It seems the universe is tying some threads of my life together into a bittersweet tapestry. Eleven years ago this May, my cousin took his life. A year prior to that, my uncle took his life. My cousin was a musician and a huge fan of a number of bands, but Toad the Wet Sprocket was way up there. Last night, I saw Toad in concert, and in the middle of the show, Glen Phillips talked about how the first concert ticket he had paid his own money for was to see Robin Williams. And two days ago, Williams had taken his life. I have never been clinically depressed. I have never given even a fleeting thought to ending my life. But I know a lot of people who are and who have. Last night, Phillips talked about speaking to the pain that someone with depression feels--not to how great their life is and why they cant just pull up their damn bootstraps and get back to living--but to the pain. For those of us who have never felt that pain, it seems incomprehensible. To truly deal with someone with mental illness is to actively choose to sit in that pain with them, and it is to be willing to deal with inexplicable, inappropriate, unkind and even truly ugly behavior. Because you are not dealing with a rationale mind, you are dealing with a disease. And disease is unattractive on a good day. It will take every ounce of your being to sit with disease and to not flinch, to not judge, to not demean, to not try to advise. Disease does not hear your advice and it does not give a damn that it has taken hold of a really good person. And disease is what drives someone to take his or her life--it is not a rationale choice because that mind is suffocatingly, maddeningly un-rational. There is no oxygen for rationality with disease. Since I cant find a recording of Nothing is Alone (TTWSs Pale album), I am dedicating Patty Griffins (another of Lukes favorites) When It Dont Come Easy to him, to my uncle, to Robin Williams, and to all of you sitting in the dark or sitting with someone through the pain.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 19:43:20 +0000
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