Look on the nightly NBC television news: a depressed woman with PTSD, who lost a leg in Iraq, is now married with kids and a medalist in Para-Olympic games. Or once on a park bench near a hospital in Topeka twenty-something years ago, a peer of mine with schizoaffective disorder, and OCD, once so traumatized she was mute, became a text-book reader for a visually-impaired friend, giving freely of her voice.
Light does emerge somehow. And yes, that shade of yellow and its odor lingers for me, like the smell of entropy and disaster, but there’s also many things to be joyful over. And though it’s ancient news, nothing explosive or revelatory about it, life continues despite the ECT, suicide attempts, cigar scars, and four-point restraints. Or more recently, dancing with my wife twelve years to the day since my last hospitalization. Silence and mourning, yes, prayer and meditation, absolutely, but then we sow, water, and re-emerge.
We beat a drum, write the lyric, strum the mandolin, dim the lights, cue the projector, or just put our feet up, and enjoy the show. Because just when you’ve checked people off the useful and necessary list—or when that unsteady and disturbed bag of bones mumbling in the corner at the city trolley stop seems without purpose—do you grasp what can occur?
