💥Prince Harry: DANCE PARTY!💥

What can I say? I guess I don't need to say anything. Harry is an idiot, he can't dance, he doesn't even know where he is or who he is. And apparently, he has plans to move back to the UK! Smart move? This guy does not even have half a functioning brain. But he has Meghan! Stay tuned for more idiocy.

Baby's First Birthday (OK, it's me!)

 

BABY’S FIRST BIRTHDAY: She has a Whole Cake to Herself!

OK, I’ll admit it – this is me at age one. For some reason my family allowed me to dive into my birthday cake, and after initial hesitation I went for it.  Before YouTube, even before home video, this became a photo essay that passed into family legend. I thought these photos were lost forever, then rediscovered them in an album at a family reunion. Please note: after I had my way with the cake, my mother scraped all the icing off and re-iced it, and it was ready to serve.

The sun comes up. . .

 

OK  then, this is probably the last thing I should be doing, but it's a great song, illustrates how immobilizing an obsession can be, and of  course has that refrain, "losing my mind" (somehow, very relevant to this whole glorious mess). That last line, "You said you loved me" is a primal wail of  grief, which could only be expressed by someone who has been there and done  that.

So what do I conclude here? Nothing, except that it's a great song by a great songwriter, and it does  express something I've never heard expressed quite like this before. Sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor, not going left, not  going right. 

I have not yet given up on the return of my own sanity, which has been compromised at various points, but never entirely lost. But that other issue. . . yes, he WAS lost, and lost himself in a way that in retrospect looks like his life's ambition from  the start. Cruel? Yes, but so is this obsession, and I want to be rid of it.  Why can't the dead stay dead? Particularly if it happened 20 years ago, and the meaningful part, FORTY years ago.  That's a long time to be immobilized.

Only love can do that. Or can it?

 

Only love can do that.

Only love.

 But love costs. Does it not, and is that not why I still find myself struggling?

Struggling in a bizarre sort of struggle I want to be free of, because it seems pointless, not to mention a little (a lot) disturbing.

 Why am I unable to oust these thoughts? They’re not hate exactly, though I sometimes find myself trying to whip up a storm of hate to drive these thoughts OUT of my head. But then my favourite King quote came back into  my mind.

 I’ve gone over it and over it until I want to just push the entire thing away forever. Someone died under horrible circumstances, more than twenty years ago now. It was a tragic, even macabre death. It was someone I thought I knew, though we never met. We corresponded for about ten years, and no doubt I saw only an idealized version of him (and vice-versa), though at times what he said to  me was very dark indeed.

 So is it working, this trying to work it out, to address it directly rather than keep trying to shove it into a black closet at the back of my mind and bolting the door?

 He was too good at words. It was a smokescreen, sometimes a swagger. He was playing a role that wasn’t really him. From his early photos, I’ve pretty much determined he was not so much bipolar as schizo-affective, his bouts of  mental illness so extreme he heard a cacophony of  voices jabbering in his head in different languages, believed his mother was a German spy, and at one point thought the Mafia was after him.

 And he ran, and ran, and ran, from job to job, relationship to relationship, always trying to outrun something in himself, or some awareness of who he really was. Are these guesses? Maybe, but based on something I sussed out,  both from those expressions (like Brian Wilson, in his own little internal universe, and Howard Hughes at the end, a scarecrow out of his mind whose reality bore no relation to anyone  else’s).

 Does this help? Of course it doesn’t, but what can I do? We first “met” (never did meet in person)   on the phone, and that was more than forty years ago. Forty. Is it the fact that everyone I knew from that time in my life is now dead? Or something else?

Only love can do that. Do what? Isn’t love more killing than hate? Sometimes. It does strange things to the mind. It can blind you to certain things. More macabre than the manner of his self-imposed death was the fact there was a police report I somehow found online (HOW? Where? How did I even know he had died?) It described  someone I barely recognized, a skeletal, even spectral version of himself, emaciated, a front tooth knocked out, eyes glazed and staring. This wasn’t the same man, or was THIS the real man, and all those other incarnations the imposters?

As I write this, I listen to Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, an exquisite, sylvan meditation which you would never know on first listening was meant to commemorate the tragic deaths of six of his dearest friends, cut down in their prime in World War I. The pieces are wistful, playful, tender, sometimes downright jubilant, with a sense of birdsong and morning dawning against the odds. And this, to mark all those deaths, those irrevocable losses. So I listen to this, to try to do what?

I don’t want to be taken over, I don’t want to think about things that happened or didn’t, forty years ago, or thirty, or twenty. This is NOW, and hard as now is, and it IS hard or I wouldn’t be writing this – so why is my now  so polluted by memories or images or even words he wrote, the words I read so  many times they’ve become seared into my consciousness? Isn’t it bad enough I often think I’m going to die fairly soon, that the cancer they think they “got” is just lying in wait? Must it be compounded by this – what? His bizarre, even grotesque means of suicide – why do I even allow  ONE such thought in my head?

Why can’t I turn this off? I have tried everything. This is just the latest exercise in futility. I  don’t know now if the man was ever truly well, for as a boy he was already experiencing bizarre, frightening symptoms, and was given unanesthetized shock treatments at the age of fifteen, a barbaric practice which never should have been allowed. Then they did it again when he was sixty, all wrong for very similar reasons, and it could not possibly “work” the way he insisted it did the first time.

Worked, meaning – what? Even in his letters, he constantly fantasized about running away. Hitting the road. Hiding out. He literally used the word “hide” a lot. From what? From something in himself? He wrote a tell-all about  his mental illness and these shock treatments, which was gruesomely graphic and probably not helpful to anyone. It was almost ludicrous in its first-person, present-tense, “you are there” approach, grabbing the reader by the lapels and forcefully pulling them into the story  until your face is right up against his. like it or not. A way of capturing your audience and forcing them to bear witness. Horrible, really, but that’s how it was.

And by rights, as with so many other people I’ve loved and lost, this story should have faded by now, and I have no idea why it has come back with such force. What is it trying to tell me? If I was still into the spiritualism I now see as incredibly naïve and even self-serving, the answer to that would be unendurable. I DO NOT want to be “haunted” by anyone or anything. The thought of it is beyond horrible.

Then what? Why can’t love drive out hate, or hate drive out love, or however it actually goes? About six times an hour, the thoughts break in or just appear. I try hard to push them away, to banish them, and sometimes they seem to actually, physically recede into the distance, always on the left side – and what is that about? When I was in therapy trying to deal with a childhood and adolescence of unspeakable traumatic abuse, I felt like there was a wall, almost an  actual, physical barrier on my left side, almost right up against my face, and on the other side of that wall were the horrors. I had thought the wall had been dismantled decades ago after a hell of a lot of hard work and expense. But here it is  again.  This sense it all dwells in an actual, physical location.

I am haunted by what it was like for the family, being told he had literally run away from a psych ward, full of pills and (very sadly, but it also makes me angry) booze. He just wanted to be found in a very public way, so that it would be written about and published. As a newspaperman, he knew that was how it would go down. His macabre attempt to  drown himself was similar, and that left him in  a coma and with brain damage. He wasn’t even very good at dying, obviously, though in the end of course, it gets us all, whether we’re good at it or not.

So did I love him? I thought I did. That song by Stephen Sondheim repeats and repeats in my  mind: “The sun comes up. I think about you. The coffee cup. I think about you. I want you so, it’s like I’m losing my mind.” Then the melancholy chorus: “All afternoon doing every little chore, the thought of you stays bright. Sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor, not going left, not going right.”

Immobilized, and by what? Surely this can’t be “love”, though I thought I loved him, or loved his words, which I now see were another kind of hiding place. It was writing which calls attention to itself: fireworks, ooooh, ahhhhh, verbal pyrotechnics guaranteed to impress the audience with its vividness. I call bullshit here, because I know all the  writer’s tricks and see through them all. I  want to say: GET TO THE POINT. I wonder, have always wondered, what exactly happened to him when he was a 15-year-old  boy doing manual labor in the far north with a bunch of  drunken grown men. I don’t wonder at all, actually, but I do about his orientation, and if his doctors or (more likely) his parents were actually trying to shock him straight. Such things happened then, probably still do in more primitive parts of the world such as the United States.  If it’s true what I suspect, it was a futile attempt to cure his attraction to men, which never left him and manifested in furtive anonymous  sex in men’s rooms rather than any sort of actual relationship.

He never gave me  a home address through at least five changes of job in ten years, never once spelled out his living arrangements except to refer, very rarely, to a “companion” (female, I assume, because he could not face who he really was). Was he with someone at the end? How did he end up emaciated  and with a front tooth knocked out? A fall, a fight, sheer neglect? Those are horrible details. He was 65, and he wanted to die outside and be found and be written about in the papers, as if his family had  not been through enough of an ordeal. It was all publicly aired, and he knew it would be, like those Morningside pieces I now see as ludicrously swaggering and even full of contempt  for everyone around him.

So what are you to say, what am I to think, was he so far gone he didn’t even know what he was doing, or – something else? A piece he wrote in tribute to Peter Gzowski  was called, bizarrely, In the Spirit of Eros (as in “erotic” – the two had a sort of weird bromance going on), but in reality he was living in the spirit of Thanatos, on a death march that went on for a very long time and ended with a frozen body beside the railroad tracks. Then the family had to be told that, yes, they had  finally found him, but the news wasn’t good.

But I must think of me now. I have worked so hard to be free, to be well, and physical limitations have dogged me for more than a year and a half. I make a conscious decision every day not to allow myself to be depressed. I get myself out, I move, I walk, I eat and breathe. NO DEATH MARCH for me! Life has never been, will never be that. So why won’t this dreadful memory just recede into the grey zone of the deep past?

It’s not happening, and force won’t work, and hate won’t work, but even love won’t  work, because it’s tinged with so much anger and horror. I  am appalled at it now, the selfishness, even if he WAS so sick he barely knew what he was doing. He knew. That sort of death took  planning, and timing, and cunning. It took secreting enough pills to kill him – and beer, for Christ’s sake, where did he get THAT? – and somehow getting all this past the people who were watching him like a hawk on a psychiatric ward.

He wrote  an awful poem about being in a psych ward, wrote it “at”  me because he was angry at me for having a  loving family, accusing me of not appreciating them enough. I wish I could get it out of my mind. It’s his usual poesy, overdramatic, first-person and present-tense, dragging the reader right into the centre of his appalling tragedy. It was as if he was shaking us by the shoulders and screaming that he was in pain, but  what the hell were WE supposed to do about it?

I keep telling myself: OK then, if love won’t  drive it out and hate won’t drive it out and I can’t get away from all this horror no matter how fiercely I battle it, can I just accept that it’s there and  try to live with it? I have to do that with so  many things, including my own addictive tendencies and my bipolar condition. I have to put myself first.

I don’t have friends now, which sometimes shocks me – they are, quite literally, all dead. All the people I cared most deeply about are gone. Stroke, heart attack, cancer, suicide. There’s that word again. A horrible word. Even saying the word makes it thinkable.

So what is the point of all this? Is there one, or did I just feel I had to put this down to give me a sense I have some sort of control here? What will it be like, anyway – dying? Will it just be like going to sleep, or will I go to hell for all eternity for not being the person I was supposed to be – or just for being at all?

Now as I listen, it’s Satie’s Gnossiennes on the piano, sultry, almost sinister, a heartbreak on the keys. But healing somehow, as it acknowledges just what life can be like in extremis. Death can seem preferable, but when I get those sinking feelings, that shadowy feeling I can’t even try to describe, I don’t want to do anything but get away from it. In my better moments, I can even convince  myself I’m going to live, after all. For how long is not so much the question – just “how”. I’ve seen enough beloved people through their own harrowing ends  to know it can be a horrible, horrible thing to  die. You deteriorate and become a bad parody of yourself, until finally you are no more.

So how will it be? And will this wraith, this spectral presence, ever bugger off and leave me alone? Bohdan, if HE wasn’t dead also, would say it’s probably his spirit coming back or whatever, but I cannot live with even the possibility of that.

So I have the music, and my life, such as it is, still precious to me simply because it is mine. It has been a long time coming. I don’t need a reason now. I live, and I suppose I will die, sooner or later, and sometimes I even hope it’s sooner or I will just die in my sleep (and right now, it’s my main ambition and goal). I would rather not be the one to survive, as everyone seems to fear I will and become a burden on everyone. I know that’s what they’re thinking. It’s a subtext in the family. Not so much that they care about me, but that they will be stuck with me.

These aren’t great thoughts, but they are honest, and mine. I did NOT choose a macabre death, at least not so far, though I suppose there were times I wanted to. When he actually died, when he was found and I somehow or other found all those articles in the paper (how?? How did I get hard copies of papers from New Brunswick? How did I find that police report online?), I was barely coming out of my own hellscape, a maelstrom of mental illness that very nearly finished me. My life was about to begin again, but I did not know that then.

That won’t happen this time.

So I am left with the quote, and my doubts about it. Love, hate, aren’t they all the same thing? And the opposite of love isn’t hate  anyway – it’s indifference. Something I have rarely felt about anything.

 But that glazed mental patient in the final photo, eyes like blank staring discs, seemed indifferent to me, hollowed out. The opposite of caring is the absence of caring.

 I can’t end this with any sort of fanciful  amen. I can’t find images to salt it with to break up the monotony of all these paragraphs. I don’t think anyone is going to read it anyway. The only blog posts that get attention now are from ten years ago, when someone stumbles on something I wrote then. Gratifying, but why feed something I should have wound up years and years ago?

 Life isn’t a performance, except it is, because those around you can’t help but see. But they are busy performing as well. Busy with their own grubby little problems, their pettiness. Mine is to take care of myself as well as I can, for as long  as I can. To try to have a reasonably good day, or if it’s a bad one, tell myself that tomorrow will be better.

 Which it usually is. Confounds me, but  that’s just how it is.

Long Black Veil: Why can't I get past this horror?

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day, though almost nobody knows about it or pays much attention. For the most part, the best sufferers of mental illness can hope for is pity.

But there is another way, something that might just break through public indifference and scorn, and that is the power of story. This piece ran in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal in 2006. It mourns the death by suicide of my dear friend and comrade Glen Allen, an award-winning journalist and great human being who suffered deeply from the effects of bipolar disorder.

I will not say he "lost the battle" with this sometimes-nightmarish disorder because I think he won, in that he lived for over 60 years, loved and worked and married and had children and wrote and taught and travelled all over the world. Even in the midst of unbelievable pain, he was articulate and wrote with a grace I'll never approach. I'd like to share this article again, just as it went down ten years ago, when my grief was very fresh.

December is long and dark at the best of times, and this year the merriment of Christmas was dulled by a death. When I opened my daily paper to the obituary section, I saw a face that made me gasp, a face I had never actually seen but knew as well as my brother’s. I read the account of his death in disbelief, shocked but not completely surprised that my friend had frozen to death beside some railroad tracks in Toronto, full of pills, after wandering away from a psychiatric ward.

My friend was Glen Allen, newspaperman, Maclean’s correspondent, world traveller, insightful and witty writer, gentle, courageous (and sometimes lost) soul. What brought us together was some ferociously honest writing about alcoholism, and what held us together for years and years was a mutual struggle with various demons. He always wrote about them better than I did. Or so I always thought.

I never knew Glen in the usual sense. I never saw his face. I had heard his voice a number of times, most memorably when he read his Getting Sober and Staying Sober pieces on CBC Radio’s Morningside. I sensed straight-from-the-shoulder directness and convoluted complexity in one person. This man was in pain, and so eerily distanced from the pain that he could write about it in prose that shimmered and shocked and stung. His writer's mind was so alive and focussed as to be almost crystalline, whereas the rest of him seemed to be slouching towards oblivion.

Sometime during his short tenure on Morningside, I began to write to Glen Allen. This guy just had a magical way with words, and seemed like a genuine (and pain-ridden, and large-hearted) human soul. I just had to get in touch with him. I was delighted to get responses, brief at first, then longer and longer, and over time we developed a sort of relationship through the mail. This was in the days of real letters on paper, written by hand, and I always delighted in his vital and elegant script, even if it deteriorated pretty badly towards the end. Often he’d write on beautiful blank cards, and I have one in front of me now, gorgeous sprays of crimson and gold called Flowers for Lord Buddha.

I think my letters must have gone on and on. I could hardly help myself, in those days, since I had no idea what was wrong with me and why I could not settle myself the way everyone else seemed to. But Glen had the same square-peg syndrome, which in his case registered as endearing eccentricity. He had a black lady cat named Imelda (I can’t think of a better cat name, can you?); he was concerned about his future once, and consulted a psychic in the backwoods of New Brunswick; when asked to be a speaker at a meeting, he shared his “experience (long), strength (not much), and hope (I’m going to hang on if it kills me)”.

Ten years is a long time, ten birthdays, ten Easters, ten Christmases. What did we write about? I can barely bring myself to open the file folder that holds all his letters, preserved and precious to me. The stark end of his life has made it impossible But I know we wrote about recovery: from alcoholism (we were both afflicted, and though his sobriety was patchy at best, he genuinely loved AA and treated it with the greatest reverence in his writing), from our parents (both of us had grown up with oppressive, cuttingly sarcastic fathers who withheld affection unless our performance in life was perfect: meaning we were never loved at all), and the worst thing of all, depression, the thousand-pound rock that weighs on the sensitive soul and destroys pleasure and joy and love. Both of us had bench-pressed thousands of pounds over the years, and though he told me his official diagnosis was manic-depression, now rather slickly called "bipolar disorder", I did not realize we shared the same affliction until this past spring, when I experienced what is delicately referred to as an “episode”.

I thought then of Glen, wondered where he was, how he was doing. It wasn't the first time. Wasn't even the twentieth. We wrote to each other for an incredible ten years, while Glen pulled up stakes and moved again, and again, and again, afflicted with terminal restlessness, an attempt to outrun his own pain. But in 1996, I finally lost the thread. I tried and tried. I even e-mailed his brother Gene, but got no answer. The trail was cold, and I had to surrender him to fate or the angels.

When I read his obituary, accompanied by a picture of Glen looking like a mere boy, sweet and shy, someone who just called out to be loved, I was barely out of my own thrashing battle, still trying to figure out what the hell happened to me, how the genie had exploded out of the bottle and derailed my life. But I kept thinking: Glen would know. He'd know just what to say to me, he'd know how to spread balm very gently on the raw wound of my mind. Like a sherpa, he'd been there before me, braved the elements and somehow survived it all.

Until now. When I read of the way he died, frozen to death like a street person (those souls he so identified with and wrote about with such compassion), with no one to hold him as the life ebbed out of him, I wanted to scream at the injustice of it all: at the medical community's complete inability to help such a large-hearted, lavishly gifted human being; at the gap between Glen and his loved ones (there was no doubt he loved them, but something always got in the way), at the grim, fearful, love-deprived boyhood that left scars on him, and in him, that would never be healed.

I did take out the folder, and looked at his dear, graceful handwriting, but haven't read the letters yet. I had thought of writing a piece about him, a sort of tribute, but I knew no one would really get it. When I think of him, which is often, tears well up, and I just want my funny, sardonic, gentle, wounded, wonderful brother back.

There is a song from the 70s by a group called Bread that I keep hearing in my mind. It has a haunting lyric that is like an impressionist painting of Glen's life:

"For a love that wouldn't bloom,
For the hearts that never played in tune.
Like a lovely melody that everyone can sing,
Take away the words that rhyme, it doesn't mean a thing."

The words seem to make a melody of themselves: I think I knew his name. I never knew him, but I loved him just the same. Wish that I had found the way, and the reasons that would make him stay.

But he couldn't stay; the pain was too great, the loneliness had hollowed him out, and the demons that screamed inside his skull had to be silenced once and for all. Such a person, making an intentional exit, is often described as "finally being at peace".

I think it goes beyond that. I think he is everywhere. I know he hangs around here, a warm spot in the room, a kind of disembodied smile, and I don't want him to go.

There is, of course, a postscript to this piece, first published in 2015. The article I wrote was published in 2006. I've been haunted by all that happened to Glen, and unable to shake it - even becoming angry  about it, and with him, as irrational as that sounds.

Glen was suffering from  more than "just" bipolar disorder, a malady I've lived with all my life. We cheered each other on during our (amazing) TEN-year correspondence, but I know he went through hard  times with addiction and was in  and out of hospital many times. After I lost touch with him, he went through worse ordeals, until he wrote a very graphic newspaper piece about having shock treatments, and the horrendous battles he had fought in the year or so before that.

I  do need to look  after myself now, as I don't even know if I'm going to survive. I am convinced cancer is going to get me, as it already "got" half my colon and may take the rest of it. I  am haunted, and wonder how to exorcize myself. He was a complicated man, and he DID run from things, but there was another side to him  that I loved. The extremes of mental illness he suffered (hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, voices jabbering in his head and over-the-top behaviour) scream schizophrenia, or at least schizo-affective disorder, which is really a combination of bipolar and schizophrenia. The incredible ordeals he suffered as a boy, including shock treatments at age 15 without the benefit of anaesthesia, seem to confirm this. So he was underdiagnosed, undertreated, and no doubt never on the right medication to truly help him. And on top of that, his sobriety could be shaky, complicated by his severe addiction to benzodiazepenes. 

So now what? I have never experienced a haunting like this, and I honestly don't know what to do  about it, as things are dark enough right now and my energy is at a premium. I threw away all his letters a couple of months ago, all the newspaper articles, all of it, and then longed to have it back. I was actually glad to find a few samples of it here. I was honestly trying to get my mind back. I know he would NOT have wanted to haunt me this way, no matter how haunting and horrible his death was.

Am I the only one who still remembers him? At this level, yes, it's likely. It was forty years ago we first connected through Morningside, thirty years ago since we corresponded, and twenty years ago since he committed suicide in the snow in Toronto, days before Christmas, always one of his hardest times. His children would be middle-aged, and most of his colleagues dead. Peter Gzowksi smoked and drank himself to death in 2002, age 60.

All those years - yet, since that fateful night in the ER when I learned I likely had cancer, this has haunted me and continues to. Where do I go from here? I no  longer have a church community or attend AA, and like Glen, most of my close friends have already died. I know how it feels to be abandoned. He ran from everything, but what choices did he have? 

I  have tried this and tried that, and now try to lean into it, which I know  doesn't  work either. But I have to try to dispel this black shadow which trails me like the long black veil of the old song. Of course I need to put my health first, including my mental health, and  at least try to  enjoy whatever time I have left.

This is the most recent of many posts I've done on Glen over the past 20  years, and as I said in my newspaper tribute, he lingers on, haunts me, and I don't know why. I can't give this a happy ending, but, like Glen, at least I can give it an honest report. He would have appreciated that.

Swarmed by Goslings! My day at Como Lake

 

This has never happened before! I stood in the middle of a colony of Canada geese, and the goslings, thinking I was going to feed them, stampeded towards me and then surrounded me. I was able to get closer to them than ever before, and after grazing in the grass, the parents shepherded them across the path to the lake, where they plopped into  the water. This was my best gosling video EVER!! 

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.