By Her Own Hand: A Farm Girl’s Miraculous Journey from Death to Hope

Maddison Caldwell woke up on Dec. 19, 2019, with a plan for the ultimate act of finality. Death by her own hand.

For those who know Maddison, it’s difficult to understand why she attempted suicide. But a young girl with limited vision could see no other options.

“Nobody else planted that seed,” Maddison says. “It's an illness. It happened all within my head. I could probably read about it and do research on it all day long, and I'll still never understand why I made that choice.” 

The Anxiety Monster

As the oldest child in the Caldwell family, Maddison believed she needed to have it all together, work the hardest, earn straight As and make people proud. She grew up on a show cattle operation in Elmwood, Ill., and exhibited cattle and pigs at shows across the country. She learned many great life lessons from showing livestock, but admits she also felt tremendous pressure to win and succeed.  

Growing up, Maddison's favorite place to be was in the barn working with her pigs. Photo by Taylor Gevelinger.

“Looking back, I see how I struggled with anxiety for a very long time and didn’t know it,” she says. “Maybe it’s an oldest child thing, but I felt like I was up on a pedestal at times. Things had to be a certain way. I had to be perfect. It was exhausting.”

The red flags began appearing during Maddison’s freshman year of college in the fall of 2016 when she took a mandatory psychology class. For the first time in her life, she started learning about mental health. 

“A lot of the things my teacher talked about resonated with me and with things that were going on in my life,” she says. “One day I talked to my teacher after class and she told me it was normal to have feelings of anxiety, but that counseling may be helpful.”

Appointments and prescriptions followed. Maddison knew something was missing, though, and before she knew it, she was maxed out on medication.

“I remember leaving the doctor’s office thinking, ‘what if things get bad again?’ My doctor basically gave me no other options,” Maddison recalls after that appointment in August of 2019. “I didn’t know where I would turn next.”

In September, Maddison’s family celebrated the one-year anniversary of her grandma’s heart transplant. And that’s when the dominoes began to fall. 

“I’ve always been really sensitive to death,” she says. “I don’t handle grief well. I remember thinking here we were, living our best lives with Grandma and her new heart. Meanwhile someone is grieving the loss of their daughter or mom today. We were celebrating a year of life and they were grieving a year of death. That was hard for me to grasp.”

The one-year anniversary of her grandmother's heart transplant brought out complicated emotions for Maddison to process. (L to R Maddison's sister Olivia, Grandma Connie and Maddison) Photo by Kim Caldwell.

Depression set in for the first time in her life. Suicide crossed her mind, but she didn’t tell anyone. She just put a smile on her face and went on about life. But inside, the questions got bigger, and the hurt took up more space in her heart. 

By Dec. 18, her meds weren’t enough. Her feelings were all-consuming.

A Paper Gown

The next morning Maddison grabbed a handful of pills collected from around the house, tossed out false claims of a migraine to her mother, Kim Caldwell, and crawled back into bed, determined to cross the darkest line of no return.

“I remember feeling so relieved in that moment, like, ‘Wow. It’s over,” she recalls. “At the same time, I remember thinking that was the last time I’ll see my mom and sit down to breakfast with my family. They had no idea what was going on in my mind that day. I hadn’t even discussed my depression.”

Maddison fell asleep and was subsequently found approximately four hours later—alive, but in a fading stupor. At the hospital, she was denied a stomach pump procedure due to her consecutive hours of sleep.

“I know from a medical standpoint, she should not be here,” says Kim, a registered nurse. “The number of pills she took, the four hours before we knew, she should have never woken up. I can tell you that with 25 years of nursing knowledge.” 

Miraculously, Maddison lived. 

She was committed to a psychiatric unit per Illinois law because she attempted suicide. It took three long days to be placed into a unit. During this time, Maddison’s anger grew. 

“I was so mad I was still alive,” she says. “Looking back, I can’t even believe the way I behaved. I didn’t even tell my family goodbye when I finally left the hospital.”

They took her by police car to a psychiatric unit where she was only allowed to bring shampoo, conditioner and a toothbrush. She was stripped down and searched before being given paper scrubs to wear.

“It sure wasn’t like the movies where you are greeted and welcomed in,” she says. “I was on my own. About 90% of the people in this facility were there for drug abuse. I didn’t fit in, and it was not helpful for me to be there.”

She was released on Christmas morning after doing everything in her power to prove she was ready to go back home. During her stay in the facility, she was put on five or six medications morning, noon and night. 

“That was it,” she says. “I wasn’t given any therapy while I was there.” 

Maddison returned home feeling like she had nowhere else to turn, with full intentions of finishing what she started.

Dangerous Deception

The next three months went by quickly. Maddison didn’t return to college in person but chose to go virtual her final semester from home. For Todd Caldwell, Maddison’s father, it was hard to understand how his daughter was feeling. 

“The first time it happened, I kept scratching my head thinking, ‘How?’ In the livestock industry, there are ups and downs. The ups are really, really good and the downs are really, really bad. But I can honestly say, no matter how bad things have gotten, that has never been an option to me.”

Although he can’t pinpoint anything that would make him think his daughter would attempt suicide again, he says he didn’t see anything in her that made him think she wouldn’t. 

“She was so damn good at hiding how she was feeling. All I could think was, ‘How can you look like she looks? Have a brain like she’s got? Have the success she’s had in whatever she chose to at this point?” Todd says. “Then I am thinking, ‘Dang Maddie, don’t you have any backbone? You are going through a bad stage. Your life has not gone exactly as you planned it to this point. But that’s just life.”

He knows those thoughts won’t win him a popularity contest. But as a father, he admits those hard, conflicting feelings ran rampant in his mind as he tried to understand what his daughter was experiencing. 

Perhaps it was fear and those conflicting feelings that never allowed him to feel at ease. 

The Caldwell farm located near Elmwood, Ill. Photo provided by Kim Caldwell.

On April 1, 2020, Maddison called Todd to see if he wanted her to grab lunch for him, her grandpa and her brother who were out working on the farm. Todd vividly remembers lots of laughing and joking while they ate lunch together.

“Never in a million years did I think she was in a bad place mentally that day,” Todd says.

A few hours later, his phone rang. It was a number he didn’t recognize, but he answered the phone. She had tried again. 

No Going Back 

Maddison did not want anyone to know what she was thinking. “I really thought everyone would be better off without me,” she says. 

Determined to finish what she had started, Maddison went to the special drawer she was forbidden to open and took out a cattle drug she knew was dangerous for humans. She thought it would kill her quickly. After having lunch with her dad, she drove out to a hill at one of their farms and injected 2 ccs of this livestock antibiotic in each of her thighs. 

“I thought it would be fairly instant,” Maddison recalls. “I sat in my car waiting and waiting.”

Time passed so slowly. She considered a few options of what to do next when the medication didn’t kill her. She ended up driving to her best friend’s house and called her friend’s mom to come outside and sit with her. 

“She had no idea what I had done or how dangerous that medication was,” Maddison says. “She called my dad immediately.”

All Todd could think about on his drive was that there was no way his daughter was going to be alive when he got there. But she was clinging on. 

It took the ambulance 25 minutes to arrive. As Maddison was being put into the ambulance, she remembers looking out the door and seeing her dad standing in the middle of the road. 

“I remember thinking, ‘What have I done?’ as I saw my dad standing there so helpless and angry,” she says. “He kept yelling, ‘What did you do? Why have you done this?’”

Maddison heard her dad telling the paramedic about his 250-pound friend who got residue from that medication on his finger, put some chewing tobacco into his mouth, and minutes later, had to be rushed to the hospital.

“‘She’s gone,’ my dad said to the paramedics. ‘You guys can drive as fast as you want, but there’s no going back,’” Maddison recalls.

Todd was scared and furious. That’s not going to be popular either, he says, but it was his truth in that moment.

“I was so mad at her,” Todd says as he watched helplessly. “I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I said, ‘Why didn’t you talk to me? You just ate lunch with me.’ She was dozing in and out and wasn’t listening to me anyway. The town policeman was there, and he finally grabbed me and hugged me and said, ‘You have to stop.’”

Due to COVID-19, they wouldn’t let Todd ride in the ambulance. He called Kim, who was working that day, and told her Maddison wasn’t going to make it. 

During the 30-minute drive to the hospital, Maddison had three seizures. 

Read on to learn what happened next in Maddison's journey.