.
In September of 2021, my church mom passed away from cancer. When I heard the news, I wept and then went for a walk. As I walked, feeling the wind against my face, hearing the nestlings chirping, I saw a bird soaring across the sky. I felt my church mom’s presence with me. I reflected on how she taught me that although I cannot change my past, I can shift the lens I use to look at my previous experiences.
The memory of her words guides me to move beyond guilt and regret and to stride forward celebrating life learning from my past. I know I can best honor her by living fully, allowing love to erase my previous fears, and sharing the hope of the universe.
Copyright 2022 by Shannon Parkin. Written for SpeakingOfSuicide.com. All Rights Reserved.
