A few weeks ago, my friend’s thirteen year-old daughter experienced something she never should have been exposed to: suicide. She had exchanged words with a twelve year-old classmate, and the next day, the little girl was found dead, hanging from the bar in her closet. My friend’s daughter went to the funeral, as did most of her classmates, but she is left with having to cope with a subject even adults grasp to make sense out of. It is for these two children and the prodding of my friends that I’ll write of my own experience with this subject.

A couple of years ago, I had made the mistake of becoming romantically involved with someone I knew was a poor match for me. He was the stereotypical Arab man you see in the movies – hard headed, harsh, selfish and short tempered. Although he never hit me with his fists, the mental abuse through manipulation and constant head games left bruises no one could see. In an attempt to please him, I was being systematically stripped of who and what I was: culture, family, freedom, and Western dress. I held onto two things stubbornly: my passport, and my religion. The tighter I held onto these things, the worse it became for me; I felt so mentally ground up and beat down, I agreed to give up my passport.

In Islam, a man is to present his future wife with a dowry. In his brand of Islam, I was give him a dowry. He felt since he was giving up his right to a virgin (I had been previously married), he required a stiff level of compensation. In the end, his idea of compensation would’ve been a furnished house in Amman, plus a new car and cash. I never felt comfortable with this because I knew divorce in Islam is relatively easy and quick. What would stop him from marrying me, purchasing a home and vehicle, divorcing me, taking all the assets and then promptly marrying a virgin? He would have everything to attract a woman from a wealthy family, and I would be penniless in a capitol city.

He wanted a Muslim wife and wasn’t going to stop at anything until he obtained my conversion. I was tormented until I said, “ok, I will convert”, but under my breath I begged for God to forgive me because I knew Jesus was, is, and always will be the only path to salvation.

At that moment my fiancé said two things that saved and nearly ended my life. “You’re too old for me to marry” and “If you converted, you would still be seen by most Muslims as a Western whore even though Islam would cancel your sins.” My first reaction was, “why would you put me through months and months of hell only to tell me you can’t marry me due to age, and even if I had converted, I would still be dirty in y our eyes and unacceptable to your family?”

Of course at the time, I was beyond devastated considering the experiences I had been put through and the dignity I felt I had been stripped of. It was almost as if I was being tortured in retaliation of the Abu Ghraib scandal, which was thrown in my face every single day. At that time it was a brand new black eye to America, and he wasn’t going to miss his opportunity to participate landing his punch. To this day, I still believe it was his way of exacting a pound of American flesh.

I had been taken down, humiliated, embarrassed, cheated on, and played for a fool. Then when I thought it was over, it got only worse. “I’m engaged to Nepo!” I didn’t know who Nepo was, and didn’t care anymore. I couldn’t care about anything because all I could feel was pain. Nepo was one of a parade of women he “threatened” to marry. There was “Marie”, a woman he claimed was a domestic worker in Amman that he liked to hurt with rude text messages, calling her a whore. Unfortunately, the message he sent me by accident was a gushy love message for her, and I had just bought a non-refundable ticket from Athens, Greece to Amman, Jordan, to see him.

The entire mess sucked me down into a vortex from hell. I had tried to be a good Christian, only to be tormented and played with like a house cat that catches a mouse – they don’t eat it, they play with it until it dies. I started to beg him to leave me alone, pleading I couldn’t take it anymore – “Go marry Nepo and stop bothering me!” He didn’t go away; he sent at least seventy-five text messages to my cell phone in the space of a few hours, tormenting me until the only “reasonable” escape option seemed to be suicide.

After all, my ability to work had been all but taken away from me; unemployment gaps in resumes are all but fatal these days, and to find someone in a hiring position who is willing to give you a chance is rare. No longer can you take time off for your family or to care for a sick loved one without being negatively viewed. I had been outsourced and I waved my job good bye as it sailed off to India. I had no way pay my bills and the pain of being a total failure haunted me. If I was going to have to return home, I used to say it was going to be over my dead body.

I sent a goodbye email and I went out into my car.

The garage was enclosed, and I turned on the vehicle and put my foot down on the gas pedal. I opened the windows and turned the fan on inside the car so the exhaust would blow in my face. I sat there, gripping the steering wheel, and apologizing to God for not having the strength to go on, with tears rolling down my face. It was 12:30 AM.

At 2:45 AM, I gave up. All I could think of was an old insult joke: “you’re so dumb, if you tried to throw yourself on the floor, you’d probably miss!” How long do you have to sit there with the car running before you asphyxiate?! This wasn’t a profound question like, “how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?”

Oh, the humiliation – I couldn’t even bump myself off, and the running vehicle was my best option! You can’t toss yourself out a first floor window with deadly results, and although I’m a little overweight, I had this fear if I tried to hang myself from a beam in the garage, I’d break the beam and my friend would kill me for wrecking his house. I was acting as the caretaker while he was working overseas and didn’t want to let him down. It’s one thing to know you’ve got a stiff in the garage, but if you find out the stiff screwed up your house, I had visions of a WWF Smackdown in the morgue. If that happened, I’d lose on the old philosophy of “live hard, die young, and leave behind a beautiful corpse”. Mine would have a black eye and choke marks.

I slinked off to bed, not even the slightest bit light headed and completely annoyed I failed. The next night at 3:00 AM I had “company”. The local police department was kicking in my door, expecting to find my dead body. I called 9-1-1, thinking it was a burglar. “Open up the door, ma’am….it’s the police.” Now I was in trouble. My buddy had trusted me to care of his house, and the police had been trying to kick down the door. I’m completely freaked, shaking, and I sleep naked, and the 9-1-1 operator’s screaming at me to answer the door. I’ve been depressed, haven’t showered in days, and smell like the garbage disposal, and I’m floundering for clothing before the police break in and then arrest me for inflicting mental anguish on them.

“Open the back door!” I heard one officer scream.

“It’s an inside deadbolt, and I don’t know where the key is right now. I’ll open the front door.”

In walked fifteen of the most gorgeous cops and fire fighters I had ever seen in my life. You’ve GOT to be kidding me?! I can’t get guys like this to come into my house on a calendar when I’m dressed and looking good, but they all come when I look like I’ve been thrown under the bus and run over? The hell was just starting.

One cop started questioning me about suicidal thoughts. “Did you write an email?!” If I said no, they’d produce it, so what was the point of trying to lie? “Yeah I did.”

“When were you going to try it?!” He growled.

“I tried it last night. You’re a day late and a dollar short, dude.” In retrospect, that wasn’t the right thing to say.