My husband couldn't say someone "died" until he took a bereavement course at grad school. When my father died, we didn't have a funeral. Maybe it was because we were atheists. Maybe it was post-death inertia.
We merely watched him get zipped into the body bag.
Then my family threw a big party a few days later. I chose not to attend, and went to an AA meeting instead (it was drink and tobacco that killed him). At the party, they had a life mask of Dad with a large glass of vodka on one side and a pack of cigarettes on the other. I guess you can admire the grim humor.
Then somehow his ashes wound up in the tv room of our beach house (he died in 2004) until last summer, because nobody wanted them. Lucretia took a doggy bag 'o Dad back home, Cordelia sniffed, "I don't believe in relics," my brother and mother weren't interested, so I packed him up in his plastic box inside the larger cardboard box from the crematorium and brought him here. He's on my dining room bookcase now, in a flowered gift bag that he would probably be pretty offended by! Since I have all of my dead cats' ashes in the cardboard boxes from the pet crematorium on the same bookshelf, it seems right. I didn't take them out of the boxes because the tins look so stupid--oval with kitschy paintings of kittens. A plain white box seems more dignified. I don't own any land, so there is nowhere to bury them.
We did scatter some of Dad's ashes in what used to be our beach garden before I packed him, at my mother's suggestion. It was just her, my husband, and me. I asked my mother if she had anything she wanted to say. She shook her head. The waves were crashing against the beach as I stuck my hand into the ashes and pitched them over the garden, twice. They sparkled in the sun. Then I scattered some where he used to plant basil. Then I looked down at my hand and thought, "I've got Dad under my fingernails."
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Monday, April 23, 2007
How Much To Disclose? Present, Tense
Today at an AA meeting, the woman next to me shared that she identified with the shooter at Virginia Tech, that she was so filled with rage that she did not find the photos of him with guns at all frightening. Everyone was staring at her with astonishment, horror, whatever. She said, "There but for the grace of God, go I."
I sat and thought about whether or not I found the pictures frightening. I have not gone out of my way to look at them, and have avoided watching the video. Shortly after I published my last entry, CNBC (I think) ran a program on serial killers, with videotapes the killers had made shortly before their rampages. I certainly understood what they were all talking about...feeling shit on by society, misplaced volcanic rage, etc. In fact, it made me so uncomfortable that I changed the channel. I know thoughts are not reality, but to know thoughts like that are commonplace in one's own head, and to see other's reactions to it (thankfully, not to me)...one must not risk speaking them aloud.
Go see 'Grindhouse' instead (said with sarcasm). That's a healthy outlet.
I sat and thought about whether or not I found the pictures frightening. I have not gone out of my way to look at them, and have avoided watching the video. Shortly after I published my last entry, CNBC (I think) ran a program on serial killers, with videotapes the killers had made shortly before their rampages. I certainly understood what they were all talking about...feeling shit on by society, misplaced volcanic rage, etc. In fact, it made me so uncomfortable that I changed the channel. I know thoughts are not reality, but to know thoughts like that are commonplace in one's own head, and to see other's reactions to it (thankfully, not to me)...one must not risk speaking them aloud.
Go see 'Grindhouse' instead (said with sarcasm). That's a healthy outlet.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Sober and Insane - January, 1999
(Author's note: in the wake of the carnage at Virginia Tech, I would like to make it clear that the following was written during a psychotic episode almost nine years ago. I have never harmed another human being or living creature, except myself.)
I am shaking as I board the cross-town bus and take a seat. My feelings are concealed behind what I hope is a blank expression. I try to ignore the screaming in my head. If you looked at me you would see that most invisible of creatures, a sloppy, overweight woman on the verse of middle-age, hair pulled back into a long ponytail, wearing an anklelength dun-colored dress and sneakers, purse on her lap, gazing out the window. You’d think I was wondering what to make the family for dinner. But I’m not.
In the seats at the front of the bus are little old ladies half my size. I want to pounce on one, the one in the gray hound’s-tooth suit and impeccable white hair, throw her to the floor, and beat her head against the bus floor until her brains come out of her skull. I can see the blood and the yellow brains on the rubber matting. I once saw a man who had been hit by a truck, and that was what his brains looked like, all over 72nd Street.
The longing is so strong my whole body shudders with it. No, I tell myself, sit still, be quiet. Don’t do anything or you’ll end up back in the hospital. I take out my pocket notebook, and write: “Help help help—I feel like I’m going to explode, to FLIP OUT, to commit mayhem, either on myself or somebody else. Can’t stand the pressure can’t stand the pressure can’t stand the pressure.”
Writing doesn’t help. Before I attack somebody, I exit the bus and walk quickly down the sidewalk, disappearing into the crowd.
Andrew Goldstein is on trial for murder in the subway pushing death of Kendra Webdale. I read about it in The New York Times. A diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, Goldstein had begged for long-term hospitalization over and over again, but had been shuttled in and out of hospitals and was currently unmedicated. His defense is not guilty by reason of insanity. A verdict of not guilty rests on the assumption that the defendant does not understand that his actions are wrong.
When Goldstein recounted the killing of his victim, he said, it was an “attack” taking over his body. “It just goes whoosh, whoosh, push.” I know exactly what he means.
The prosecution is attempting to say that Goldstein is guilty because he was cognizant of his actions. That Goldstein acted out of malice, out of hatred toward women, not because he is insane. People think that you cannot be insane and sane at the same time. By those standards Goldstein should have been able to calmly describe his actions at the time of the crime. Since he couldn’t, he was a drooling lunatic. “Was he drooling, or anything like that?” the district attorney asked a detective about Goldstein’s demeanor at the time.
Like Andrew Goldstein, I am mentally ill. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I was fine until I stopped drinking, in late June of this year. Then, it was like my brain exploded. At various times I have been diagnosed as schizophrenic, borderline schizophrenic, unipolar and cyclothymic. I have been told I suffer from borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, oppositional defiance disorder with a soupcon of obsessive-compulsive disorder and personality fragmentation. As one therapist I saw last year said to me, not joking, “You are the entire DSM 4.”
This past summer I spent nine days in a psychiatric ward. Miraculously it was my first hospitalization, although I have had many trips to the emergency room. Mostly due to alcohol withdrawal seizures. Let me tell you, those are not fun. You don’t feel them coming on, but then you are, with a dress hanger stuck in your mouth and surrounded by paramedics. I can’t even remember my phone number, much less where I live.
If I stay sober, at least I won’t have those any more.
When one of my psychotic episodes attacks, my head is filled with my own screams. I become agitated. If I do not throw objects or attack other people, I attack myself. Hitting my head with my fists, clawing my skin with my fingernails, slicing myself with razor blades. The attacks come when I am under stress, when I am tired, when I am upset. Ordinary anger or sadness turns into hysteria and I go off. The horrifying part is that I know what is happening to me, but I cannot always stop it. One voice in my head is saying, “Do it! Kill the bad thing!” The other is begging, “Please, stop, why are you doing this?”
At twenty years old, with a history of suicide attempts and breakdowns, I was hallucinating and psychotic. Other people were behind a wall of glass. I despaired of ever living a halfway normal life. My family thought I was being dramatic. I drank. The therapist I saw believed that hospitalization would stigmatize me, that medication was unnecessary. I could will myself out of insanity. And over fifteen years, I thought I had.
Now I no longer drink, and my mental illness is much, much worse. Booze helped to medicate my feelings, calm my internal violence, and much of my abnormal behavior in the past was put down to drunkenness.
Now, I am alone with my insanity. And it wants to kill me.
I am married, I live in a nice apartment, I have many friends, and until recently I was successful at my job. Those I work with have little inkling of my internal struggle. Perhaps they wonder why I go to the ladies’ room so much. I’d rather they thought I was on drugs than know the truth: I am shaking and crying in the toilet booth as waves of emotion come crashing over me. For no discernible reason. At times I feel like I’m vomiting from a bottomless pit of grief. I hold on to the counter in the employees’ kitchen, fighting the urge to scream and throw the milk cartons across the room.
Why isn’t this happening to any of the other people I know in early sobriety? They talk about “pink clouds” of euphoria, how relieved they are to be free of the spell of the disease. Or they talk about the discomfort of feeling their feelings. Feeling your feelings…bullshit! Try feeling THESE feelings! These are the Incredible Hulk of Feelings!
Which voice in my head is the true voice? The one I’ve kept silent with alcohol for almost twenty years? “Kill yourself,” it urges. “You know it’s the only reasonable choice. Go ahead. Everybody will be better off if you die.” I fight this side of me almost daily, armed with therapy, medication, 12-step meetings, exercise. But I know if I don’t take that handful of pills every morning, I will stop straddling the line between sanity and insanity. Insanity will take over. I’m terrified.
I do not know whether Andrew Goldstein should be found guilty or not. But I do know that you can be sane and insane at the same time. And it is a terrible place to be.
I am shaking as I board the cross-town bus and take a seat. My feelings are concealed behind what I hope is a blank expression. I try to ignore the screaming in my head. If you looked at me you would see that most invisible of creatures, a sloppy, overweight woman on the verse of middle-age, hair pulled back into a long ponytail, wearing an anklelength dun-colored dress and sneakers, purse on her lap, gazing out the window. You’d think I was wondering what to make the family for dinner. But I’m not.
In the seats at the front of the bus are little old ladies half my size. I want to pounce on one, the one in the gray hound’s-tooth suit and impeccable white hair, throw her to the floor, and beat her head against the bus floor until her brains come out of her skull. I can see the blood and the yellow brains on the rubber matting. I once saw a man who had been hit by a truck, and that was what his brains looked like, all over 72nd Street.
The longing is so strong my whole body shudders with it. No, I tell myself, sit still, be quiet. Don’t do anything or you’ll end up back in the hospital. I take out my pocket notebook, and write: “Help help help—I feel like I’m going to explode, to FLIP OUT, to commit mayhem, either on myself or somebody else. Can’t stand the pressure can’t stand the pressure can’t stand the pressure.”
Writing doesn’t help. Before I attack somebody, I exit the bus and walk quickly down the sidewalk, disappearing into the crowd.
Andrew Goldstein is on trial for murder in the subway pushing death of Kendra Webdale. I read about it in The New York Times. A diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, Goldstein had begged for long-term hospitalization over and over again, but had been shuttled in and out of hospitals and was currently unmedicated. His defense is not guilty by reason of insanity. A verdict of not guilty rests on the assumption that the defendant does not understand that his actions are wrong.
When Goldstein recounted the killing of his victim, he said, it was an “attack” taking over his body. “It just goes whoosh, whoosh, push.” I know exactly what he means.
The prosecution is attempting to say that Goldstein is guilty because he was cognizant of his actions. That Goldstein acted out of malice, out of hatred toward women, not because he is insane. People think that you cannot be insane and sane at the same time. By those standards Goldstein should have been able to calmly describe his actions at the time of the crime. Since he couldn’t, he was a drooling lunatic. “Was he drooling, or anything like that?” the district attorney asked a detective about Goldstein’s demeanor at the time.
Like Andrew Goldstein, I am mentally ill. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I was fine until I stopped drinking, in late June of this year. Then, it was like my brain exploded. At various times I have been diagnosed as schizophrenic, borderline schizophrenic, unipolar and cyclothymic. I have been told I suffer from borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, oppositional defiance disorder with a soupcon of obsessive-compulsive disorder and personality fragmentation. As one therapist I saw last year said to me, not joking, “You are the entire DSM 4.”
This past summer I spent nine days in a psychiatric ward. Miraculously it was my first hospitalization, although I have had many trips to the emergency room. Mostly due to alcohol withdrawal seizures. Let me tell you, those are not fun. You don’t feel them coming on, but then you are, with a dress hanger stuck in your mouth and surrounded by paramedics. I can’t even remember my phone number, much less where I live.
If I stay sober, at least I won’t have those any more.
When one of my psychotic episodes attacks, my head is filled with my own screams. I become agitated. If I do not throw objects or attack other people, I attack myself. Hitting my head with my fists, clawing my skin with my fingernails, slicing myself with razor blades. The attacks come when I am under stress, when I am tired, when I am upset. Ordinary anger or sadness turns into hysteria and I go off. The horrifying part is that I know what is happening to me, but I cannot always stop it. One voice in my head is saying, “Do it! Kill the bad thing!” The other is begging, “Please, stop, why are you doing this?”
At twenty years old, with a history of suicide attempts and breakdowns, I was hallucinating and psychotic. Other people were behind a wall of glass. I despaired of ever living a halfway normal life. My family thought I was being dramatic. I drank. The therapist I saw believed that hospitalization would stigmatize me, that medication was unnecessary. I could will myself out of insanity. And over fifteen years, I thought I had.
Now I no longer drink, and my mental illness is much, much worse. Booze helped to medicate my feelings, calm my internal violence, and much of my abnormal behavior in the past was put down to drunkenness.
Now, I am alone with my insanity. And it wants to kill me.
I am married, I live in a nice apartment, I have many friends, and until recently I was successful at my job. Those I work with have little inkling of my internal struggle. Perhaps they wonder why I go to the ladies’ room so much. I’d rather they thought I was on drugs than know the truth: I am shaking and crying in the toilet booth as waves of emotion come crashing over me. For no discernible reason. At times I feel like I’m vomiting from a bottomless pit of grief. I hold on to the counter in the employees’ kitchen, fighting the urge to scream and throw the milk cartons across the room.
Why isn’t this happening to any of the other people I know in early sobriety? They talk about “pink clouds” of euphoria, how relieved they are to be free of the spell of the disease. Or they talk about the discomfort of feeling their feelings. Feeling your feelings…bullshit! Try feeling THESE feelings! These are the Incredible Hulk of Feelings!
Which voice in my head is the true voice? The one I’ve kept silent with alcohol for almost twenty years? “Kill yourself,” it urges. “You know it’s the only reasonable choice. Go ahead. Everybody will be better off if you die.” I fight this side of me almost daily, armed with therapy, medication, 12-step meetings, exercise. But I know if I don’t take that handful of pills every morning, I will stop straddling the line between sanity and insanity. Insanity will take over. I’m terrified.
I do not know whether Andrew Goldstein should be found guilty or not. But I do know that you can be sane and insane at the same time. And it is a terrible place to be.
Losing My Therapist to Death...April 15, 2007
Last month, my therapist suddenly canceled on me, and later called saying she would not know what her schedule would be, because her husband was going into hospice care at home. In a brief series of phone calls, we talked about the hospice experience, and whether or not she was returning to the clinic I had been going to for about four years. Turns out not. Our last conversation, she was crying. My dad died at home in hospice care, but he only had it the last two days of his life, due to medical bungling.
Then a therapist from the clinic contacted me, and convinced me that I needed "closure" with the clinic, and should consider taking therapy with her. As soon as I walked through the door, I knew I'd made a terrible mistake. All of the grief I'd felt at losing my former therapist hit me right in the face. I hadn't let myself truly feel it...I mostly felt bewilderment and a sense of loss at how it had happened.
Ever since I went back to the clinic, all sorts of horrible thoughts and images are bombarding me. Talking about Dad’s death that way, and my terrific guilt about my therapist suffering whatever she might have been suffering at the time with her husband having had his larynx removed before she and I even started treatment. But I didn’t know, and she never said. Until after she had left.
I keep seeing Dad as he was on those last days, wretchedly thin, gasping for air, the window wide open and the room freezing cold. His eyes, bluer than blue, the ice blue I associated with the rage of my childhood. Only now they were open in uncomprehending panic, a sort of “what kind of huge cosmic insult is this?” Amazing how hard it is for someone to die, even when they want to.
Then I see his dead face, looking at it sideways as I lay on the drenched, soiled bed next to him. Apparently I lay there for hours. He didn’t look like himself any more. There was no soul there. Even my cat Mooki looked like Mooki when she died, which was part of why it was so hard to let Dr. Martinez take her body. This huge, gaping hole of grief has been torn open again, and it’s just plain wrong.
I miss my therapist. I miss her laugh, and her outrage, and her articulateness. I miss that she was also a writer and was never at a loss no matter what word I used, unless it was a modern colloquialism used by the younger set. I miss her funny misshapen shoes—she must have had bunions. They were nice shoes, but they always had wide elastic inserts. She parted her brown hair in the middle and had extremely thin lips. Often I would spend long parts of our sessions absently staring down at her shoes, while Bucky lay beside me. She adored Bucky, loved his soft coat, loved rumpling his ears. I don’t think she’d ever had a dog; everything about his physical being surprised her. Joan never wore makeup (maybe not the best influence for me), but she always had a pair of large dangling earrings on, and her clothing was usually from Ann Taylor. I often saw the labels of her jackets when they hung on the door. She had very good taste and middle-aged spread.
What I miss most is her ability to see the positive side of everything, since that’s an ability that was crippled in me so many years ago. The worst experiences had something to offer, even if it was only that I had survived them. When the critics savaged my show in 2005 and I was devastated, she emphasized what an achievement producing the show and running the gauntlet of the Midtown Theater Festival had been. And how I then learned enough to triumph in San Francisco, and did extended improvisation on stage for the first time. She was so supportive of my marriage, pointing out how extremely rare it was for a couple our age and length of marriage to still have a regular sex life of any kind. In fact she was so supportive of everything; that annoyed me sometimes. I guess my psychiatrist, with his strong opinions and directive-ness, is an easier quantity for me to understand.
I wish it hadn’t ended in the awful, sad way it did. I want to contact her, but I am afraid I will get her in the middle of something…she’s at the end stage of caring for her husband, and by now he might have died. I’m glad that unlike me at that time, she is surrounded by a strong, caring family.
Then a therapist from the clinic contacted me, and convinced me that I needed "closure" with the clinic, and should consider taking therapy with her. As soon as I walked through the door, I knew I'd made a terrible mistake. All of the grief I'd felt at losing my former therapist hit me right in the face. I hadn't let myself truly feel it...I mostly felt bewilderment and a sense of loss at how it had happened.
Ever since I went back to the clinic, all sorts of horrible thoughts and images are bombarding me. Talking about Dad’s death that way, and my terrific guilt about my therapist suffering whatever she might have been suffering at the time with her husband having had his larynx removed before she and I even started treatment. But I didn’t know, and she never said. Until after she had left.
I keep seeing Dad as he was on those last days, wretchedly thin, gasping for air, the window wide open and the room freezing cold. His eyes, bluer than blue, the ice blue I associated with the rage of my childhood. Only now they were open in uncomprehending panic, a sort of “what kind of huge cosmic insult is this?” Amazing how hard it is for someone to die, even when they want to.
Then I see his dead face, looking at it sideways as I lay on the drenched, soiled bed next to him. Apparently I lay there for hours. He didn’t look like himself any more. There was no soul there. Even my cat Mooki looked like Mooki when she died, which was part of why it was so hard to let Dr. Martinez take her body. This huge, gaping hole of grief has been torn open again, and it’s just plain wrong.
I miss my therapist. I miss her laugh, and her outrage, and her articulateness. I miss that she was also a writer and was never at a loss no matter what word I used, unless it was a modern colloquialism used by the younger set. I miss her funny misshapen shoes—she must have had bunions. They were nice shoes, but they always had wide elastic inserts. She parted her brown hair in the middle and had extremely thin lips. Often I would spend long parts of our sessions absently staring down at her shoes, while Bucky lay beside me. She adored Bucky, loved his soft coat, loved rumpling his ears. I don’t think she’d ever had a dog; everything about his physical being surprised her. Joan never wore makeup (maybe not the best influence for me), but she always had a pair of large dangling earrings on, and her clothing was usually from Ann Taylor. I often saw the labels of her jackets when they hung on the door. She had very good taste and middle-aged spread.
What I miss most is her ability to see the positive side of everything, since that’s an ability that was crippled in me so many years ago. The worst experiences had something to offer, even if it was only that I had survived them. When the critics savaged my show in 2005 and I was devastated, she emphasized what an achievement producing the show and running the gauntlet of the Midtown Theater Festival had been. And how I then learned enough to triumph in San Francisco, and did extended improvisation on stage for the first time. She was so supportive of my marriage, pointing out how extremely rare it was for a couple our age and length of marriage to still have a regular sex life of any kind. In fact she was so supportive of everything; that annoyed me sometimes. I guess my psychiatrist, with his strong opinions and directive-ness, is an easier quantity for me to understand.
I wish it hadn’t ended in the awful, sad way it did. I want to contact her, but I am afraid I will get her in the middle of something…she’s at the end stage of caring for her husband, and by now he might have died. I’m glad that unlike me at that time, she is surrounded by a strong, caring family.
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