Descent into darkness

Descent into darkness
By Louise Kiernan
Chicago Tribune
February 16, 2003

First of two parts

The mothers are searching for their daughters.

They are always searching for their daughters, even though their daughters have been dead for more than a year now.

At a march on the lakefront, the two women share a hug and a murmured joke, heads close, hands woven together. On the telephone, they whisper so they won't wake napping grandchildren.

In a meeting of mental health experts at a dingy medical library, they trade a quick wave across the room. They explain who they are.

"I'm Carol Blocker and I lost my daughter through postpartum psychosis."

"I'm Joan Mudd and I lost my daughter to postpartum depression four weeks after Carol's daughter, Melanie, took her life."

Carol Blocker reaches for a discarded napkin to wipe her eyes. Joan Mudd pushes past the crack in her voice.

The two mothers aren't friends so much as allies. They want the same answers. They want to know why their daughters, after giving birth to the children they desperately wanted and desperately wanted to love, became mentally ill and took their own lives. They want to make sure that no one else's daughter dies.

In obvious ways, they are different. Carol is black, petite and precise, with hands that reach out unconsciously to smooth wrinkles and brush away crumbs. Joan is white, tall and blond, with a raucous laugh and the frame of the model she once was. But they are also alike, in their anger and determination and the pain in their eyes sharp as hooks.

Even their apartments are similar, airy, high-rise perches cluttered with evidence they have gathered in their struggle to understand: videotapes, pamphlets, articles from medical journals. A worn handout on how to deal with someone who is depressed, a laminated eulogy, a plastic bag with 12 bottles of pills and, everywhere, photographs.

Look at Jennifer Mudd Houghtaling in her wedding dress, her gloved arms flung wide in joy. Look at Melanie Stokes, her pregnant belly bursting bare from beneath a red scarf wrapped around her chest.

Look at Melanie at 20, a homecoming queen waving from a car, flowers tucked into the crook of her arm. Look at Jennifer at 12, sitting on a raft in a lake, a sheet of dark hair hanging to her shoulders, arms wrapped tight around her knees.

Look, because you can't help but look, for a portent of what will happen. Look for a shadow, for the sadness lurking at the corner of a mouth.

Look for some hint that Jennifer Mudd Houghtaling, less than three months after delivering her first child, will stand in front of an elevated train, hands raised above her head and wait for it to kill her.

Look for the sign that Melanie Stokes will write six suicide notes, including one to a hotel clerk and one to God but not one to her infant daughter, line them up neatly on a nightstand and drop from a 12th-floor window.

There is no hint. There is no sign.

The college student waves. The bouquet blooms.

The girl smiles. The sun shines.

Rare cluster of tragedy

Melanie Stokes was the first to die, on June 11, 2001.

Over the next five weeks, three more new mothers in Chicago followed her.

On June 18, the day before her daughter's first birthday, Amy Garvey went missing from her home in Algonquin. Her body was found floating in Lake Michigan two days later.

On July 7, Jennifer Mudd Houghtaling slipped out of her mother's Gold Coast apartment and walked to the "L" station to kill herself.

Ariceli Erivas Sandoval disappeared on July 17, five days after she gave birth to quadruplets, and drowned herself in Lake Michigan. A blue sign reading "It's a Boy!" was found on the floor of her car.

This cluster of apparent suicides was rare, the flash of attention it drew even rarer. What people know about mental illness among new mothers they know mostly from women who kill their children, like Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in Houston nine days after Melanie Stokes committed suicide. In these cases, the horror of the deed often clouds the horror of the illness.

Most women who suffer postpartum mood disorders do not kill their children or themselves. They just suffer. And, with time and treatment, they get better.