Showing posts with label mental illness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mental illness. Show all posts

Sunday, February 7, 2016

The Ghomeshi trial: this handful of slime



























As the song says: I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it.

I didn't want to write a blog post commenting on the Jian Ghomeshi assault trial, and the testimony and subsequent crucifixion of one brave woman who stepped forward to point at him and cry, "J'accuse!"

Not because I'm not interested. Hardly that. It's the queasy impression I have that a great grasping hand has burrowed down into the depths of our sick misogynist culture and pulled up a vast, dripping, rotten clump of slime with hate-formed creatures writhing around in it like those nightmarish little figures from Hieronymus Bosch.

That's why.

But I've read things in the news, seen things on TV, and read posts on Facebook lately that have turned me as white as a ghost.  

 Now that this seething clump has been dredged from the depths(before it is pushed back down again - which is what always happens, or we would not still be in this horrible mess), the contentious issue is the fact that at least one of Ghomeshi's victims maintained contact with him after he assaulted her. Flirtatious contact, in the form of teasingly sexual emails and bikini shots sent via Instagram. 




This leads to another issue poking out its slimy little head: why don't people consider that emails always leave a trail, and that "delete" means nothing when the police can easily crack the memory depths of any computer? In the case of Lucy De Coutere, that lack of awareness (obviously extending to her lawyer) led directly to disaster. It gave Ghomeshi's lawyer the opportunity to savage and humiliate her by forcing her to read these emails (now considered "incriminating" - not that SHE is on trial here!) out loud.
 It didn't look good for her, and I will admit it does not sit well with me that she sent titillating photos and expressed a desire to "fuck his brains out". But I think I have a tiny inkling of what this was about.

Ghomeshi held all the cards here because he had such power in the media. His radio persona was seductive and "cool", which is highly unusual in this country. The media courted him, lionized him, and used him to do things like host the Gillers (though I can't think of one person who is less qualified) in a desperate attempt to make the Canadian image seem less stodgy and out of date, and perhaps to reduce the average age of CBC Radio listeners from, say, 73 to 37. This was in full knowledge that he was abusive, disrespectful, and a misogynist asshole, a man-boy holding sway over his own personal fiefdom. He habitually abused the system and exploited the people in it, but did that stop them from going back and sucking up to him for more favours? I mean, again and again and again?




There may have been a sense that it was some kind of dubious honour for women if he was interested in them, at least until he tired of them in a few weeks or months. (Ghomeshi has never been known to have any sort of lasting relationship with women, except perhaps his mother.) This does not mean all these women were stupid or weak. They may have been sucked in, but media were ALSO sucked in and seduced by Ghomeshi on a much larger, public scale, and it went on unabated for years and years.

But tell me this. Who ended up taking the fall?

Personally, I believe women are bewildered, embarrassed and frightened by being abused and will sometimes downplay it, even contacting the abuser to try to somehow make it right. Yes, it's a form of denial. But if it is, then the CBC was in PROFOUND denial in a situation with similar dynamics. 




There's even more to this as the oozing clump rises and drips in front of my eyes.  As is often the case, Ghomeshi may well have attracted vulnerable women who grew up with abuse as the norm. But this is considered an old saw now, and if you dare say it, someone will dig up a case where it "wasn't like that", demolishing your theory. Not that there is any emotional baggage/misogyny/discrediting of women there. But we don't necessarily know what we think we know. People are not always going to reveal their childhood wounds to the world. Does anyone - I mean anyone do that, unless they have no personal boundaries whatsoever?

My God, the tangled, visceral mess this is dredging up - do we really want to look? When it triggers belligerent name-calling rather than an attempt to understand an extremely complex, often-baffling situation, it just makes my gut sink. One very well-respected writer slathered the same abuse on Ghomeshi and DeCoutere, dismissing them both in a Facebook post as "morons". He seemed to feel it was perfectly all right so long as they were equally slagged and savaged. Quite a number of  the responses to his post were supportive, and I don't know how many "likes" it got because if I look at it one more time, I will likely gag.




There is always the question, when a woman is with an abusive partner, "Why doesn't she just leave?" First, there is no "just" about it. Women are most likely to be murdered by their partners when they leave. Abusive men get women on a yoyo string and keep yanking them around, sometimes for years. This does not mean these women are ninnies, have no will of their own, or are making stuff up just to damage someone's reputation for fun and profit.

Lucy Coutere got up there to try to stop this bastard. It probably won't work. She left herself open to considerable contempt because she exposed at least some of the complicated, contradictory dynamics of abuse to a culture that simply does not want to know. Will this change anything? Why do I feel like we're sinking here? My suspicion and my dread is that we are going not forwards but backwards in our disgraceful treatment of women, and I see nothing on the horizon that tells me it will ever be any different.



POST-BLOG THOUGHTS. This is almost a separate post, but I decided to run them together because, folks, I am tired today. I'm dealing with unknown health issues and a change of doctor, and maybe yet another round of tests, which is why you're getting so many gifs lately, and comments about news items. But this I had to write about. It's my response to a breathtakingly abusive Facebook post that I discovered in that diseased, slimy clump I just wrote about. I don't know why I'm not running this asshole's comments with his real name on them, except that his tone scared the hell out of me and I don't want him coming after me.

This was not just a rant but an eruption of some corrosive substance that was so frightening, I didn't want it making contact with my skin. His remarks were loosely based on the Ghomeshi trial - or  maybe it was just an excuse to air his toxic views on women in general. He went into great depth about various types of mental illness and how they affected females. But this wasn't about mental illness. At all. It was about hate. He believed such women were inherently evil and almost gleefully destructive, deliberately wreaking havoc on the legal system to get their kicks. He painted a picture of savage harpies flying through the air like Valkyries, living for the barbaric pleasure of destroying other human beings. (This somehow was all tied in with Lucy DeCoutere and the "irreparable damage" she is doing to an innocent man with her obviously concocted accusations.) It was, incredibly, from someone IN the system who has dealt with mentally disturbed women for years. Looking him up on his Facebook page while holding my nose, I discovered he is a psychotherapist whose specialty is dealing with the "criminally insane", a term that should have been drop-kicked into the nearest sewer decades ago.



So. Not only is the Ghomeshi trial dragging out a truly incredible amount of hidden misogyny, it's jacking the cover off a jaw-dropping ignorance of what it is to suffer a mental illness. These are my NOT-dispassionate thoughts in response: 

"Have you heard of 'mental illness', or do you think it's just a form of evil or a choice women make to be perverse? Humanity still has incredible fear and loathing of mental illness and writes it off as a willful, even gleeful form of violence and destruction that people COULD "help"/change if they just pulled themselves together (with, of course, no resources to do so). Maybe, at one point, when they were little children, someone loved these women, but it's even more likely that they were horribly damaged. So at some point, did they decide it would be a kick to "go bad"? I am NOT saying, well then, let them go ahead and kill people, be destructive, etc. Society does need to be protected from those who are so sick they can't control themselves, or are not aware of what they are doing, or perhaps (like my brother, who died tragically from the effects of schizophrenia) are hearing voices telling them to kill people. My brother wasn't evil, at all, but he was constantly being "told" to do evil things by those voices. He virtually never acted on it, and now I wonder how he ever had the strength of mind to do that, probably far beyond what most "normal" people have. The feeling is, well, these women should just control themselves, or (something you hear all the time now, which always puts the onus on the sufferer) "reach out for help". Hmmm, WHAT help, I wonder? The kind YOU are offering? Might they not have better prospects for survival in the vastly more compassionate throes of their disease?"





POST-POST.  I usually think of "something after the something". Last night I went to Caitlin's dance recital, and I can't begin to tell you what joy it gave me, not to mention how terrific 12-year-old Caitlin has become in four genres of dance: jazz, tap, hiphop and musical theatre. I say "become" because this kid has worked so incredibly hard, completely overcoming the self-consciousness that used to cause her to take sneak-peeks at the other kids. Now she's bold, sassy and full of pizzazz.

 But that's not what I have to say right now.

 There was a puzzling number by another group. I forget the name of it: something like "One Person's Craziness is Another Person's Real", and it consisted of six teenaged girls writhing around on the floor in straightjackets.

 At various times during the spooky, haunted-house-like music, they stood up and "made crazy" in the way we still think of as crazy, pulling faces, jumping and thrashing around. This wasn't just silly or stupid, it was disturbing, and it made me angry. It was playing with the trappings of "madness" (one of my least-favorite terms) in order to entertain an audience. A cheap trick, because craziness is still so vastly entertaining, particularly at the institutional level where a human being's worth seems to equal that of a block of wood. If we wish to write off or dismiss anyone in our culture, we accuse them of being a "whack job" (and no one stops to think how dehumanizing it is to be referred to as a "job"). 



I couldn't figure out if this thing was supposed to be funny, because at the end they all rushed off the stage into the audience and made everybody laugh. I didn't. I know that I have been, at various times, accused of having no sense of humour because I object to all this. It just isn't real to people, and that's the whole trouble: they don't get why it is a problem. (Is there someone in the room? . . . No? Didn't think so.)

 OK, I hated it, but isn't one of the purposes of art to disturb and unsettle?  Last year a group did a strangely haunting dance routine called Gates of Auschwitz. This was set in - Auschwitz - and featured guards and captive Jews. But it was done in a surprisingly spare, restrained way, not playing down the horror so much as implying it in stark, minimalist fashion. I liked it, partly because it was provocative and daring and performed with a great deal of sensitivity.

 The girls in the straightjackets were just. . . girls in straightjackets. Loonies, wackos, nutbars, and all those names we hear every day when we want to write someone off as less than human. And the funny thing is that no one bats an eyelash, because whack jobs are, apparently, always fair game.

 (Speller's note. I am aware that the proper spelling is "straitjacket", but I am a little tired of being "corrected" when I spell things properly. Accurate spelling has gone the way of the dodo. So I hereby surrender to the WRONG spelling, just to save myself grief.)
Another word for mentally ill




Afflicted with or exhibiting irrationality and mental unsoundness: brainsick, crazy, daft, demented, disordered, distraught, dotty, insane, lunatic, mad, maniac, maniacal, moonstruck, off, touched, unbalanced, unsound, wrong. (Informal) bonkers, cracked, daffy, gaga, loony. (Slang) bananas, batty, buggy, cuckoo, fruity, loco, nuts, nutty, screwy, wacky. (Chiefly British) crackers. (Law) non compos mentis. Idioms: around the bend, crazy as a loon, mad as a hatter, not all there, nutty as a fruitcake, off (or out of) one's head, off one's rocker, of unsound mind, out of one's mind, sick in the head, stark raving mad. See sane


Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


Posted by at 7 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Let's Talk: today and every day





Every day, and in every way, I am hearing a message. And it's not a bad message, in and of itself. 

It's building, in fact, in intensity and clarity, and in some ways I like to hear it.

It's about mental illness, a state I've always thought is mis-named: yes, I guess it's "mental" (though not in the same class as the epithet, "You're totally mental"), but when you call it mental illness, it's forever and always associated with and even attached to a state of illness. You're either ill or you're well; they're mutually exclusive, aren't they?


So the name itself is problematic to me. It seems to nail people into their condition. Worse than that, nobody even notices. "Mentally ill" is definitely preferable to "psycho", "nut case", "fucking lunatic", and the list goes on (and on, and on, as if it doesn't really matter what we call them). But it's still inadequate.

There's something else going on that people think is totally positive, even wonderful, showing that they're truly "tolerant" even of people who seem to dwell on the bottom rung of society. Everywhere I look, there are signs saying, "Let's reduce the stigma about mental illness."

Note they say "reduce", not banish. It's as if society realizes that getting rid of it is just beyond the realm of possibility. Let's not hope for miracles, let's settle for feeling a bit better about ourselves for not calling them awful names and excluding them from everything.





I hate stigma. I hate it because it's an ugly word, and if you juxtapose it with any other word, it makes that word ugly too. "Let's reduce the hopelessness" might be more honest. "Let's reduce the ostracism, the hostility, the contempt." "Stigma" isn't used very much any more, in fact I can't think of any other group of people it is so consistently attached to. Even awful conditions (supposedly) like alcoholism and drug abuse aren't "stigmatized" any more. Being gay isn't either. Why? Compassion and understanding are beginning to dissolve the ugly term, detach it and throw it away. 





"Let's reduce the stigma" doesn't help because it's miserable. It's the old "you don't look fat" thing (hey, who said I looked fat? Who brought the subject up?). Much could be gained by pulling the plug on this intractibly negative term. Reducing the stigma is spiritually stingy and only calls attention to the stigma.  

So what's the opposite of "stigmatized"?  Accepted, welcomed, fully employed, creative, productive, loved? Would it be such a stretch to focus our energies on these things, replacing the 'poor soul" attitude that prevails?





But so far, the stifling box of stigma remains, perhaps somewhat better than hatred or fear, but not much. Twenty years ago, a term used to appear on TV, in newspapers, everywhere, and it made me furious: "cancer victim". Anyone who had cancer was a victim, not just people who had "lost the battle" (and for some reason, we always resort to military terms to describe the course of the illness). It was standard, neutral, just a way to describe things, but then something happened, the tide turned, and energy began to flow the other way.

From something that was inevitably bound to stigma in the past, cancer came out of the closet in a big way, leading to all sorts of positive change that is still being felt. But first we had to lose terms like "victim", because they were unconsciously influencing people's attitudes. We had to begin to substitute words like "survivor" and even "warrior". 





One reinforced the other. The movement gave rise to much more positive, life-affirming, even accurate terminology. That's exactly what needs to happen here. We don't just need to "reduce the stigma": we need to CAN that term, spit on it, get rid of it once and for all, and begin to see our mental health warriors for who and what they really are. They lead the way in a daring revolution of attitudes and deeply-buried, primitive ideas, a shakeup and shakedown of prejudice that is shockingly late, and desperately needed.





Why do we need to do this so badly? We're caught and hung up on a negative, limiting word that is only keeping the culture in the dark.  I once read something in a memoir that had a profound effect on me: "Mental illness is an exaggeration of the human condition." This isn't a separate species. Don't treat it as such. It's you, times ten. It's me, in a magnifying mirror. Such projections of humanity at its finest and most problematic might just teach us something truly valuable. Why don't we want to look?






Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Stunning? I'd say so!





Top Psychiatrist’s Stunning Announcement About Gun Violence


By PAULA J. CAPLAN, PHD
Featured Blogs October 9, 2015

After each highly publicized gun violence incident, some lawmakers—whether with good intention, for political gain, or both—declare that we must have laws to keep guns out of the hands of people with mental illness. It is therefore stunning and profoundly important to note Sunday's blog post from the American Psychiatric Association's president, Dr. Renee Binder.

As chief executive of the major lobby group that advocates for the interests of psychiatrists, Binder might have been expected to recommend an increase in psychiatric treatment for the mentally ill as a way to reduce gun violence. Amazingly, she not only did not make that recommendation, but she made the powerful—and well-documented—statement that people diagnosed with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it and that most of the mentally ill will never commit acts of violence against others. Thus, to pass laws to prevent the mentally ill from owning guns is no way to reduce the frequency of murders. In fact, as Binder pointed out, "Stronger indicators of risk include a history of violent behavior, domestic violence, and drug or alcohol abuse."



Politicians on the Sunday morning news shows either failed to read Binder's essay or chose to ignore it and plowed right ahead, pushing for gun laws about the mentally ill. And on Monday morning, former Congressman Patrick Kennedy appeared on CBS, making an impassioned plea to prevent the mentally ill from owning guns and making the bold—and unfounded—assertion that that such a step would have prevented the most recent mass shooting. It will be worth watching to see if over time, Binder's strong statement alters politicians' proposals. Today, Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson made a similar plea.

Two important points shed further light on this matter. One arises from the fact that the primary way that "the mentally ill" are identified is by having been given psychiatric diagnoses, but a vast body of work over three decades has revealed psychiatric diagnostic categories to be constructed and applied with little or no scientific support, so attempts to divide the populace into "the mentally ill" and "everyone else"—and aim to pass laws affecting the former—make no sense.



The other relevant point is that the ballooning numbers of categories and subcategories that are called mental illnesses has led to the psychiatrizing of our society, the tendency of therapists, media people, the public, even some novelists to try to explain every aspect of human behavior as caused by a mental illness. This often takes the form of, "Person X did Y, and the fact that they did Y proves that they are mentally ill, because Y (almost any action or expression) is a mental illness." Defense attorneys operating in a system that is often stacked against the accused, especially if the latter are poor or women or people of color, understandably try to get their clients diagnosed as mentally ill, hoping to argue that the psychiatric disorder is reason for a reduced sentence. As a result, a confounding factor we will increasingly need to consider is that an artificially created correlation between a diagnosis of mental illness and commission of a violent act will result, as anyone charged with an act of violence is increasingly likely to be labeled mentally ill. As that happens, it will unjustifiably become ammunition for those who want to base laws on the notion that "the mentally ill" are more dangerous than the rest of the populace.



POST-BLOG THOUGHTS. I've added a couple of things that might be relevant. Below is one of those cut-and-paste Facebook messages about depression, which are, I guess, better than nothing - but not much. They strike me as paper doll or cookie-cutter responses, don't cost anything, and can give you a false sense of having done your bit (so you can wash your hands of it all). 

 These are posted for just one hour, then, I assume, taken down - but why? Why is it considered so dangerous for people to leave a post about depression on their page? Why the necessity of reassuring people with statements like "I did it for a friend and you can too" (which smacks of "well, my friend has this problem. . . )? The whole post seems to be saying, "it's OK to display a message about this completely taboo topic, because no one will ever know".



For many people, even mentioning the subject to offer "a moment of support" is just too great a risk, likely because they fear being exposed as a sympathizer. "If I don't see your name, I'll understand" is a very sad statement: I know you can't risk mentioning your name, because people might think you're "one of them". As I've said before, and I will keep on saying it, mental health issues are where gay issues were in 1970, and cancer issues in 1950. 

 I have some things to say about all this (as usual). Below the Facebook quote and my response to it, I've posted a link to something you really need to see, if this subject interests you at all. (Please note: this is what you should NOT wear as a Halloween costume.)




Facebook cut-'n-paste message:

Yes depression is such a bitch and seems relentless. A lot of us have been close to that  edge, and some have lost friends and loved ones. Let's look out for each other and stop sweeping mental illness under the rug. If I don't see your name, I'll understand. May I ask my family and friends wherever you might be, to kindly copy and paste this status for one hour to give a moment of support to all those who have family problems, health struggles, job issues, worries of any kind and just need to know that someone cares. Do it for all of us, for nobody is immune. Hope to see this on the walls of all my family and friends just for moral support. I know some will!!! I did it for a friend and you can too. You have to copy and paste this one, no sharing.

My response to these one-hour-long, "if I don't see your name" messages of support: 

 We're starting to see more about depression on Facebook these days, and people are pasting and sharing and doing all manner of things. But do you know what might do even more to help the cause? If you know of someone who is off work with depression, don't avoid them or pretend it isn't happening. Ask them if they're up to a visit at home or in the hospital, and go see them and bring flowers or something else they might like. Depression is disabling and hurts far worse than a heart attack or a broken bone, but there are virtually no flowers sent to psychiatric wards. People's aversion runs very deep. Let's get over it, shall we? THAT would be really helpful.

Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Death of a hero




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 2005. 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.



  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)