Self-pity Can Kill

OVER AND OVER, through the gaiety of the preholiday season in December 1965, I chanted this litany of despair: "I gave all I had to give, and it wasn't enough." And on Christmas night, I made a drunken and almost successful suicide attempt. Consciousness returned in the special-care ward of the local hospital, where doctors waited to determine whether brain damage had occurred during the moments when my heart had stopped beating, thirty-six hours earlier.