The Overnight, chapter 4

For all chapters, go here.

Heading west on Denny Way towards the Seattle Center and not yet to mile 17, I realized there was simply no way this was going to be a 20 mile walk. I was devastated. I had told everyone I would walk 20 miles, I had told myself I would walk 20 miles. My feet were pounding with pain, I was somewhat bleary, but I didn’t want it to end. I was kind of angry about it, actually. I ended up passing the 17 mile mark about ten minutes before entering Seattle Center so it worked out to about a 17.5 mile walk.

As I entered the Seattle Center, I was greeted with more volunteers cheering me on (I think I was coming to the finish line much earlier than most people). I was also greeted with the bags that had been decorated to memorialize the people who had died by suicide. I had written about Rick on one of these bags but here were hundreds of the bags, lining the walk, each with a candle inside. All these glowing things, each with someone’s name on them. People finishing their walks slowed down to look for the bags they had made. Some found them and were camped in front just staring, sometimes talking a little. There were so many bags.

“To Mom, we love you and we miss you.”
“Eric! You are always in our hearts!”
“For my friend, Crystal.”

And this one:
“To Jill’s husband, your wife and family miss you very much.”

I didn’t stop to read very many of them because I decided that I simply wasn’t done walking yet. I hadn’t come to Seattle to walk 17.5 miles; I flew across the damn country to walk 20. So after the finish line, I just kept going. I walked out of Seattle Center and started heading downtown on 2nd Avenue once again. The roadside mileage markers had long since been removed so I just calculated on an average 20 minute mile and figured I’d walk 25 minutes then turn around and walk another 25 back. I mean, sure I could have factored in walks to the car and stuff but that doesn’t count. That’s not the rules.

Thing is, walking through downtown at a little past two in the morning means closing time at the bars. Drunks spilling out into the street, kids out partying screaming out plans for where they’d go next, various dodgy looking characters with whom one best not make eye contact. The entire variety of intoxication. I’d never been more sober.

I had never walked this far in one stretch before and by the time I was heading back to the Seattle Center, I was in pain with every step. But I got there. I walked the 20 miles. It didn’t make Rick’s death any more bearable, the extra 2.5 miles didn’t prevent any more deaths. But it was a promise I made that I had to fulfill. I can’t really think of any symbolic relationship between this and the struggles of suicide survival. Maybe they’re there, who knows. But just as I didn’t want to look out at the water during the walk (that’s where Rick’s ashes were scattered), I didn’t want to really think about anything other than the walk.

Returning to the Seattle Center at 2:40 in the morning, I grabbed a plateful of food, a mylar blanket, and a free T-shirt and sat down. Then I covered my face with the T-shirt and collapsed into, oh, about seven minutes of uncontrollable sobbing. Then I dried off and ate the food. Good food.

Eventually I got up to go look at the bags again. There were hundreds of them, each memorializing someone who died, who devastated their families, who caused a chain reaction of despair that will never end, who tipped a domino that will ripple through their families and hurt family members who haven’t even been born yet. These bags all glowed in the pre-dawn darkness. They weren’t ghosts, they weren’t the people who had died. They were bags with candles in them.

And the bags shouldn’t have been there. I mean, I’m glad they were for the purposes of the walk; it was incredibly powerful and poignant. But those people should have been at home in bed. Mom, Eric, Crystal, “Jill’s husband” should all be home in bed. They should wake up hours later and have some breakfast and read the paper and then go to the park or maybe a movie. They should hug their kids, kiss someone, learn a new language. They should dance. Instead, they’re a bag on the grass.

When people ask me how many people were walking that night, I quote the figure of 1200 which I heard somewhere. “That’s great”, they inevitably say. And yeah, that’s true, it’s great that there is attention for this problem. But they shouldn’t be there. They shouldn’t need to be there. That was the first line spoken at Rick’s service in Seattle. The pastor said, “We shouldn’t be here.”

I looked through many bags, trying to find Rick’s. But I gave up after a while. He was in there, someone else had surely seen his and missed their own bag that I saw. Rick was in there, part of this terrible club, part of this sea of bags, this sea of souls with Eric and Crystal and Mom and Jill’s Husband and Kurt Cobain and Chet Baker and Spalding Gray and Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf and Elliott Smith. Here’s a picture I took of someone I never knew:



I returned to the building where people were resting and recovering. I watched through some huge windows as the sky turned a lighter blue. Dawn had arrived. A closing ceremony was held. A girls choir sang. The two walks combined, New York and Seattle, had raised something like 3 million dollars. The money would go to prevention programs, psychiatric research, and other avenues to understand and stop suicides so fewer bags and walkers would be needed one day.

I’ve been sitting here at a keyboard trying to think of what to say in the What It All Meant part at the end here. I think it was a political act, I believe that if depression/mental health/suicide got the attention that drunk driving got, there would be fewer deaths. It was personal, of course, as I awakened to this vast network of people sharing this common experience.

But more than anything else, it was gaudy. It was tacky. It was a little obnoxious. And that’s a really good thing. Here were people in these beads marching through a city, not disruptively, but acutely and glaringly present. And they were speaking about this unspeakable act. They took their horrific pain and put it on display. Depression is a lonely place and so is grief. For one night, it was placed in a community of darkness, pain, and ultimately daylight.

Next year, the walk is in Washington, DC.

**
Here’s Weekend America’s story on the Overnight.
Here’s Weekday on KUOW talking about the walk.
Here's a really interesting article in the NYT Magazine.

Build the fence on the Aurora Bridge.

Thanks for reading.

_

The Overnight, chapter 3

For chapters 1 & 2 go here.

A lot of people on the walk were from somewhere other than Seattle, which, along with New York, was one of only two cities hosting the walk in 2008. So these out-of-towners didn't understand why we needed to go up a steep tiny street to see a troll statue. Me, I used to live in Fremont but I never quite got the troll either. As the night wore on, I noticed fewer official volunteers and more people who seemed to be just watching the walk, like they stumbled into it. The guy near the troll statue was like that. "I lost my friend. Thanks for walking," he was half-mumbling, "High five. Thanks. Good job." He may have had a few drinks. This walk meant something to him.

I kept on walking through Fremont down to the Burke-Gilman trail and at this point we were north of Lake Union in Seattle. We were pretty thinned out by then and I just had to hope I was going the right way. I fell in with a woman who was walking alone. Her grandfather died before she was born but she was walking to understand why her dad was the way he was. This woman was a teacher and invited her dad to her classroom on a day when they happened to be having a Day of the Dead celebration. Her dad got panicked and had to leave the room. He's pretty old now but incapable of having a conversation about death. She walked for her dad. He couldn't.

Further east and down to the Husky Stadium parking lot for a midnight (well, 11:45) lunch. Sandwiches, pasta, some brownies, and also chairs and grass embankments. O, you foul temptresses chairs and grass embankments! Such relief to get off one’s feet but tempered with the knowledge that it would make getting back on one’s feet so much harder. I paused, talked to the Wisconsin folks a bit, checked in with the Pirates fans, and then stood up to start walking again, more stiffly. Past the Museum of History and Industry, across the Montlake Bridge and over to Eastlake Avenue and heading south. By now it was way past midnight and no one was really visiting any more. No one was sharing stories of who they were walking for. It was too sparse a crowd and the pain was getting to be a real nuisance.

Part of what I loved about the idea of the Overnight walk, back when I first read about it, was the stagecraft of it all. You walk through the darkness, you emerge in the light, you are part of a mass of people who all share this issue with you. It was a 20-mile walk but it was almost performance art, almost a protest. They didn’t talk about the part where the crowd would thin and it would be dark and kind of cold and you’d be alone. Still, this 12:30 a.m. stretch was just as potent symbolically as the more obvious theatrical moments. There came a point as I walked past the Eastlake Zoo tavern where I was alone. Part of this massive charitable healing event, sure, but really? Alone. No one within 100 yards of me. And I’m in pain, each step like a hammer to the foot. And I’m tired. And wondering if I could really keep doing this thing but knowing I had to. I had to keep walking through this darkness regardless of who was or wasn’t cheering me on. We can wear beads and special shirts and have been sponsored by wonderful friends, we can seek fellowship and sympathetic ears but we’re all ultimately alone.

Unless you’re part of the group of people in red T-shirts. Then you’re with everyone else in the red T-shirts. “Dude, you’re not even walking on your left heel!” shouted what appeared to be their leader, a buff and blond male cheerleader type as I passed them. No, I told him, it was just hurting me a bunch so I was favoring the front of the foot first, hoping it would get better. He had a lot of questions about my shoes in between cheering his team of five or so on. “I’m a personal trainer,” he said, “so I’m, like, REALLY into shoes. It’s all about the shoes! Whoo!” Not the kind of person you expect to meet on a suicide walk.

Down around the south part of Lake Union. A family on the side of the road. Mom and Dad standing and cheering, two young kids in a wagon smiling and clapping, they couldn't have been more than six or seven years old. Way past their bedtime. This family has a reason for being there.

Two teenagers walking near me asked if I knew how long the walk was. 20 miles, I told them. They said that’s what they had thought but they had heard from someone that it was only 18 miles. We snaked through the South Lake Union neighborhood past the mile 16 marker and I fell back in with the exuberant personal trainer and his redshirts. He thanked me for walking. Politely, I thanked him right back. He said that he’s lost two friends to suicide and that he’s battled depression his whole life. “I’ve been awfully close to suicide myself. I have to fight this every day,” he said quietly before turning back to his group with “Whoo! Come on everyone! You’re doing great!”

NEXT TIME: the end of the walk, eventually.


All walkers wore beads. Cheap plastic strands but extraordinarily heavy when you factor in symbolism.
*


We were asked to stretch before the walk even though it was just walking.
*


Seattle just before it got dark.

_

The Overnight, chapter 2

Chapter 1 is here

I walked with Rob’s mom for a while. The crowd thinned as quicker walkers accelerated a bit. Soon we were in Belltown, a neighborhood where hipsters party and barhop on Saturday nights. A bit of cognitive dissonance for the hipsters: here we were in Mardi Gras beads but clearly not headed for the bars and clearly not festive. I heard a few people ask some walkers what this was all about. I didn’t stop to clarify for anyone. I just walked and chatted about the weather with a man and a woman I took to be brother and sister. Both wore gold beads (loss of parent), the woman asked the man about Seattle, we all speculated about whether it would rain. The crowd continued through downtown, past Hammering Man, turning right on Cherry Street and down to the waterfront where our first rest stop awaited. It had not yet been two miles but here were snacks and drinks and toilets. Some chose to stay and look out at the Seattle waterfront in the evening sunlight. I had seen that water before and, in fact, beautiful though it was, I wasn’t eager to see it again. That’s where Rick’s ashes were scattered. Now wasn’t the time to reflect, it was time to walk.

Walking north through Myrtle Edwards Park, I began to feel the sore feet a bit. Not really sore but the indications of where soreness would be. And oh, it would be. I fell into conversation with a woman who was walking for her aunt whom she barely ever knew. Her aunt and her mother had been very close and when the aunt died, well, the mother was never the same after that and is still something of a wreck to this day. There’s this idea that loved ones will somehow “get better” or “recover” but it’s just not like that. Again and again, I hear of people not getting better, just getting different forever. So this woman was walking as a Mother’s Day present to her mom, to try to raise some money and awareness. Her friend was walking with her because she was her friend. The Overnight wasn’t all people who directly lost someone, the crowd contained many people who have been rocked by the ripples.

Across the freaky Amgen bridge on Elliott Avenue, south on Elliott past the Baskin-Robbins, then back up Queen Anne to Mercer and I met some people from Wisconsin (they didn’t need to tell me they were from Wisconsin, I’ve learned the accent). They walked for cousins and friends, one of whom had served in Iraq and then took his own life. One very cheerful young woman also walked for herself. She was bipolar and diagnosed with PTSD. I didn’t ask what caused the PTSD. “I have to work pretty hard!” she said, cheerfully.

Down Mercer, by this time it was quite dark, to Westlake and the next rest stop where a woman in a Pittsburgh Pirates shirt approached me. “Are you John Moe?” she asked. Yeah, I am, I said. She had read my book and turned out to be this huge fan. She brought her husband over, also dressed in Pirates gear, he had also read my book and said he loved it. “Get off my lawn!” he yelled, citing a chapter where I go to a shooting range, a chapter he said was his favorite. I didn’t tell him that, six months after the book was published, my brother died at a shooting range. Didn’t want to bum him out. He had lost his father two months after his wedding. That happens a lot, I’m told. Babies are born, weddings and graduations happen, suicides of family members. His dad was a huge Pittsburgh Pirates fan, thus the gear. The shirts, the beads, all part of the weight we carry.

North on Westlake and I talk to a woman from Portland. Maybe 50 years old. She was walking for her father who died on Christmas Day when she was 16. She found him. “I’m amazed you can even walk at all, let alone in this,” I said. Four months ago, she lost a nephew as well. Her friend asked me a lot of questions about how Rick acted before he died. She has family members who she feels may be in a dangerous situation and so she keeps her cell phone close at all times and was interviewing whoever she could find to look for clues.

Across the Fremont Bridge. Fremont (Seattle’s Berkeley if that helps) was having their annual festival so there was a celebratory mood in the air. An SUV drove by and, seeing all the people in Mardi Gras beads, a young woman yelled, “Whoo! Show me yours and I’ll show you mine!” No thanks. I wonder if she ever found out what the beads were for. I kind of hope not. Or maybe she meant, “Show me your deep psychological wounds and yearning for catharsis and I’ll show you mine!” and she just didn’t have time to get all that out as the SUV drove past. Yeah, that’s probably what happened.

At about mile 9 at this point. 11 more to go.

The Overnight, chapter 1

Warning: I'll be doing some recaps of the Overnight walk I did this past weekend. There will be very few jokes. There will be higher word counts. Shorter posts with more jokes will be interspersed.

It was 2:30 in the afternoon and the walk didn't start for five hours so after registering at Seattle Center's Center House I was just going to leave for a while, get some dinner, a bucket of coffee. But I noticed a lot of people who seemed connected to the walk were milling about the Mural Amphitheater and wearing beads, like plastic Mardi Gras beads. Awfully festive for a suicide walk, I thought. Turns out everyone is asked to wear beads corresponding to how suicide has been a part of their lives. So if you lost a child to suicide, white beads. A parent? Gold beads. Purple was for people who lost a friend. Red for people who lost a spouse or partner. If you have battled depression personally, you wore green. Everyone got blue also for supporting the cause. I went to the table and accepted a blue strand as well as an orange one, which was the color for people who have lost siblings.

All who registered for the walk had been given white paper bags. These would eventually have candles placed inside them and be placed on the ground where the walk ended. Walkers were asked to personalize them in some way and many people had attached photos or art work. I had my bag but had not decorated it. I didn't know what to say. I went up to the table where we were supposed to drop them off. They had magic markers there so I grabbed one and wrote:

"Rick Moe
Brother
Son
Friend
8-24-62 - 4-4-07"

And handed it in and walked away. About 100 feet away I remembered something and walked back and had the volunteer dig out the bag. I added "Father" after "Friend". Rick's daughter Sophia was born three months after he died.

Then I went to get some Pad Thai. And insoles for my shoes. And that bucket of coffee.

When I returned to the Seattle Center at around 6:30 that evening I noticed all the teams. Groups of people seated on the lawn together in matching t-shirts that depicted who they were walking for. Pictures pinned to backs, pictures held on sticks, pictures clutched in hands. Pictures of young men, middle-aged women, elderly people, more young men. Lots of young men. I realized that most people on this walk are walking with someone else – friends, husbands, wives, sons and daughters. Me, I’m walking alone. I’m alone. It would have been nice to be with someone for this thing but then again, we all ultimately walk through the experience alone so I might as well walk through this alone.

There were about 1100 walkers in all and all wearing beads so just by looking at people you knew a lot about the most horrible day of their lives. So that lady lost her child. That guy lost a parent. The other fellow battled depression. And everyone wore beads. Suicide and depression is something people kept hidden most of the time but here it was all out in the open. Before the walk started someone got up and spoke. She had lost a son and had done several walks. She said that on her first walk she didn’t talk to anyone, the pain was too great. But in later walks she found that her pain was so great she had to talk to people and her pain was so great she had to hear other people’s stories. She encouraged us all to talk to each other out there.

Soon we were off, leaving Seattle Center and heading south on 2^nd toward downtown. An older woman walking next to me asked who I was walking for. “My brother,” I said. I was hesitant to say much more but only for a few seconds and then I told her everything. She was wearing a green t-shirt with a picture of a young man on it. She wore white beads. “Tell me about your son,” I said. She told me about Rob.

“He died when he was 22 years old,” she said. “He would have been 33 next week.” She didn’t say this with sorrow or tears or pride or anything. She said this as a fact. He would have been 33. He never got to be 33.

I’ll stop there. More soon and photos.

_