She Called Me Radar

25 years ago today, a fascinating but tortured soul took her own life by putting a gun to her head.

Her name was Shaula Montgomery.

There are very few people that I have shared this story with.  I guess I always felt that certain people who might not understand Shaula like I did or who might judge her didn’t deserve to know about her or what she went through. But today, on the anniversary of her leaving this world, I feel compelled to tell everyone about her.

She was only 45 years old.

She was one of my first bosses at the Audubon Nature Institute. She was the Associate Sales Director, but a Sales Manager as well. I worked in a small office behind the Aquarium with her and two other people.

Shaula was unique. She was funny and honest; quirky and caring; fun to work for and fun to be around. She never watched TV – not the news, not sitcoms – and at first when she would say she wasn’t aware of a current event or that she didn’t know who a particular character was, you’d laugh and think, that’s not possible.  But then you’d see it in her face that she really was telling the truth, that she really didn’t know, and you’d smile gently and go on to explain. It was really quite refreshing after awhile when you realized how childlike she was in her disassociation with that part of the world around her.

She unfortunately also had circumstances in her life that gave her pain and anguish, made her question her kind nature, and beneath the bubbly exterior and the infectious laugh, she was tormented and slowly becoming torn into shreds by things beyond her control.

On this day, 25 years ago, I had just arrived at the office and was putting my things down on my desk as the phone began to ring. Our other sales manager, Tom Long, was on the phone in his office, which was directly across from me. We waved to each other as I picked up the phone.

On the other end of my phone was Shaula’s husband – also named Tom.  I said, “Oh, hi – good morning, Mr. Montgomery – how are you?”  I don’t think he actually replied to my question, but the next thing he said would shatter my world.

“Shaula won’t be there today” he said. As I waited for him to tell me why – oh, is she not feeling well, was of course the first thing I thought – I could never have expected or been prepared for what he would say next.

“Shaula shot herself last night. “

I don’t know how I didn’t drop the phone out of my hand, but I sort of staggered back and fell against the bookcase that was next to the wall behind me. By this time Tom, our sales manager, had finished his phone call and was getting up from his desk, coming over towards me, mouthing the words “What’s wrong? What’s happened?” He would later say that I was “as white as a sheet”.

I said to Mr. Montgomery, “Please tell me you’re making this up. Please tell me it isn’t true.”

He said, “I wish I could. “

I don’t know how I continued the conversation, but I remember him saying, “I’d be interested to know if there was something at work yesterday that may have precipitated this.”  I said, “No – there was nothing at all.”

The day before was like any other normal day in the office. Shaula was her usual bouncy self. She and her best friend Liz were going on a trip to New York City the following week, and they were meeting for drinks after work to finalize their plans. When Shaula walked out of the office at the end of that day, she was happy, excited about their trip. I can still see her heading towards the small hallway that led to the elevators, as she whipped her head around and said, “Bye! See you tomorrow!”

Liz said later that after their couple of drinks together that Shaula had dropped her off at home and they had “laughed the whole way there.”  Shaula had said that she was going home as well, but she didn’t. In an instant, she made a fateful decision that would irrevocably change everyone around her.

We had known for awhile at work that Shaula had been struggling with a lot of turmoil in her personal life. Her stepmother, a bitter and cruel woman, had been sick and in the hospital. Her father, who had never given Shaula the love she deserved but rather had been verbally, mentally and emotionally abusive to her for her entire life, continued to be so, even though he too was ill. When he finally wound up in the hospital as well, he carried on with his nastiness, even as Shaula was coming to visit him, bringing him his favorite magazines, and trying to be kind to the man who never had been to her.

Cap this off with the fact that she had absolutely no help from her only sibling, a brother, so it fell to Shaula to take care of these parents who had nothing but heartache to give her in return. It became her sole responsibility to check on their house, get their mail, make sure bills were paid…all for people who didn’t care about her, and all with a smile on her face, constantly hiding her torment.

In our little office, we all knew about everything that she was going through, because she didn’t hide it from us – she talked about it all the time – but she always bounced back after getting things off her chest. When someone commits suicide, the people left behind who knew them always ask the same question:  why didn’t we know? Why didn’t we see anything? Where were the signs?

With Shaula, there were no signs. Nothing at all. None. Certainly nothing that day when she left the office, happy as can be, that would have told us “she’s going to kill herself tonight.”

Weeks before, we did have a conversation with her about her taking a leave of absence from work to deal with the strain she had been under. Her immediate reaction was “No, I can’t – I have too many people depending on me here.”  Slowly, right up until the tragedy that occurred, she was leaning more towards actually heeding our advice. “Do you really think I can do this?” she asked. We all told her, “Yes – yes you can.”

It was no secret that Shaula had a drinking problem; however, it never affected her job or her work. She never came to work drunk, never drank on the job – which would have been an easy thing to do, considering we sold parties for a living.  She used to say that our department were the “whores of the Audubon Institute” because we were selling something that people wanted, not what they needed. Yep, that was Shaula, in all her unmitigated  glory. She would say, “Come on,  it’s not like we’re selling vacuum cleaners.”  Shaula’s dependence on the drink came after work, when she had to go home to all the problems she was dealing with in her personal life.

It became my task to clean out her office and gather her personal belongings for her husband. Underneath papers in her desk, I found pamphlets from Alcoholics Anonymous and a copy of the Serenity Prayer. She was trying.

Instead of going home that night after dropping off her friend Liz, Shaula made the decision to go to her parents’ house. It is where everything came to an end, in the house where she grew up, where she had endured all her misery as a child.

This is where she was ultimately found by her husband. Shaula had called her brother from there, who decided to make his way over there after hearing how she sounded on the phone. But first he called her husband, who got there before her brother did.

She was just going to get the mail and check on things at the house as she had been doing for months now. Apparently, however, after the couple of glasses of wine she had with Liz, Shaula decided to continue drinking, as she sat there in her parents’ house – and not something she was accustomed to drinking. Whiskey, if I remember correctly. We all said after it happened that it was like there were all these puzzle pieces that came together that night, and if one or another hadn’t been there, the outcome would have been completely different.

One of the pieces of the puzzle, unfortunately, was her father’s gun collection.

I will never believe until my dying day that Shaula Jacobs Montgomery set out to kill herself that night. Her friend Liz said later that she felt that wherever Shaula was, she was cursing herself saying, “Oh, shit – what have I done?”

There she was, tormented soul that she was, in the house of her miserable, brutal childhood. There to take care of and look after the parents who had always treated her so cruelly, who never gave her an ounce of love. Talking on the phone with the brother who wasn’t helping and who had given her nothing but grief and judgment – critical, uncaring as well. Shaula was surrounded by puzzle pieces that were broken, that did not fit. Picking up a drink to try and make them all fit, to deal with all the broken pieces and force them to fit.

But they didn’t. Try as she might, she couldn’t make them fit. She lost her sense of reason that night. Even though the pieces didn’t fit, they were all there, in the turmoil of her spiritual life. And she just wanted the pain to end.

Shaula put that gun to her head on the night of March 27, 1996. Her physical life did not end until approximately 1pm on Thursday, March 28, 1996 when her husband made the decision to take her off life support. There had been “zero brain activity” when they brought her in.

One of our other coworkers used to say that I was like the character of Radar on the TV show M*A*S*H because I always seemed to remember clients’ names and the dates of their parties off the top of my head when no one else could. Sometimes it was in the form of finishing their thoughts for them. Once we explained to Shaula who Radar was, that became her name for me. She started calling me Radar all the time. And I didn’t have a problem with that. Shortly after she died, another Aquarium worker saw me in the hallway and called me Radar, and I burst into tears.

We enjoyed The Far Side cartoons and the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes together. Sometimes we’d have to explain certain Far Side jokes to Shaula because she innocently didn’t get them. But once she did, that infectious laugh would burst out, and all was right with the world.

As I was gathering up her personal belongings from her desk in her office, her husband Tom called me and asked me if there was anything of Shaula’s that I would like to have. There was a character named “Buddha Bear” in her life, and she had a picture of him in a frame on her desk. Buddha Bear was a stuffed bear that Shaula’s husband got for her, and Shaula used to talk about him like he was real. She would buy little clothes for him at Baby Gap, sit him on her lap on the plane when they went on trips. The photo that her husband so graciously said I could have to this day sits on a shelf in my home – the stuffed bear, sitting on a rock on the beach – “Buddha Bear at Big Sur” is what she called it. A quirky, funny, loving little thing in Shaula’s life that made her happy and content, when everything else was falling apart around her.

There was a memorial service for her a week later, which was set up by other members of Audubon. It was held at what was then called the Hibernia Pavilion at the edge of Woldenberg Park near the Aquarium, where the Mississippi River begins to make a turn. We dropped roses into the river at the end.  The Andrew Hall Society Jazz Band, who always played at the Aquarium parties that Shaula sold, were there to play Shaula’s favorite song – “Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding. The band’s leader had become good friends with Shaula, and the band would linger after the parties had ended. They would sit around talking as tables and chairs were being broken down, and inevitably Shaula would ask them to play her song. At her memorial, the bandmember who sang the song could not get through it without breaking down.

Shaula had been named after a star, ironically by the same father who had given her most of her misery her entire life. When she died, I like to think that she became that star, high above in the heavens, looking down at the world she left.

She would have probably still been here, because she truly was a lover of life, had things not taken such a tragic turn. But she was finally at peace and free of all the terrible pain she was trying so desperately to overcome. Like her precious little Buddha Bear, she’s relaxing on a beach somewhere, thinking of all the places she’d been and enjoyed; sipping on a glass of wine, and laughing at some joke that she finally just understood.

That’s how I’m remembering her today. And always. Shaula – you were here. You were a person. You were worth remembering. You were worth knowing. You had so much to give. And give you did, as best you could, with whatever you had left. You were the traveler on the road whose destiny was ultimately in your own hands. It may not have been what you really wanted. But it was the one thing that finally set you free. I’m grateful to have known you.