For the last few weeks, this blog has fallen to the side, for a couple key reasons.

First off, my wife is doing really well. I’m beginning to sound a bit like a broken record in saying this, but it’s nice to be able to say it, so I’ll say it again: my wife is doing really well. We were walking through the park the other day, and I said to her
Honey, you have so much happiness right now.
I know, isn’t it great?
It’s is great! And think about it, 6 months ago, when you were suicidal, you didn’t think you’d ever feel happiness again. You thought your life was doomed.
I know, but actually, it’s much more than happiness. It’s much more than I ever felt before I got sick. Before I got sick, I could be happy at moments, but I was still uncertain with myself, and comparing myself to others, and very self-critical. Right now, I feel a mixture of acceptance, pride, happiness, and gratitude, since I went through what I went through, and I made it. It’s an amazing feeling.

Fuck yeah that’s awesome, isn’t it? 10 months after she’s saying that she’s the devil and trying to throw herself out of a moving car, this is what she is saying. So yeah, I’ll say it yet again: she’s doing really really well. And in truth, I’ve been enjoying that. I’ve been enjoying what feels much more like a normalized marriage, one of give and take, laughing, serious conversations, planning, and most of all, joy. It’s fantastic. So in truth, I didn’t really prioritize taking the time to sit down and write, because I was too busy enjoying life. If there’s any reason to not write, I think that is the best of all the reasons.

In addition to this, I am almost at the end of the school year. In fact, I’m 48 hours away from being done with school, and starting a year off of world traveling. We will be driving across the country, I’ll go on a solo bike trip of 450 miles, we’ll go to New Zealand, Fiji, Japan, Italy, and Kenya…it will be amazing. But before getting there, I have been putting a lot of focus into concluding my time at my school. I’ve been spending time with my co-workers and my students, swapping memories and laughs. It too has been really really good.

So in essence, I haven’t been writing because I’ve been too busy being happy. I started this blog when I needed an outlet for my feelings of anxiety, terror, uncertainty, and frustration. I needed to spew out the haunted memories. And I did. Quite intensely so. At its most regular, I was churning out 5 posts a week, each one of about 1,200 words. That’s not bad. But lately I’ve been happily dragged away from the computer by a jubilant life.

The strange part about this is two-fold, both revolving around guilt. First off, I feel guilty for dropping off the face of the earth. I had been building community with some of you, and I disappeared. And second off, probably much bigger, is that I’m starting to feel a bit of survivor’s guilt. We have made it. The worst is over. It lasted 10 months, but it is in the past. There are countless people out there who haven’t made it. They may not ever make it. This will be their lifelong challenge. We were thrown into the deep end of a 5,000ft pool and forced to the bottom, but we are now back to the surface and catching our breaths and enjoying the view. Many other people are not. And I’m feeling guilty about that. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t explain why my wife got better and other wives didn’t. And I’m not responsible for her recovery, while others are not responsible for someone else’s stagnation. But I still feel guilty. I think that’s the third reason I’ve stayed away from writing. I felt guilty about saying how well things are going.

I will probably post much less regularly, especially through the summer as we road trip. We did a road trip last summer and I am so looking forward to another one. It will feel so wonderful to run away on the open road with my wife and dog, to camp in deserts and forests and on mountains, to get lost and eat Dairy Queen and listen to good music and chase our dreams. So I’ll be gone again for a while. I’ll try to check in on everyone that I like checking in on. I really hope you all find the moments of escape that I have found.

I get a lot of comments from people saying that “I’m such a good guy for sticking by my wife,” “my love must help her so much,” yada yada yada. I get them in person, from family, and on this blog.

And I’ll admit. I’ve done a great job. I don’t even say “good,” I think that “great” is justified. I stepped up in a really fucking hard situation and I carried myself with grace, strength and had the endurance to not give up. I give myself a lot of credit and a pat on the back.

But we’re all flawed, we’re all selfish, and we all have our shortcomings. And I’m here to confess one of them:

I don’t miss my wife.

There I said it. She’s out of town, she has been gone for over a week and doesn’t get back for another few days. And I don’t miss her. I actually am really enjoying having her gone.

That’s an awful thing to say, but I would say it’s particularly awful because she misses me a lot. I get texts messages and calls from her almost every hour. I’m on the West Coast, she’s on the East Coast, so every morning I get a text that says “Call me when you’re up.” Or if I’m in class “Call me when you’re done class.” Sometimes if it’s a few hours that I’m occupied I’ll have a few voicemails and a few text messages, a sign that she’s anxiously waiting to hear back from me. She doesn’t necessarily have anything to say, she just wants to say hi and hear my voice. She is always so happy when I call. And that doesn’t make me feel good and loved. It makes me feel annoyed. I know I’m going to have to put on a fake smile and tell her how strong she is, how well she is doing, all of that other stuff when I just want to hang up and have my own space. Terrible.

While she is pretty obviously reflecting upon how much she needs my cheerleading and unwavering smiles and hugs, I’m stretching out and realizing how much I needed some space. I put so much of my own priorities aside that for this week I have enjoyed allowing myself to feel shitty because I need and I don’t actually need to hide it. Typically, I need to schedule my own feelings and release them when I’m alone…but not now. I’ve been allowing myself to do nothing without feeling like I should be keeping her busy. I’ve been allowing myself to indulge my sexual frustration after a 9 months of very limited sex (in an entirely solitary way, don’t worry…this is not that type of confession).

But basically, I’ve done all of this and I haven’t missed her in it. And this is the challenge of the caregiver. I take care of her and I feel good and noble about it. But when she leaves, I don’t miss her…and then I feel guilty about it. I wear my badge of love proudly but then I relish in the chance to take it off and hide. I even at times deliberately miss some of her calls, just because I don’t really want to talk to her.

My mom sent me an email with a link to photos from their time together and I saw pictures of her and didn’t miss her, I just saw her for what she is as a recovering woman who is self-conscious about it and trying to process what happened to her, but I didn’t yearn for her to be home.

So I’m not missing my wife. I even stretch out and sleep diagonally on the bed, with the windows open, and the blinds pulled, none of which I get to do when she’s home. And I feel guilty about it.

She’ll come home and I’ll go back to being supportive. But for now, I still have 4 days to do what I want and need to do.

I love this little poem. It’s nothing worthy of a Pulitzer prize but it seemed pretty fitting to find this on the beach that has been my respite, while running to pump myself up with endorphins, at a time when my wife is making huge leaps and bounds.

I’m a teacher. I don’t teach English, but I’m going to break this poem down, emphasizing a few words in the same way that an English teacher might do so in school.

The Sun. I put a lot of symbolic weight behind the sun in this blog, and I’m borrowing that from a long literary tradition. The Sun is the source of all light, and light is good, while dark is scary, unknown, non es bueno. I think my personal fixation with the sun has roots in when I was in high school. During the spring, I would get home from a day at school after sports practice and the sun would be coming through my bedroom window at just the perfect angle so that my pillow would be bathed in sunlight. I would lay down and rest my head on a pillow that felt like Mother Nature had just taken it out of the oven, temperature setting at “Perfect,” and after resting my weary head on such a warm and gentle pillow I would quite literally fall asleep on with the light in my eyes and a smile on my face. It actually goes back further, to my subconscious memories, when I was born jaundiced and my mom would have to put me in the window to get sunlight to return my skin to a more healthy tone. I see sunlight as healing, nurturing, life-affirming, and so the idea of walking on a path that meets “The Sun” implies it is the ultimate path, the best path you can take, the path like none other filled with goodness beyond your wildest dreams.

The Road. Well No Shit, Sherlock, The Road is a symbol for a journey, but not just any journey, The Journy, Your Life’s Journey. I happen to be reading Cormac McCarthy’s fantastic novel The Road right now, which is a really intense book about a really intense journey, and some of the distraught feelings about God and helplessness evoke recent memories to me, and I think of just how many times in literary history writers have evoked a road to describe the process of life. But while Cormac McCarthy’s road is buried in gray ash, in this poem The Road, the journey of your life, meets and coincides with the most nourishing and warming concept in our world. Nice.

We. Obviously this is a critical part for me. It’s my Lost Finale argument. We don’t go through life alone. We go through life with people that we love, and that love us, and that is the crux of existence. No man is an island. This year has made that my mantra. I am not alone. I am in the paradox of needing my wife, while she is the one who got sick, and so without her I never would have gone through this. This illness buried itself into her being and threw our lives into turmoil, but that being is inextricably part of my being, so I needed her just as much as her situation made me suffer. And I don’t just refer to her, although as my life partner I refer to her when I think of “We” most sincerely and frequently. There is also family, friends, and strangers who write me nice things telling me to Hang In There.

Done. This is where the poem really finds its soul.

done [duhn]

–adjective
4. completed; finished; through: Our work is done.

Synonyms: a wrap, all in, all over, brought about, brought to pass, buttoned up, compassed, complete, completed, concluded, consummated, depleted, down, drained, effected, effete, ended, executed, exhausted, fixed, fulfilled, over, perfected, performed, realized, rendered, set, spent, succeeded, terminated, through, used up, wired, wrought.

In other words, Done = The End, the glorious curtain call when the audience is thunderously applauding and showering the stage with flowers as you smile into the blinding spotlights to take a bow. So when It is Done, we are together in sacred joy. Love it.

The poem says when “it’s done,” and I think we can assume that the “It” in here refers to the shit. The bile that assaults our harmony and acceptance and has us doubled up, vomiting on life’s anxiety. But our lives are always full of anxiety. We will always be challenged. So “it’s done,” probably referes to the ultimate end, death. However, I actually don’t believe that death is The End. About 80% of the time, I believe in an afterlife, which means that death is not the ultimate end, it’s actually more like the ultimate beginning. I believe in reincarnation for about 15% of the time, which means that although we may meet one death, we will have many many more deaths to embrace, so we are far from done. And in the 5% of the time in which I dabble in nihilism, even at death what happens to my body is that we will put it into a coffin but the worms and bacteria will gnaw through and get to me and dissolve me a nutritious mush so that from my rotting carbon a new sapling can spring. Regardless of the death. Even if my wife had thrown herself over the bridge, or let’s say even I end up doing so, who knows, I mean if this could blindside her then it can blindside anyone, then we might float along and get nibbled at by fish or seals or maybe if we’re lucky a shark and in our death we still contribute to life. From ashes to ashes. So I don’t actually believe there is an ending.

So if there is no ending, and things are never Done, then that means that things are also always ending, and they are always Done. In Benedictine spirituality there is a wonderful saying “Always we begin again.” With every breath we are finishing and starting anew.

The poem starts with a line that seems to project into the future, but it’s actually pointing to right now. It already is done, even as we experience the shit that life throws our way with the next life we are done with it, and so we already are walking together on a road showered in the sunlight. We are already on our path filled with goodness beyond our wildest dreams. Even when she was in the hospital. Even when she was suicidal. Even when I’m so apathetic I don’t want to get up. At each of those moments, we are here. We are done.

1,082 words.

I photoshopped a picture that I took and integrated the poem into it to try and best explain what I just said in a thousand words, which is how much a picture is supposedly worth.

First off, fuck me. You heard me: fuck me. I’ve been spelling “Risperdal” wrong for the last few months. I was spelling it “Risperdol,” and all along I was thinking I was going to become like the leading Risperdol blogger out there, people would google their way to this site to get insight on the medicine. But it’s actually Risperdal with an “a,” and so all my previous Risperdol tags are for naught. I confused them because the brand name is Risperdal and the medicine itself is Risperdone, or the other way around, so I just blended the two into Risperdol. I am the leading blogger of a misspelled antipsychotic medication. Goddamnit.

I’m inspired to write this blog because I’ve been wandering around the web lately and have seen some web sites that rather aggressively advocate for a medicine-free recovery from mental illness. Now in normal life I’m pretty anti-medicine myself. I don’t like to medicate. I don’t drink or do drugs, and there’s a reason for that. I’m not into chemical changes.

But when my wife was hospitalized, I had what could be called a change of heart. My wife’s psychosis was really, really intense. When we took her to the hospital, the “5250′ed” her, which basically means that they committed her for the law mandated minimum of 72 hours. However, if she refused to take medicine, they would not be able to force it upon her until a judge decreed it to be so. I remember showing up for the hearing, thinking that I could lobby on behalf of the family to support giving her medicine, whether she wanted or not. Classic rookie move. They don’t need family members, most of the people at psych wards don’t have family members that show up anyway, so they proceeded with the hearing about an hour early, before I could even get there. But it didn’t matter: the judge agreed that she was off her rocker and needed to get shots administered in her butt cheek until she agreed to take her pills orally.

We started with Geodon (whose name I liked for being vaguely intellectual), but it was slow to stem the delusions. And her delusions were really fucked up. I mean really. The 2nd day in the hospital was probably the worst one. When I got there, the nurses greeted me by saying that she had spent all day in her room, on her bed, laying there and not saying anything. I showed up, and hospital policy decreed that I wasn’t allowed in the room. But the nurses could see in my face that I wasn’t the type that was going to just sit back and agree with hospital policy, so they agreed that they could be flexible with the rules and I could go into her room.

I walked into her doorway. She slowly rolled over, saw me, and then shot up into a sitting position.
“Get out!” she shrieked. “You need to protect yourself. I am toxic and I will hurt you. The devil wants you too! You need to get out!”
“Hi honey, how are you doing? It’s so good to see you.” I had really steadied my nerves on the way to the hospital, through the lobby, up the stairs, and in the waiting room for this moment. To shower her with normalcy and love in the face of all that is irrational.
“Get out! You are going to die in this hell with me if you don’t leave. It’s enough for one of us to die.”
“OK, I’ll walk out, don’t worry, but honey, you aren’t going to hurt me. I love you, you love me, everything is fine. You’re not going to hurt me.”
“Get out.”
“OK, I’ll get out.”
I stood in the doorway for a minute, thinking. She calmed down a bit, but would ask “are you burning yet? Am I burning you up?”
“No honey, I’m doing just fine.”
I came up with an idea.
“Hey honey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we test it. You think you’ll hurt me. Well, what if I come into the room and sit by your bed for just a minute. And we’ll see if I get hurt or not.”
“I don’t know. You don’t want to mess around with the devil.”
“Let’s give it a shot.”
She didn’t agree, but didn’t tell me to get out. So I walked in, pulled up a chair, and then sat down.
She looked over me in complete and total terror, like she was about to see me die right in front of her, like a bus was bearing down and she just had to sit there and watch me get squashed by an out of control bus but couldn’t do anything.
“Look, I’m doing just fine.”
“For now.”
I reached over and touched her hand. I had to.
She shot up again, “What are you doing? This isn’t going to end well. It’s not a good idea. You need to leave. I am the devil. I hurt everyone. I need to die. It’s over for me.” She was raging.
I stood up, backed away to see if she would calm down at all. She did, a little bit, so I sat back down, and really went for it. I reached in and kissed her on the forehead.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I love you.”
“You don’t love me. I’m going to die. I want to die.”
At this point she curled up into a ball on her back and pulled her knees into her chest, like she was trying to stretch out her lower back. She switched into her native tongue, Italian, and started saying over and over again Voglio morire, which means “I want to die.” She was rabidly repeating it. It started at a normal tone and then increasingly got louder and louder and then would quiet down into a whisper and she would be hissing it through her clenched teeth.
A nurse was in the doorway. Clearly this visit was going well. I left the room, I stepped back out into the threshold to give her space. She eventually slowed down and relaxed. She looked up, and saw that I was still there.
“You’re not dead.”
“Nope.”
“I’m not dead.”
“Nope.”
“Why?”
“Because we love each other.”
“We do, don’t we.”
“Yes. And that is stronger than this.”
“I’m scared.”
“Me too.”
She eventually calmed down and realized, at least for the night, that touching me wasn’t going to kill me, and I was able to sit with her, hand in hand, for about 10 minutes before I left.

So that was my wife when she was psychotic. That’s a snapshot of an hour of psychosis. She was psychotic for over 30 days. 23 in the hospital, about 3 days before the hospital, and about 2 more weeks after the hospital, although under much more control. When she was released, she’d fluctuate between being psychotic and not being psychotic. You could literally see a lightswitch in her head flip and the fog fill up her eyes again, and she’d start pacing and asking if she needed to go to hell to be punished for how she behaved in the hospital. The first day out of the hospital it was like that for about 3 hours. Then 2 hours the next day, twice. Then 1 hour. And it slowly faded until she wasn’t psychotic anymore.

Some of these medicine-free websites preach that psychosis is when a human being has reached the spiritual apex of his or her life, has become a living deity and is transcendent and sees the reality of the world for what it is. I’m paraphrasing and I don’t want to call any of these sites out by name, but I remember nurses being called “nirvana-haters” and doctors “destroyers of enlightenment.”

Give me a fucking break. You’ve got to be kidding me. My wife, curled in a ball on her back, shouting at the ceiling over and over again that she wanted to die, she wanted to die, voglio morire, voglio morire, that is enlightenment? To repeat: give me a fucking break. That was suffering of the worst possible kind. She had lost a basic human ability, our ability to perceive and process, and she was suffering. She was paranoid, afraid, alone, and her psychosis made it practically impossible to penetrate that force field of delusions.

Until she started taking medicine. She went from Geodon to Seroquel back to Geodon to Zyprexa to Risperdal (not Risperdol) and eventually the doctors settled with that one. My analogy for Risperdal is simple. It’s like turning the volume down on your experience of life. For my wife, her volume was turned down. Her feelings were dulled, which is a good thing when the feelings are either paranoia or hopeless depression. Her emotions became muted. Her thinking was slurred. She became the Great Validator, agreeing “Yes” to almost all questions I asked with a fraction of a second pause in between the question and the answer in order to process the question. “Isn’t this fun walking the dog?” Hardly noticeable pause. “Yes.” “Did you enjoy the dinner that we cooked?” Minimal pause. “Yes.”

This muted reality sucked. Horribly. She moved slower, she literally lost control of some of her muscular abilities and had stiff arms and a clawed left hand, she sagged her left shoulder, she would purse her lips and saliva would gather in her mouth and if she wasn’t careful she’d be drooling. But I don’t hesitate for a second to say that it was a drastic improvement over her psychosis. If you don’t believe me, go back and re-read the shit you just read. Would you ever want to see your spouse in that condition? For the third time: give me a fucking break.

My wife shuffled through 7 months of a muted existence. I know it wasn’t exactly fun, it was a fucking nightmare, but at least with her thoughts on a lower volume, they could sort themselves out more rationally. And as her neurons started firing in concert again (or whatever the fuck was going awry in her brain was resolving itself) she was finding the right balance of mood stabilizing medicine so that the muted feelings she felt were at least good feelings, and not suicidal feelings. And so eventually, we took her off Risperdol. The result has been like setting a caged bird free to get her off this medicine. She is back to full movement, back to full expression of emotions, back. She laughs, jokes, expresses, and lives. And her mood is high, the thoughts are good. But without antipsychotics, her persistent psychosis could have led to her actually killing herself or else hurting someone else, I am pretty confident in that. So I’ll take the 7 painful months of waiting to get rid of the medicine well over a lifetime of mourning as a widower of a successful suicide.

I’m sorry to the holier-than-though medicine free out there, but there is a time and a place for everything. There is a time to numb someone and to wait for rationality to return. My wife was so deep in her psychosis that there was nowhere else to go, no other options, and we turned to medicine and it worked. Before hospitalization we had meditated, met with spiritual leaders, done yoga, prayed, tried therapy, all of it. But she needed medicine. It saved her life.

To run the con’s of Risperdal
-it’s Big Pharma which is like public enemy #1 and yeah I get it but still.
-she gained about 50 pounds on her antipsychotics which I know she hates but it’s again a part of that trade off
-imagine taking all of your feelings and thoughts and turning them down to a barely audible mumble. That would be weird and very disorienting

The pro’s of Risperdal
-It got her out of her psychosis.

Boom. End of debate. Worth it.

*     *     *

I don’t know about you, but I loved it. I absolutely loved it.

The show has been set as this debate between fate and destiny, but I don’t believe that is the case. The finale proved that the mythology and the numbers and so many of the other mysteries were just distractions, red herrings, just like we have in real life. False hopes to follow, leads that take you nowhere, questions that you won’t be able to answer. If you listened to what the producers and actors were saying in the lead-up to the show, it was a show about human relationships and human nature. The entire finale centered around the amazing moments when each character finally “got it,” and understood that the high point of their lives was on the island, because on the island they found redemption, and much more importantly, love. That is the case for all the characters (except for Ben, who deliberately stays out of the church…because I don’t think he found his love on the island with this group. He needs to move onto the next world with his daughter, and needs to reconnect with her).

So how does this specifically break down? I think the flash sideways was purgatory. They all died, Jack on the island, many others also on the island, but they all died. But they found their growth and redemption on the island, and in order to leave purgatory and move into heaven, they needed to be together again. So the flash sideways was the purgatory where they all found each other to finally connect and move into heaven together. They couldn’t actually leave purgatory until they were all together again, because it’s almost like you enter into heaven in groups….that what you do in this world is not about what YOU do, but about how you do it in relation to others. That’s what Jack’s dad said in the church at the end: you couldn’t do it alone, and they couldn’t do it alone. And since life can’t be done alone, then you can’t move into the next life alone either. How amazing is that message. I fucking love it. That the people you love in this life are so important and vital that you must be with them in order to move into the next life. I love it. Obviously after this year that message is all the more powerful for me, but I think that’s what it’s all about. And you know what, if it isn’t, I don’t care. That’s what I’m sticking with.

The people you love are so important that you need them to move into the next life.

If you want to check out my favorite Lost blog, which I’ve been consulting since about Season 4, you can check out: http://lost-and-gone-forever.blogspot.com/ I just read his instant reaction after writing this email and he seems to agree with me a lot.

*     *     *

Sorry, that will be it for my Lost geekness, it just felt like it was made for my story right now. And I loved it.

When my wife was first out of the hospital and heavily medicated on Zyprexa, Lexapro, and Risperdol, she was so sedated that she was typically dozing off by about 8pm at the latest. And when you’ve had a long day together, trying to eek out some moments of gratitude and joy, and your wife crashes at 8pm, what the hell else are you gonna do than turn on the TV?

Thank god for Hulu and Netflix stream instantly, I was not at the mercy of the inhumane cable TV gods, and I could watch what I wanted. I feel deeply in love with “The Office” and the carefree comedy and awkwardness of that world. “Weeds” was a good time, really hooked me and had me questioning my life-long sobriety, and that was fun to entertain. But no show resonated with me like the hit ABC drama “Lost.”

I started watching “Lost” in mid-January, and I think I watched the whole first season in about a week. My wife would watch it with me, and she loved it as well. She slept through much of it, but I’d catch her up the next day as we’d walk the dog or bike ride. As the seasons added up and the show got weirder, her love for the show faded, but mine grew stronger. And now I write this on the morning of the series finale. I am not a multi-year Lost fan, just a multi-month Lost fan, but I still love it and am highly anticipating a night of Lost.

Let me explain some of the reasons that I like Lost so much, and how (believe it or not) it has actually taught me some valuable lessons. Even the thought of learning something from a TV show would have made me puke a year ago, but a lot can change in a year. So let’s look at what I like about Lost.

-First off, there is the obvious. It’s a show about survivors. People who crashed in a plane and want to stay alive. It was a stark contrast for my wife, who had survived a crash and yet wanted to die. After episodes we would talk about the motivations of characters and their flaws. I’d love to wax poetically and say that I used arguments of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas when I would try and convince my wife of the value of staying alive, but I didn’t. Instead, I would reference Jack Shepherd, Sawyer, Kate, John Locke, and all the other Ocean 815 survivors, because it was more relate-able to both of us. I appreciate the show for giving us a common vocabulary with which to discuss the painful dilemma of suicide.

-Second off, I loved the mystery of the show. It’s a fucking weird show. When I visited my parents in Japan a few months ago, I wanted to download the most recent episode and watch it. My dad asked “So what is this show about?”
“Hm. Well, there was a plane crash, and the survivors end up on an island. But it’s not a normal island. It’s a symbol for the struggle between good and evil on earth, and there are weird people who already lived there called the Others, and the island can travel through time and space, and……ahhhh shit, I don’t know what the hell this show is about.”

Although the enigma of Lost is extremely frustrating for others, I find its mystical way of addressing main themes very relevant to me. At its core, it seems to be a running debate on the nature of fate and destiny. Is there a bigger plan for us, or are we just operating under the chaotic principle of chance? The first argument seems to support the idea of God, while the second seems to refute it. Built into this debate are various bizarre manifestations that really complicate the argument–polar bears, delusions, smoke monsters, and the works. It is clearly a very magical place, and so the question of destiny vs. fate is that much more heightened.

When I was hooked into the show, I could relate to that on a profound level. My wife’s delusions, as I have mentioned in the past, were intensely religious: she thought she was hearing the voice of God, she thought she had to be martyred to the devil to protect the world from evil, she thought she had to protect me, she thought she was the devil, so on and so forth. It was all some weird bizarre magical shit, very similar to Lost. And I was the very emotionally attached audience, watching this wild narrative unfold, and trying to make sense of it. What caused this? Was it her destiny to suffer like this? Was it mine? Had she or I done something to deserve this?

I remember in college when we were dating, I asked her: “Do you believe that we are following a plan, or that we are in control of our destiny?”
“Hm. I think that when I do something well, I am in control. But when something goes wrong, it’s for a bigger reason and it’s out of my control.”
I made a lot of fun of her for this answer. What a cop-out! The good stuff is your responsibility, the bad stuff isn’t.

But here I was, supposedly much more mature and insightful many years later, believing the exact same thing about God. For the first week of her hospitalization, I scorned God. I was pissed off and I thought that I was the one who could fix her. I would spend all day stewing over what she had said during our visit, trying to make sense of the senseless babble, to try and find a key to her recovery. It was frustrating. Finally, after about a week, I threw up my hands in liberating defeat. I couldn’t fix her. Only God could. A priest friend of mine emailed me and said “She is in God’s hands now, and there are no better hands to be in.” As soon as I trusted that, literally to the day, her doctor called and said she was making progress. That is some weird bizarre magical shit right there, and I dove head-first into it. I would go surf and imagine that each wave was a spirit that I would bow down before as I dove under it, and would lay prostrate in front of the spirits in prayer, to occasionally get up and dance with the right spirit to elate me to ecstasy. For about a month I was like a surfing shaman. I would go alone and would be in almost a tantric state in the water. If you paddled over to me, you would probably paddle away. I was seeing God everywhere and in everything. I feel desperately in love with the idea of a loving Creator, a giving force that was lifting me up to strength and recovery.

But I didn’t see God in her suffering or her delusions. That weird bizarre magical shit didn’t count in my lexicon. Which is weird. Because if I was accepting the mystical in breaking waves, why was I so adamantly refusing to see the mystical in those things which were overtly mystical? I refused to acknowledge that this force that I trusted, if it really is all-powerful, had let us crash so painfully. And that apparently it was the mystical force of evil that had done it. As my wife still insists today, she really was possessed by the devil. It wasn’t delusions. I don’t know because it didn’t happen to me. What wishful thinking, to accept the loving God but to reject its counterpart or the negligence that permits us to experience such pain.

So when Locke and Jack would discuss destiny and would try to make sense of the numbers of the smoke monster, and the show would never, ever, ever give us answers, I related. Because I was in a huge debate within my own heart about god and fate and destiny and you know what? There aren’t answers, at least not ones that I can access. They might be out there somewhere, but I’ll never know why this had to happen to my wife. I’ll never know what she experienced. I’ll never know if it’s the medicine that is working or the love that is working or if it is time that is working or if even any of it is working in the first place.

Just like Lost. The show will end tonight but I know there will be tons of lingering questions. There will be no sealed answer as to whether good or evil will prevail, because one cannot prevail over the other. We won’t know if there is destiny or fate. And the mythology of the show will last and will give us things to ponder and discuss.

My wife hasn’t been delusional in 7 months. She hasn’t been suicidal in a month. But it’s not over. We still have questions, and we probably won’t find answers. The mythology of her illness will last and will give us things to ponder and discuss.

The trumping force, over destiny and fate and good and evil, is faith. That is what I have learned through my many theological ponderings. And that is what I anticipate that the show will teach tonight. With faith, I am with OK with not knowing.

My wife left for a 10-day trip away two nights ago. I took her to the airport very late, around midnight, came home and crashed. When she leaves, I go into a several emotional hangover. Caregiving is demanding, but when you’re in it, you don’t really feel the strain. But once that strain is relieved, I hit rock bottom. Yesterday I had a full day and wasn’t anticipating getting home until around 8pm but I got home at 6. So I took a nap until 8pm. Rather than get up and make a nice fresh dinner with local produce, I ordered a pizza. From a major corporate chain, no less. I didn’t even support local business. I watched a bad baseball game on TV and a bad TV show afterwards and basically just sat around and scratched my ass. I had a huge stack of emails to get through, work to get done, projects to plan, books to read, Words With Friends games to get caught up on, etc etc etc. But I couldn’t get through it. I just sat on my ass instead. The apathy felt terrible and guilty but also incredibly necessary. I’ve pushed too hard this last 9 months and I needed a break.

The odd thing, as I’ve been pointing out, is how much better my wife is getting. This is having a strange effect on me. For the last 9 months my identity has been as a caregiver, supporting and loving a very sick woman. Someone who didn’t want to get out of bed, who would fall asleep on the couch at around 7pm, who spent most of the day convincing herself that today wasn’t a good day to kill herself.

But she’s not like that right now. She’s staying up later, jumping out of bed, eager to tackle the day and to have fun with me, her friends, at her yoga class, her pottery class, her hospital volunteering. Activities that she used to do just to do are now things she loves doing. It’s a wonderful change. I’m getting my wife back.

In spite of this, I’m still wrapped up in being a caregiver. I want to let that part of me go, but I can’t. I’m still frantically checking to make sure she takes her medicine, asking gently probing questions about her well-being…in short, nagging her. She’s cool with it, I think she’s used to being taken care of by me about as much as I’m used to taking care of her. But she’s doing so much better. This last month has been damn near miraculous in her turn-around. I just got a text two days ago from a friend who say her the other day: “She is doing great. She was awesome and really funny tonight. Loved it!” Well I fucking loved that text message, I didn’t love it, I motherfucking loved the shit out of that text message. Despite this, I’m still stuck on seeing myself as a caregiver. I guess you just can’t let that go as easily as you can become one. I am starting to act illogically. The objective data is not validating my worries, but they are there.

Her illness hit us in the most tragic and unexpected way, and my old life was violently ripped away from me. I got used to the new life, as much for survival as anything, but I definitely got used to it. I’d even say at points that I liked it. It was kind of nice to have a fallback excuse (a genuine excuse, but an excuse either way) to get out of anything that I wanted to get out of. I was never expected to actually call my grandparents on their birthday, my mom would just add me to the email but anticipate that it would be the other siblings who would do the calling. I had the ultimate “Get Out of Jail Free Card.” I was in hell instead, but all those little nagging jails were off the radar entirely. Who is gonna force me to do stupid little errands when I got the ultimate excuse in my back pocket? No one, that’s who. But as the stress of my wife’s situation is alleviating, I’m uncontrollably going into wanting to take care of everything else that I’ve neglected. I think this is just another reason that I need to unplug and run away, which is basically what we’re doing in a few weeks, as I explained in my last post UNO.

So I am still exhausting myself with worry–about her and now increasingly about the things that I’m not doing well enough that I used to do really well–and it’s making me crash. Every now and then I need to spend a night looking into the muted waters at the bottom of the well of apathy, lower my bucket, and take a long drink from it.

Gulp.

You start with 7 cards, and I like to organize my cards as soon as I get them. I of course sort out the 4 different colors, and put the Wilds off to the side. This way I can easily see which color I have the most of, so which one I need to focus on. Within the colors there are numbers, as well as special cards like Draw 2, Skip and Reverse. You can play color on color, or number on number, in order to switch colors. I organize according to number as well, within my color organization. I like to go from low to high, left to right, and but if I have multiple cards of the same number, but across different colors, I group those together as well. If I have a few 7′s, for example, one of yellow and one of blue, I’ll make sure that the 7′s are organized right next to each other so I know that I can use them to switch the colors to move the game forward. I’ve played enough UNO to know how to sort it out and try and make sense of it.

However, sometimes you just get obliterated by the other side. Like absolutely annihilated. If someone puts down a Draw 2 on you, well then the actual act of picking up two cards counts as your turn. So you draw two, and you miss your turn. If you’re playing with only one other person (which I mostly do, with my wife) then it’s back to her turn. It’s like a triple wammy for me. There are some moments where your opponent craftily organizes the ultimate death blow on you, starting off with like a Draw 4 wild (the trump card in the game…you get to pick the color, the other players has to pick up 4 cards, and if you’re playing with only one other person, it’s your turn again), and then goes right from that Draw 4 to like a Draw 2, then skips, then skips in another color, then Draw 2′s you in that new color, and only has two cards left, and there you are, quite unexpectedly with 8 new cards in your hand, totally demolished and panicked.

When this happens in UNO, I take the time to reorganize. I’ve just been dealt an entirely different hand. It’s like a whole new game. I’ve got totally new cards, I need to re-sort my colors and my numbers to figure out what my priorities are.

This is why in 3 weeks, I’m quitting my job. People say they understand, but I don’t think they really understand. This is the worst economy since the Great Depression., and I’m willfully giving up my job. While people fear getting laid off, I’m quitting. I am saying goodbye to a salary and insurance coverage to go without steady income, and to pay our own insurance via Cobra for the next 12 months. We’re going to travel (which costs) and not work (which doesn’t earn money). You know why? Because we got the death blow. Whoever the hell I’m playing against in UNO conspired against me to beat the shit out of me, but not quite end the game, just make it bad enough to think that the game was over, but really just to fuck with me. I didn’t get a Draw 4 and then a few Draw 2′s, I got like a Draw 6,000,000,000, fuck you this isn’t even UNO anymore this is an entirely new game with new rules and you’re way the fuck behind and are about to lose, so you need to figure your shit out, now. Granted, I’m playing this game with a partner and that helps, but we still haven’t figured things out. We need to sort through our cards, count up our colors and our Wild’s and our Skip’s to find out what our new priorities are.

So I’m on the way out the door of work. It feels freeing but also somewhat unsettling. I’m looking forward to traveling the world (New Zealand, Fiji, Japan, Italy, and Kenya….oh, and a cross country road trip in the US as well as a 6 day biking trip which I’m planning to do by myself, under a vow of silence) but I’m still not sure I’m going on vacation. I think I’m just starting to sort through this mess of cards that we’ve been dealt to really find out what is going on. This writing has helped, has been a big first step in that, and will be something I continue to do. But I still got a ways to go.

I included this picture at the end because when you google image “UNO” this thing comes up. Awesome. And also encouraging. I’m hoping to end up this carefree after I take this year to sort through my UNO cards.

San Francisco is obviously known for many quaint and charming landmarks, like its cable cars, rolling hills, and probably most famously, the Golden Gate Bridge. It is a gorgeous bridge. It’s totally worth the $6 in tolls to drive across it, which if you do it during the summer means that you will leave the fog and arrive in sunny Marin County to sip coffee in Sausalito. I love to bike across the bridge, it’s an experience like none other.

I was so drawn to the bridge that I made a music video for a musician friend of mine that features old archival footage of the opening ceremony for the Golden Gate Bridge. I focus in on this one little kid with blond hair who runs and jumps, he’s so excited by walking across this massive feat of human accomplishment that he can’t help but to literally jump for joy. When I made the movie, that was exactly how I felt about moving to San Francisco in the first place. And yes, this video will show you my name. Step 2. So be it. I’m not yet ready to show this blog to people I actually know, but I’m OK with this step.

Unfortunately, the Golden Gate Bridge is also an internationally recognized suicide destination. Many people come to San Francisco, but some people come here to die, and to throw themselves off of this beautiful bridge. The railings on the bridge are very low, so it’s not at all hard. The official statistic from what I’ve heard is that it’s about 1 suicide every 2 weeks. It’s so well-known that there is a movie called “The Bridge” that talks about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge. I saw it a few years ago, when the idea of my wife wanting to jump off the bridge was preposterous and unheard of, like an alien landing. I remember it being a really sad movie.

For the many months that my wife was suicidal, she mostly considered jumping off the bridge. She toyed with over-dosing on her medicine, but the bridge was always her preferred way to do it. Obviously, we stayed away from the Golden Gate Bridge when she was immediately out of the hospital, but it’s inevitable that at some point you’re going to have to cross it again to venture north.

I remember when she first saw the bridge after fantasizing about it for many months. We drove across it to visit friends. I didn’t make a big fuss about where we were and what we were doing. We just drove over the bridge in silence. After we were safely back on land, I asked her how she felt about it. “I was mostly looking for which spot I would go to in order to jump.”

I think I need to accept the fact that I am more traumatized by this experience then I often acknolwedge. I just wrote about happy endings and optimism, and that is genuine and it’s good, but I’m also still pretty fucked up by this whole thing. When I first returned to work, I would sometimes have visual hallucinations about my wife trying to kill herself. I’d be in front of the classroom teaching, and then I’d look down at my feet while the kids were reading, but I wouldn’t see the ground below me, but instead it was like I was her, and I was looking down from the ledge, with the bay rushing below me, far far away. I would be in her point of view, seeing what she would likely see if she was to do it. I’d push the image out of my head and try to get back to work, but it would creep up on me again and again. Or I’d see things from another angle, some beautiful, poetic shot where the camera would be held over the railing, but far away, like 100yds away, so you’d just see a long solitary orange rail, with my wife on the wrong side of it, ready to fling herself off.

This morning on the drive into work I must have played the wrong song on my ipod because those images came rushing back to me. I was once again having a full-body experience of a suicide attempt that never actually even happened, just an enactment of a hypothetical, life-shattering nightmare. That to me is a pretty clear sign that I’m traumatized by this. Clearly enough to necessitate the therapy I’m seeking. Enough for me to change my lifetime commitment to be drug and alcohol free in order to take sleep medication so I can rest at night. (Which, by the way, I haven’t taken in about a month.)

She’s getting better, but the memories linger. If you had told me one year ago that I’d spend day after day convincing my own wife of the various reasons to stay alive, I would have punched you in the face. But that’s how it is.

Probably the worst memory that haunts me occurred in my first month of returning to work. To give you a timeline here, we’re talking like mid-February, 2010, I was back to teaching after taking the first semester off. Things went well at school that day, which was a rarity. I was focused, I wasn’t distracted, all was good. I came home jolly and feeling good about my work.

I came home to enthusiastically tell her about how my day had went, all the good that had happened. She mostly just sat there, trying to be happy for me, but not into it at all. My energy dwindled, I started to not care about what I was saying, so I finally asked her “How are you doing? Is everything OK?”

Pause. She didn’t want to talk about what she was thinking about. I encourage her, so she finally got to it.

“No, it’s not OK. I can’t decide. If I go to the bridge, I’ll take the Vespa to get there. So what I can’t decide is what to do with the key. If I jump with the key, then I’m hoping that they’ll find the body, that way you can use the key and still drive the Vespa. But what if they don’t find the body? [Editorial note: she referred to it as the body, not her body.] Then that means the Vespa will be stuck without a key. So maybe I can leave it in the ignition. But that means someone will probably steal it, and I don’t want you to lose the Vespa. So what should I do? Should I leave the key, or bring it with me?”

I don’t know.

Once upon a time a little boy was born into a loving family who nurtured him as he grew. His third day of college he met the most beautiful girl in the world who was also raised by a loving family, and the two fell in love. They got married, moved to California, and lived happily ever after.

Now, if I was to succinctly tell you my life story as I saw it 8 months ago, it would go like this:

Once upon a time a little boy was born into a loving family who nurtured him as he grew. His third day of college he met the most beautiful girl in the world who was also raised by a loving family, and the two fell in love. They got married, moved to California, and all was going well until the little girl got really sick. She had a psychotic break and was hospitalized for a month, and their lives were thrown into chaos and sadness. All that was known became unknown, and the little boy and girl were afraid.

Today, however, I tell it with a happy ending again:

Once upon a time a little boy was born into a loving family who nurtured him as he grew. His third day of college he met the most beautiful girl in the world who was also raised by a loving family, and the two fell in love. They got married, moved to California, and all was going well until the little girl got really sick. She had a psychotic break and was hospitalized for a month. This was the most intense challenge the young couple had ever faced in their lives, but through patience, faith, and love, they were able to rebound from this awful tragedy and make peace with it in their lives, and they lived happily ever after.

My wife’s illness is fucked up, but I believe that we will have a happy ending. These last 9 months have felt like an eternal hell, but they also seem to a slowly drifting into the past, like a buoyant burden cast out into the receding tide. We can still see it, but it’s moving away, and it’s easier to see our lives for what they are. We sill have yet to fully make peace (including that little nugget in the story is a pretty optimistic touch) but I think we’ll get there.

Not all stories end happily, especially when it comes to mental illness. There are other people who loved their wives just as much as I do, but that wasn’t enough to bring them back from the edge. There are parents of children who did commit suicide, families whose loved ones can never return to normal, functioning lives.

For 27 years, I led an extremely charmed existence. My parents are great and I lived very comfortably. My siblings and I are unnaturally close. I went to a good college and didn’t have any student loans. I got into a profession that I loved (I’m a high school history teacher), regardless of the money. I met my wife early and we fell in love hard and have been wonderful companions for each other. I had a lot of really great sex. Every night I fell asleep living happily ever after.

My wife’s illness shattered the illusion of a painless life, and suffering was thrust violently into my face for the first real time. And yet, I’m now writing once again optimistic that this epic road bump has been traversed. While walking on the beach this weekend, my wife said to me: “We have a lot of good times to look forward to, and I think they start right now.”

I don’t know why I have happy endings and why other people don’t. I don’t know why my wife didn’t jump off a bridge, but other people do. There is no certain answer to this. Philosophers and theologians have tread this ground for ages. Job asked God why he was being punished, and was punished even more. Nietzche thinks that God must be dead. Even Jesus asked why it was all happening as he was being nailed to the cross.

I don’t write with an answer, just with acknowledgment. I know I’m lucky, even within my misfortune. One of the earliest blog comments that I got here was someone saying that “life had dealt me a really rough hand.” At the time, it sure as hell did seem like that, but that was a micro-view of the situation. On a macro-level, I’m a blind-as-a-bat asshole if I can’t see the loved that is showering down on me. Love isn’t like pizza. If you give some away, you don’t end up with less, you end up with more. So that’s what I’m trying to do on my little patch of the earth: take the love I’m given, and give it to others. That’s the only way I can make sense of the good that I’ve been given.

I don’t think I did anything wrong to deserve what went wrong, but I also don’t think I did anything right to deserve what went right. It just did. But to those of you out there who might be feeling that they never get to wish upon a star, that there is no riding into the sunset, I would just say quite simply: ……yet. You are not there, yet. But I wholeheartedly believe that everyone is loved by a force greater than all of us and that force wants what is best for us. It just takes time. It may not even be in this world. We love fairy tales because they come true.

Easy for me to say. My 9 months is probably a drop in the bucket for many of you. So it goes. I can’t fake pessimism, I live and breathe hope. That’s what 27 years of a charmed life will do. But 9 months obviously hasn’t soured that hope out of me, it has strengthened it. And I say this now, with my wife off her antipsychotic medicines, and her side effects diminishing, and her smile returning, and a year of amazing travels on our horizon, but this hope didn’t magically appear like a rabbit out of a hat. It has been growing and strengthening from the first time I looked at her in sadness as she was on the other side of a locked door in a psychiatric hospital.

We will all live happily ever after some day.