Blue Healer: The Suicide of Dr. Judith Eve Sandick

“There are no words.”

Of all the comments on Facebook which appeared in the days after Dr. Judith Eve Sandick—doctor, wife, mother of four grown children, volunteer physician in Haiti and Pakistan, former Olympic-level ski racer--took her own life, the ones that appeared the most, after “Sorry for your loss,” and “Sending our thoughts and prayers” were, “There are no words.”

         I should know. I wrote them myself. Wrote them despite having been a professional writer for most of my adult life. Wrote them despite having known Judy all my life, known her longer than anyone else in the virtual or actual world, save for her two siblings.

         The last time I saw Judy was four summers ago. She and her husband, David, drove down from their home in Edgecombe, Maine to watch the World Cup finals at a bar in Brunswick, Maine with me and my then-partner, Charlie. I can’t remember who was playing—I’m not a soccer maven but Charlie, David and Judy were stoked up about the match and I wanted to hang with all of them, but especially with Judy, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year—and so we came up with this plan so that everyone could get what he or she wanted, not an easy thing to accomplish in this life.

         Judy was in fine form that afternoon. Charlie and I got there first and saved Judy and David seats. Gordon, Charlie’s Brunswick neighbor, an academic mucky-muck who taught political science at Georgetown University, also sat with us, each seat sporting a cup-holder and fold-out moveable tray so that you could drink your beer and eat your nachos while watching the game, an agreeable way to pass a hot July afternoon.

At half-time, we got another round of drinks and Judy and Gordon got into a dust-up about health care. It was all very good-humoured, even flirty; Judy had been a beauty in her youth, and she was still, with her strong-boned face and athletic body, a woman of whom men took notice. But Judy, who’d practiced emergency medicine for thirty years, who’d raced down mountains all over the world before becoming an MD, wasn’t about to let some policy wonk lecture her about the problems of Medicare for all.

         I didn’t say a word.

Part of me was appalled at Judy’s chutzpah at taking on this guy she’d never met and the other part of me admired the hell out of her. Judy had principles and she wasn’t about to abandon them in the interests of making nice.  

I’ve been in awe of Judy Sandick’s chutzpah for most of my life.    

 We met in Mrs. Moore’s kindergarten at the Berkshire Country Day School, and were inseparable for the next nine grades, both of us spending a good deal of time in the hall for various infractions: talking out of turn, not putting our books in our cubbies, failing to sit still. At recess, our problems multiplied; we eschewed the girly-girls who stood around comparing ruching on their dresses and played kickball with the boys, games that would often end with Judy beating the crap out of some kid because he’d accused her of throwing like a girl or seeing her underwear when she ran: “I see England; I see France; I see Judy’s underpants.”  Once, our fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Marks, had to pick Judy up by the sash on the back of her dress and remove her from the flailing body of some fleshy nerd she was pummeling.  Judy spent rest of the day in the principal’s office.   

Today, we would be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, medicated with Ritalin and segregated into “special” classes; back then, we were just trouble and everyone—from bus drivers to substitute teachers—gave us a wide berth.

 A trio of girls—together so much they made one formidable social animal CandyMollyFran—hated us. In retaliation, we started our own secret society, the Buddy-Buddy Club. We had secret handshakes, secret greetings, secret meeting places; when we wrote one another letters, we put “The Buddy Buddy Club” as our return address, as if we were some junior branch of The Porcellian Club.

How can you have a club with two members? my dad teased. Because, we said.

Looking back now, I can see that there were signs, even then, that Judy suffered from depression. My father’s mother lived within walking distance of Judy’s house on Spadina Parkway in Pittsfield and Judy would often walk over to meet me when I was visiting. My grandmother, who came from a family of seven and loved to regale us with tales of her childhood, would often drive us to the Howard Johnson’s on Route 7 for afternoon treats of banana splits. Judy would sit in the back seat, as grim as if she were trapped in the principal’s office. Fiddling with the sugar as we waited for our food, Judy would continue to give us the silent treatment until my grandmother would smile and say “Judy, why do you scowl so?” Judy's face would get all red and scrunched up and I could tell she was about to cry.

When we were teenagers, Judy invited me to France to attend a week-long ski training camp in the French Alps, followed by a trip around Europe in a van with several other ski racers. Judy didn’t say a word for an entire week. At the time, I thought it odd, even irritating—I was the only one who wasn’t a competitive skier, and would have appreciated some verbal checking-in--but the others knew that the best thing was to let Judy be. And hope that her mood, like days of fog on Mont Blanc, would pass. By the time Judy and I split off from the others, spending a night in Grenoble before we flew home, she was back to her zany self. We spent our last night gorging on French pastries and gossiping.

“Judy was always hardest on herself,” a fellow ski racer wrote on Facebook.

Of course, I thought. Judy was hardest on herself. Which is why she drove herself to homeschool her four kids while sailing with her family around the world. Which is why she worked double shifts in the emergency room at Miles Memorial Hospital to support her family when they returned to Maine, working even on Christmas. Which is why she went back to school in her fifties to complete a Master’s in Public Health so that she would be qualified to work as a doctor in third-world countries. Which is why, when she couldn’t shake the old, dark feeling of being unworthy, she couldn’t let it go, couldn’t forgive herself.

 “Sorry I haven’t been in touch,” she would write in an e-mail or text, as we tried to get together in Maine, where Charlie had retired, or Massachusetts, where I still lived and worked. When my relationship with Charlie ended, I intended to tell Judy, explain why I was now the one who hadn’t kept up. But like Judy, I was hard on myself, felt humiliated to have failed at another relationship. Widowed, divorced, single again—“You could check every box on your tax return,” Judy had once joked--I felt like a loser.  

“I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend to her,” I wrote to David in a private message on Facebook. “I should have seen the signs, should have worked harder to stay in touch. I was too wrapped up in my own shit.”

In Judy’s obituary, which David and their four children wrote together, mourners are asked not to send flowers but to hug their loved ones.

It’s a singular request: my arms ache from trying to honour it.

                                    ***

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Leaving Blue Hills Road: The Suicide of Deborah Digges

“The suicide doesn’t go alone, he takes everybody with him,” wrote the novelist William Maxwell. When prizewinning poet and Tufts University professor Deborah Digges jumped from the upper bleachers of McGuirk Alumni Stadium at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst on April 10th, she took hundreds, perhaps thousands, with her: her children, brothers, sisters, ex-husbands, friends, students, colleagues, neighbors, and readers. She took the young women of Temple University’s Lacrosse Team who were practicing at the stadium that afternoon: they were the ones who called the police after finding her on the ground, badly injured, at the end of their practice. And she took me, a fellow writer and resident of the Pioneer Valley, who cannot pass McGuirk Stadium on Rocky Hill Road without grieving for her.

I never met Deborah Digges, though I was once invited to a dinner party years ago in Washington, D.C. where she and her second husband, poet Stanley Plumley, were to have been among the guests. The hostess was another writer, a fellow graduate student in the M.F.A. program at George Mason University in Virginia. I declined her invitation because I was feeling sorry for myself over a failed love affair and in no mood to make literary niceties. Now I am sorry I didn’t go, because if I had shared a meal with Deborah Digges, I might now possess some insight, however shadowy, into why she killed herself.

It had been a spectacular day, that Good Friday before Easter, unseasonably warm and sunny, more like mid-June than mid-April, with forsythia and magnolia coming into bloom, daffodils and crocuses sprouting up along the roadsides. As my husband and I inched east in bumper-to-bumper traffic along Route 9 to pick up our son, who had been let out of school early and was playing tennis at Amherst College, we noticed cells of college kids on lawns playing horseshoes, drinking beer, waving as we passed. Every other patch of muddy green seemed to host such a gathering—the boys shirtless, the girls in bikinis, everyone high on sunshine and the holiday (Passover and Easter came back-to-back this year).

Everyone except Deborah Digges, the 59-year-old widow in the driver’s seat of her VW Jetta, leaving the 1950s yellow Cape where she lived alone with her dogs and cat, passing the green mailbox she had painted herself, perched on its filigreed, white-painted stick like the welcoming smile of an old friend. The mail had already come, and she was driving to the end of Blue Hills Road, no husband in the passenger seat (her third husband, Dr. Frank Lowe, a former dean of the veterinary schools of Tufts and Cornell Universities, had died of cancer six years ago); no child in the back seat (her younger son, Stephen, was now a successful photo-journalist in Kenya; his brother, Charles, also a journalist, lived in Oslo and St. Petersburg); no one except a once-beautiful, gray-haired woman alone, turning left onto Amity Street, driving toward eternity.

But you’re a famous poet, I tell her in this strange, posthumous conversation I have been conducting over the past weeks. You have a great job; students who adore you; good health and dental coverage; a decent 401K retirement fund. You publish regularly in The New Yorker. (I know tenured professors with several books under their belts who will never be published in The New Yorker.) You have written four books of poetry, and your last, The Trapeze, is considered a “masterwork,” according to your obituary in The New York Times. You’ve published two acclaimed memoirs. (Last week, I checked out The Stardust Lounge from the Jones Library in Amherst, and inhaled it in three days, crying at the end when the 18-year-old Stephen Digges, after six years of drug addiction and delinquency, is delivered by his mother to college in New York City where he waves goodbye and says, “Thanks for a great childhood, Mom.”)

What’s more, you’re not some selfish, careerist poet boasting about your latest grants and publications, your most recent appearances at literary conferences in posh locations. You’re a good person; while your son was going through his crazy-making adolescence, you adopted a homeless boy, Trevor Clunes, and helped him negotiate Amherst Regional High School, helped him get his graduate equivalency degree. According to your biography at the Tufts University web site, you also volunteer at the Dakin Animal Shelter in Leverett, and travel frequently to East Africa to work with children at the Tumaini Orphanage near Mount Kenya.

I know you are still grieving the loss of your beloved Frank, whom you wrote about so movingly in “Seersucker Suit,” which your New York Times obituary quoted in full. When I read the lines, “O, the great ghost ships of his shoes,” I imagine you standing in Frank’s closet, smelling his trousers and suits and belts and shoes. I, too, have stared at my dead husband’s clothes, knowing I ought to give them away, and yet wanting to leave them right where they are because maybe he might come back, go to work among the living again. I know that mourning doesn’t follow some set pattern laid down in the grief books, doesn’t necessarily attenuate with time.

Still, how could you do it? How could you leave behind your own ghostly shoes for others to grieve? How could you leave those pretty, sweaty, big-boned girls in their goggles and headbands and red-lettered jerseys, girls who were looking forward to pizza and a good night’s sleep at the Econolodge, looking forward to playing UMass on Saturday afternoon, how could you leave them with images of your broken, bloody body, the wailing sirens of the Amherst Ambulance rushing to Cooley-Dickinson Hospital? How could you leave me, a middle-aged woman in blue jeans whom you never met, riding my bike slowly, at dusk, past your home on Blue Hills Road, wondering stupidly how I might have saved you?