March 23 2013
By Mickey Friedman
Last week began for me with the news my former love had hung herself. The obituary reported she died at home. True, but hardly the real story.
When it comes to mental illness, we don’t often tell the real story.
Three people in my life have killed themselves.
We didn’t talk about mental illness, although there were deep strains of depression in both the Italian and Hungarian sides of my family. One cousin was never diagnosed. She just lived at home and hardly ever left the house. Her brother killed himself in his late twenties.
A college friend, a bright, talented poet, newly married, killed himself. I obviously didn’t know him well enough because I was shocked his pain so overwhelmed his love of language, his love for his wife.
But I wasn’t shocked on Monday because Pat had tried to end her life before. I chose numbness. I didn’t want to re-experience the initial joy and pleasure of our life together, then the unrelenting descent into pain. To acknowledge again my inability to stay afloat when her torment was taking her down; and taking me with it.
It was hard to sit amongst the large crowd who came to memorialize her. Who wanted to find the light in all this, a successful life to be celebrated. To heal. To talk about our compassionate community.
The problem is mine. But I’m uncomfortable when the chief memorializer doesn’t know the deceased. He did his best to acknowledge Pat’s despair. But it’s difficult to weave a convincing tale of hope, of continuity, of continuing on when you don’t know the whole story.
Crissey Farm was packed. For me, just another odd note. Because, of course, Crissey Farm isn’t a farm, but a large hall used for banquets, weddings. I was last there when townspeople weren’t listened to as they once again shared their misgivings about Downtown Redevelopment.
Pat had an innate sense of design. We ate dinner on china, lit by candlelight. I’m not sure Pat would have chosen this place to say goodbye.
While some talked about community, some of us were there to acknowledge our community failed. Perhaps success is impossible when it comes to mental illness but I firmly believe we’re nowhere near doing our best to achieve it.
It’s hard to face the darkness within, and it’s hard to see the darkness in those we love. To admit our life doesn’t resemble the life we wished for. Love everlasting. Work that not only provides meaning but the house, the car, and a long life of Key Lime Pie. The TV life. Where Sean the “Bachelor” has transformed rejection by Emily “The Bachelorette” to find himself in love with a handfu of women. In the blink of an televised eye.
Mental illness, a cancer of sorts, can turn kindness to coldness; patience to paranoia. My friend was gracious one moment; violent the next. Set back from the road, her antique shop was a small world of wonder. She could find the beautiful hiding beneath junk; a lovely landscape obscured by layers of dust and dirt.
Charming, she engaged so many so quickly. Yes, she was odd at times, and often quirky, but she transformed strangers into friends. What she didn’t often reveal was the great pain and the extraordinary anger. That was reserved for those she knew best.
Some of us at the Memorial were on the receiving end of that pain. We share a feeling of failure. That as much as we cared for Pat, loved her, we failed in the end to help her get the help she needed.
I tried and tried. And failed and failed. Then I reached the limits of my love. Maybe if I loved her more, was more patient, more skilled, more insistent, less insistent … The fact is I couldn’t get her to therapy; I couldn’t get her to try anti-depressants. I couldn’t get her to acknowledge she was ill.
We know when we’ve got cancer. And yet it seems so much more threatening to acknowledge we’re depressed.
I was lucky. When within four years my father died, my colleague was murdered, and my two best friends died of cancer, when I was swamped by death and despair, I found help.
We underfund mental health. We hire recent graduates from Social Work school and pay them next to nothing to minister to impossibly large numbers of our friends, neighbors, children, work-mates who are at their wit’s end.
We watch as the undiagnosed and untreated take their guns to schools, to work, to transform personal anguish into irrevocable public mayhem. To kill those they know and those they don’t. To kill themselves. Then we spend more energy defending the right to bear arms than the need to take care of our own.
I’m sorry but I can’t see the light in that. It’s still dark for me.
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