Lisa Cooper Ellison Realizes She Can Only Rescue Herself
TW: A warning: We mention suicide in this episode. If you or someone you know is struggling, call the national suicide hotline 1 800 273 TALK.
OPENING:
Lisa Cooper Ellison grew up in the tiny town of Horseheads in Upstate New York. Her family was known for saying things like “if we didn’t have bad luck, we wouldn’t have any luck at all.”
LISA: Laugh all day, cry all night. You have to wait for the other shoe to drop, because it's going to.
As early as Lisa could remember, her mom would tell her about all the bad luck that had befallen their family.
LISA: They experienced a number of pretty profound losses in their late teens. My father had had Hodgkin's disease when he was 19 and my mom lost one and a half of her ovaries and was not supposed to be able to have kids. So all of these things that happened and, and financial issues, and then there was this huge flood that happened in our town that devastated everything. And in fact, the town I'm from has never recovered.
… death, disease, loss, even a flood.
When she was four years old, Lisa remembers making cookies with her mom who recounted this story.
LISA: She's pouring the molasses into this bowl, filled with butter and sugar and the flour is nearby and the story is being told to me. And as she takes her finger and, you know, scoops it into the cookie dough to taste the sweetness, that's when she tells me that I made up for everything. LISA: …And then she would say, and then you were born and your father looked at you and he cried and said, you know, you make up for everything that ever happened. And there was something about that that made me feel like, oh, I made up for everything that ever happened. And I guess that's what I'm supposed to do.
LAUREL: And while your mom probably thought she was sharing this wonderful compliment, it was a lot of pressure.
LISA: It was a ton of pressure, because I felt like how could I disappoint them and what if I do disappoint them?
What do you do when you’re told you are the antidote to all your family’s sorrows?
This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
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Lisa grew up in a violent home. Her parents were not a good match.
LISA: There was a lot of screaming, there was a lot of yelling, things being thrown against walls. My father never hit my mother, but I did see my mother strike my father a number of times.
The kids Lisa and her two twin brothers were often left unsupervised. Lisa looked out for her younger brothers, even though she was only two years older.
LISA: There was this period of time when their marriage was disintegrating when I took care of my brothers, it was the three of us. And that was it. And so there were many nights when I made them dinner, I made sure they went to bed. I made sure they got up in the morning. We were each other’s everything…So we were like the three musketeers. We were very into survivalism. We wanted to build this underground house where we would be able to live forever. In fact those fantasies our ability to survive helped me survive what was happening in our home.
Often it felt chaotic, like there were no rules.
LISA: We would go wild and we would do things like, you know, play freeze tag on the roof of the house with 10 other kids. And we're jumping off the roof and, you know, doing all of these things that are incredibly dangerous.
Her brother Joe was especially sensitive. When he was little he had a speech impediment. As he grew older, taller and lankier he tried to protect Lisa from the neighborhood bullies.
LISA: He really, really wanted to be liked, that that was really important to him. He cared very deeply about, uh, my brother and I, um, and he wanted to fit in and be liked.
They loved listening to their older cousin’s heavy metal and punk albums Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Sex Pistols.
MUSIC HERE FOR A COUPLE BEATS THEN FADE
LISA: I'm like seven, eight years old singing like number of the beast and <laugh>, and looking like about four and having like this, like, you know, super innocent look on my face and being like 6, 6, 6, the number of the beast… I think that the rage and the speed of the music spoke to something inside of us that we couldn't articulate. And so we love loved that… I think that the rage and the speed of the music spoke to something inside of us that we couldn’t articulate.
While they were close, Lisa and her brothers fought a lot. It was just the way they had learned to communicate. It was often two ganging up on one. The boys often made fun of her calling her a brainiac or goodie two shoes for making the honor roll while the twins struggled with grades and got involved with drugs.
Their mom had gone to rehab and returned much more controlling and strict, sometimes grounding the kids to their rooms for a month at a time.
LISA: By the time my mom got out of rehab I was almost 13. What I was looking for more freedoms at a time she wanted us to have fewer freedoms so we could become the kids she wished she had raised.
As she became a teenager Lisa tried to put distance between herself and her parents. She got lost in her schoolwork, poetry, listening to heavy metal, and imagining the day she would leave home. And she met a classmate who would wind up changing the course of her life.
Her sophomore year she started hanging around with a boy we’ll call Alex who had read every book in their school library and played drums in a metal band.
LISA: So he would introduce me to new bands and he was in a band…and he'd done something that I really wanted to do, which was leave home…
Alex also came from a difficult home life.
LISA: When I, when I saw him, you know, and he told me the story, I was like, oh, this really is an option. It's not just a fantasy or a story I'm telling myself, um, this could happen and, and I could make it happen.
Leaving home had long been this fantasy for Lisa, but as her fights with her mom grew more intense, running away felt inevitable. She had learned in New York it was legal to be on your own at 16.
Then, one day in the summer of 1990, everything finally came to a head. Lisa had gone on a camping trip with her dad, brothers, and her now boyfriend Alex. It was on this trip that she lost her virginity to Alex. That same day the boys and Lisa took a boat out on the lake and brought it back full of water. When they got home, Lisa’s mom told her she was grounded.
LISA: I don’t know what was going on inside my mom but she lost it and she ended up punching my head multiple times. My step dad had to pull her off...I can't do this anymore. I'm not gonna be hit anymore. And I actually said that, and I said, you know, if you hit me again, I leave. And the message was, there's the door. And I said, goodbye. <laugh>. And I walk out and I have this backpack with my school books and I think my asthma medication. And I walked down this road and, and actually my my brother Joe followed me.
They went to a friend’s house and hid out in their basement singing theme songs to their favorite shows until their mom called looking for them. Lisa wanted to rescue Joe but he couldn’t part from his twin or leave their mom.
LISA: And he decided to go back home… I believed I was gonna be able to somehow get a job and get custody of him <laugh>, you know, and find a place to live and that he could live with me. I mean, that that's really, I really believed that I could do that.
At one point she took Joe to see his probation officer after their dad had given him two black eyes. But his probation officer took one look at his file and sided with Joe’s dad who was a prison guard.
Lisa felt terrible for breaking up the three musketeers but she believed she’d reunite them again someday and straighten them out.
The family she babysat for wound up taking Lisa in for her senior year. Alex and Joe helped her carry trash bags full of her clothes and belongings to their house.
After school she and Alex would take his car up into the hills overlooking the town and talk about their dreams – the future rock star and bestselling writer. All they had to do was get out of this town.
So two weeks after graduation, they escaped again. Lisa and Alex got married and moved to Louisville, Kentucky. She felt by leaving and going to college she would show her brothers the way out.
LISA: Even though I had no idea what a successful life really was I felt like I had to do that. I also felt if I did that then I'd save everyone else in my family. Then I would show my family. They would save themselves. So I had tremendous pressure on myself at that time and it never left.
Alex joined a metal band and started to book regular gigs there. After a year of college Lisa quit to earn money as a hotel housekeeper, then a cake decorator at Dairy Queen, all the while gathering material to become a writer. Alex and Lisa had a room in a house they shared with the band.
KATE: It was very much sex, drugs and rock and roll was the way it was. I mean, we, you know, we were 18, 19 years old, all the people I knew drank at the time, you know, people smoked marijuana. We would get together 10, 15, 20 of us every weekend, there would be band practices. People would come over for that. You know, as my husband's band got more successful, more people came over and at one point I lived with, um, many of the members of the band…a lot of late nights, a lot of parties, a lot of that going on, um, people having sex all over the house.
Even though she’d left home Lisa still checked up on her brothers often. She called whenever she could and she visited twice a year, once Lisa stayed home for an entire month. Without Lisa her brothers had become inseparable and got into even more trouble doing and selling drugs. Often when they drank they became violent.
KATE: We had spent this night playing cards and we'd had this wonderful time. And you know, my other brother he said, ‘do you realize we're all here together? Do you realize how special this is? How important this is?’ We'd had this kind of great time, but things were kind of escalating. Uh, my husband and I ended up leaving and 20 minutes later, my brothers had this really terrible fight. Um, and you know, one brother, you know, tossed the other brother into a wall. And so there was this body sized hole in this wall.
In 1994 Lisa and Alex were newlyweds living in Louisville with Alex’s band. One day while she was at Dairy Queen trying to decorate a cake before it melted she was told she had a phone call.
LISA: I get on the phone and it's my mom from New York. And she's telling me about the situation that had happened at my father's house, where my brothers had had a lot of issues with drugs and… the police were there and they were there for Joe. He was on the stairs and he picked up his gun and he pointed it on himself. And he was in that position for about two hours where the police were downstairs with my father. And the situation ended when his twin ran up the stairs and convinced him to put down the gun.
Joe wound up going to rehab. After that Lisa tried to check in with him more frequently.
LISA: He and I would write to each other we wrote while he was in rehab. I was only around a couple times a year and he and I didn’t connect until I was on AOL and we would chat online.
Lisa was doing what she could to stay in control. She would be the designated driver while everyone around her partied…she got to work on time and tried to keep the house from falling into a sticky, beer-stained mess. But there was something inside her that was screaming.
One night, at home, she turned to a group of partiers and asked: What if tomorrow we all went skydiving?
LISA: and it's like 3:00 AM and I'm like, let's go skydiving. And everybody's like, yeah! So we get like, you know, all these people together and they're like, yeah, we're gonna do it. It's awesome. So, you know, at, you know, the next morning, it's like 11 and I'm up looking in the yellow pages to see if there's a place to go skydiving, So I call them and tell them, I have 13 people who are gonna go skydiving with me and everybody that day they were like, yeah this is awesome this is metal then slowly one by one by one, they all backed out … But I decided that I was gonna do this.
Lisa signed up to jump out of a plane all by herself two weeks later. She met her guide and went through an all-day training and several tests before they took her up in a plane at sunset. Her hair whipping in the wind she looked down at the ground a zillion feet below. And she jumped…
KATE: The first time you jump out of an airplane On the one hand it truly is terrifying but it's also invigorating because it's like you have conquered something and once you get out there and you're in the sky, it's absolutely silent and peaceful and beautiful. I could see the mist on the mountains. And it was like, I could feel everything and be completely present. And all the things that had happened in my life that had been difficult, all the pains that I carried were gone, because all I had was the present moment.
In January 1997 Lisa got AOL and connected with her brother Joe connected almost every night. She worked long hours now at a call center, then came home and logged on. They talked about how much they both loved Nirvana. He told her he wanted to be a park ranger. She talked him into skydiving with her.
But one night, she got a call from her mom.
LISA: My brother had broken up with his girlfriend at the time and my mom was worried about him, you know? And she was worried that what had happened in 1994 could happened again. I told her, ‘he’ll be just fine. Don't worry about him. I'm gonna call him in the morning and I'm going to make him live with me. And if he does not get in this car Sunday, I'm gonna kick his ass. And I said, I'm gonna straighten him out. Don't worry mom. I will straighten him out.’
The next day she went to her call center job and on the drive home she planned her evening, chinese takeout, phone call with Joe, movie marathon. But as she walked in the door the phone was already ringing. This time it was her grandfather.
LISA: On the phone and I can tell right away, something's wrong. This is not the way it's supposed to be. And I, I grab the desk and um, you know, and he hands the phone to my other brother and he tells me that Joe is dead and that he killed himself. And it's like, I felt like a part of me blew away. You know, that it just like just left. That's how big it was, this, this moment. And I scream. And um, so I scream and I can't believe it.And my mom is telling me, I have to get on this plane and it's coming in an hour and I have to like, you know, get ready.
She hangs up the phone and screams running around the house throwing things in a suitcase – a pillow, vitamins, a teddy bear, shirts but no pants. She’s just in a state of shock.
When she arrives at the airport in Upstate New York Lisa is greeted by her mom and brother.
LISA: My mom says, it's bad. She says, it's bad. It's bad. And I say, well, what's bad. How bad? And my, my brother says, we just have to, you know, wait till we get to mom's house and no one will tell me what has happened. And, you know, then I find out, um, that night my brother's death was the lead headline on the six o'clock news, they'd filmed his body coming out of this house.
The following morning Lisa picks up the newspaper off the front porch.
LISA: There's my brother's picture from, it's a mugshot from a time when he'd gotten in trouble before. And, um, you know, the lead headline is, um, about how he had, um, killed himself after an all night standout, you know, standoff with the police. And then I get a certain, you know, sense of what had happened, kind of a certain kind of story…57 it was really difficult to see this story of my brother, this monster story of, of what had happened. Um, when I held this very different story of who he, he was, and I didn't know how to hold those two stories together.
Lisa’s grandfather also saw the newspaper article.
LISA: He looked at that photo and he pointed at that picture and they said, how can they say, he's a man when he is just a boy, my boy. And he just collapsed and I've never seen him cry before ever. And he just lost it.
Lisa was livid at how the reporter had framed the story, given out their address, and painted Joe as a monster. They didn’t account for the fact that this was a person in the middle of a mental health crisis. But Lisa was also upset with herself.
LISA: I saw so many ways that I had failed him. I mean, that's really the way I saw it. ..I could look back and, you know, I saw when he came to visit me in the middle of 1996, he said a couple of things that just didn't didn't feel right… And maybe if I hadn't left home and I'd stayed, maybe I could have straightened him out
Lisa talked to her husband over the phone. His band had landed a tour in Europe with the metal band Biohazard. He offered little in the way of comfort but invited her to join them on the tour.
She wanted so desperately to be told everything would be ok, to be relieved of her guilt, to feel anything but this, so she bought a ticket to Dusseldorf, Germany.
Her mom scanned the tour stops and saw they would go through Yugoslavia and Croatia. She told Lisa she couldn’t go to war torn countries. She couldn’t risk it. But Lisa had already bought the ticket.
All Lisa knew about the part of the world where she was headed was what she watched on CNN… tanks, mass graves, people running for safety. Reporters used the word genocide to describe the atrocities committed by Serbian Nationalists.
KATE: It was also a little bit like we're getting ready to go into dangerous places and maybe I'll die and that's okay or something bad will happen. And I'm okay with that.
Once Lisa arrived she tried to talk to Alex about Joe’s death but it was like they were talking past each other.
LISA: It felt like, um, it was, it was an indictment against me that if I were really lovable, if I were really innocent of these crimes that I had committed in my mind, then he would've come home.
The bands travel by bus and van passing the time playing cards and watching The Godfather. Biohazard’s lead singer tried to comfort Lisa.
LISA: He tells me that, you know, when I need to do is bury that shit down. … at the time I didn't know what to do with that because my feelings felt too big. But what do you say to like the cool rock star filled with tattoos who’s trying to give you like, you know, his Sage wisdom?
But the thrashing music and violent movies that used to sort of sooth her now triggered her–brought her brother's trauma flooding back.
The bands are on the road for hours at a time, rarely stopping for bathroom breaks. They finally arrive at a soccer arena in Yugoslavia. Military police with machine guns marched by with muzzled dogs. After the sound check student activists came to the band's dressing room.
LISA: These people are coming up to me saying, thank you for being here and they're hugging us and they wanna tell us about their experience. And many of these people were dissidents who were trying to overthrow the government.
No musicians had come to Yugoslavia since 1992.
LISA: There were these two women that came and when I looked in their eyes, their eyes were tired. Like my eyes were tired and I could see the pain that they had experienced and that they were living with that pain and they were trying to do something else with it. Even though we never really said anything there was this way we bonded over it like I get pain. Even though what you've experienced is completely different from what I've experienced. I get what it's like to have your world blow up.
That gave Lisa a new perspective. She went from suffering every waking moment feeling the pain of her brother’s suicide to possibility.
LISA: And I began to think what if I could do something with that pain? What if I could somehow transform this into something else and you know, I'm thinking about this and I'm actually, whew, this is such like a, it's a, it's a small moment, but a big moment in the same way, you know, I'm, I'm standing out in this soccer field outside of this arena and I'm thinking, could I do something positive with this? Could I make a difference? I'm kind of wrestling with this. This little puppy runs up to me from out of nowhere. And he is like this little scruffy little dog with its tail almost broken off. … I just look at this puppy and I look at her innocent eyes and I feel like I see my brother and I feel like I see myself and I feel this overwhelming, um, need to save this dog. Like I have to save this dog… I decide we are going to take the puppy with us.
Lisa takes the puppy all over town asking people if they will give her a home. One man tells her ‘we are too close to war for dogs.’ But she talks Alex into putting the puppy in his coat and bringing it backstage. She convinces the lead singer of Biohazard to make an announcement about the dog.
LISA: And I'm thinking, oh yeah, you're gonna take that dog. <laugh>
So we go back to the bus and we're, we're playing with the puppy. And, um, he begins to tell me about the war. And everybody wanted to tell me about the war. They wanted to tell me about their experience. They needed someone to bear witness to their experience, which was interesting because that's exactly what I was waiting for someone to do for me. And no one was able to really do that. So he's telling me all about this. And he gets out these pictures that he had in his wallet of his cousins that lived in Croatia and how he didn't even know if they were alive or dead. And he had had to fight. And he says to me, um, if they make me fight again, I'll kill myself. And I say, you cannot do that. You can't do that to your family because this is what just happened to me. And, you know, I tell him about my experience and, you know, he says that pain is something that happens part of our lives. And I think that if anyone else had said that to me, it would've felt pretty trite, but there was something about his pain that made it okay. Like this is just part of our experience. And he, and we make this pact to live. We promise that we will both do what we can to live. And then he agrees to take the puppy…and I feel like finally, somebody heard my story and, and I can live, you know, and I made this promise and that, and that the dog is gonna live too. And that was a huge moment for me, sounds so simple to say, like, I saved a dog, but I saved a dog.
Lisa stuck with the band for two weeks then it was time to go home.
On the flight from Milan to Louisville she made the decision to go back to college. She also decided she had to now live the lives of two people – Joe and herself.
LISA: You will get straight A's. You will do this perfectly. And I think working that hard was like anesthesia. It was a way to not feel…
She was in the midst of a deep depression but didn’t know it.
LISA: I did not realize I was depressed until I was on the, um, top level of the parking garage at the university I was going to, and I was very casually thinking about the angles of a ramp I could build so that I could drive my car off the top and thinking about the speed with which I would need to go. I was very, it was very casual, very easy. I wasn't sad. I was completely numb. I didn't even know I was hopeless. I didn't even know I was there. And then all of a sudden I'm in the middle of this, like rumination around like, you know, this, this angle and how am I gonna get it right. And, you know, does it need to be 45 degrees or more than 45 degrees? Like very, you know, clinical things. I was thinking, all of a sudden, I go, oh my gosh, I'm planning to die.
She was holding on by a thread but she remembered the strange encounter she had with Mirco and the promise she made in Yugoslavia.
LISA: and I was like, I cannot break this vow.
So she went to the campus counselor.
LISA: But in that moment I crossed the threshold and I say, if I'm gonna live, the person who's gonna save me has to be on the other side of the door. So if you want me to live, make it happen because I knew if she wasn't there, I would probably go back to the, the parking garage. Mm. And it was this, I mean, I think we come to these moments in our lives where it's like, you know, like a major crossroads. And that was one of them. I mean, had a number of them along the way, but that was huge. And the woman that came out, um, saved life.
Lisa layed out everything that had happened – her brother, her marriage, her feelings of worthlessness – before the therapist.
LISA: She swallows hard and she sits next to me and she said, it's gonna be okay. And I'm here. And it was what, and, you know, I I'd been waiting for someone to say that. Yeah. And she was only supposed to see me seven times over the course of a semester. And she saw me for two years.
She gave Lisa space to tell her story, to grieve, to share her beliefs about herself that she was the antidote to everyone else’s sorrows. Then the therapist challenged her beliefs.
LISA: When you're the antidote you can't have your own feelings because you're trying to hold everyone else's. And that was really one of the messages that I, I was given that, you know, I had to be a vessel for other people's emotions growing up. So there wasn't room for my own. And until you feel your feelings, you can't begin to imagine what else might be true.
And that’s when Lisa had a revelation.
LISA: I realized that I could not change anyone else's suffering. The only suffering that I could change was my own... as I let other people have their own experiences, um, and didn't try to rescue them that made room for me to rescue myself.
Lisa and Alex’s marriage didn’t last. For many years she carried anger toward him. She’d never felt supported through her grief and depression in the wake of her brother’s death.
Lisa went to years of therapy and trained to be a therapist herself. So she was studying forgiveness for a long time. But it wasn’t until she sat down to write her memoir How Not To Die, that she was ready to forgive Alex.
LISA: I was writing this book and as a part of this, an exercise that I learned is to take difficult scenes and write them from the perspective of your antagonist.
Lisa looked at it from a different perspective. He didn’t know how to respond to someone going through something so traumatic with such big feelings. But she also knew she deserved to have someone be there for her.
LISA: I eventually got to this place inside myself. I was like, I need to say this out loud to him. And so I do.
In 2011 Lisa helped organize a suicide prevention walk. She’d been asked to speak at the event about her brother. But she wanted her speech to actually help people to lead them toward resilience. She was put in touch with the National Alliance of Mental Illness and they decided to conduct a training.
LISA: The instructor said, you realize the reason we're all here today is because of you. <laugh> … So of course I'm already like, you know, feeling all the feelings. And then I tell my story of, you know, losing my brother and everything that happened. Wow. So I'm, I'm telling the story of, you know, what happened with my brother. And then I say, what became the magic words for me that like night percent of people who die by suicide loss, my brother died as a result of untreated mental illness, not missed phone calls or failing or mistakes from family members. And it was the fact that I said those words out loud in front of a group of people who bore witness to my experience that healed me. Like when I heard myself say those things out loud in front of witnesses, it was like, boop, you're done. I realized it wasn't my fault. And I was free.
This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
