I met the man when I was in my early twenties. He was fifty-two. I was going to college and working the midnight shift at a hospital. Actually it was a warehouse, a human warehouse. I worked at Ypsilanti State Hospital. "Ypsi State" for short. His name was John. He was a bald, skinny man, about five feet ten inches tall. In another life he'd been a mailman. When I met him he was one of about eighty men who lived on Ward C63.

C63 was a locked ward for combative patients. The guys who lived there had a history of fighting or aggressive behavior. Although sometimes it was hard to tell who was more aggressive, staff or patients. When in doubt I always went with the person who had the keys.

One of the benefits of working midnights was the absence of the craziness that went on during the day shift. Lights out was at 10:00 PM. Outside of occasional thievery or bed hopping things were pretty quiet. My shift started at 11:15 PM. Occasionally someone would go bananas. In those instances my partner and I called for backup. Three or four attendants would gang tackle the unfortunate soul, inject him with a large dose of Thorazine, Mellaril, or Chloral Hydrate, and lock him up in a separate room.

The cardinal rule at Ypsi State was to never work alone. This rule was always followed unless someone called in sick for their shift. Then the shift supervisor would send someone from a quieter ward to work with me. But every once in a while enough people wouldn't show up for work and I found myself working alone. The remedy for this situation was the shift supervisor would check in on you unannounced to make sure everything was okay.

It was on a night when I worked alone that I met John. He had been admitted earlier in the day. The nurses' notes from the afternoon shift said he was agitated, They sedated him around 10:00 PM that night. John was sleeping in the locked room next to the office. At 11:30 PM I peered through the screen grating in the door and saw him asleep on his bed.

About 1:15 AM the pounding next door began. I had called in my shift check with the main desk a few minutes earlier. At first, I thought that John had woken up and was pounding on the door. But there was a strange rhythm to the pounding. I would hear a thump and then about a minute later I'd hear another one. I listened for about five minutes and decided he wasn't going to stop. When I looked into the room I saw the reason for the strange cadence of banging. John was running full tilt into the two inch steel door using his head as a battering ram!

I couldn't get the key into the door fast enough! As I opened the door, John wound up for another run. Instead of the door, John hit me in the chest with his head. His momentum threw us both into the hallway. He was hallucinating and screaming about killing himself as we rolled around on the hallway floor. As we wrestled, several thoughts crossed my mind. What if he's too strong for me and really hurts me? What if nobody finds me until the day shift comes on duty? How can I get help? What do I do next?

Well, as luck would have it, another attendant came by. He found John and I wrestling in the hallway. Together we got John back to his room and sedated him. I thanked the other attendant for his timing. The rest of the shift proved uneventful.

A few nights later, when he was lucid; I asked John what was going on. I couldn't understand why anyone would want to kill himself. He told me that he was Catholic and for about twenty years he had been a mailman. He began to slip into mental illness when he was about forty-two years old. That's when he started hearing voices in his head. The voices told him he had sinned by not listening to his parish priest. He believed he was evil and should die. I confirmed his account from his chart and the history he had given the psychiatrist who admitted him. His slide into mental illness had taken about ten years.

About two weeks later on my shift, I checked in on John. He was disoriented and lying on the floor. I asked him what he was doing and he told me he was trying to kill himself by throwing himself out of bed and onto the floor. I was considering the humor of the whole situation when I noticed a large gash above John's right eye. John was so out of it that he didn't notice the blood pouring from the wound. I stopped the bleeding and got my supervisor. She called the resident physician who was on call. He said to meet him with John in the medical room on A1. At Ypsi State, A1 is where you went when you had physical problems.

John was in pretty bad shape both mentally and physically. I strapped him to a gurney and with help of another attendant took John to A Building. The doctor met us and surveyed the situation. He told me I'd have to hold John's head steady while he stitched the gash on his forehead. One attendant held his feet and legs, I held his head, and the doctor got ready to suture the wound. John was given a local anesthesia for the pain but it didn't seem to register. He was screaming and shouting uncontrollably. Time crawled slowly forward as the doctor methodically sewed John up. I was positioned at the top of the operating table holding Jo hn as he alternately screamed and cursed.

We were about three quarters of the way finished when suddenly John stopped crying and shouting. It got deathly quiet in the room. I looked at the attendant at the foot of the table and then at the doctor as he repaired the wound. They looked at me. John's eyes shot wide open and as he lay there we made eye contact. Slowly a smile crept across his face and began to laugh uncontrollably. Peals of desperate laughter filled the room and continued for three or four minutes. Then as quickly as the laughter began, it ceased. John relaxed and wept. Genuine tears of pain and anguish rolled down onto the table. As we exchanged glances around the table, we felt the pain, the sadness, and despair that John carried within.

I had the next two days off but looked for John when I came back. I was not really surprised when I found that John had been transferred to Northville State hospital to recuperate. Although I watched for him, he never returned to Ypsi State.

Six months later, I was reading the monthly census report from the mental hospitals around the state. These reports listed patients who were admitted, discharged, or died. I usually never read these reports. On this night since I had little to do, I read the report. Under the statistics for deceased patients, I found John's name. John died alone in a mental institution. Since then I have often wondered what forces could compel a person to so desperately seek to end their life. I also wonder whether John found the peace of mind he so painfully sought.