Making sense of the madness

I decided to visit the club's library, complying with the dress code: no halter tops, no flip-flops, no spandex, no Lycra, no provocative or revealing clothing. Being in the Eileen Fisher stage of human development, this was not a problem. Settling into a large leather chair, I scanned a book from the alumni shelf about "The Great Gatsby," the story of someone who never fit in.

The next day, a Thursday, several hundred doctors, therapists, previous and current patients, and others gathered at 8 a.m. in the club's Grand Ballroom, with its Palladian windows, tasteful taupe interior, and a molded ceiling, to honor the award winners. More than one attendee noted the discrepancy between the posh room, the croissants, and the abundant sun, and the prisons and alleyways to which many mentally ill people have been banished, boats against the current, battling something mighty. "Out of the closets," went the battle cry, "and into the light."

Patrick Tracy, the author of "Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family's Schizophrenia," confessed his fear that he had shoved his two ill sisters under the bus for the sake of an art project. Nicholas Dawidoff, who wrote "The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball," mourned the distance between his father's promising Ivy League pedigree and the thwarted world he occupied. The co-authors of "The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic" gave a shout-out to a patient whose truthful claim to be a nun was considered proof of her delusions. Michael Greenberg, who wrote "Hurry Down Sunshine," characterized the voices inside his daughter's mind as a "speeding language" only she could speak. David Lovelace, author of "Scattershot: My Bipolar Family," told how his only non-afflicted family member objected to the notion she was unscathed: "She made it clear, 'I was scathed too.' "

The room was especially still for Cambridge writer Joan Wickersham, author of "The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order."

"He was a lovely, gentle, tolerant man. You could talk to him about anything - Shakespeare, history. You could go to him with a problem and he would listen and not judge you. But he was also private and secretive. He would never have seen a psychiatrist, or taken medication. He didn't know how to tell anyone about the kind of despair he was feeling. His suicide was a shock to everyone who knew him. I think that in some way his secretiveness killed him.

"Suicide takes away not only the person, but your sense of who that person was. It messes up your understanding of the relationship. My mother died this past fall, and I miss her a lot - but I know who I'm missing. My father's death interfered with my sense of having known him."

Only after I returned home did I learn the real reason for the commotion outside my room upon my arrival: A landscape architect from West Lebanon, N.H., had likely jumped to his death. That Monday was the last time John Michelini, 43, was seen alive, according to security video. The New York Daily News reported that housekeeping knocked on his door five times before a guard unlocked it, finding "the bed unmade and the window open." When security returned on Wednesday when he was supposed to check out, it was obvious the bed had not been slept in. Police assume "he jumped from his 17th floor window, fell 10 stories, and crashed through the air conditioning unit on the roof. [He] left several hand written prayers in his room, though no suicide note. His family told police he suffered from lifelong depression."

I wondered later: Did the waiters, professional and silent and invisible, circulating with their silver coffee pots, know what we did not? Did they know that our event was both a call to arms and an unwitting eulogy?

Madeleine Blais, a guest columnist, is a professor at Amherst-UMass and author of "Uphill Walkers," a family memoir.