Chapter Sample #3 (Autobiography)
   —  by Bob Olson, Ghostwriter

FINAL MOMENTS

It was just a few years ago, 2001 to be exact, and for the first time in years it was snowing on Christmas Eve. I was sitting alone at the bar at my favorite Kennebunkport restaurant, Federal Jack's Brew Pub, looking out the window at the boats and the sparkling salt water in the port. I finished my pint of stout and left a fifty on the bar. I'm sure Sean, the bartender, assumed my generosity was due to Christmas or drunkenness, but the truth was that I didn't need money anymore. Tonight was going to be the last night of my life.

I grabbed a few after-dinner mints on my way out the door and smiled at Lindsey, the hostess. I don't think she knew how to respond since she hadn't seen me smile in about four months. Tonight, however, I was in an unusually cheerful mood. From what I've read, a new sense of peace is fairly common among people who make the decision to end their life.

The brisk Maine air made me gasp for breath the second I stepped outside Federal Jack's. It was nice, though, because I could feel my lungs when I breathed. It was good to feel something. I don't think I had felt anything since losing Sarah. Everything just went kind of numb. Tonight, however, I savored every moment. I stood in the parking lot, closed my eyes and lifted my head towards the sky. I experienced every snowflake that melted on my face. Ironically, I hadn't felt this alive in months.

I was walking tonight because I knew I'd be drinking. Just because I had decided to take my own life didn't mean I wanted to take someone else along with me. Not that I hadn't driven under the influence before. I shamefully admit that I had driven drunk a few times after September eleventh. That is one of the things that happens when you go numb—you don't think about yourself and you don't think about others. Tonight, however, I was thinking quite clearly. All I can say is thank God nothing happened in the past.

I left the parking lot and walked into the town's center. Kennebunkport never looked so quaint, even before the terrorists destroyed my life. Every building was covered with tiny white lights, making every snowflake shimmer like a trillion diamonds. There were wreaths and garland and people buzzing all around. I looked into the window of Coastal Jewelers and saw the owners, Brian and Sue, still helping some last minute shoppers. Then I remembered why I hadn't been in to see them this year. My cheerfulness took a dive, so I moved on without going inside to say hello.

I reached the giant Christmas tree in Dock Square, flaunting itself in the center of a tiny rotary that sits in the town's center. With the lights and ornaments, and the half-inch of snow that clung to the branches, the tree looked flawless. I chuckled at the plastic lobster positioned at the peak, where one would normally place a star or an angel, and the lobster-trap buoys that hung on the branches as ornaments. It was tacky, but this was a fishing town, so it was beautiful in its own, silly way.

I felt happy and sad all at the same time. Standing there made me remember the years Sarah and I watched the ceremonial Christmas tree lighting together. The whole town would gather and listen to the high school choir sing Christmas songs, as people mingled while drinking hot chocolate and coffee from Port Coffee Shop. Sarah and I didn't really know too many people, as we had only moved to Maine a few years earlier, but we enjoyed the people-watching. I usually stood behind her with my arms around her waist to keep her warm. It was a nice memory, but I was getting gloomy again thinking about it, so I figured I should just go home.

It was a frigid five-mile walk to the village of Cape Porpoise where I lived, but I didn't mind the cold or that my bad knee hurt with every step. I had taken the beach route past George and Barbara Bush's house. It made my walk a couple miles longer, but I got to see and smell the ocean. I absorbed every house, every view of the water, and every historic landmark with an awareness that I had never known… or rather, that I would never know again.

I was almost home when I reached Cape Porpoise center. Cape Porpoise is one of those villages that you can miss while driving through if you happen to look down at your radio or sneeze at the wrong time. I walked passed Bradbury Brother's Market, which houses the post office in a little room between the pet food and the wine. Across the street was Cape Porpoise Pizza, looking charming as ever with its steamy windows and its signs made out of cheap paper plates. I continued walking, passing Nunan's Lobster Hut a couple hundred yards down the road before I could see the fence of my yard. My heart began to pound in anticipation of the coming events.

Coming upon my house, I strolled across my icy driveway, patted my old Chevy like a dog and smiled in thought. Again, I couldn't help but ponder the memories Sarah and I had in that car: our trip to Disney World, Sunday drives by the ocean on our way to get omelets at All Day Breakfast, and watching movies at the drive-in in Saco. I turned and walked onto my porch to enter the house from the kitchen.

The house was warm but painfully quiet, a silence I usually avoided by playing the television or radio softly in the background. I turned on my portable radio and tuned it to a station I knew would be playing Christmas songs. Elvis was singing Blue Christmas. "How appropriate," I mumbled to myself, as I turned up the volume and looked around the messy kitchen.

Sarah was the neat one. She cleaned up without even knowing she was doing it. She'd walk into the kitchen from the living room to get a glass of water and pick up empty glasses and crumpled napkins along the way—usually stuff that I left there. I wasn't messy because I knew she would clean up after me; I was just unconscious half the time. My mind was always focused on work. Now I was wishing I had given more attention to Sarah and less to work.

As I looked around the cluttered kitchen, I realized just how much she had cleaned up after me. The sink was filled with dirty pans and dishes. The counter tops were littered with empty beer and vodka bottles. I had books and unopened mail piled high on the table. Jackets, shirts and baseball caps balanced on every chair except one—Sarah's. I kept her chair clean. And the floor, now covered with several pairs of shoes and sneakers, hadn't been swept or cleaned in months. Amazingly, this is the first time I had noticed any of this.

It was now time to get on with my plans. As I thought about my suicide plan, I began to wonder about hell. Even though I had lost my faith in God, my Catholic upbringing still had me a little concerned about the consequences of taking my life. I was pretty sure the Thou Shall Not Kill commandment included killing yourself. I had hoped the beers at Federal Jacks would eliminate these concerns, but I hadn't taken into account that walking five miles in bitter-cold weather might sober me up.

I opened an upper cupboard and found the tallest glass I owned that was clean. It had a picture of Minnie Mouse in a bikini on it. I bought it at Disney World, teasing Sarah that it turned me on. I reached down into a lower cupboard and pulled out a large bottle of Absolute. It was three-quarters empty even though I only bought it a week prior, but I still had enough for a few glasses. I immediately guzzled one down to stifle my fears, then filled a second glass and carried it to the bedroom with the radio under my arm.

I have to admit that it was eerie walking through my house for the last time. The pictures on the wall reminded me that my family's memory of me would soon be limited to the few snapshots that I hadn't avoided. This was the first time I had thought about the people I'd be leaving behind. But that was a minor deterrent since the only contact I'd had from my mother or brother since Sarah's murder was an occasional phone call. They simply didn't know what to say or do; so they simply avoided me. They were never good at dealing with death. Even when my father died, my brother just got drunk, toasting my father with every beer he opened. My mother threw out everything that reminded her of Dad and never spoke a word of him after the funeral. Consequently, since they really weren't a part of my life anymore, thoughts of my mother and brother did little to curb my holiday gift to myself—my permanent grief relief.

Once in the bedroom, I sat on the bed and pulled a medicine bottle from the drawer of my nightstand. For a minute or an hour, I'm not sure, I stared at that bottle in my right hand. My doctor had prescribed tranquilizers for anxiety, but I never had anxiety. I only told him I had anxiety in order to get the pills. Tonight was the culmination of weeks of thought and planning. I never really knew if I would do it. It was comforting just to know I could, if my sorrow got any worse. It did. It got worse with each day, especially during the holiday season. And I just couldn't bear to spend Christmas day without her.

As I stared at the medicine bottle, my thoughts drifted. I wondered if Sarah would be disappointed in me for giving up. I had always told her I didn't want to live without her. So I figured she wouldn't be too surprised. Then the phone rang, snapping me out of my daydream. I kind of shook my head and looked at the phone without moving from the bed.

After four rings, the answering machine came on. "Hi, this is John. Leave a message and I'll get back to you." Then the beep.

It was Sarah's best friend, Donna Peters. She was pleading with me to pick up.

"Hey there, John, it's me, Donna. Are you there? If you are, could you pick up the phone? I have to drop Skip off at his house and I was thinking about stopping by on the way to drop off your Christmas gift. Come on John… please pick up..."

I don't quite know why, but the sound of Donna's voice filled my eyes with tears. She was the one person who was there for me when the towers collapsed. Despite her own grief, she helped me get through the worst of it: the waiting to know if Sarah had died; the retrieval of her body, or what there was of it; gathering the dental records and so on. Donna even went to the funeral home with me to make the arrangements. I don't think I would have been able to do it all without her. My brain just shut down to numbness and I was overcome by a fog that put everything in slow motion.

A part of me wanted to pick up the phone and confess my plans to Donna, but the part of me that wanted to end the pain was stronger. Donna kept talking so I turned up the radio to drown out the rest of her phone message.

I opened the medicine bottle and poured all the pills into my left hand, about thirty tablets total. With my hands shaking and tears raining off my cheeks, I began washing the pills down my throat with the vodka. The crying made it all the harder and I kept choking. It took me five mouthfuls to finally gulp them all down. Then I drank the remaining vodka until the glass was empty, making a disgusted face as I wondered why I hadn't used beer instead or, at least, mixed some juice into the glass.

I put the glass on the nightstand and leaned back into the bed. All I could do now was wait. I reached over to cover myself with a quilt that Sarah had won at a church fair at the age of twelve. We had just begun dating at the time. I couldn't believe that twenty-five years had past so quickly. The quilt was torn in several places, but Sarah could never get herself to throw it away. She believed it brought her good luck because she met me the same weekend she'd won it. I pulled the quilt up to my nose so I could smell it. It still smelled like Sarah.

I always loved the way Sarah smelled. It was like orchids, which I only knew because she had orchids in her bridal bouquet. Smelling the quilt reminded me that I'd been noticing the same scent at various places since Sarah's death. I wasn't sure if it was on my clothes, in the shampoo I used or possibly in my soap, but one day Sarah's scent filled my car and another day my office. As a matter of fact, I smelled it at the funeral and the first day I visited her grave. Both times I looked around but didn't see any orchids. I smelled it so often that it was becoming a bit haunting, yet in a strange way it also comforted me. So on those days when my grief made life seem unbearable, I'd snuggle up with Sarah's quilt and sooth myself to sleep with her beautiful scent, which is exactly how I wanted to die.

I was nervous and my body began shivering. I wished the tranquilizers would work faster. I reached over to a pad and pen I had left beside the bed, then faintly laughed at the irony of writing a suicide note when the only person I would be writing to wasn't alive to read it. I threw the blank pad on the floor and laid my head upon Sarah's pillow. From underneath it, I pulled out a crumpled, partly scorched piece of paper that I kept there. It was a note that Sarah had written to me while she waited for help to arrive in the World Trade Center. The building collapsed before anyone came. While some people were able to call family members with their cellphones, we couldn't afford one. I guess that's why she wrote a note. A fireman found it inside her jacket pocket. As I had done every night before going to sleep, I read the note one last time.

When I finished reading the note, my vision was blurred from both my tears and the tranquilizers that were finally beginning to take affect. I pulled the quilt to my nose and began taking deep breaths from it like it was an oxygen mask. In time, I slowly lost consciousness. After a few more whiffs of Sarah's scent, my eyelids closed and my entire body fell limp.