MORNINGSIDE MEMORIES: why here, why now?

So here I sit, a day or so after my Morningside flood of words, which I honestly didn’t know was going to happen until I sat down and wrote it. It poured out, or rather, gushed out under pressure. There was a lot to say. Why I would even go back so many years is anyone’s guess, unless my current health problems have brought mortality up so close it’s smacking me in the face.

I wrote the piece with the intent of doing more with it. I was actually intending to put it on Facebook, even knowing no one ever clicks on my links and actually READS what I write.  And if anyone follows my blog any more, it’s only to comment on things I wrote 10 years ago. So I do it for myself, or for that mythical discovery in ten more years, when, who knows, SOMEONE might happen upon it and have it speak to them, or maybe even sing to them.

So I wrote the piece, not knowing where it would take me, all eight pages or so, and it carried me along in a flood, so that I only needed a bit of tinkering and polishing. Then I posted a link on Facebook, but with a weird feeling.

Why now, exactly? It was an astonishingly long time ago.  But something clicked today that might explain at least a bit of it.

There’s all this stuff  coming out now about  Princess Diana, and the fact that 2027 is the 30^th anniversary of her death. Weirdly (and I just made this connection right now, this minute), Morningside ended in 1997, almost at the exact time of her death. Now the controversy is over whether people (her own brother, to be exact) should  still be “dining out” on her memory, bone-picking in other words, to make a cheap buck.

So has that Diana-stuff influenced me here? Could be, as I can’t help  but follow the wretched soap opera of the Royals, especially the lunacy of Harry and Meghan and their never-ending, ever-escalating melodrama (or “mello-drammer”, I should say, with a tinny piano playing). By 1997, when the show ended, I had pretty much moved on from  Morningside, though I was a huge fan of DiscDrive with Jurgen Gothe, a lovely man who became a good  friend (and died, like all my closest friends, a few years later). I think Morningside “petered” out, or just sort of gradually ran out of steam. It was an ‘80s sort of show with ‘80s sorts of interests, and it did not really provide anything a younger person would be interested in.

This means that any remaining fans of Morningside would have to be, at  very least, middle-aged. Or older. (Or dead?) But I felt almost compelled to post the link on Facebook, knowing it would go the way of all my other Facebook posts. Ignored. The one time I had a lot of response was when I told a silly little story about wearing casual pants to the mall, and having two old ladies titter at me, point to my bottoms and ask me if I was in my pajamas.

That’s it. I got 50+ comments, most of them gushing  with compassion for me for all I had to endure –such torture! The piece was written totally tongue-in-cheek – in truth, what these two old busybodies hissed at me struck  me as borderline comical. But as always, my dear friends on Facebook completely missed the point.

So now, when I could really use SOME sort of response, I won’t get any. I  don’t think  so, anyway. The original Morningside piece ran with the usual small, square image (Facebook crops these things for you, see), which was a  cut-down version of one of the book covers. If you don’t see a picture that totally encompasses everything that is in the article, then it doesn’t exist. It was hard for me to look  at all those covers of all those books, the endless series of recycled free material that was The  Morningside Papers. And I did something a bit daft, but I did it – I went on Amazon and ordered Gzowski’s The Morningside Years, basically to see if I’m in it (and if not, damn them anyway!), or if there’s anything more about Glen or Ralph Allen. Well, need I wonder? I KNOW they’ll be in there, along with a lot of twat-waffle from Gzowski about how magnificent they were.

After 30 years and a total revolution in human communication, Gzowski has been re-evaluated, along with the importance of his show. It really wasn’t much. It was a bit embarrassing, to tell the truth. I remember a few ludicrous features: Memorable  Meals (“I had pancakes on board a sinking ship!"), A Morningside Bestiary (“I saw a chipmunk this morning!”) and – my least favourite – a parody of  Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie poems. The one I remember is (get the sick bucket): “I’m sitting in the middle of a very messy kitchen.” No kidding, that was the featured poem, the winner of one of those innumerable little contests. (I won’t mention the others, as it’s kind of a sore  point for me. I  was told by one of the producers that my entry was by far and away the best, and that no, I wasn’t  going to be named the winner because Peter didn’t  like me. Not the piece I wrote. He didn’t  like ME. No specific reason was given.)

Well, listen, Peter-in-your-grave, the feeling is  mutual. You were no more the affable host than Ellen DeGeneres  was the purveyor of kindness and compassion, and Oprah Winfrey the shining goddess of self-help. All were revealed to be tin gods, mis-crowned by a deluded public. A lot of energy went into those facades, and in Gzowski’s case it was maintained by mobs of sycophants (including Glen Allen, the "courtly" writer who sucked up to the King) and lashings of alcohol and cigarettes, smoking being the pistol with which he eventually shot himself.

But I did notice, after writing that long blurt last night, that today I felt some sort of change. I’ve been struggling with a certain aspect of these memories, and trying very hard to somehow get back at the helm, to get back to myself, to know in my core that my feelings are my feelings and do not need to be justified to anyone. Self-possession, in other words, not possession by some  “demon”, as GA liked to call his worst habits.

So if I made this a series, would anyone bother? Likely not, but I do know, from how I feel right now, that this is doing ME some good. Yesterday was a horrible day for me, I felt really sick, I realized I am nowhere near finished with the intrusive medical tests that will eventually reveal whether or not I really do have cancer. That’s what is on the table. But this sort of writing is absorbing. The kids would say it’s my superpower. And by the time I went to bed, I felt more solid, less like I had been shot full of holes.

So it serves me.

Should I continue? Haven’t I always? You have to know when to get off the stage, but that may well be taken care of for me. The big cane may come out, latch on to me and pull me off before I am ready. So in the meantime, don’t I have the right to say what I need to say? 

I know the answer already. 

MORNINGSIDE: Memories, second thoughts, and why we shouldn’t have heroes

 

So what happens when your hero turns out to have feet of clay?

Well – is there any  other kind? Isn’t this realization a kind of punishment for the sin of having a hero in the first place?

This all goes back a long way, so bear with me, please. It was back in the 1980s, and I was living in Hinton, a small town in Alberta in the foothills of the Rockies. Like a lot of people, I was a huge fan and rabid listener to Morningside, that folksy, down-home, ultra-Canadian radio program which ran for three hours every weekday (with a cornball ten-minute drama tacked on at the end, which now seems utterly cringeworthy, but there you go. This was CULTURE,  and the drama  even provided that all-important “Canadian content”.)

Of course, at the helm of Morningside was one Peter Gzowski, always presented as an avuncular nice-guy, friendly, down-to-earth, and only stirred to ire if anyone dared question his rabid Canadianism. He seemed to champion local stories, pride in your small-town community, tales of everyday heroism, people heroically struggling with serious health conditions, and predictably dull interviews with Literary Figures, the usual round of third-string Canadian novelists who were making a wee splash with their latest book.

Now it seems painfully parochial, awfully small-time, but  then, at least where I lived, it was a very big deal. I even began to send in some of my short pieces, and did backflips of  delight when some of them were actually being read on the air. It never occurred to me I was giving stuff away when I should have been asking for the dignity of some sort of recompense. This was MORNINGSIDE, the champion of the small-scale Canadian author! How crass were you to even think of - ? But the utter glory of hearing Gzowski cough and wheeze his way through the piece was supposed to be enough. Certainly, my small-town neighbors in Hinton were thrilled I was getting so  much national exposure.  At that point, I had a weekly column in my local paper, but back then, newspaper columns were read today, and used to wrap  fish tomorrow.

After a  while, a friend of mine began to get HER pieces read on the air, so we sort of banded together, keeping an eye on each other, of course, but mostly cheering each other on. Then there was The Morningside Papers,  a series of books made up of all those donated bits of folksy stories, thrill-packed adventures in tiny towns, and even a few moderately-more-serious topics. My first piece in the Papers was a  thrill, as was the second and third. My friend Amber also had quite a few of her own writings in the Papers, and at one point we had a champagne celebration that was covered in the  Hinton Parklander. Fame at last!

But the BIG one for me was being asked to  appear on the  show to respond  to a man who had written a rather lame folk song about the Great Hinton Train Crash.

It wasn’t that big a deal when it happened, but it was prime Gzowksi  material, small-towny, folksy, of the earth, of  the Common  (of course, Canadian) Man. So I got on there and talked  to the guy, who hummed and hawed  and  said  that, actually, no, he knew nothing at all about Hinton and only read about  the crash in the newspapers. I was especially incensed when he  referred to our  glorious community as “a sleepy little pulp-mill town”. I had  a few word s to say about THAT.

It made for good radio, or OK radio, though of course there was no recompense except the shining glory of being ON Morningside! My small-town friends were ecstatic, and I actually got a few gigs on Edmonton radio as a result (and by the holy, they PAID me, though not very much. At least they didn’t shame me for asking.).

At one point, a new producer came on-board, and I recognized him as Glen Allen, a man who wrote a truly hair-raising series for Morningside on getting sober. This was his Detox Diary, first-person, present-tense journal entries (Day One, Day Two, etc.), written in what now sounds like rather purplish prose, It was “You Are There” stuff, recounting his physical breakdown as a result of floods of booze, cigarettes and pills. “My liver is as big as a house” was one  memorable phrase, as was his insistence “I loved  booze  more than some people love each other. What a time it has been! The rye and  ginger years, the rum years, and then the discovery of Russian vodka, the Ultimate Weapon, the sweet sting of the steppes rising from the bottles with the strange-sounding names. Taken neat, it was strong enough to run a tractor.” If any of this seems creepily detached from the reality of vomiting blood in a detox ward, then you’re right, it IS creepy and actually irresponsibly dramatic. By the end of it, on Day 12 or whatever, he’s citing  a psychiatric nurse who described him as “superficial, infantile, and lost in life.”

I should have listened.

Because he was so honest and courageous (confessing he left little glasses of vodka all over the house, so that “passing from  room to room, travelling by the Stations of the Cross, I would never be far from good cheer”), he was deemed a hero. He was confessing all this on public radio - reading his pieces himself, of course, not in Gzowki’s wheezy baritone. Back then, before social media and reality TV exposed the public’s blatant schadenfreude, the myth was that the more you “shared” this harrowing stuff, the better for the public good. And, of course, it couldn’t help but help YOU in your “journey”. So  everyone thought.

So Glen landed the gig. He was “in” with Gzowski, and thus with Morningside, though, as was typical with him, he lasted less than a year.

I  was actually kind of riveted by his Detox Diaries, and when they appeared in the Morningside Papers, I  wanted to get in touch with him. Oh yes, and I also wanted to run some things by him for  the show, which worked after a  fashion. They used maybe ten per cent of what I sent in, and Glen let me in on the fact Gzowski thought I was  a nuisance and wished I would go away. But what I was to learn about Glen Allen should have turned some lights on.

He was the  son of Ralph Allen, whom I had  never heard of, but who was fabled as some sort of  founding father of Canadian journalism. And Gzowski  idolized him to the point of sainthood, if not godhood. The fact Allen died in his 50s from smoking  and drinking just added to his mythology. So here was his son Glen, fresh off those astonishingly self-revealing and unnecessarily graphic  pieces about booze (not a confessional, but "a last letter to a lost love", he called them) that he read on the  air – and Gzowksi began to rhapsodize about him, calling  him a “shy and courtly writer” and “one of the finest journalists in Canada”. He was a fine writer when he was able to  sit up and tap at a typewriter, but a lot of the time he was, by his own admission, face-down.

 It was a strange sort of bromance, with Gzowski constantly trying to pump Glen for stories – any stories, anything at all – about his hero. He didn’t want to play, making it clear his father was horribly cruel to him and they never got along. Gzowski  even claimed that trying to squeeze Ralph Allen stories out of his son was like “a tongue probing the exposed nerve of a tooth.”  He also described “the smile that ignites his face”, though he was disappointed that this odd facial blaze reminded Gzowski  of his mother rather than his hero Ralph.

As a producer, Glen Allen lasted barely one season, but by this  time he  was truly encouraging my writing  and even urging me to try to sell some of it. I eventually did get gigs with  the Edmonton Journal, and eventually wrote for papers all over the country, including the Montreal Gazette and the Globe  and  Mail. Would I have gone ahead with it without  Glen’s promptings? Yes, I would, but it was still kind of nice. In the fullness of time, I wrote five novels (well, five and a half)  and published three - with publishers, folks, real ones, not the other kind. If my timing had been different, who knows, I might have sat there inhaling all that toxic second-hand smoke.

Starting with me, of course, Glen and I began to write to each other, and this correspondence (pen to paper, with envelopes and stamps  - this was the old days) went on, on and off at least, for nearly ten years. We shared a lot about certain mutual struggles – I gave up drinking and joined AA when I was 36, realizing it was doing terrible  damage to my loved ones and my life. And like Glen, I had fallen down the mental illness rabbit hole when I was only in my teens.

You have to understand how people idolized Glen’s  writing. It was, as I was to realize later, writing that calls attention to itself, inciting “ooooohs” and “ahhhhhhs” from the audience, like watching a fireworks display. But it would have helped if he had stuck to facts and not resorted to so much embellishment and  florid storytelling, which I now see as unnecessarily manipulative. “Respect your readers” should be the first law of journalism.

I was to find out later that Gzowksi  had pulled a lot of the same shit, doing just about anything (including staging  disaster scenes  to boost his reputation as a reporter) to get famous. I  was also to find out later that he privately groused about me because I was only sending my pieces in  to  get exposure on the radio. Horrors! A writer wants people to hear them? And to even think about being paid was even more reprehensible.

But back to Glen, and the fact that his commitment to sobriety was shaky at best. I was also to  learn he had bipolar disorder and had crashed completely at the time of his detox diaries. To hear him talk  about it, his life at that time was a smoking ruin, he had no job, his family was hanging by a thread, and he was close to actual death, but here was Gzowski, idolizing his dead Dad and willing to do anything  to squeeze information out of him. 

So he was hired.

 A few years later, when Gzowski  retired from Morningside, Glen wrote a long newspaper piece about his ten-month stint on the show (which actually was about average for him sticking  at anything). The piece was called “In the Spirit of Eros” – “eros” as in “erotic”. I will try not to read too much into that, but added to the tongue probing at an aching tooth, you’ve  got to wonder.

Some of his letters were beautiful  in that  powerful storytelling  way he had, but there was always  a smokescreen, a sense he wasn’t  being very truthful and that it was all from some sort of strange arm’s length. He did land in detox again because he was swallowing  benzodiazepines like candy, and I never had the sense he really became a part of AA, just went to meetings, sat at the back, then bolted out the  door. He never had a home group and was "terrified" to get a sponsor, presumably because he wasn't putting too many sober days back-to-back.

In those ten years, he  worked at five different jobs in three provinces. Newspapers, magazines, radio. He even did a short stint at Macleans magazine, which his legendary father had founded. (Glen was totally obsessed with this man who had treated him so shabbily, and referred to him in almost all his letters.)  I could  not keep  track, and he never provided a  home address. I didn’t  pry, because he was supposedly intensely private in spite of his detox True Confessions. He had a  “companion”, but never gave a name. I did wonder sometimes if it was a man or a woman, though ultimately I don’t think it mattered, because nothing ever lasted with him.

Then the trail went cold. He stopped answering  me, perhaps taking off on another adventure somewhere – he constantly talked about “hitting the road again”, and “hiding out”. In the fullness of time I realized he had dragged his wife  and small children all over the world, each gig lasting  a year or two. Many of these countries, such as Chile and China, were not  even English-speaking, which makes me wonder if he really did care about his children and their wellbeing. It seemed utterly selfish to me that a man who was supposedly so lavishly gifted had to keep hopping  around as if his feet never touched the ground. 

Then it  stopped, the trail went cold, Morningside ended - but not after a final piece of  mine appeared in the last Morningside Papers. But there was something wrong at the end of it.  Something awful.

The name of my town was listed as KINRON, Alberta. Kinron. There IS no Kinron, such a place does not exist, and to make matters worse, I  had already been ON the show doing an interview from Hinton.  No one seemed to think this small gaffe meant anything. No, not to folksy, small-towny, parochial Morningside! Why should I be so  upset, when they were generous enough to select my writings for the show?

KINRON.

Ultimately, I heard Gzowski  had died of emphysema, after writing an astonishing detox diary of his own – claiming he was in rehab for smoking. I have never heard of such a thing, but to his last gasp  he never admitted to his alcoholism. He was as destructive a drinker as Glen, but much less honest about it. It was only later that I found out about his “secret son”, a child  he had fathered with an anonymous woman, only to keep paying him off to  keep his mouth shut.

Funny,  because the same thing happened with Glen. He told a harrowing story (to  me, anyway – to  him it was just reporting) about moving in with a woman he barely knew, fathering a child with her, then leaving when the baby was only six months old. He put all his things in a garbage bag and sneaked out, likely in the middle of the night, never to return.

Yes, he was an afflicted soul, but as he was to claim years later in another harrowing You Are There piece (about getting  shock treatments in a psych ward), this was one of those long stretches when he insisted he was perfectly well and totally functional. He claimed to only experience a bout of mental illness every ten years or so, with “eight or nine trouble-free years” in between, before "the demons came calling" again. When they finally did, the shock treatments he wrote about made him euphoric, and the newspaper piece he published made him seem positively giddy, enraptured by the sudden bright colors, the murmuring of friendly voices (psych nurses) and the pleasant ticking of a clock. To  someone who is bipolar, this is NOT good news.

By the time I read that piece, he was dead by his own hand. Hospitalized again, the fifth or sixth  time in three provinces in two years, he took  an overdose washed down with beer, wandered away from the psych ward into a freezing Toronto  winter, and froze to death by the railroad tracks. There was even a police report about  a “missing man”, showing someone who did not look like Glen at all, skeletal, with glazed eyes and a front  tooth knocked out.

I know how I am supposed to feel about all this. In fact, it seems horribly cruel to feel any other way. Compassion, even pity, and huge admiration for his courage in describing how the doctor glued electrodes to his skull and flipped the switch, sending a jolt of electricity through “the addled spheres of my brain”.

But the piece was written with a lot  of mythologizing  and glib phrasing that somehow held it all away  at a safe distance, while pulling the reader in, forcibly, with that inevitable first-person, present-tense style he loved to use.

I know it was an awful death, and I can kind of see why he needed to write about the shock treatments, but this idea that spilling your guts is always  a good thing has aged like milk. I am sure most people reading his psych ward diary were taken aback  - even I was, and I knew the man well enough to know this wasn’t the first time. Nor did he need to recount every single one of his bizarre manic episodes, in which he heard jabbering foreign voices in his head, hired a film crew for a non-story on corrupt bankers in Montreal, hallucinated seeing his dead father in elevators, went on  several wild hitchhiking trips in Northern Alberta, and believed the Mafia was after him.

This seemed a lot more like paranoid schizophrenia to me than bipolar, but maybe he was both. The weird dissociative thing pushed it all outside himself. When he wrote about an accident after a bad drunk, he said “an arm was paralyzed, and stayed that way for  a month.” AN arm, not HIS arm. Another time, he cut “an arm” with a broken bottle. And the poetic ramblings in between were what we writers call “making story”, We don’t ever let mere facts get in the way.

I don’t know why all this has come back to  me now, except I think I do. I am not at all sure the health problems I am struggling with now are going to be survivable. It’s not looking good. So is this bizarre death from 20 years ago  haunting  me because my  own death is imminent? And what will that be like? Can it be any worse than what happened to Glen?

Gzowski  wheezed out his last in a cardiac ward in 2002, and Glen lay down and died like a homeless man three years later, having literally run away from a psychiatric ward. I see him now as running and running, even during those long stretches of “trouble-free years” he claimed to have. He fathered a child during one of those stretches, then abandoned his daughter and a single mother with no means of support.

So  do I forgive all this because he was “mentally ill”? He was, but so am I, technically, living with bipolar  disorder which has come close to finishing me many times. When I tried to share some of my mental health struggles on Morningside, the pieces were treated like dead rats. You had to be the son of a hero to get away with that.

So I’ve done a lot of things to try to shake this off. Morningside now seems embarrassing to  me, not just small-time but totally hypocritical, willing to mangle the name of one of those quaint small towns we all were supposed to celebrate, even after featuring many of my writings and even an interview from  my home  town which was on the air.

KINRON.

Yes, Kinron, which is “nowhere”, and in a way Glen was Nowhere Man, but it seemed like self-exile to  me, and during those supposed (self-reported) long, long stretches of sobriety and stability, what was his  excuse for yanking his small children all over the globe, never letting them settle anywhere, and abandoning an infant daughter? The suicide attempts he so willingly recounted were all very public – he  jumped in front of a bus in Montreal, he took pills in New Brunswick and waited for the  tide to carry him out (resulting in a coma), then ended up in Toronto as the “missing man”, frozen to death beside the railroad tracks. These attempts all had something in common. They were extremely public, and were all geared towards finding his dead body in  a very public place. Being a newspaperman, he knew all about getting the story, and he knew in each case it would invariably  get into the papers (he was a public figure, after all), and his family would be approached for comment. As if they hadn’t gone through enough hell already.

 So I have a lot of anger mixed in with the pity and bafflement, and I now see his “diaries” as sensationalistic and far too graphic to be of any real help to  anyone. In the final analysis, I don't even think it helped him. We don’t need to hear about the technician “plunging a needle into a ready vein”, knocking him out, gluing electrodes to his skull, flipping the switch like something out of a Frankenstein movie. He even phrased it, “And out I am in this fourth of eight shock treatments at New Brunswick General Hospital.” Out I am? This takes his usual, attention-grabbing (if not lapel-grabbing) “you are there” to a  whole new, ghastly level. How can you SAY you’re “out” if you are indeed unconscious?

Someone should have blocked the publication of this piece, particularly when it was reprinted after he  died. At very least, he should have waited to write it after the course of treatment was finished he was only at the halfway mark) and he came back down to earth. Someone should have taken him aside, but no one did, because the writing was so impressive. He worked at that. He did die rather horribly, and I grieved, and kept all his letters for a long time, until I couldn’t  any more and decided I needed to dump  the whole subject, but since writing is my way of making SOME  sort of sense of my life, I’ve  needed to do this now. Morningside, with its faux-folksy host  (with the secret son) and Son of the Legend (with the secret daughter) now make me feel a little queasy. That was then, of course, and this is now, the only now I have.  There’s a Cole Porter song which keeps coming into my head: aptly, it’s called Every Time we Say Goodbye, and one of its more memorable lines is, “But how strange the change/From major  to minor.”

Yes, when the fog lifts and the lights come on and the Frankenstein scenario is finally over, things definitely slide into  a minor  key. If anyone actually reads this, and I am a fool to  think anyone will bother, no doubt I’ll get blasted for NOT having warm, fuzzy, folksy memories of Morningside and Peter Gzowski,  everyone’s jovial favourite uncle. But  Kinron. And all those pieces, when I did not  yet realize it was OK  for a  writer to actually try to  make  a living with their skills. For even thinking about being paid, I was roundly shamed  and branded an opportunist.

I  won’t do my usual thing and break this up with photos or  images or whatever, because I’m too tired right now, I’m exhausted from treatments of my own (though no  electrodes are glued to my skull). A lot of  time has passed, more than half my life, and an awful  lot of this stuff has aged very poorly. For  the most part, though there are likely a few diehards, Gzowski is no  longer seen as the folksy hero, his endless wheezy chain-smoking and equally-endless drinking starting to make him look kind of shabby. No doubt Ralph Allen was a nasty piece of work (smoking and drinking himself to death as well), a narcissist who made everyone think it was a privilege to  work for him. Glen - poor lost Glen - was doing himself in steadily through most of  his 65 years. Yes, he kept a record, but  though his writing was praised for its “oooooohh”, “ahhhhhhhh” factor, I see through all of those tricks now.

There’s a not very nice name for these attention-seekers in this  age of internet fame and infamy. Yes, those were different times, but not THAT different. Don’t pretend to be this shy, private person  who only spills his guts (FOR PAY, by the way – he was paid for everything he did on Morningside – son  of the Legend, after all!)  for the public good. What he wrote did not reduce the stigma or “raise awareness”. It had shock value, and as  a seasoned writer, he knew it did and chose it deliberately. But gut-lurching shock is not a public service. It’s a deliberate demand for attention, sympathy and even pity, and though he no doubt was treated like a hero for it, there was always something in it for him. If nothing else, it got him another job when he had crashed in flames once again.

So  don’t have heroes. They have feet of clay, as we  all do. I hope the public is at least a little more sophisticated now, a little more skeptical. I suppose when I heard my pieces read on the air, it did give  me a momentary thrill, and made me a teeny-tiny celebrity  in my sleepy  little  pulp mill town.

HINTON, folks. Not Kinron. Kinron does not exist.

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.

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 try to 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 following story first appeared in the New Brunswick Reader on June 19, 1999.  Glen Allen was found frozen to death last week in Toronto.)

Angels of Madness by Glen Allen

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.