Why I can't say the "w-word"

 

My daughter cliff-dives in Greece, and my granddaughter hang-glides in Brazil. . . so, you may ask, what sort of risks have I taken? Are you kidding? I WRITE, for God’s sake, and for 30 years or so I couldn’t even say I was “one of those” without inciting laughter or a derisive “yeah, right!”. It took me until age 50 to publish my first novel, and there were two more after that, and I am immensely proud of that accomplishment. But it’s still the same old story: “you’re a WHAT?” Just daring to say you’re a . . ., you know. . . a . . . (don’t say it, they’ll think you’re pretentious or lying) is, to me, an extreme sport. Here I strike various overdramatic poses, and by the way, I reviewed ALL the books on those shelves behind me! I know who I am, and of course the process of writing is its own reward - but it’s sort of sad that the rest of the world hasn’t caught up with me yet. I’m not holding my breath.

Prince Harry at the Polo Match: 💗💗NACHO 4 EVER!! 💗💗💗

 

I couldn't resist! To get away from his screeching wife, Prince Harry recently showed up at a polo match to watch his idol, Nacho Figueras, and a photographer caught him in a vulnerable pose. He looks downright girly! So the Instagram trolls could not resist making some delicions AI parodies of the image. My favorite is the Little Mermaid, though he looks better in Meghan's outfits than she does. The pregnant pose is especially poignant. 

DUDAMEL! I love you so!

 

DUDAMEL! I am so glad to have found you! This is no small thing, to have found a conductor so skillful that he can actually find new nuances and freshness in what should be an old chestnut. This man, this genius, strips off all the old layers of varnish and restores the masterpiece so completely that the paint is still glistening wet. The instrumental virtuosity, particularly the flute and the bassoon, is excruciatingly pleasurable, but never overwhelms the whole, and Dudamel himself does not try to overwhelm the music with his personality. 

He has often been compared to Bernstein, but Bernstein became a "personality", a celebrity conductor people came to SEE as much as hear.  And yes, I did attend a Lenny concert when I was 13 years old, at the opening of Centennial Concert Hall in London, Ontario, in 1967.

Oh, it was a big deal in our house - we were seeing Lenny, the fabled Bernstein, the man we were kind of force-fed via those Young People's Concerts which we couldn't escape watching, and  which now seem - uh, er, how shall I put this? Utterly pretentious! He had a lah-dee-dah way of speaking that was actually cultivated (he wanted to sound classy, as if his parents really weren't just working class types) rather than cultured. And his attempts to be just one of the kids fell  flat, no matter how hard he tried to find value and "relevance" in pop music. 

But it WAS exciting to see him come out and do that flamboyant bow with his hair flopping down. The first piece was Mahler's 4th Symphony - I remember it now as the one with the jingle bells at the beginning. It's probably the most user-friendly of Mahler's blockbuster works, and that slow movement really was sublime, with Lenny bobbing and weaving and generally using his entire body to conduct.

Then there was intermission, in which we all oohed and ahhed that we had seen LENNY! Then came Debussy's La Mer, another opportunity for flamboyance. I am sure there was nothing wrong with his interpretation, except that the audience's attention seemed mostly focused on him. He was a rock star and he knew it, milked it. It detracted from the music, I now see, as most celebrities inevitably overwhelm their art forms.

And I remember the encore, the last movement of Charles Ives' first symphony, with a quote from Columbia the Jewel of the Ocean at the very end, followed by a massive, comical discord. Then, right on schedule, the audience jumped to its feet.

And the ovation went on and on. Len-NY! Len-NY! It was almost like some sort of sporting event ending in a  Clear and Magnificent Victory. He stood there, a beaming narcissist, soaking it all in. Applause was oxygen to him, and given how he smoked four packs a day and gasped out his last with emphysema, he needed it badly.  Finally, after several more bows, he pointed to his watch, made a "praying hands" gesture beside his face ("I have to sleep now, folks!") and strode out, as everyone cried for more.

Dudamel, well, I doubt I will ever get to see him in person, but just from  these superb YouTube videos of the nine Beethoven symphonies, I can tell that, dynamic and charismatic as the man is, he never overwhelms the music with his personality. He bows to it, he surrenders to it, he SERVES it, the way a true musician/magician must serve.

I have only listened to a fraction of his Beethoven Nine, partly because I often end up in tears, and some days I just don't have them to spare. But I have them stockpiled, and on days when I need to restore my soul, this music does it. .

Plus he's gorgeous, a poet with his  hands, graceful, but minus unnecessary theatrics. Not jumping up and down on the podium, not stomping his feet or roaring or doing any of those histrionic Lennyisms. It interests but doesn't surprise me that he is the youngest person ever to be named musical director of the New York  Philharmonic, Lenny's  old stomping ground. He wears these laurels lightly, having leaped up the levels of fame at an almost shockingly early age. But his leaps have been cat-like, no pole-vaulting as in Bernstein's case. In his mid-40s, he has already accomplished more than most conductors dream of in a lifetime.

So I am glad to have my music back, after a short detour, and glad that something good can come out of the much-maligned internet. I will never have to buy a CD again, and if I can't get to concerts, I have this. This magic, this music, this Dudamel.

How does it feel to be married for 53 years?

We make it official! Our wedding day, May 24, 1973. The rest of the story. . . we were living together (gasp!) for a few months, but family pressure hastened us into making it legal. Since neither of us were religious, and both of us were broke, we had a simple ceremony in a judge’s chambers with close family and a few friends. People looking at our wedding photos now are puzzled, as in “where’s the bride and groom?” Frankly, donning a virginal white gown that costs a zillion dollars never appealed to me, though I did get Bill to wear a tie.

At the time, he was completing a Master’s degree in biochemistry, and I was supporting both of us on a secretary’s wages. I was nineteen years old. (And I wasn’t pregnant – that’s the other assumption people always make!) We moved to Saint John, New Brunswick, where I didn’t know a soul, and within four years we had two children (by then he was working long hours in a pulp mill). I had nil experience with babies or children, and we had very little money and no family support, but somehow we managed.

I’m sometimes asked about it, but there isn’t a “secret” to all this, except to say that respect and acceptance may be, over the long haul, even more important than love. This isn’t a popular thing to say, and I get the same puzzled looks from people when I say it. I will add that “in sickness and in health” is VERY important, and in the past couple of years we have had to take care of each other through a lot of very serious stuff.

The other night we were having dinner at our favourite restaurant, and at one point I asked him, “Any regrets?” He said no, and I said “Me neither”. What could be more romantic than that?

BEAR: Beware!!

(I thought I'd copy and paste my original Facebook post and the ensuing discussion I'm having with fellow bear enthusiasts about  their various wild encounters. So far we haven't seen him again. Let's hope!)

YIKES! I was sitting at my desk after dinner, when I heard a mighty crash. Then Bill yelled up the stairs, "WE HAVE A BEAR." Not so unusual, though most of them come into the back yard at night to sniff around for bird feeders or whatever they can get. Once in a while they come during the day, and you can usually scare them off with a loud noise.

But this wasn't the usual black bear - in fact it didn't look like any bear we had ever seen before.

It was a BROWN bear, a very large one with a fluffy brown coat (looked a little like a giant teddy). I have never seen a brown bear anywhere near civilization before. Not only did this creature pull over the barbecue and ravage it, he demolished a circle of cinder blocks which were arranged around our massive cedar tree. In more than 30 years of living with the bears, nothing like this has ever happened before. I couldn't believe how much damage it did.

It didn't want to leave, so I blew on the bear whistle as loud as I could, and it ambled off to find greener pastures or warmer barbecues. But if this beast starts terrorizing the neighborhood, we're going to have to report it. Little kids play out in the back yard in the evenings! At any rate, I was in a panic and did what anyone would do under the circumstances: I googled "brown bears in British Columbia", mainly to reassure myself this WASN'T a grizzly. This is what came up.

Yes, brown bears and grizzly bears are the same species (Ursus arctos), but they are often considered different subspecies or categorized by location and diet.

"Brown bear" typically refers to coastal populations with access to salmon, while "grizzly bear" generally refers to smaller inland populations. Both are Ursus arctos.

Coastal brown bears (e.g., Alaska/BC) have access to rich marine resources like salmon, allowing them to grow much larger. Grizzly bears live inland and rely on a diet of roots, berries, and small mammals.

Coastal brown bears can weigh over 1,000 lbs, whereas inland grizzlies are generally smaller.

Both have a distinct shoulder hump, dish-shaped face profile, and long claws. The name "grizzly" comes from the "grizzled" (frosted-tip) look of their hair.In summary, all grizzlies are brown bears, but not all brown bears are grizzlies.

A THOUSAND POUNDS?? If we have a grizzly bear's cousin knocking over our barbecue and nearly tipping over our giant cedar tree, I'd say we're in trouble.

Amber Hayward    We see black bears in our yard in the spring, usually young ones who don’t know how to get along in the world. They can be destructive like your grizzly, one demolished my compost bin. They seem to move on, so I hope yours does the same but wildlife officials might want a bear trap set up.

Margaret Gunning    I'd rather not, but then, if it's a safety issue (which it might be) - I spoke to a neighbor about it and he said it was nosing around in his yard before it landed in ours. The problem is, barbecue season is upon us, and we don't have a way to lock ours up, though we put a heavy cover on it (which he thought was a hat, I guess). The bird feeders are down until this blows over!

Amber Hayward    The trap doesn’t kill, usually the bear is relocated

Laura Redman     He’s a beautiful wild creature and you’re living on his planet, in his territory… get some advice from bear experts at conservation authorities or your wildlife ministry before causing him harm… understanding and sharing bear behaviour will save your peace of mind and your neighbours and the bear… all the best.

Margaret Gunning    I don't want to do anything to harm him/her, though I hope it doesn't keep coming around for his/her own sake. Spring is the time they come out of hibernation, so they're extra hungry. At any rate, I won't put my bird feeders up for the forseeable future, though I think it was the BBQ he was after. It's the first time we've seen a brown bear in these parts! The thing is, though we're in the suburbs, we're also right on the edge of a large green belt, and critters are a fact of life.

Laura Redman    thanks for following up… bears are opportunists, so when hungry, they’ll seek food wherever they can find it - which is how human conflicts can occur… so yeah, barbecues, bird feeders, baked goods near an open window, garbage or accessible pet food… they are also smart enough to remember where that meal came from so they might add that spot to their foraging route…

I have friends in central Ontario who have had black bears break into their homes or trailers or pickup trucks in order to steal a dinner or a lunch…

But thankfully those occasions are rare, and the bears are not familiar with human contact so more fearful.

It does happen more often in the spring when they’re waking up and food is more scarce. Many people in those bear populated regions put all outdoor food away from April to October.

I hope you and your bear can both stay safe and cohabitate in a non-threatening way.

Margaret Gunning   I hope so too! Thanks for your comments.

Julie Willmot    I was walking up my road with my now deceased former Newfie mix Bee when I noticed what I thought was another black pup about the same size about 50 feet ahead near the entrance to my Russell Williams shack. Then it turned its head and I got a glimpse of a little bear face and quickly turned around and went in the other direction. Luckily a car came down my access road and I asked the driver to escort me on my way home in case the mum of the baby bear was hidden in the ditch. 

I am ashamed to admit that I phoned my neighbors who have bees near me who advised that a mother with two cubs had been observed earlier that Spring on the next concession over. I have seen bear prints around my house on several occasions but smallish ones. I have a small overgrown orchard and they are probably attracted by the apples. Hope you scared that bear away. Bears can be dangerous although the number of bears killed by humans far outnumbers the number of bears who have killed and eaten humans in Canada.

Margaret Gunning    They're also attracted to rotten salmon (we have a creek about a 5-minute walk away in which the salmon spawn in the fall) and berries with pits in them. I see the results on the trail - they don't try to hide their scat, maybe marking their territory? Very messy for cyclists! And it's true, if you see a cub, be VERY careful. 

We rediscovered a "bear whistle" we had stashed away, and it did work, with a very loud, shrill, earsplitting blast. Since then we went to Canadian Tire and bought two more, boating whistles this time, but with the same effect. That bear jumped and leaped over the fence (and how do 200-pound bears jump over 8-foot-high fences like cats?) Living with the bears is quite a challenge sometimes. I still don't have my bird feeders up ,but this bear was after the barbecue.

Talented Bear Walks Backwards!!

 

So I lied about being done with bears! But the other night was traumatic, and I am having to purge my soul of the trauma. And what better way to purge than to make silly YouTube videos!

OK, I'll stop now. . .

 

What I love about this (and yes, I think this IS a real bear) is the fact you can see a face flashing in the window as they took the video. Great timing, as we were unable to get any sort of shot of OUR brown bear. So we don't know if he walked on his hind legs or not. But this is a brilliant gif!

Back Yard Bear: YIKES, he's HUGE!

 

Well, this is the comic version, but it's no joke what happened last night. I was sitting at my desk after dinner, when I heard a CRASH. Then Bill yelled up the stairs, "We have a bear." Not again! I assumed it was one of those nosy black bears that wander around in the back yard, sniffing out bird feeders or whatever they can find.

But no.

This was a BROWN bear, not like anything I have ever seen before, like a giant teddy, and it had pulled the barbecue over and was rooting around in it! Not only that, the cinder block barrier around our cedar tree had been demolished, lying in ruins.

From a bear.

This video isn't of our bear, of course, but he's pretty close to what we saw. I since found out that brown bears (a close cousin to grizzlies, which did NOT make me feel better) can reach a thousand pounds, though this one looked to be a mere three or four hundred. Black bears are common around here, but in nearly 40 years of living here, we have never seen a brown bear, in our yard or anywhere else. In fact, seeing ANY bear in the yard is rare in broad daylight, but that didn't stop him.

Fortunately, I had a bear whistle! This is something we bought years and years ago, a  nice-looking thing with a thermometer and a compass on it. Perfect for getting lost in the woods. And it is LOUD, high and shrill, and yes, it did freak him out and he bounded over the fence and took off (I am amazed at how these lumbering creatures can jump up on fences like cats, and wander along looking down into the various back yards to see what they can ravage next.)

I can't put any bird feeders up at all now, and won't for the forseeable future. We hope our barbecue (a fairly new one) isn't totally wrecked. Or will explode from a propane leak. . . 

No more excitement, Mother Nature, please! Meantime, I thought I'd have a little fun with animation and make a wacky gif of the whole thing. Our bear didn't dance, but it rummaged, pulled down feeder poles and for some reason pushed over a barrier of cinder blocks as if they were dominos.

The Death of Mainstream

 

He has a point here. But this was a test to see if I can still post YouTube videos! 

Meghan and Harry: Just a distraction, but a good one. . . 😄

 

Outtakes from Meghan Markle's Netflix  cooking show! Here she places raw vegetables on a cake. 

Just giggling away with the girls (and getting soused at the same time). Then comes a master stroke: she empties a bag of pretzels onto the counter! 

                                               CHEERS! 

Happy Dance with Oprah and Pals!

Can I lay this ghost to rest. . . at last?

This is one of those times when I want to write my way out of a maze that I can barely comprehend. Having scraped through a near-death experience a year  and a half ago, and still learning to deal with compromised energy and diminished physical ability, I find that my mind is jumping back in time in a way I don't want or need, but somehow can't stop. My way out or through every difficulty I've ever had (and I have had some doozies) is to write about it. Though I was able to exorcise a couple of dire spirits that would not leave me alone, I am still left with Glen Allen, a man I never met and never knew, and whose writings about alcoholism and mental illness enthralled me then - but they disturb me now, and I can't leave it alone - or it won't leave ME alone.

I see in now. I see deeper. I am not fooled. Being one myself, I know all the writer's tricks: writing that calls attention to itself, writing that postures, and - most of all - reporting (for isn't all writing actually just reporting, especially the kind of bittersweet poetry Glen could produce at will?). I have read and re-read Glen's harrowing report on his own life and struggles with what we so delicately call, nowadays, his "mental health". In our long correspondence, we spoke mainly of alcohol addiction and bipolar disorder, but when I re-read much of what he wrote, all those self-revealing pieces from a man who seemed almost insanely private, I can see or feel conflicting threads: the need to tell the story, the need to put a good face on it, the need to open a vein in front of everyone while still  hiding out behind that facade of almost pathological shyness and introversion.

I keep thinking of this piece he wrote that appeared in a newspaper in 1999, then was reprinted when he committed suicide in 2005. At the time I felt shock - and  compassion - and I still do - but also considerable horror. I realize now that what he suffered  from could not have been bipolar disorder alone. The symptoms he speaks of, the hallucinations, the delusions, the paranoia and the voices in his head - these are the province of schizophrenia, the disease that killed my brother Arthur when he was only 30 years old. 

I used to think I could "see" schizophrenia, not just in a person but in a photograph, that "look", removed, remote, a person dwelling in an inner world that has little or nothing to do with what we roughly agree on as "reality". When I look at early photos of Glen, I see it, that look, and I realize that he didn't  stand a chance - it was going to get him in the end.

And it did. But here I sit more than twenty years after his death - not exactly in a psychiatric crisis (for once), but in a different kind of existential turn, a place of stopping, of saying, "Am I going to survive?" Will my body make the decision for me?

So I have thought of a way to try to exorcise this haunting, this obsession (call it what it is!) that I don't even want to be experiencing. Can I do this? I want to be ruthless here, I want to be a reporter, and see if I can get at this thing by offering my running commentary. It's one of the most bizarre writing projects I've ever undertaken, but why am I still here after my own sometimes monstrous experiences, except for that voracious need to FIND OUT?

I need to lay this man to rest, and as with poor Bohdan and Gabor Mate, I may need to do a sort of psychic surgery. Will it work? Can I even begin to find out  unless I go ahead and do  it?

So here is his harrowing memoir of mental illness and the equally harrowing treatments he endured to try to regain his health and his sanity, a war he ultimately lost. I don't want to be cruel here, but I have to get AT this at last, and tryto get to the truth of how I really feel. 

I decided to include the original images from my initial post on Glen's travails, partly as illustrations, but mostly to break up the text and make it easier to read.

The anesthetist, head swathed in a surgeon's fez, plunges the needle in a ready vein and leans over and says, "You'll smell the smell of garlic and then you'll be out."

And out I am in this fourth of a series of eight shock treatments on the psychiatric wing of the Saint John Regional Hospital. While I'm unconscious, a nurse places two electrodes on my skull and the attending psychiatrist flips a switch, sending a powerful current of electricity into the addled spheres of my brain.

OK then - this is Frankenstein territory! A ready vein? Electrodes on my skull?Flips a switch? Even the "out I am" is macabre in some way - "I'm dead now", it seems to say. Electrodes, currents of electricity - all that's missing is that howling cry, "It's alive! It's ALIVE!"

Odd as it may seem - odd because no one really knows why it works - I awake feeling refreshed in the recovery room where I am asked my name, the date, where I am. I not only answer the questions in rapid order but I note the clarity of the vivid colours all around, the pleasant ticking of a clock hung on the wall, the murmur of friendly voices. 

Note from someone who has been there: a sudden boost out of a very deep depression is dangerous as hell, which is why I approach the subject of ECT with a degree of horror. Suddenly from the depths, colors spring to life, birds are twittering, and everything is beautiful again. Not so fast - the same thing happened to me, when I was ascending the most harrowing part of my worst manic episode - all the world was beautiful, it was all like a Disney cartoon surrounding me, birds were twittering and the sun was shining and colors looked unnaturally  bright - but those  supernatural sounds and colors were more dangerous than I ever realized.

I am climbing out of the pit of suicidal despair that sent me to the hospital - the fifth stay in hospital in three provinces in two years - in the first place. And for the first time in a long time, I feel healthy and I tell myself that this is how other people, untroubled by the mania or depression that has come out of the dark closet of my mind every decade for the last 40 years, must feel most of the time.

This is a common one. I've seen it again and again, even in that louse Gabor Mate, taking meds for his ADHD for the first time and swearing this is what everyone else feels like all the time. It's not true, we can't jump inside someone else's head, not even an artist with words who lays his soul bare in a way I now see is frankly dangerous. And this "every decade" thing is a misnomer - he's putting more space between episodes to try to make it palatable to his readers, or to himself.

Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), as it is properly known, is the treatment of last resort for some psychiatric afflictions, notably depression, and I haven't experienced it for 44 years. A frightened and deeply depressed boy of 15 - by far the worst time in my life - I was given a series of treatments without the benefit of anesthesia and while I don't remember much beyond that first rude shock I felt well for 10 years, I left home and enjoyed a successful career in the construction industry
from the far North to California until this strange and cruel malady caught up with me once again.

Some things stand out. More minimizing:  every ten years? When you continue to read this story, you realize he never had anything like this length of remission,  trying to frantically outrun himself as he literally moved all over the world and kept finding himself there, lethal wounds and all. His work history must have been appallling. That "worst time in my life" likely refers to the kind of schizophrenia that commonly manifests in young adulthood. I am all too  familiar with it, watching my brother diminish from a charming young man with a bizarre sense of humor to a shambling wreck barely able to keep his  shoelaces tied.

And that "successful career in the construction industry" was, to put it more bluntly, manual labor. He dug ditches for ten years, during which time even darker things happened to  him which I will comment on later.

Manic depression, or bipolar disorder as it is now called in these days of political correctness, touches the lives of one of every 100 New Brunswickers. It is an often devastating malaise that can strike without warning, rendering its victims subject, initially, to inexplicable "highs" that can spin out of control. First comes "hypomania" - a time of great busyness and well-being and then follows full-blown mania when the afflicted persons will make great plans, sleep not at all, feel a sense
of grandiosity, spend wildly and travel widely.

OK Glen, we know you're a reporter and there's no doubt that  this is an example of good reporting. But it's your own entrails you're reporting on here. It's  almost as if you've taken this out of a textbook. But what comes next is hardly by the book.

It can also be a time of delusion or even hallucination (hearing,
seeing or smelling things that aren't there) marked by extreme irritation with family or friends who cannot share this experience. This condition leads the manic persons to believe that what they are doing is absolutely correct. They may, as I have done in the past, write floridly mad letters to everyone but the Queen simply because it seems necessary to alert the world to some clear and present danger, again the right thing to do.

I'd say yes, except no. Bipolar disorder almost never pushes the brain to these extremes. I'm not saying it wasn't present - but in spite of what almost everyone seems to think, it's NOT "either-or" with psychiatric diagnoses. The diagnosis of schizo-affective literally includes elements of both. Human beings are complicated, mental health ebbs and flows, and yes, you CAN have any number of overlapping conditions that can blend and separate. But I think I know what I am seeing here.

But mania can go well beyond this epistolary extravagance. Earlier this year, in the grip of mania and hospitalized in Montreal, I saw my father - dead, lo these 35 years - in elevators and there was a constant jabber of voices in my ear, one of them a basso profundo saying over and over again with astonishing clarity in Chilean Spanish, "Los pobres son
dijes" (The poor are good). Prior to this, I nurtured the idea - the same fevered idea I had had the year before - that I had to travel to Northern Alberta's Peace River country to complete a novel my father had written decades ago - one in which the heroine and her children seek tomake a new home there but never actually arrive. I had hitched a ride with a trucker headed for Calgary. He insisted I leave his company
somewhere south of North Bay, Ont., and get psychiatric help. ("You're out of it, man," I recall him saying as he reached over and opened the passenger door.)

This isn't a joke, but it's almost presented as a funny story,  the  kind of tale you hear at AA meetings and support groups for the mentally ill.  And that brings us to Glen's absolute obsession with his father, Ralph Allen, then a well-known magazine editor who has been largely forgotten, along with that other obsolete Canadian institution, Peter Gzowski. Glen kept referring to his father obsessively in his letters, though he hated the man or at least felt the man hated him. 

Complete a novel his father wrote? When, where? How do you "complete a novel" anyway? I've written five (well, five and a half), published three, and I cannot imagine trying to complete anyone else's unfinished thoughts. And I don't think his father wrote novels, none that was ever published anyway. Was he trying to correct that situation or what?

I made my way to Montreal where I ended up in St. Luc Hospital and later a halfway house where a barrage of drugs including lithium established a calmer state of mind. After two months of recuperation, I returned to Saint John where my truly enlightened employer gave me yet another chance to ply my trade as a reporter. But within weeks, mania had come
full circle: its sinister cousin, clinical depression had set in. I felt a blackness of mood, a sense of dread and despair and a longing to end my hopeless life I hadn't felt since an earlier suicide attempt and once more entered the hospital where, this time, ECT was the indicated treatment.

I have to say now, if ECT is still used at all, it should be an absolute last resort, and my feeling is that it is a dangerous practice which can briefly propel a depressed person straight upward - it can act as a sort of catapult, bringing all that Disney goodness back for a brief time. But the brain was never meant to receive those mysterious ("no one knows how this works") Frankensteinian shocks. If there is any benefit at all, the returns are ever-diminishing with repetition. Carrie Fisher is an example of  a celebrity whose brain was basically turned to jelly with multiple rounds of ECT, eventually leading to her death by drug overdose -  one of those cases where they  found 15 different drugs in her system at once.

Looking back on it all now, I might have known something was amiss when I was yet a small child. My father was off at war and my saintly mother, I was convinced in my five-year-old mind, was a German spy. When that war ended and the Cold War began, I was sure that the Soviet Union, our latest enemy, would invade the leafy precincts of my Toronto neighbourhood. I remember staring at the Disney decals on my bedroom wall and believing that taken together they were a bizarre scroll of destiny: the world would end in fire.

Shortly after that, my parents split up and I was seized with a sense of power - perhaps my first "manic" episode - when I became their go-between. Each would have me memorize messages for the other and when my father - a man deeply hurt by the war - came to pick me up for Sunday outings in his 1947 navy Pontiac, I would do my best to heal the breach, subtly altering their second-hand messages so as to ensure that each
knew the other was loved and deeply missed. In hindsight, it was the wrong course to take. They lived together in a stormy alcoholic marriage until both died of cancer in their mid-fifties.

I can't begin to wrap my head around the kind of child  abuse that was going on here, and I have other ideas about what happened to Glen when he was 15 years old and working with a crew of drunken men in their 30s on a remote Northern highway. He was, to put it bluntly, a sitting duck, and the sexual assault I am virtually certain he endured rendered his innate fragility into something that was eventually terminal. But somehow he took  this unmitigated horror and transformed it into a ten-year "successful career in the construction industry". And to think of an adolescent boy entertaining such terrifying thoughts and fears is harrowing, and far beyond any description of bipolar disorder I have ever seen.

But once this feat of wishful thinking was accomplished, I fell into the deepest of depressions, a malaise that was to last for years. Alone in my room for days at a time, I wept incessantly and wished for release. One desperate day, I cut across a wrist with a broken bottle and an alert doctor in a hospital emergency ward recognized the act for what itwas, a cry for help, and recommended to my bewildered mother that my
mental state be assessed. My parents shared society's distaste for anything that smacked of mental illness and had a deeply felt distrust of mental-health practitioners. They had already taken me out of school, read the angry and despairing poems I had fixed to my wall; they had watched as I refused food and the attentions of my friends, but they were reluctant to place me in the hands of the shrinks as if once there, there

would be no turning back. But there was no alternative: I was taken to see the good Dr. Grant who clapped me in hospital and after rest and conventional therapies of the day failed, suggested ECT.

And so it went. I would have eight or nine trouble-free years until the monster reappeared and I would be swept up in the rising and falling tide of mood. Indeed, in the sixties I spent time in a hospital in Chicago and 10 years later in Montreal, I jumped in front of a moving bus. In the mid-eighties, a full two years were blighted by bipolar illness. That was a time of sheer terror and misadventure. Among other things, I had concluded that the big banks were to blame for all of society's ills. I hired a video camera crew and forayed into one of the major bank's
headquarters in downtown Montreal, shooting footage of executives at their desks. I was also convinced at one point that the Mafia was after me.

This is paranoid schizophrenia, friends. It's plain to see. Not just bipolar, but schizo-affective disorder. This is grave mental illness of the most intractible sort. And the "eight or nine trouble-free years" is, to put it bluntly, bullshit. It's the kind of minimizing we do when we need to convince ourselves it's not REALLY that bad. 

But it is. It's worse than that. It kills.

Then came last year and this - two botched trips out West, time in a hospital in Thunder Bay, then Montreal and three stays in the facility in Saint John, one of them in a coma following a suicide attempt.

This is hardly an illness that moves out of the way for a decade, then lands in again like a hurricane out of nowhere. This is a horror show, an ordeal that I can barely wrap my head around. 

And all that time, the tone, the even reporter's tone that seems oddly detached and unemotional, creeps me out in a way I can't even describe.

All this time, all through these years I had been told by professionals that I had to take medication - namely, lithium - to ward off the depredations of an illness that is of the brain, not of the mind, an illness that is largely due to faulty genes and biochemistry being grievously out of whack.

But for years, especially when I felt well, I denied to myself and to the world at large that I had bipolar disorder. I wanted badly to be like other people, even given the fact that members of my immediate family had been stricken in the same way resulting in hospitalizations and suicide.

Instead of taking my pills, I would attempt to cope in other ways. Sadly, until the bottom fell out of my world in 1984, I drank heavily, just as my father had done before me. I also moved constantly. I always felt better for a time when I changed location. I have lived and worked in England, Italy, Algeria, three American states and seven Canadian
provinces. After I married, I trucked my little family around, bag and baggage, as far afield as Chile and China.

Until I read this account, I had no idea just how "restless, irritable and discontented" Glen really was (to use AA parlance). This is extreme - incessant moving, ending in hospital here and there and everywhere. And in my experience, it's actually very hard to get yourself admitted to a psych ward. Usually, I was sent home to cope with my misery alone, with no support at all. But this kind of chaos seems to imply extremes, even the kinds of brushes with the law that Geoff Pevere wrote about, or at least being so deeply sunk that hospitalization is the only recourse.

.

But there were no cures, only palliatives. One of them - alcohol - was ruinous. As for travel...well, as someone wiser once said, when you get off the bus you're always there waiting for yourself. Depression, my lone outrider, would inevitably close in just as a ship spotted as a tiny smudge on the horizon inevitably comes to shore, looming larger than life itself.

Manic depression is a mood disorder as opposed to schizophrenia, which is a disorder of the thought process itself. In it, there is a disruption of a person's normal emotional states, such as happiness or sadness. The moods of manic depression include at one end, utter melancholy, passivity and fatigue and thoughts of suicide and at the other, elation,
grandiosity, agitation and, when extreme, delusions and hallucinations. Delusions can include grandiose beliefs: a person may think she or he has special talents or is related to a special person. A manic might also believe that he or she is the subject of whispers of friends and strangers alike, or that Lloyd Robertson is sending special messages during
his newscast. Hallucinations are usually imagined sights or sounds. Auditory hallucinations are more common (although all senses may be affected) and may have a religious overtone, such as the voice of God or angels and may sound like commands.

OK then Glen, you're denying again, and you just finished telling us how  chaotic your thoughts were and how  extreme your delusions were. These were thoughts, not just  feelings, and you acted on them. The voice of God or angels? That's schizoid thought distortion. I don't know if he was never diagnosed, or was just underdiagnosed, or if it was just too much for him to bear to face the possibility. And may I say here that calling someone "a manic" is thorougly hateful?

Most people go through many more bouts of depression than mania, thoug to be considered "bipolar" a person must have gone through at least one manic episode. For some, it is a chronic illness that becomes more pronounced with age but a manic depressive typically goes through long periods of remission in his or her life. A person may be relatively
symptom-free with only mild mood swings for years, then for any number of reasons (the primary one being discontinuing prescribed medication) the cycle returns.

There are manic depressives who experience only one cycle in their lives and others in whom the illness disappears at an early age. But complicating things is the fact that depression and mania can exist at the same time. As writers Diane and Lisa Berger state in their excellent primer on manic depression called We Heard the Angels of Madness, the term "bipolar disorder" deceives because the mania and depression "do not
occur in even opposition. It is not like the North Pole and the South Pole; instead, it more closely resembles two points on the equator. They're side by side, sharing a border and overlapping.

Researchers don't yet have a definitive cause of manic depression but they do know that it runs in families and that defective genes must, in part, be at fault.

Reporting, reporting. I don't  know how he does this, scribbling on a pad and then almost casually opening his guts. It's very strange, very disturbing to me. I see what he was doing here, but these kinds of raw and horrifying revelations seem in total opposition to how private the man was - actually, almost pathologically shy and introverted, finding it hard to even talk to another person. He often mentioned in his letters that he would literally go days without speaking to anyone at all.

But all that said, why tell this tawdry story at all? I have lost all
appetite for the confessional and take no pleasure in this exercise. But there are two points I would like to make in passing. One relates to stigma. The mentally ill, however much society has changed in recent years, are prey to an abundance of myth and misinformation that is, quite simply, astonishing.

Victims of major mental illness - schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and clinical depression - are still often shunned and tucked away, even though their maladies, most experts would now agree, are physical in nature, just like diabetes or heart disease. And the most serious of these diseases, schizophrenia, has disabled many of the 300,000 Canadians affected by it, many of them young people in their prime. They are our sons
and daughters, wives and husbands, our neighbours and we have all too often tended to see them as a tribe apart, spoken of in whispers. They are no more "violent" than the population at large and their illnesses are, for the most part, episodic in nature. Most enjoy great islands - even archipelagos - of calm and productivity between short-lived bouts of illness. And they are much with us: one of five New Brunswickers, at some point in their lives will, like me, go beyond the brink and need
the attentions of the mental-health-care system.

The other point worth making is that there is help out there. Each of 13 regions in the province has a community mental-health-care centre staffed by a psychiatrist or two, nurses, social workers and psychologists. There are problems: there is a dire shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists and public money is short indeed for the chronically ill. But for the most part, the work of this corps of professionals is largely unsung. While they may be too few for the demands placed upon them,
in my experience - a view confirmed recently by an Ontario study - New Brunswick has one of the best mental health-care systems in the nation.

Meanwhile I have come through once again feel eminently sane. If the demons come calling again it won't be for many years hence. I have hope, I have met some interesting people along the way and am very glad to be alive.

Many years hence? Within five, he would be dead from all this. He simply could not endure the chaos any more, or the "treatments" that likely contributed to his eventual death, which was also, not coincidentally, very public. The police had to hunt for him until they found his frozen body beside the railroad tracks. Hospitalized in Toronto, he had taken an overdose and wandered off - and the amount of planning this must have taken while on suicide watch is headspinning. He meant business this time.

But his safe reporting tone begins to seem like a form of whistling in the dark, while the bare facts scream in the background.  Glad to be alive? I don't think his respite lasted long at all, and having jolts of electricity fired through your brain seems like an extreme way to get a little peace.

For these blessings I thank the God of my understanding. Without Him by my side would I have been here to tell this sometimes sorry tale? 

He refers to it as a "sorry tale" and even uses the word "tawdry", but this is at odds with his insistence that mental illness not be stigmatized and that he feels no shame in it. He did. I read it in his letters. I don't blame him, I felt the same way about my own disasters, but this stepping away from it is an eerie form of distancing that ultimately isn't helpful at all.

Was there help  for Glen? His own denial was one of the obstacles, though it's kind of understandable given how extreme his case was. One of his colleagues mentioned that it was remarkable "how long he was able to park that pain". True, it was heroic in a sense, but the denial that pushes reality away eventually comes around and bites you in the ass. 

He got sicker and sicker, the treatments more and more desperate, and they continued to damage the part of his  brain that might have ultimately saved him, had there been something - anything -  that would have actually helped him. He mentions a coma, but there was a near-drowning, a stroke, and losing his ability to write, the one thing that kept his personality (though fractured) in a semblance of one piece.We still throw drugs at mental illness, we still shock the brain like  those cattle prods used to humanely kill livestock. But does it actually help, or just shove the person back on their feet for another endless, meaningless trudge?

So what is the answer? There isn't one, and I want to put all this in the past. I have no idea if this is going to help  me or not. I have no idea if I have ten years left to live or ten months, and I don't  want any of that time blighted by depression or mania. But trying to put a good face on it, while it seems brave, ultimately works against you. 

I read about a very grotesque suicide once in a memoir written by a psychiatrist. Another doctor he knew committed suicide literally by doing surgery on himself - injecting local anaesthetic in his neck, making an incision in his own throat with a scalpel, and tying off the jugular vein with surgical skill. His last therapeutic act. Freezing to death by the railroad tracks is horrifying, and I can't and won't minimize the horror of it. No, I have to finally let Glen go, the way I had to let my dear brother go. 

Whatever the quality of it, I have more living to do. I am not finished yet, and I hope mental illness does not swallow me the way it did Glen. But it's beyond ironic that the coping devices we resort to (cool-headed reporting on horrifying situations) can work against real recovery. Black is black, and calling it white or even grey does not alter the reality of tbe total absence of light.

CODA. It's the next day, and I have more thoughts that are less charitable. Unfortunately, I left out the worst part. He told me in a letter that he lived with a woman for 18 months, fathered a child with her, then abandoned both of them in  the middle of the night, never to return. He sneaked out with his belongings in a garbage bag. The baby was six months old. This happened during one of his "well" periods. 

Much as I want to feel compassion here, I just don't. Abandoning a baby is unforgiveable, and I have no idea why I was willing to let it go by for so long. The so-called avuncular good guy Peter Gzowski also had a “secret son”, whom he paid off to keep his mouth shut. Glen’s daughter no doubt had “abandonment issues” – how could she not? – then had to endure his  very public suicide many years later. Due to his status as an "award-winning Canadian journalist", reporters even asked her how she felt about all this, as if they didn't know. But what a great start to your life. No matter how rough Glen's childhood was, his parents didn't walk out on him as if he never existed. 

But his version of events was all very public, veering between too much information and a dishonest rewrite of the truth.  That is the point. He kept doing this over and over again, true confessions that were sometimes extreme and unnecessary (do we really need to hear about the "ready vein", the needle plunging in, the electrodes on his skull?), even though he was supposedly this shy, sensitive soul who hated the “confessional”. The exact same phrase appeared in his Morningside followup, in which he admitted he wasn’t staying sober at all.  But why did he keep doing this? Was it really for the public good? It was a play for sympathy, even  pity, and a compulsive need to call attention to himself in the worst possible way.

But to me, the worst of it is the hypocrisy - saying one thing very publicly, but obviously not meaning it, or at least never able to face it. And I can tolerate just about anything in a person except this. Hypocrites do not and never have deserved my sympathy, no matter how much they spill their guts and beg for attention and forgiveness. Some things truly are beyond forgiveness -  and running out on a child you have fathered and pretending she never existed is far past the limits of my compassion.

AFTERWORD. A long time later. . . 

Since Glen was supposedly such a master of words, he wouldn't use any word lightly or incorrectly. So I became interested in his use of the word "tawdry" to describe his story. Here's what I found:

tawdry  /ˈtôdrē/

Tawdry describes something that is cheap and gaudy in appearance or morally distasteful and sordid.

Core Meanings

• Cheap & Tacky: Used to describe something that is flashy or colorful but of low quality and poor taste (e.g., tawdry jewelry or tawdry decorations). 
• Moral Sordidness: Used to describe behavior, situations, or relationships that are base, unseemly, or shameful (e.g., a tawdry affair or tawdry political revelations).

Synonyms

Flashy, garish, meretricious, tacky, sleazy, or sordid.

So the word "tawdry" doesn't just mean distasteful or sensational, though all his suicide attempts were performative and  "public" in the extreme (stepping in front of a bus, trying to drown himself in a rising tide so his dead body would be found washed up on shore, wandering away from a psychiatric ward, full of pills, and being found by the police days later, frozen to death beside the railroad tracks). 

This so-called intensely shy and private person was making a public spectacle of his attempts to destroy himself, over and over again. His three children and two siblings must have been told more than once that they couldn't find him, and I can't think of anything more cruel and selfish than that. That last and final attempt must have taken a lot of planning, as he was in a psych ward on suicide watch. He even brought sufficient pills with him, and apparently washed them down with beer. I know that when you are admitted, they search your luggage carefully for drugs or razors or anything else you might use to kill or maim yourself.

Finally it "worked" and he was dead, but as a newspaperman he knew a sensational story when he saw one, and he knew full well what would gain the most publicity. He  knew the story would be covered in the papers, not just locally but nationally. He wasn't exactly famous, but he was well-known around the country as an old-school newspaperman, and had won various awards. His father, now largely forgotten, had founded McLeans magazine, which - weirdly - Glen wrote for briefly, before inevitably moving on. Even the horrendously graphic description of his shock treatments (not to mention the two Detox Diaries he wrote and read on-air on Morningside) were gruesomely public, not to mention histrionic. 

He uses the word "tawdry", which has layers of meaning, from tacky and superficial to sordid and shameful. In other words, a sleazy spectacle. I have a theory about that, which is that he led a double life, cruising men's rooms for anonymous sex. It's implied in a lot of his writings. It may even be why his parents made him go to a psychiatrist to "straighten him out", then shocked his 15-year-old brain (without anaesthesia) in the most monstrous treatment I have ever heard of.

But it goes deeper. Peter Gzowsky was so obsessed with Glen that it almost appeared to be a sort of bromance.  In one edition of the Morningside Papers, he kept going on and on about how painfully shy Glen was and how he didn't  want to talk about his father (Gzowski's  mentor and hero, even though he was a thoroughly nasty person). At one point he said - I'm not making this up - that trying to get information out of Glen was like "a tongue probing into the exposed nerve of a tooth".

He also - weirdly - described one of his facial expressions as "the smile which ignites his face". Ignites? Sets it on fire? Gzowski was disappointed this raging facial blaze reminded him of  Glen's mother, not his sainted father.

I don't think it was entirely one-sided. There was a vibe. When Gzowski finally retired, Glen wrote a first-person account of his  time (less than one year) at Morningside. It was titled - again, I am not making this up - In the Spirit of Eros - eros, as in "erotic".

He felt a lot of shame about all this, but on his wild and crazy travels while in a state of drunken mania, I think it must have happened a lot. Surely when he was a teenager digging ditches in some work camp in northern Ontario, with everyone drinking heavily, he was a sitting duck.

It has been hard for me to let go of all this. It happened a shockingly long time ago, but for reasons unknown, maybe my own fairly recent close call, it haunts me now as it never did  when it actually happened. Was I unable to grieve then, overwhelmed by my own struggles? In many ways it was the hardest time of my whole life. But the more I  look at this, the more tawdry it is. 

So was he a good man or not? He was one of the most fucked-up individuals I have ever encountered, and I have met some doozies in my time. He was incredibly selfish and self-absorbed. He dragged his wife and small children all over the world following job after job, and stayed for a year in each place, including China and South America and many other places where they didn't even speak English. Why would he inflict this on his children? He didn't try very hard to maintain sobriety or kick the downers he ate like candy. My estimation of him has fallen fast and hard, and has made a hole in the ground.

I was wrong about him, but  somehow I only saw the poetical, dreamy, sensitive side of him, and conveniently looked away from the many histrionic and very public attempts to kill himself. Didn't he realize how horrendous this would be for his family, his children, his brother and sister? What about the daughter he abandoned when she was six months old, leaving a single mother with a baby and no means of support? 

He got his wish, anyway, if that really WAS his wish, and after many attempts, died very publicly. By this time he was almost skeletal, 6' 2" and 150 pounds, with a front tooth knocked out by God knows what kind of trauma - bar fight, bad fall? But in retrospect, I can see now that this whole wretched tale was a blatant ploy for sympathy and pity, though it's an awkward situation in that people have to try to downplay the horror of it and see him sympathetically.  But this is just more pain inflicted on the survivors.

When the lights finally come on, the glare can be blinding. But blinded by the light means the full horror of the situation can finally be revealed.