Back from the Brink--May Wu's New Outlook on Life

"No one's sure how long I'd been unconscious when I was discovered," says May Wu, speaking of her third suicide attempt. She was living alone at the time, and often traveled abroad by herself to clear her head. When some friends tried and failed to get in touch with her, they contacted her younger brother. Wu had had a meal with her family just a few days prior to the call from her friends, so her brother, assuming all was well, didn't check on her immediately. By the time they found her, her apartment reeked: she'd been unconscious for so long her rectum had prolapsed. Rushed to National Taiwan University Hospital, her prognosis wasn't good. The doctors stated that she was in a deep coma-a three on the Glasgow Coma Scale. They listed her in critical condition and predicted that she would be a vegetable if she survived at all. Even the rosiest scenario had her on dialysis for the rest of her life.

"I took lithium, which is a traditional treatment for bipolarity," explains Wu. "An overdose has the same effect as mercury poisoning-acute kidney failure." Her recovery without dialysis after taking over 100 lithium tablets was unprecedented; NTU Hospital had never seen anything like it.

Wu is a smart, voluble, well-read woman with a good job. Though divorced, she has many friends and a supportive family. From this conventional perspective, it's hard to understand why she was suicidal.

Originally no fan of Christianity, May Wu (center, in purple) had herself baptized after seeing Jesus during an NDE last year. The photo shows her with her family during her illness.

Searching for something more

"I was always looking for the meaning of life," says Wu. "But life's events are so fleeting. They're like grains of sand in an hourglass, endlessly flowing." Born in Chiayi, Wu and her family moved often as her father, a civil servant, was assigned to different positions with TaiPower. In middle school, her family sent her to board at the parochial school she attended. Outraged by injustice even as a child, she decided early on that she would become a journalist speaking on behalf of the little guy.

After graduating from Fu Jen Catholic University with a degree in Chinese, she went to work for the Commercial Times and other newspapers. She covered securities for them for more than a decade, and worked for a time at Business Weekly magazine. At the age of 35, her desire for adventure led her to pool her assets with those of a friend and start a business. Their company, which designed and marketed financial products, successfully promoted a couple of mutual funds. Then, in 2000, bipolar disorder inserted itself into the 37-year-old Wu's life. She often found herself sobbing violently for no discernable reason or even wanting to crash her car into a bridge support. After recovering strongly in 2002, she wrote a book entitled, Looking Up at the Sun from the Depths, about her experience with bipolarity.

"I worked hard to move up the ladder," says Wu. "I was always looking upwards to see how far I had to go. I never looked down." She says she spent every moment working and living to the full to make sure she didn't miss out on any opportunity. She threw herself into all she did, and tried to make each act and event meaningful. But when she discovered that the world was impervious to her efforts to change it, she fell into despair.

Wu is a scrupulously moral person. Her actions during her newspaper days were beyond reproach. Unlike some journalists, Wu always refrained from buying shares in the funds she covered and politely declined year-end gifts of shares from the companies on her beat.

She got into a little trouble when she started her own firm. Not wanting to be beholden to a big bank, she promoted an unknown mutual fund and helped it raise several billion NT dollars. Unfortunately, its management company then ran it into the ground. The fund's troubles cost investors a great deal of money. Though Wu hadn't taken their money, she'd been instrumental in their losses and was wracked with guilt.

At the end of her rope

The unexpected death of three close friends in 2004 also hit her very hard: An older friend for whom she had enormous respect died suddenly in spite of seemingly good health. Shortly thereafter, her hero, Hong Kong superstar Leslie Cheung, committed suicide. Then her psychiatrist was diagnosed with terminal cancer. "The most important parts of my life were disintegrating," she recalls. It was all just too much. Wu had reached the end of her rope. "I'd had it all and tried everything," she says. Perhaps, she thought, dying was the only way to turn things around.

In 2005, she traveled to the US in an effort to clear her head, never imagining that her six-day stay in New Orleans would become the straw that broke the camel's back. Made physically ill by the city's juxtaposition of decadence with economic inequity and racial injustice, she returned to Taiwan and began coolly preparing to die. She put documents in order, gave away her clothing and other items, and hoarded lithium. Friends and family, meanwhile, noticed nothing.

Then she overdosed, lingering at death's door for who knows how long.

"I was running in the dark, with I don't know what chasing after me," says Wu, recalling her strange vision. She says a force protected her while she ran, drawing her away from the darkness behind. She was yanked back and forth by these contending forces before suddenly finding herself in a field atop a hill. A ray of light shone down and she heard a voice: "Your questions arise out of what you don't know and have not yet learned. They don't mean that I do not exist."

A new outlook

"I knew immediately that this 'I' was Jesus," she says. Wu, who had always been anti-Christian, says that her psychiatrist had recommended that she read the Bible when she was ill, telling her to set aside her hyper-rationality and give faith a try. But she never got around to reading it. This experience colored her response to the "Jesus" in her mind. "Don't make me laugh," she told him. "How can I become a Christian?"

"By following me," said the voice.

Several fantastic scenes followed. In the first, she was with a group of rural villagers working from dusk till dawn. While wondering how she had come to be among them, she found herself in a wilderness with a different group of people, all of whom had serious illnesses such as AIDS and cancer. Her psychiatrist was among them. At the end of her vision, she heard the voices of friends and family. She recalls her mother telling her not to spit again and two friends asking how they could have let her slip so low. She then heard her nephew say, "Auntie, you have to try. We're all waiting for you to wake up."

She finally came to her senses again after more than ten days in a coma. On waking, she learned that her friends and family had really said all the things she'd heard them say while she was comatose. That ray of light and that kind, solemn voice stayed with her as well. A few months later, she had herself baptized.

"I had been looking at the world from the wrong perspective," says Wu. "So everything I saw was bleak and barren. No matter how broad a perspective I took, that's how it looked to me. I just couldn't see the rest of the world, the part where flowers bloom and birds sing." She says that God finally gave her a new outlook on life, bringing her to that other side, to the proper perspective. "Through God," she says, "I learned that death wasn't my only option." She realized that the past was behind her, and everything ahead was new. As Wu puts it, it was as if her brain had rebuilt itself overnight.

These days, she rises every day at the crack of dawn to read the Bible and pray, often gaining new insights into her life. For example, while reading Exodus' account of the Israelites' wanderings in the wilderness and their failure to appreciate how God had protected them, Wu heard an inner voice say: "I was with you in your dark days as well. You just didn't recognize me." Wu then recalled her psychiatrist's gift of a Bible and his concern for her. Suddenly realizing that each had been an expression of God's love, she couldn't hold back her tears. "Otherwise, how would God have known to come save me?" she asks.

A voice from above

She also resolved her long-standing problem with anorexia through prayer. Her distaste for food and inability to offer thanks for a meal came to an end and she quit worrying about her weight.

The long-term tension in her relationship with her father also eased. When her parents recently came up to Taipei to see her, she and her father got into a heated argument over something trivial. She prayed early the next morning, reflected on her own behavior, and wrote a letter of apology to her father. "The unbelievable thing was, I actually asked him to his face not to be angry with me," she says. Emotion in her voice, she says she never used to love herself and couldn't love others. She thought she had to be perfect to earn people's affections. The only way she could express her feelings for her parents was through gifts, and she was never able to make them happy. Eventually, Wu came to understand that love is a kind of unconditional giving. These days, she's grateful to finally be taking strides towards loving others.

So, has she found the meaning of life? Wu admits that she's still not sure, but can now wait serenely for God to provide an answer in his time. Her certainty and patience surprise even her. In the past, she stopped at nothing to get to the bottom of even the most trivial issue, wearing herself and everyone else out in the process. Yet, here she is waiting patiently for the answers to life's biggest questions.