I gripped my cell phone in my right hand waiting for it to ring. My father was unreachable in Mexico, hoping to not get shot by rebels as he tried to provide relief to the poorest of the poor. My mother was away at a conference. My phone finally rang. I answered it, snapping back into my body, feeling the moisture on my face for the first time.

"Mom, I'm physically okay. No one has been hurt. But I've got a very big problem."

Through gritted teeth, I told her. I was outside my body again looking down at the Saab from above, waiting for my mother's response. She was stunned. I heard frustration in her voice; she was mostly worried about my safety. As we talked, there was a microscopic relaxation of the terror in my chest. I forgot for a second where I was and what was going on. Then it all came back to me, opening fresh wounds. When I hung up, I had no idea what to do next.

I turned the ignition on and started driving. My brother and his wife owned a condominium and two children close in age to my own. I stood outside their front door, my face still wet, desperate for human contact. My brother answered the door. Two years my elder, he and I had fought and competed in the past. But I lurched forward then, in desperate need of support. I held onto him for dear life.

"Matt, what the hell happened?" he asked. I started to tell him. Each time I repeated what Erin has said about my never seeing my kids again, I sobbed hysterically.

"I can't take it. What have I done?" I told him I had no place to stay and only the clothes on my back. He reassured me that I could spend the night. After several hours of this conversation, he went to the kitchen to make a phone call. He talked to our sister in a whisper. I strained to overhear him say to her, "Do you think he is suicidal? What signs should I look for?"

My sister-in-law finally made my bed on the living room coach. Before turning in, she went to the kitchen and carefully took all the sharp knives and locked them in the basement. She pocketed the key before coming to say goodnight.

My drinking had been out of control for years. At business school, I fell asleep behind the wheel of my girlfriend's car on the Massachusetts Turnpike. The car flipped. I woke up going full speed down the highway, upside down, waiting to see if I would live or die. Amazingly, I escaped with no major injuries, only scrapes. The state police officer who arrived on the scene took one look at me standing next to the wreck, shaken but in one piece.

"Son, you're one lucky bastard!" he said. "I have seen more than one Escort flip but have never seen anyone walk away alive. I don't like pulling dead bodies out of a wreck, so how about being more careful?" The car was totaled except for the six-pack of Sam Adams Summer Ale bottles I had in the back seat. They—ironically—had not shattered.

A month after moving from my brother's place into my dumpy studio, I went to our large family Thanksgiving carrying the shame of my now public infidelity. My paternal grandmother, a spiritual woman then in her eighties, took me aside.

"There is good stuff in you, Matt. I have seen it," she told me. "It is not how you fall that counts in life, but how you pick yourself up."