You Must Remember This

Introduction I

The blog before this, or, I should say, the "look" or "appearance" of  some kind of "mutilated" blog before this, is not the result of some crazed series of moments in my life; it is the result of what happens what you write a perfectly good blog and hit SAVE but forget to hit PUBLISH.  I hit "save" several times throughout the piece, as it was a longish piece; I never once managed to remember to hit "publish" at all.

Introduction II

As psychologically healthy beings, we are not finished in our development at twenty-five or thirty,  we are never finished, ever.  While it is true that what we take to be our personal identity often appears to be linked to early developmental patterns and models, it is also true that we are always in the process of trying to feel alive, safe, comfortable and in movement,  and that, through these efforts, we are endlessly altering our own capacities for growth.

Even if we are full of suffering or major impairment, most of us try to restore our connection within whatever large (or small) areas of available emotional, physical or neurological motility so that we are also moving towards connection and safety.  As Leonard Cohen writes in his song Anthem,  "There is a crack, a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in/ That's how the light gets in."

We are adapting all the time, no matter what our age. I have been thinking about this process today, most probably because today I took four of Jim's large framed photographs which had previously been lovingly lodged at Bob and Mel Dietz's home, to the local UPS store, in order to send them to my daughters, Kelly and Erin, two to each.
                                                                

                                               You Must Remember This
                                                             

"I feel as though I am sending my children off to school," said Mel, as she accompanied me to my car as I carried the photographs out of their home. I don't remember how it was that they acquired the pictures: did they acquire them all at once?  Did Jim gift them to our beloved friends, did they buy them, did they acquire them one by one or all at once? How did any of this happen?  All I remember is that Jim's photographs, the Bird on the Wire, the picture of the ship in the puddle which won a fairly large contest, as I recall, the picture of the yellow ladder leaning against a wall, the picture of the red door, which became the cover of a book published by Knopf,  had seemingly always hung there in the Dietz's stairway between their living room and their upstairs, in that order, in that way, so that if you entered Bob and Mel's home, there they were.

I nodded at her words, my own eyes welling up with tears.  Ours' had been a long friendship and Jim had been an enormous part of that friendship for forty-three years. His matter-of-factness, his intelligence, his humor, his various and sundry talents and capabilities, his many interests, his kindness, his  gentleness, his cowboy-lonesomeness, his creativity, his steadfastness, his interest and ability in food and cooking, his ability to love.....well, let me stop here,  Death doesn't end one thing, friends. I am smiling as I write these words, but tears are very near the surface.

And still, there are the pictures.  How Jim loved to take pictures!  What stories I have about Jim and his brother Neil out there in the blasted hot Eastern Washington desert, trying (and ultimately succeeding), to take one damnedly decent photograph of a rattlesnake striking at their camera.  What danger! What joy! What nonsence!

But it was not nonsense to them.  Nor was it dangerous.  It was simply, "How do we get to the truest truth of this?"
                                                                  *
Photography equals truth.  Jim equaled, for me, truth.  "Love,"  says the author Julian Barnes,"is the meeting of truth and magic.  Truth, as in photograph; magic, as in ballooning."  Well, Jim didn't "balloon," whatever Barnes meant by that, but he did nearly everything else. He wrote, he translated, he built pots, he directed plays, he photographed, he discovered a "link animal between this one and that one" and the "new" animal was named after Jim - - that is, Morganis-something-something,  he learned Latin and wrote two scholarly papers which were published in definitively scientific journals.  And, one dark night, among friends, namely, Steve, Katy, Bob and Mel, he sang, slowly and evenly, all the lyrics to The Red River Valley, while we sat, spellbound.

Why were we spellbound?  Did we not know he could sing?  Really, he couldn't.
 But, really, he could.  Fact is, he did.
 In the unfolding of memory, all this comes back to me.
                                                                  *

Since Bob and Mel returned Jim's photographs back to me I have dreamed five dreams about him.  In each one, Jim has died but is now returned to live again.  He is to die again, so the dreams
say, but not yet, not yet.

In the first dream, Jim says, "I think I should feel guilty that I'm back."

In the second dream, Jim asks, "My own death? Are you kidding me?"

In the third dream Jim is married to somebody else and won't look at me.

In the fourth dream, Jim asks me if we had any curry and chutney.

In the fifth dream Jim is being carried around by Obama.

                                                                       *
I put the photographs in my office closet and I shut the closet doors. Grief  hit me again. "Grief is a human, not a medical condition, and while there are pills to help us forget it  - - and everything else - - there are no pills to cure it.  The griefstruck are not depressed, just properly, appropriately, mathematically sad," says my friend (well, I have never met him, but so far he makes the most sense to me of all the many authors whom have written about the loss of their wives or husbands since Jim died, including Joan Didian,  Joyce Carol Oates and others - - so many others, and therefore, he IS my friend!!)

I found Jim's little old Cannon camera,  took pictures of the photographs, found somebody to help me send the pictures to the girls, and asked them which ones they wanted.  They told me.  And so.  A few days later, today in fact, just this morning, I loaded them up in my car, the way you would load up anything, and drove them to the local UPS store, where I had to ask a man if he would kindly open the door for me.  I didn't want to make two trips.  I only wanted to make one trip.       
                                                                         *

I gave the UPS lady the four large framed pictures, each signed and dated by Jim.  I addressed the labels.  How odd this feels, how odd, I thought, but I couldn't figure out what was so odd about it.  Jim has been dead now,  (Dead! What a word to use! So coarse!  Coarse!  What a word to use! So
middle-class!) --Jim has been dead now - - five years! And then I say to myself, "Five years, next to forty-three years, is nothing. Nothing! You see patients who are dealing with their first five years! Give yourself a break!"

                                                                         *

Many things have happened since Jim died, some good, some bad.  Many photographs have been taken. The photograph of me in Times Square.  The photograph of me at Lambeau Field.  The photograph of Aleister, now thirteen, and me, dancing, in my kitchen,  The photograph of Aleister and me at the Seattle Aquariam.  The photograph of me and Katy at Etta's restaurant. The photograph of me and Bob and Mel.  The photograph of me and Steve and Katy. 

"Life goes on," said Bertold Brecht in his play, The Good Woman of Setsuan. I didn't like that play overly much, but I played the lead.  Sometimes you just keep trying to get close to something you love even when you don't love the direction you're going, the vehicle you're driving in, the frame that's surrounding you.  You're doing your best.

It's hard to never hear from him. Sometimes I'll just take any reason at all just to write about him even a little bit.
                                                                           *

Well.  As I said in the beginning of this somewhat (or very) disjointed blog, no matter how isolated or lonely or withdrawn we become, we all have an impulse to keep moving towards the light. Homo sapiens are, if nothing else, persistent. I am, if nothing else, persistent. As a therapist, trained in  grief therapy,  I am amazed at how much we don't know.  I know we don't know it, because I have seen, since Jim died, at least ten people, all sane, well organized individuals, who had "lost" their partners of over thirty-some years (and, in some situations, over fifty years) to death - - and who, like me, were not at all quick to "pulling on their boots".  One does it for one's social life, for one's friends, for the decorum end of it, sure, yes, we all know how to do all that - - but, really?

And yet, there is, there is always,  "the light."   In one of Jim's photographs there is the image of the moon (among other images), having been taken in a puddle. The entire photograph is blueish.  The moon, in the photograph, while not the most important image, is not the least important. Nor is it blue. It hangs there. It cannot, as the lyricist says, be denied. It is round and sensual and there. It says, I may not be the most image here, but without me, this photo would be unbelievable. Hang on to me. Hang on.
      
                               

                                                                          *      
 Sometimes I think that's the best we have.





        
  

Oh, Americans, Americans

I have spent the last few hours trying to think about what I think about those in the Republican party who want to shut down our government. It's difficult for me to remind myself that these men (and women?) have been elected by the people. It's equally difficult for me to understand that, we the people, when told that our government has been shut down, are likely to simply rant a bit inside our own homes or places of work (if we still have places of work) - - and -- that's it. Mad at you all? Hell no, I'm mad at me. 

We came here. We came here with fire in our bellies. We came here with hope in our hearts. We came here with more courage than fear. We came here because it was better than there. We came here because we did not want to be oppressed. We came here because we were drug here. We came here because we had a vision.  We came here because we were hungry.  We came here because we wanted to make a living. We stayed here. We made a living, a big living.  We made a living, a little living.  We fed ourselves. A lot. We fed ourselves, a little. We more than met our vision. Our great-great-great grandparents came here. We became Americans.  We never met our vision. We were brought here by our parents.  We remained oppressed. We found a way to beat oppression. Americans, that's what we are. We elected people like us, other Americans, real Americans, to represent us. Represent. To be an authorized delegate or representative of.....us.  We believed the people we elected would have us in mind.

I have health care.  But if I didn't have health care, I would most deeply want the person I elected to represent me to find a way to procure for health care for my family and me. That's a good thing. That makes sense. Rich people all have health insurance. Middle-class people used to have mostly have health-insurance, but it's getting real dicey out there, and nobody knows where the line is between lower and middle class anywhere.Yeah, where is it? Nobody knows.  Can we find it? No. How come? Dunno. Somethin' real bad's happen' out there.

 Obama-Care. Is there anyone so out of it out there that they don't know why it is called "Obama-care?"  Does anybody not get that? Because it has to do with him. You know. Him. That black guy. Ohhhhhhbama-Care.  Yes sirree. We will shut down the government. We will shut down medical research. We will shut down payments to our soldiers. We will shut down..........(take your time, fill in the blanks, it's late here).......because we do not want bad extra stuff like affordable health care and not attached to uh-huh.

So I believe what they are  saying or at least feeling, on a symbolic or unconscious level, (those agents of shame, hatred and chaos, like Ted Cruise), is that they really and truly want to hurt (use whatever word you like here) Obama. There's a black man who's president of these United States of America and we hate him so much.

Oh, God. We Republicans hate him so much.

You can call me naive, you can call me a race-monger, you can call me late for class but it smells bad out there. Just now I remember once having seen a bit of film showing Carl Jung saying something like, "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls," and I think there's a whole lot of Republican soul-negation goin' on. Shame on  you, Ted Cruise. Face your soul.  

                                                          




                                                                Today


                                  Rereading letters from an old friend, I remember who I am.
Talking with this old friend, I experience the feel of who I am. Slowly, slowly, I become me again.  Over this past five years, I have forgotten. I have been a leaf, curled up and darkened, desiring nothing more than to take on any other color than my own.  But today, on the day I fly off to my granddaughter's graduation, I go with my own blaze of color and a feel of well-being.

     "We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same." Good old Carolos Castaneda (probably older than old, by this time), said that sometime in the sixties, inside one of the Don Juan books.  It's true.  Like stress, whether it's bad stress or good stress, it's still stress. But the results are different. Expressions, happy or sour, make wrinkles. But the wrinkles are different. Our efforts and attitudes can make for different life circumstances. But the circumstances and situations often can be happier or at least richer. Fuller.

     I'll choose that.

          I once had a wonderful patient who had lived, as a little child, in Berlin, during the Second World War. I saw her the other day and she told me she is reading Victor Frankel's beautiful book, Man'S Searach for Meaning, wich Jim and I once read aloud to each other. Being a child while your world - - no, while your  family is being bombed, is a terrible thing. You can not look to your parents for safety. Your parents can not clear their faces of fear. Their voices change. Their nervous systems change. And you, the child, your autonomic nervous system is never allowed to adequately develop.  This is only one of the many extreme examples of what can happen to a child who is brought up in a war zone, whether it is an actual war with fighting soldiers, or a family war zone, with fighting family members. 

"We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us."  - V. F. Wow. And, yes. What does Reality expect from us? To stay present. To stay real.

And, when you fall off the path, to get back on it. More than that,to become, yourself, the path.

This is a tiny blog, written so that I do not forget this hour.  I have only a few moments before I leave for the ferry so one more quote I've been keeping for myself forever. Itt's from the ancient Jewish philosopher Philo.  Philo said,  "The true name of eternity is Today."

So, see you around. From Today.  And that's a long, long time.

        

                                                                Now and Then

   
If only I were younger, thinner, richer, more widely published, with somebody. If only I didn't have this physical pain. If only I were less impulsive, more matter-of-fact, more serene.  If only I had known then what I know now

But, of course, I have been younger, thinner, richer and completely without pain.  What about those days, what about then?  What were my "if only's" way back when?

What I desired then is not what I want now. Then, I wanted more patients, one more degree, way more excitement.  Now, I want a lot of what I do have....but I am still capable of nudging myself into what the Buddha would call a life of (relatively small) suffering by looking past my present to the uncharted future, to whatever is coming around the corner. Oh, then, then, then.

"Chronic anticipation", said aurhor Theodore Rubin, "is an attempt to control all of life's possible confrontations and makes it impossible to be peaceful or easygoing."  Well, I know that, and so do you. We all know that. But that doesn't keep us from anticipating more, more, more, or other, other, other.   Nor does all the literature, from the Greeks on up, that tell us to "Be here now", or --newer still - - tell us the importance of Mindfulness - - really get to one of the singular problems of being human. 

When Jim was reading Krishnamurti, he would often comment how Krishna would say that, while we call the past "the time before", and the future as "the time after", we can only go through it in time present.  "Truth," said Krishnamurti, "has no future, so path, no continuity."

If only I had been Krishnamurti. How glad I am that I was not.

When I think of the past, I realize how much change my friends and I have been through! Indeed, I notice that change is the predominent state.  If one arrests the flow for too long, the arrested moment is no good, is ridiculous, stops being remarkable. The rythm is destroyed. Change is the only territory there is.

I am in my late afternoon of life.  Carl Jung wrote about this state when he said, "Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as thierto. But we cannot live the afternoon life life according to the program of life's morning: for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie."

I don't have any great tips for stopping the kind of suffering that takes up so much useless space in our minds. And, as a therapist, I've rarely met anyone who is exempt from this type of thinking. Certainly, therapists are not. And neither, for the most part, is anybody else. maybe my Uncle Neil with the lobotomy. Maybe not. Every decade a new book is written about The Now and every decade each new book's author about The Now is congratulated as if they have discovered a brand new concept.  Stop comparing. Stop wishing. Stop thinking about the past. Stop worrying about the future.

Yoga? Meditation? Drugs? Bad habits? Healthy habits?

Forget going bra-less. Maybe we should go brain-less for awhile.  If only that would help.    
 

                                                  Two and a Half Years

Mountains shift, and so do relationshps. How is a relationshp lived? Month by month? Two and a half years is not a long time, not to me, who once was married for forty-three years. In a long term relationshp, there are so many two and a half years. No erosion, only differences and development.  Growth. Setbacks. Turns. Twists.  The years of lust and infatuation, the years of ecstasy, the years of not knowing, the years of coming to know,  the political years, the child raising years, the photography years, the academe years, the years filled with friends, the years losing friends and making new friends, the theatre years, the beach years, the years of being closed off, the years of opening back up, the years of turning to others, the years of returning to ouselves, the years of the bones, the years of writing,  the years of the body, the years of conversation,  the years of drama, the years of serenity, the years of solace, the years of youth, the years of aging, the years of family, the years of creativity, the years of building a business, the eyars of devotion, the years of illness, the years of flesh, the years of joy, the years of tears.

This is what a longterm relationship is like.  It is like Life. It IS life. And, it is time. In the end, Time is all we have.

How is two and half years lived?  In the body, in the fit of the body, in the feet, in the breathe,  in the sound of the voice, in the fit of the hand.I learned a new time to awaken and a new time to sleep. I learned a new type of sound. I learned new people: Star, Cousin George, who was inestimably well read and bright and enthusiastic about the life of the mind: who knows?  perhaps George is what the two and a half years was ultimately about.  George died, but so does everybody else. George died and the mountains shift.

Sometimes it only takes an instant.  Sometimes a day. Sometimes months, Sometimes, years.  In 1880 Edison patended the light bulb. In 1945, we got the Slinky and the bomb. In 1946 we got mobile phones. In Oklahoma last week, there was a tornado.

Books on relationshps talk about stability but there is no stability, only the ability to sustain uncertainty and change. Only the commitment to seek balance. Only the commitment to commit.  Ask the mountains about change. You can not push back the mountains and you can not redo a relationship. You can try (and I have tried) but mostly, barring a few wonderful couples I have known and still loved, it doesn't work.

Songs are filled with lyrics about time, change and regrets. Even two and half years can contain tons of Proustian bit of Time Remembered. When we went to New York. When we went to Jersey and walked the Boardwalk. When we attended his reunion.  When we saw the Broadway shows, when I had an anxiety attack in Times Square, when we heard Woody Allen play live, or Leonard Cohen sing, or Kris Kristofferson, or Bonnie Raitt or Mavis Sataples,   or we saw Alvin  Ailey's Revelation.  When we........when we.......when we........When we went to Lambeau Field and tears came to his eyes. And the Packer's won. And we couldn't find a decent green salad on the menu. 

Alan Ginsberg wrote an entire poem with one word: gone. Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone.

 And more "gone's".So, if so much is gone, what lasts? What does one keep? The body doesn't know how to overthrow it's memory. It simply does not/can not. We are memory. Without our stories, we are not us. Even if we do not speak our memories, they remain, esconced in our muscles, in our unconscious,
A certain type of memory loss is always happening and another type never occurs.

Time.  "Sometimes I knew it would work out that way. Time is the great author. It always writes the pefect ending."
         - Charlie Chaplin, in the film Limelight

Is that true?  Have I just lived through another prefect ending? How come they all seem so incomplete?  What am I missing, some sort of Zen-ned out practice I don't care to spend the final years of my life learning?  My Uncle Neil didn't remember anything. He was given a lobotomy during the Second World War and he never looked all that happy to me. Was his a perfect ending?

Ah, but back to relationshps. Two and half years.  What is it?  What of it?  I can't speak to the person. I can't touch him. He is, as Ginsberg said it many times, gone. Many people in my life have been gone: my mother passed when I was twenty-five, my father when I was thirty-five, grandparents, of course, Jim -- my life, or so it seemes and now this.  And here I stand.  Neither a victim nor a soldier.  Repair takes place over time.  Nature hates a vacuum. Repair will take place.

And I will be old.

Still:  I hold out hope for me.

"And then there is the spring park,
damp as if freshly peeled, sweet
greenhouse, green cemetery with no
dead in it - - except, in some shaded
woods, under some years of leaves and rotted cnes, the body of a warbler
like a whole note fallen from the sky - - my old     
love for him, long a songbird's rib cage picked clean."
    -the poet Sharon Olds
       

                                     The Incredible Light of Being Human


"Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."
    - Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"



These lyrics crystallize what I love about Leonard Cohen.  The tipping towards impefection.  Like the ancient Korean potters who purposefully left a mistake in every pot, Cohen raises anthems to human error.  This past weekend, Alan and I traveled, by Amtrak, to Vancouver, B.C., to experience Leonard Cohen give a concert in his native country. Tonight, after sitting with five patients, all of them good people who hate themselves to varying degrees due to the simple fact that they, like me,  are homo sapiensand therefore must make mistakes, my thoughts go back to Cohen's lyrics and their message of error, acceptance and self (and other)forgiveness. 

If we are even to halfway celebrate life, we are going to have to come to terms with being human  Most of the people I see in my practice want to "error-proof" their lives, which is an impossible task and rather ugly, when you think about it, implying, as it does, that being who we are, is being wrong. 

Here's a quote I like:
"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.  In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive enrvousness on their behalf.
    -William James, "The Will To Believe"

Yes, the same William James who gave Gertrude Stein an A on her philosophy test at Harvard (I think it was Harvard!) on the day when she wrote at the top of her paper something like, "Dear Dr. James, I am so sorry, but it is such a beautiful day outside and I do not feel in the slightest like taking a test".   He could stretch.  He could  weigh this against that. He knew what it was to be human. (He also knew, of course, the considerable weight of the considerable Gertrude Stein's intelligence and ability).

Back to Cohen.  The other thing I love about Cohen is his obvious passion.  It has become common practice, in this ultra-puritanical country of ours, to believe that extra bits of intensity and passion are such "overboard" emotions as to only be explained away by attaching mental illness diagnoses to the front or back of them.  God, I get so sick of this.  Think what diagnosis Dante would be given - or Shakespeare - or any of our greatest writers or artists. Well, it's happened to nearly all the best of them, hasn't it. Go ahead and feel - - but not TOO much.  And, if you DO happen to feel a great deal, for heaven's sakes, don't SHOW it.  Because THAT'S bad form.

To be judgemental, we must feel sure that we know right from wrong, and that we ourselves would never ever confuse the two.  But the experience, philosopher Kathryn Schulz says, "the experience of erring shows us otherwise.  It reminds us that, having been wrong in the past, we could easily be wrong again - and not just in the abstract but right now, here in the middle of this argument about pickles or constellations or crumb cake."

Pickles or constellations or crumbcake. Right in the middle of an ordinary hour in an ordinary day in an ordinary life. Because we are human.  Because we are mistake-makers. And mistake we need not dread being mistake makers.

Because there is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

                                                                  Stores

Stores and philosophy. Stores and psychology. Of course.  Who says otherwise? Between the asiles of  mushrooms and marscipone are centuries of poetry, philosophy, politics, song, sexuality, intrique, language, poetry, he, he and she, animals, animal husbandry, laundry, sleep, sleep aepnea, medicine, drugs, and other medicine, rules, schools, discipline (or not), religion (or not), language, sexuality.....shall I go on? 
Or shall I go on, merely, to my own two small matters at hand, observed in two Bainbridge Island stores?  Yes, this. I've had a long day, the East Coast is drowning, Ive driven through enough rain to drown plenty of cats and rats all by myself, today, here goes:

               I was in the wine aisles at __________________ standing somewhere between Malbec and Merlot, but leaning and longing towards a Bainbridge Island-made wine whose name I could not recall.  It was a wine Alan and I had both loved (unusual, since Alan is not a wine lover).  We had enjoyed this wine at a local winery with the first name of the winery being Amerlia, while my daughter Kelly and her fiance Bill were here with us.  I remember (but of course!) what we ate with is....cheese, smoked salmon, two types of crackers, salami.  The dte was way before Halloween but the small and charming wine tasting place was adorned with tiny  Halloween decorations.  I even remember the art deco earrings on the very pretty, very nice blond wine waitresses' ears.  I recall everythig except the name of..........the wine.

_________________________wine steward approached me, asking if I needed help.  "I do," I responded, "but I have so little for you to help me with.  It's a Bainbridge label.  They sell this wine at ____________.  The first letter comes early in the alphabet.  It's a red.  There's a wine tasting place down the road on Winslow Way; they sell this wine. We love it. My husband and I were hoping you sell it, but I can't find it."
     "I'm so sorry, "the attractive wine steard said, "I think you might mean a Cuvee, but we don't seel that wine. Someday, maybe." She smiled, but her smile was sad.
     "Cuvee, Cuvee, YES, that's what I WANT!" I laughed!  "Thank you! You're so smart! And now I have to go!"
     "Can I interest you in any other of our Bainbridge reds?" asked the wine steward?
     "Afraid not,"  I said, "I have a patient coming at ten and I only have twenty-five minutes to pay for all this and get back into the office.
     "Oh God, are you a therapist?" she asked.
     I smiled and said "I am."
     tears spurted out of her eyes, she began to fumble inside her pocker for something. Finally, she brought out a sheet of white folded paper.  "Please," she said, "please. Yesterday I saw my doctor at Virginia Mason. She gave me the name of a doctor, a woman she said I MUST see. I have it right here. It's printed right here. Just tell me know if you have  heard of her or not. It will help so much."
      She unfolded the paper.  I looked at the printed name.  There it was.  It's always a bit of a surprise just as it's always no surprise at all. Not in this county. It's what a lifetime of doing has accomplished. Like walking in the same room ovr and over, in the dark.  KAY MORGAN, printed in a stranger's printing.
     "Do ou know this person?" the wine steward asked.
     Strangely, I thought of an old Saturday Night Live routine but I stopped myself from going there. Of course.  'It's me,"I said.  "I am Kay Morgan.  "Your  doctor is sending you to me."
     "The wine steward burst into tears and threw her arms around me, crying and saying, "It's God! It's God God is sending me to you! What else could this mean! I've never been to a therapist before! It's such a narrow little window and here you are! I'm so depressed! I want to die but I won't do it because iat's so wrong! And here you are! You are the name on the paper!"

Yes I was.
It has happened before.
It used to thrill me, as in: I'm Important (Aren't I?)
Now, the feeling is strangely akin to embarrassment attached to a kind of "caring"attached to resolution.

Apart from all of that "inner stuff", it is odd to see one's name, which comes down to being quite an intimate thing....printed on a prescription pad by a doc one has never heard of.....how do we position intimacy, professionalism, suffering, in human life?  How do we do this?  Where is the moral to this story?

October 30, 21012
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Today in Eagle Harbor Book Store, a Grandpa and his young grandson are happy and harried.
     "Grandpa! Grandpa!  I want this book! Remember? You said you would get it for me next time!!"
     The Grandpa, tired though he is, decides he will have some fun; not TOO much, just enough, for he knows how much fun he can have with his grandson, this happy and clever grandson of his.
     "But how do you know today is "next time"? The Grandpa asks with a twinkle in his eye.
      He says this both teasingly and lovingly, with his hand stroking the boys shoulder and the back of the boy's neck.
     "But of COURSE it is NEXT TIME, it HAS to be NEXT TIME, because here we ARE AGAIN, and we HAVENT been here ever since we were here before, which is PROOF, perfect PROOF that is is NEXT TIME!      ----------    Isn't it?"
          Time stood still in the Eagle Harbor Book Store.
     I stand still.  The poet John stands still.  The older man with the black and gray dog stands        till.   The pretty young girl with the red tights and the pink and gray polka dot sweater stands still.
   "Well, of course it is next time!" the grandpa laughs.  "Bring the book up to the counter here and I'll buy it for you right now.  And, by the way, where is your jacket?  Where did you put your jacket?
       The grandson, whose name was Roberrt, looks around for his jacket, but he can't find it.  He starts racing around the store looking here and there without having much success.  Other people too, other people in the bookstore, begin looking about, furtively at first  and then more openly, looking for a boy's jacket.
     The jacket is not found.
      "Well,then," calls out the Grandpa to his Grandson as they walk out the door, "just put your book on and we'll figure out something to tell your mother by the time we get home!"
             At that, everybody in the bookstore has a good laugh.
     There are ways and ways to live life.  There are ways and ways to communicate.  There are ways and ways to react.  There are ways and ways to agree. There are ways and ways to disagree. There are ways and ways to think you are being logical.  There are ways and ways to hurt people. There are ways and ways to stop hurting people.  There are ways and ways to learn. All the best medicines are not on the shelves.

All the best medicines are not on the shelves.      

A Sneeze Is A Cough Through Your Nose

9:45 a.m., on the ferry en route to Swedish Pain Center, this time to inform the director that DSMO ( horse linement, for God's Sake), was perhaps a mistake.  Mistake is the nice way to put it.  Horror story is more like it.  I found the linement in its pure (ha) form at Bainbridge's infamous Bay Hay store and on line in a more  civilized mix of 70% DMSo and 30% aloe vera. I purchased seventy dollars of the latter form, so high was my hope. First, I gave it a go with the undiluted form and my  bottom was red for two straight weeks.  I looked like the Marqui de Sade and I had spent a holiday together.  Do you know the not-so-lady-like-phrase "that burns my ass?"  Well, I was the living example of that not-so-lady-like-phrase.

I tossed the undiluted DSMO.  I suppose I'm lucky the doctor didn't want to have me shoed.  To be fair, chronic pain is inexact and annoyingly difficult to treat.  I don't know how he does it.  Perhaps he's ust a masochist. Or a sadist. I can't tell. His South African accent, though, is awfully pleasant.

Anyway, I'm on the ferry, reading the science section of the New York times; it's an article  about exploding colons and the fact that one can not complete a yawn with one's eyes closed.  I used to worry about that, most specifically, about having to yawn and, just at the end of my yawn, closing my eyes and bashing into somebody or something with my car.  Since I, the World's Worst Driver, have bashed  into any number of things (not people, not so far) with my eyes open, it only seems reasonable that it wouldn't take too many yawns for me to make my way through all sorts of contraptions out there on the highways.  And yet, I am glad to report, I haven't. Yet.  And this, from the same article - certain antidepressants produce yawns that trigger orgasms. Hey!  I've been a therapist for nearly thirty years and have spent many many hours trying to make the case, when truly required, for antidepressants. Come on, doctors of America, come on, you smarmy marketers of pharmaceuticals, let's hear more about this!  If this be true, USE this! (And, by the way, which antidepressants trigger these, um, orgasms?)  Modern therapists want to know.

So now it is twelve-thirty p.m. and I'm ferrying back from my appointment, which went something like this:

The Director: "Hello, there, how's it been going?"
Me: "The DSMO nearly burned my bottom off, the mixture of it  with aloe wasn't much better, the Nortriptyline didn't do a thing so I've weaned myself off, I've studied coxxydinia and have come to the conclusion that not much can be done, I'm fine except for sitting which is excruciating  but sitting is my job, I can't go on  opiates because of my job, I've ordered three chair-things specifically crafted for coxxydinia, here's the photograph, I'd like to give the Lamactyl you mentioned last time a go, I now have a sheet saying I'm good for medical marijuana and that's about it."
The Director: "I'd say you have things well in hand."
Me: "Yes, well, thank you."
The Director: "You're right, you know. Other than removing the tailbone there isn't much we can do.  Thirty percent of people with this diagnosis respond to medication and the rest don't.  It's bloody painful, we do know that.  I don't know how you manage to remain so cheerful."
Me: "I don't."
The Director:"Well, you seem to do better than many people I see with this."
Me: "What are my choices?  Besides, I cry and tear my hair and feel sorry for myself as well......but, look, I can walk, I can dance, I can hike, I just can't sit.....and that's not true, either....I can sit, I just can't sit without pain.  Lots of people have it way waaaay worse than me. In fact, I feel sort of embarrassed that I'm even hear at all."
The Director: "Oh, good Lord, you can get over that one. Here. I'm writing you a new prescription for a cream compound.  With a higher degree of a numbing ingredient.  But you must tell them that you are highly sensitive to anything like DMSO because, believe it or not, they do use emollients like that to push the rest of the ingredients through.  Will you do that?  And call me with the results."

We didn't make another appointment. Hey.  What's the use. 

It's now three-thirty and I have a four o'clock, although normally I don't see patients on Tuesdays.

 Here's an insightful joke the commedienne Dick Gregory used to tell about pain:.

"An old man falls down the stairs and breaks his legs. If he screams, people will run away and he will be alone. If he laughs, they will come to share the joke and stay to help him. That's how you deal with pain."
. 

They Numb Horses, Don't They?

My fourth visit to the Swedish Hospital Pain Center.  I'm sorry to say that the ever increasing doses of nortriptyllineplus the salve, compounded in Poulsbo for $148.00 a tube, have not yet done a thing except to empty my pocket book.  Nor did the rehab, the acupuncture, the botox, the surgical removal of the fifteen inch wire, the medical hypnosis, the series of spinal injectivions, the chiropractive procedures or the "forgiveness" entries, in case my pain was a case of repressed rage directed towards the urologist who surgically implanted the box and the wires or at myself, who allowed the entire botched-up to take place.  At any rate, I spent an entire month, writing letters of forgiveness to just about everyone I knew, to now avail.  Anyway, here I am, on the ferry from Bainbridge to Seattle, sitting on an absolutly flaming bottom, since yesterday I ended up sitting in my car for four and a half hours coming from Alan's place to mine due to an accident on the Agate Pass Bridge.

During my working hours, which are ever growing, I have taken to sitting on various stuffed animals which lie beneath a thin blanket beneath my bum. Throughout the many hours of each working day I only pray I am subtle as I arrange and rearrange the arms and legs of the arnimals in order to provide a continual sense of relief for myself.  My longterm patients know exactly what I am up to and so they go on, engaged inside their week, their histories, their relationships, never batting an eye.  Sometimes I explain, but mostly, I don't. I do worry, sometimes, that my newer patients must think I am playing with myself under my thin blanket but I am too tired, too bored with any explanations swirling around the subject of chronic pain, "You see, in 2005, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah............."

Blah. Blah.

So now I am one of the director of the Swedish Pain Center's patients because....well, it's some kind of  cliche' or law.....I just keep being bumped up because nobody else knows quite what to do with me.   Sitting in the waiting room I often feel "less than" or some kind of fraud as I look around and see patients in wheelchairs and the like.  The  lady I spoke with last time, for instance, the woman with only one usable hand who managed to rustle about inside her blankets until she brought forth a pack of cigarettes and then managed to roll up and out a lighter, wheel herself to the outside patio and light up.  If I were her, I told myself,  I'd do that. I'd smoke, I'd smoke, I'd smoke, so I went out and talked with her for the longest time.

But I am still here on the boat, we must be a bit more than half way across and I notice that we are all on the morose Woody Allen boat.  Somewhere out there is the gala Fellini-esque boat, filled with beautiful ladies with big breasts and big smiles, everybody having a good, no, a great time, and here are we, looking down, watching our inner images crawl across our inner screens, one two, one two, like grim soldiers who must get up too early.....Oh, what have we done to have been give entre' onto THIS sodden boat?  Are we all in some kind of pain?

So what do I hope for?  I hope for this:  I hope that Dr. Gordon Irving, five years younger than me, author of books on pain, will smile at me and wave his hand as if to say "No matter, no matter" when I report to him that I am "no better" - - and then he will pronounce, in a soft but firm voice, in a voice tinged with emotion, yes, just a tinge, "I have found it!  The exact place, the exact site of your pain.  And oh GOD, how you have suffered!  Do you mind if I publish a paper on your case?  I mean, once you are better, which you WILL BE, by the way, and VERY, VERY, SOON?  Perhaps I could write TWO papers!  One, on the anatomical systemology of your chronic pain and another on your absolutly spectacular heroism."  And then perhaps he might kneel down beside me, take both my hands in his and say with tears in his eyes, "Dr. Morgan, I have SO much to learn from you. Indeed, we ALL do.  So much so that we would like you to begin a series of lectures......"

The ferry is nearly ready to dock.  Apparently there is no grandious place my brain is not completely willing to go, and gladly.  Apparently I want both a cure AND applause. Yes,  I am the child, wanting the parent to say, "We can take care of you AND BY THE WAY, how BRAVE you have been!"

It is later.  My blood pressure is 116 over 67.  My weight is one pound above what it was three weeks ago.  There is a knock on the door and a big smiling doctor bounds in and introduces himself.  He is a Foot and Ankle Pain man.  He asks if he might talk with me for awhile.  I say yes indeed, although my feet and ankles feel very well.  He says he is glad to hear that.  He sits down and reads my chart, asking me this and that.  Then, right on the dot, Dr. Irving comes in, says Hello to Dr. Foot and Ankle, and asks me how the cream worked, plus the nortriptyline.  I say the cream needed more "numbing" ingredients and the nortriptyline seemed to have no effects at all.  "Oh, that's a shame," he said, "Well, I would still like you to continue going up on it, increase it to 50 mg for a week, and, if no side effects and no benefits, go on up to 75 mgs for a week, and if no benefits, begin to decrease and ultimately we will get you off it.  It's damned expensive, I know. "

He wants to talk to me now about the medicine Lyrica and at the mention of Lyrica I start to cry because I have been on Lyrica and went manic and then suffered some suicide ideation and I told him this and both he and Dr. Foot and Ankle smypathized and shook their heads and said No, no, of course, and Dr. Irving said, Well, there's only about a thirty per cent chance of it working, anyway.

"Can't you put more numbing stuff in the salve?" I ask.  "I grew up on a farm and sometimes we had to numb up the cows. Can't you treat me like a cow?"  He looked at me for several seconds and then said, quite thoughtfully, "Hmm I can't treat you like a COW, but there IS a cream that is given to horses and sometimes to people, called DMSO.  You get it from livery stable shops or on line.  I think that might be a Very Good Idea.  Yes.  I'm going to prescribe some of that and I want to see you back here in two weeks."  Dr. Foot and Ankle has gone from looking quite distressed to looking happy once again, now that he knows there is a chance that I might be able to take the horse ointment and that the horse ointment might help.

I say to Dr. Irving, "I'm sorry.  I think I must be one of your worst patients."
"Why ever would you say that?" he asked. He is from South African and everything he says comes out sounding British.
"Because nobody can figure out what to do with me?"
"But that is the very nature and challenge of chronic pain," he said. "That's precisely why I love it.  It is a horrible, horrible thing. If we could just cut it out, we would. But we can't. It is extremely difficult to treat. And, in fact, you are a most excellent patient. You have a sense of humor, which is wonderful. And you can sing! I've heard you! The thing is, you simply can't give up. I won't give up, and neither can you. I've written up a prescription for the compound with a more numbing ratio and I want you to find some DMSO. You can use the two together. Let's give it a go, hmmmm?  See you in two weeks."

    Well, that's it.  Life never goes the way one wants it to, or at least it rarely does.  But, as Teilhard de Chardin said, "It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm, you're going to have to wade through it anyway."