S1: If/Then- A Woman Witnesses the Suicide of a Stranger(Stories of Suicide & Loss)

Charlotte’s career is built on theoreticals. As an operating room nurse, she has a protocol for every tragedy — a “then” for every “if.” That all changes one night when, on her way home, Charlotte encounters a teenage girl on the wrong side of a guardrail on an overpass above a highway.

Charlotte wasn’t this girl’s mother, or sister, or best friend. She didn’t even know her. But Charlotte was the last person who spoke to the girl before she died. She was THERE. And now, she doesn’t know how to get back to the way her life used to be.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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How are you?

Most people answer that question with fine or good. But obviously, it’s not always fine, and it’s usually not even that good. This is a podcast that asks people to be honest about their pain.

To just be honest about how they really feel. About the hard parts of life. And guess what?

It’s complicated. Hi there, it’s summer break, but not for us. We are off making more episodes of Terrible Thanks For Asking.

We’ll have new stories here in the feed for you in a few weeks, but in the meantime, we are sharing a few of our favorites, including this episode.

We’ll also be putting out bonus episodes on our premium feed, and you can get it all anytime at ttfa.org/premium, or wait until the first week of August when we will be back. See you soon.

A quick warning that this episode contains references to suicide. Okay, picture this. You’re driving down the road, and it’s just this great night.

You’re with your sister. You’re just gonna hang out and have fun, and then you see someone and something really scary, and you realize that you have been put in this place, and you need to help this girl. This is your reality right now.

What are you gonna do? Make a decision.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Terrible. Thanks for asking. If you’ve ever laid in bed, just obsessing over a situation from your past, this is the episode for you.

Laying in bed rehashing the past is actually one of my favorite pastimes, and I’ve been doing this since I was a child, so I’m pretty good at it. I was a worried child.

I was consumed by what ifs, and my father would tell me, well, Nora, what if the moon were blue? I think that he was trying to quiet my anxiety, and that had the opposite effect.

It was a very cerebral and dismissive, I got to say, dad, way of saying it is what it is, and worrying about it isn’t going to change reality. Now, it is what it is happens to also be one of my least favorite sayings.

Even if it’s true, it’s only technically true, it’s just true because it’s so vague, it can’t be disputed. Like, yes, it is what it is, I suppose, but even so, you’re still allowed to think about what is or about what could have happened.

So, show me a person who hasn’t worried over the many possibilities and hypothetical results of their life decisions, and I will show you a baby, a baby who is lying. Charlotte’s career was built around hypotheticals.

Charlotte was an operating room nurse, so she chose to spend her days working with people in trauma, and for every if, she had a then. Her job was this semi-controlled chaos that gave her energy and adrenaline. She was saving lives.

She was at her best helping people through their worst. No matter what happened, she knew exactly what to do. She was trained for it.

She was trained to anticipate what was next and to act accordingly swiftly and decisively.

I love the technical stuff in the OR and like the rushing around and getting things and really just the structured chaos.

You have your checklist of things even if it can be complete craziness chaos that you’re going through, but you are just doing that checklist of what you need to do as fast as you can to get it done.

That sense of structured chaos was an illusion, of course. The world is out of our control, which is easy to forget because in general, we’ve done a good job of hiding the chaos with functional roads, indoor plumbing, Netflix.

We give ourselves routines, routines so predictable. I don’t know about you, but I can easily drive home from these studios in St.

Paul all the way to Minneapolis, where I live, and have no recollection of my entire drive, as if my brain and my body just went on autopilot for a 40-minute commute.

But regardless of all we’ve done to tame this unruly universe of ours, every so often, a big, huge if happens, an if that we’re not prepared for, an if that is not on any checklist. You make one different decision. You stay at home.

You go out. You leave five minutes early or late. You drive a new route.

And everything changes. Everything is different. Suddenly you’re on your own.

No checklist. No protocol. No best practices.

And that’s what happened to Charlotte. It was a Wednesday night. It was beautiful.

It was unseasonably warm for November in Kansas. And it was Charlotte’s little sister’s birthday.

We had planned to just chill out, get a pizza and hang out. We’re pretty much home buddies. So we ordered the pizza and we decided we’d go pick it up just to get out of the house.

And so I went, I drove there. We got the pizza. It was fine.

And on the way back, I drove a different way back than what I normally would. So on the way back, I took the little shortcut through the town. And we were just chatting and whatnot.

And came over. That’s just a small overpass. So we were driving over that.

Maybe she wouldn’t have noticed if she’d taken her normal route, but she saw it.

Just out of the corner of my eye, I just saw like a glare of light.

So it was a very, very dark night. Like it looked like a white light is what it looked like. And I remember just immediately knowing that that was a face.

A girl, a teenage girl on the overpass.

And there is a fence.

And it’s not a tall fence or anything, but she was on the other side of that fence.

So, imagine this. You see a girl, a teenager, on the wrong side of a guardrail, on an overpass above a highway. What do you do?

You’re driving, you’re going to be off the bridge in a matter of moments. You could just keep going, you could head home. Maybe you didn’t even see what you thought you did.

Maybe it was just a light from the highway. Maybe it was just a trick of your eye. Maybe you’d rather just not think about it.

So what do you do? For Charlotte, there is no choice.

And I just knew that it was a person. So I just flipped the car around. It took like 30 seconds to turn around and go back.

I mean, it was really quick.

The overpass is one lane each way. There’s a small sidewalk and then that low guard rail along the edge.

It was obvious that she was on the other side of that guard rail for one reason. She was facing me and she was holding on with her hands and she would kind of lean back and then pull forward. And she did that a couple of times.

So, I opened my car door and I got out of my car. I just left the car door open and I stood like in the middle lane. And the first thing I said was, you are not going to do this.

And, you know, looking back, I really thought that this was something I could handle.

Charlotte is an OR nurse, so she’s used to emergencies. But she sees her patients after a trauma, not when there’s still a chance to prevent it.

She was looking at me and said, go away. She just flat out said, go away. That’s when I turned to my sister and I said, call 911 right now.

She takes off down the street to look at the street side. And so I’m standing in the other lane, my car’s on, it’s still running, door’s open.

If this were the OR, Charlotte would know exactly what to do next. She’d have a protocol to follow. But right now, she’s just making it up.

Charlotte and this girl are only about 10 feet away from each other.

And I just said, think about the people that love you. And she said, nobody loves me. And I just kind of lost it.

And I said, no, I love you. I don’t even know you. What do you need?

What do you want? Do you want my car? I was just thinking, get in my car.

I’ll take you wherever you want to go. But she was just a little girl. You know, she was 16, 17 at the time.

So I thought if I got closer, then maybe she would just do it, you know, just let go. My next thought was, I’m going to have to grab her. There’s just no other way.

But what if the girl startled and she lets go before Charlotte can get to her?

Where are the police? Where’s anyone else?

At that point, I mean, I don’t know how much time passed. Long enough for me to realize that there is just like 20 cars behind my car. And there’s a car like right, like a foot away from me with the lights blasted.

Nobody gets out of their car. Nobody says anything.

Charlotte’s a little closer now and she’s got a plan. The plan is to grab this girl, to pull this girl over the fence, back to safety, call this girl’s parents, get this girl some help, and then just go home.

Go home to her own family, eat cold pizza and celebrate her sister’s birthday. And as soon as Charlotte thought she had a plan, as soon as she thought that things were in control, she said to me, here comes the semi.

And, you know, I took that as a positive sign because she had such a flat affect, like nothing, like she barely noticed anything really around her except for me talking. She never looked around or anything, just straight ahead.

And when she said that, I turned and looked, and I saw the semi. And I was like, yes, there is a semi, you know, good. We’re getting maybe somewhere.

But when I looked back, she wasn’t there.

At first, I was like, oh, good, oh, she’s off.

She’s off the bridge. She went back to where the bridge meets the land, and there’s grass. And I looked there, and she wasn’t there.

And then I looked over the bridge, and at first, I didn’t see her. And I was like, oh, God, you know, hopeful. And this is all in a matter of seconds.

So, and then I looked back over the bridge and I see her. And then a car, like in front of her body had stopped. The semi was down the road, and it was pulled off on the side of the road.

And there was another car down there that had pulled off. The person that was just like a foot away from me with their headlight shone on me, they rolled down the window and said, did you know her? And I just didn’t even respond.

I think I just said no. And then ran down there, the car directly behind me. She got out and yelled down over the guardrail, and she yelled, check her pulse.

And that makes me very angry that that person sat there and didn’t do anything when they could have, you know, they couldn’t have helped me, helped her. They wouldn’t, they didn’t try to help me or help her.

And then after the fact, you’re gonna yell.

Now you got advice?

Yeah, to check her pulse. And I’m like, there’s no… Well, I ran down there and a car had stopped.

And a man, like just out of nowhere, jumped in front of me and like put his arm out. He said, it’s done, it’s done, it’s done. And I was just like crying, couldn’t catch my breath.

He wouldn’t let me go to her. That man, he said he was an off-duty police officer. And they actually checked her poles and she was just laying on her side and she looked like she was asleep.

I remember turning around and looking up and seeing my sister on her way down. And I was just like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can’t, you can’t see this, you know?

I just stopped her and just, I just screamed at her. Do not look, do not look.

The man told Charlotte it’s over. It’s done. And once the police did come and took Charlotte’s statement, it was done.

But it wasn’t over. Charlotte and her sister had told her husband and her kids they were stepping out to get pizza. They’d be right back.

This was not the plan.

So we get back in the car and I have to go back the way that I drove there in the first place. And I remember being like, why didn’t I drive back home this way? That is so weird.

Why didn’t I do that, you know? And we both were just at this point where we didn’t even know what to say to each other. We get back to my house and my husband knows at this point because she called him.

And we just sit there. We have this pizza. We open the box.

She like picks up a piece and I do too. And then she like takes a bite. Nobody’s talking.

And then she puts it down and she says, I’m going to go home now. And I say, okay. And then she leaves.

And I go into the bathroom and I’m in there and I’m in there and I’m in there forever and just sobbing. And I just remember saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And even now, I’m like, no, why did that happen?

No, that shouldn’t have happened, you know, this no.

So, we’re gonna take a little break, and we’ll be back. So, we are back. And Charlotte just witnessed a young girl’s suicide.

She’s crying in the bathroom, and we get it, right? Like, of course this is what happens. Of course you cry.

But at some point, that level of understanding stops. At some point, we expect each other to go back to normal. Even though everything is different.

And for Charlotte, everything is different.

I just couldn’t take it as just a coincidence. I felt like there had to be something more to it than that. Good God, it changed me.

It changed my life. I couldn’t sleep anymore. I wake up in the bathroom, at the toilet thinking I’m going to vomit.

I can’t breathe. I can’t swallow a pill to help me sleep because I’m so scared I’m going to choke to death on it. You know, it’s screaming in my sleep, waking up my husband every single night screaming.

Everything is different, but also nothing is different because this is a different kind of trauma.

Charlotte wasn’t this girl’s mother or sister or best friend. She didn’t even know her, but she was there. Charlotte was the last person who spoke to the girl when she was alive.

Charlotte is the emotional collateral damage. And that’s not really something that the world stops to acknowledge or make space and time for. I mean, the world barely makes time for any grief.

Like, I think most American companies give you five days if you lose your own kid. Now, if you see a kid die, there’s not an HR policy for that. There is not a card for it.

There’s not a social norm for it. And Charlotte’s friends and family, they don’t know what to do with it.

The first few months, it was just trying to get through life, like trying to do things, like dress the kids, and get them ready for school, and clean the house.

I was just so lost in my head that it was hard to concentrate because it was just, I had so many questions, and I just didn’t understand why this happened. And there’s just so many layers to it.

Charlotte is peeling the layers even months later, even a year later. There are just too many unanswerable, agonizing unknowns. There’s the huge one, why?

Why would this girl have done this? And then a million ifs.

What if I didn’t stop? Would she have done it? Was she waiting for someone to talk to her?

I mean, I don’t know. Was she waiting for someone to beg her not to? Was she just waiting for the right moment?

Did I put, did I do it? Did I, did what I say to her just make her even more upset?

Because no matter how many times someone tells me that her mind was already made up and you couldn’t have changed it, that will never be my reality of what happened that night. Because that night could have ended differently.

I’m not saying it’s my fault, but there are like a million possibilities. That just the fact that somebody, and it just happened to be me, saw her and turned around. I mean, what are the chances of that?

Now, we’ve all done this.

You’re probably going to do it tonight. You will stay up and replay something, the way I did as a child, the way that annoyed my dad. And it annoyed my dad because it wasn’t a matter of life and death, but for Charlotte, it is.

And that’s what people don’t understand. People who know her and love her, who are spending their own nights replaying whatever it is they’re replaying, they just don’t get it. Why Charlotte is still thinking about this night.

They weren’t there. They didn’t almost save that girl. So they don’t have these same questions and they don’t get why Charlotte does.

They want to know why she’s so obsessed with it. Why she can’t just stop thinking about it already. It’s over.

It’s done.

Because it’s all I wanted to talk about. And I wanted to know, I wanted to know what they would have done, you know? And so I would just straight up say, okay, picture this.

You’re driving down the road. You’re going this, you know, and I would just start to lay out the scenario. Because I wanted to know what would they have done?

They would just say, no, stop. Just stop. I know what happened to you, Charlotte.

I know it’s hard, but you just got to let this go. I kept saying, hey, I didn’t ask for this. Hey, wait, no, I’m not obsessed with this because I choose to be obsessed with this.

Don’t you think that I want to put this all behind me, you know? Of course I do, but I never will be. That is not going to happen.

It’s just something that happened in my life, changed everything in my life, changed me, changed my relationships, changed the way I looked at everything. And I just have to accept my life as it is now with that having have happened.

The only people Charlotte can think of who might be able to understand are the girl’s parents. So Charlotte reaches out to them thinking, maybe it will help them to know someone was there, that Charlotte was there.

And maybe meeting them will help Charlotte.

I wanted to tell them how it happened. And I can’t imagine the pain. And mine is not the same.

It’s totally different. It’s, you know, they lost a daughter. I can’t imagine that.

So, you know, yeah, I wanted them to know that someone was there and that, hey, I tried to stop her. I talked to her, you know. They asked me, what was she wearing?

And, you know, things like that, that moms would want to know, dads would want to know about their daughter.

Charlotte does stay in touch with the family for a while, but it doesn’t last. They’ve all been traumatized in totally different ways. They may have similar questions.

At one point, meeting the girl’s dad, he asks Charlotte why Charlotte couldn’t save his daughter, and then he acknowledges that she couldn’t have. So, I mean, similar questions, but no answers. Even Charlotte’s job is different.

Charlotte had gone back to work a few weeks after the girl’s death, and it’s the same job, but the job is not the same. It used to give Charlotte a sense of control over the chaos, and now being an OR nurse just feels like chaos.

I was just really kept to myself, really quiet. I was very distracted in my head, but I didn’t make any mistakes, or nobody said anything to me. I just…

Did you still love the work?

No.

No, I didn’t. I kind of went from being like, just loving that kind of environment to needing something that was much, much more calm and less things to think about or worry about.

These were all traumatic experiences, and I just, I had one really big bad one, and I don’t need to know that there are more. I don’t need to be a part of that anymore. I just, I mean, I know that I can if I needed to, but I choose not to.

This girl’s life just barely intersected with Charlotte’s, but her death changed everything.

Charlotte’s job doesn’t fit, her friends, her family, they don’t fit, the town she loves doesn’t fit. She feels emotionally isolated, having gone through this thing nobody can relate to. So what now?

Where does Charlotte go from here?

I came home from work and I said, I’ve got this great idea. He’s like, okay, what? And I was like, listen, I’m just gonna pull all my money out and we’re just gonna move.

And he was like, you know, this isn’t gonna fix anything. And I’d be like, well, that’s not why I want to do it. You know, he hesitated because he knew why I wanted to move.

He knew that I was just trying to get away from all this. And that it wasn’t gonna go away. But I didn’t, you know, I denied that that’s why I wanted to move at that time.

And I know that has nothing to do with why I want to, what are you talking about? You know, he was like, you know what? Okay, let’s do it.

Where are we gonna go?

Where they went is a town of about 1500 people. They moved, they packed up their kids, they left Charlotte’s sister and their families, left their big town in Kansas to move to a little itty-bitty resort town in Arkansas.

It’s small, it’s rural, it’s beautiful. I definitely peruse some vacation homes there after our interview, but it’s different. Charlotte gets a new job.

She’s still a nurse, but she doesn’t go to a hospital anymore. Instead, she goes to see each of her patients.

It’s like intimate work, because before, I didn’t even talk to my patients. I just took care of them while they were asleep. And so now, I work in their home.

They let me in their home and allow me to provide nursing care. I mean, you can’t get any more intimate than that. You end up being a part of their weekly life.

You end up knowing all kinds of stuff, and they tell you all kinds of things. And like, you really take the time to get to know this person and everything they do and say, all of that, it matters.

And it’s just, you know, like an honor to be let into their home. And it’s very different. It’s definitely not the person I was before this happened.

No more tragic emergency accidents.

It kind of sounds like everything turned out fine. Like, Charlotte’s accepted everything. She’s moved on, closure, etc., etc.

But this is not a life that Charlotte would have chosen. She has a job that she’d have never done in a town she would have never moved to. And even her family is different.

If that night hadn’t happened, if she’d only driven another way, everything would be different.

I think I would have had another baby for sure. We would have stayed, definitely. We would never have moved.

It’d still be probably in the same home and the memories of that home and the town. And, yeah, I think it would have been totally different, maybe better, but on the other side, maybe not.

Maybe not, because there are a million other things that could have happened. I could have altered the course that Charlotte was on. We don’t get to pick what wrecks us, what changes us.

We don’t get to pick what it is or when it happens. It just is what it is. Dang it.

See, it’s just true. Doesn’t make it good. But if we could, if she could, would Charlotte call for takeout?

Would she call for delivery? Would she drive another way? Would she still stop her car?

I’d do it again.

Because somebody has to try. You know, I would hate for no one to have been there and then it happened anyway. That’s horrible.

But no, if I knew it was going to end bad, I’d do it differently, but I wouldn’t take a different route. I would go the same way.

What would you have done differently?

You know, I’ve asked myself this a million times. And I don’t know what I would have done differently. I don’t know if anyone…

One thing I do know that I would have done differently, for sure, is I would have told her, it gets better. Because when you’re young like that, a teenager, and you know, you’re having a crappy life, because we do, when we’re teenagers.

And to just have someone say, listen, it’s gonna get better. You have a whole life ahead of you. Everything’s gonna be different.

And it’ll get better. That’s what I would have done different. And I don’t know if that would have worked, but I definitely would do that next time.

If there was a next time.

She would still choose it, that pizza, that root.

This life, unrecognizable in so many ways from the one she had, from the one she assumed she would always have, she would still choose five years and counting of unanswerable ifs, of hypothetical hypotheticals, of a life that was reshaped by one

face, spotted out of the corner of her eye. She would still do it. Would you? I’m Nora McInerny, and this has been terrible.

Thanks for asking. You can find our show at ttfa.org. We are a production of Feelings & Co, an independent podcast production company.

Our team is myself, Marcel Malekebu, Jordan Turgeon, Megan Palmer, and Claire McInerny. Our theme music is by Joffrey Lamar Wilson. You can always get in touch with us by calling 612-568-4441 or emailing us, terrible at feelingsand.co.

We are working on new episodes right now. And if you have an episode idea for us, reach out, send us an email, call us or go to ttfa.org and submit your story idea.