Chapter 83: The Story So Hard to Tell
Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.
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First a content warning: This is a story about suicide. If you or someone you know may be struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255)
There are stories you can recall reading for the first time, stories so memorable that when you pick them up again after a long time has passed you are instantly transported back to that moment of discovery. You remember where you read it, and remember, too, the sensation of being pulled in and along, from the first word to the last. That is what happened when I began re-reading “Kill Me Now,” by Jaime Joyce.
Jaime had written for us before and so when her story landed I was eager to read it. I printed it out and – I can still see the setting – took it outside where I could sit on a garden bench near the office. I believe it took me all of one paragraph to be hooked.
It began: On the morning of Thursday, April 12, 2007, Wye Hale-Rowe watched out the window of the plane as U.S. Airways Flight 180 descended into Phoenix. She surveyed the landscape that unfolded on the ground below—blue swimming pools, elevated freeway interchanges, and a flat grid of streets studded with slender desert palm trees. When Hale-Rowe left her apartment in Aurora, Colorado, that morning and drove twenty miles by taxi to the Denver airport, the air had been frigid. In Phoenix, however, the temperature was expected to climb to seventy-five degrees. But Hale-Rowe wasn’t a snowbird, the local term for retirees who flock to Arizona in the winter and stay through spring to enjoy the weather. Her trip to the Valley of the Sun would be short. She was there to help Jana Van Voorhis commit suicide.
A word about that opening paragraph: many stories – like, hundreds of thousands – open with a scene, an anecdote. Yet too often they do not succeed in connecting the reader to the story. Why? Because they lack momentum. We don’t sense – and readers have, to borrow from Hemingway, 100% built-in fool proof sixth senses – that the writer is sure where she or he is taking us. But here, everything in those first 126 words leads us to that final sentence. From that point on we know where Jaime will take us, and we are given a clear choice: continue or not, but know what this will be about.
I remember racing through the story. It was, I believe, over 10,000 words long. I didn’t check. I just kept reading. When I was done I told my colleagues we had to publish it. Then I mentioned it to an editor at BuzzFeed. He read it and he reacted exactly as I did, and we decided to co-publish. BuzzFeed, bless them, chose to publish the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I winced at the timing – really, this story at that time of year? – but had no choice. The story, however, had over a half million page views and if memory serves was one rank above a piece on Miley Cyrus.
That Jana Van Voorhis was a deeply troubled and unhappy person was not in dispute, nor was the fact that Jana wished to end her life. She chose not to act alone. Instead, she sought out people who could assist her. And therein lay the quandary at the heart of the story: was it right (to say nothing of legal) to assist in the suicide of someone who was not dying, someone who had chosen to end her life before physical illness ended it for her.
As Jaime wrote: In fact, Jana was not dying. She did not have most of the ailments that she said she did. The truth was that she had a long history of mental illness and believed that she was physically ill. According to family members, Jana had begun to talk about suicide when she was a child. “She’d threaten to run out into traffic,” her sister Viki told me. She did poorly in school and had trouble making and keeping friends. Jana was first hospitalized in 1970, at twenty-one, and over the years, she had been admitted to the psychiatric wards of several local hospitals.
Family members say that as Jana got older, her condition worsened. On May 7, 2006, her psychiatrist, Michael J. Fermo, noted in his records: “She reports having depressed mood swings, periods of irritability, difficulty shutting off her mind, especially at night, erratic sleep, low energy, nervous, socially isolated and an ongoing feeling that bugs are eating her. The patient has been increasingly becoming psychotic, claiming that roof rats have been overtaking her home, sneaking into her house, and attacking her.”
Jana was 58 when she contacted a group called Final Exit Network. She sent along $50. Four days later she took a call from a man named Harry Lien, a retired elementary school teacher. Lien took extensive notes about her physical condition, her medications, and her family, in particular whether they were aware of her plan. They were not.
Still, that initial call set in motion a process that would bring Wye Hale-Rowe and colleague, Frank Langsner to Jana’s door. Langsner, who was eighty-two, was a retired professor of health and physical education at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
When they arrived, Jaime continued, Langsner and Hale-Rowe rehearsed the suicide with Jana. First, they had her prop the pillows up on her bed so that she would be in a semi-reclining position, which would keep her airways open as she inhaled the colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas. Then, Hale-Rowe showed Jana how to place the plastic hood over her head like a shower cap, so that it cinched just above her eyebrows. Jana also practiced connecting the vinyl tubing to the tank’s nozzle.
What Jana did not do was pull the hood over her face or open the valve on the helium tank. Those actions would have to wait until the actual death event, which was to take place that evening. “When you do that,” Hale-Rowe told her, “you’ll be asleep within two minutes, maybe three. You will go to sleep and it will be a deep sleep. That is the last that you will know. Be very, very sure that this is what you want to do before you pull the hood down, because there isn’t any turning back.”
There is no sense in the telling of this story that Hale-Rowe, Langsner, or Lien are bad people. Rather, they come across as people who care deeply about helping those for whom life has become unlivable. It might have been easy if they were unlikeable, or rigid or uncaring. And that only makes the story so much more difficult and compelling. The death of Jana Van Voorhis did not bring this story to a close. In fact, it set the story in motion, for Final Exit Network, for Jana’s family, and for Jaime Joyce.
Jaime knew Jana, not well but well enough to know what a troubled person she was. Jana was connected to Jaime’s family in ways that were at once complex and painful. She reacted to news of the circumstances surrounding Jana’s death not with the eagerness of a reporter who has spotted a fascinating story. In fact, she was not even sure she wanted to tell it.
Like me, Jaime had not looked at the story in years. When I wrote to ask her about it, she also wanted to re-read it, to see it again, after so many years had passed.
Then, a few days later, she wrote back to me: “It took me a long time to come around to writing this story. I’d known of Jana for years, though I’d only met her once. When I learned the true circumstances behind her death, I was shaken. How could you not be? I knew this was an important story, but I wasn’t sure I was the right person to tell it. And yet I couldn’t shake it. Sometimes, we hold onto stories for years before we’re ready to take them on.
“My mom gave me the phone number for Jana’s sister, Viki. I had to work up the nerve to make that call. But once I did, there was no going back. The story is just so deep and complicated. Life is complicated. Death can be too. I started working on this story in 2011. It was published two years later. Until you wrote, Michael, I don’t think I’ve read it in nearly a decade. As you say, it wrestles with a profound moral dilemma — but it’s not only about end-of-life issues, it’s about people who are living with severe mental illness and the ripple effect that it has on a family. Jana’s story is important, and the circumstances of her life and death continue to move me. Revisiting it all these years later, I think about the experience of those in my own family who suffer from mental illness, and of being by my father’s side last year, at my sister’s home, when he died of cancer. We come to stories for different reasons, and what we take away from them, how we experience them, changes, too, with the passage of time.
“One of my teachers at Columbia, John Bennet, once gave me some advice about how to approach a story: ‘Write it for yourself.’ It wasn’t specific to this story. It was about any story. Don’t worry about the audience. Don’t worry about the publication or the editor and what you think someone else wants or expects from you.
Just write the story. Because it’s yours to tell.”
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