Right this moment I am radioactive. Seriously. A few minutes ago I was ushered into a room by a tech. The young woman opened a lead lined pill vial and took out a radioactive capsule. Dressed in her loose fitting blue uniform the tech asked me if tap water was okay. I responded, “You are asking me to take a pill that has to be maintained in a lead lined vial and you think tap water is going to scare me or somehow make this worse? I don’t think so.” She laughed. “Some people are very, very particular about the water they drink. You wouldn’t believe it,” she responded. I laughed. Given all the poking and prodding I have had over the years and all the shall we say rough and questionable nights I brought on myself tap water and some radioactive iodine are the least of my worries.
The day today is grey. I am awaiting a cab to take me back to my office. As I engage in this forced meditation on patience I sit under an awning with the word “Patient Entrance” emblazoned on it. Grass is greening up quite nicely around the campus. This is a joy. The green has only arrived in the past few weeks after the damn hard and truly brutal winter we had in the period December 2013-May 2014. Very nice to see signs of nature’s will to life. I wish I could bottle the will to live the grass is showing and push it out to everyone I know. God I have spent so much time with people in the doldrums that I just wish I could sprinkle some will to live into each of their hearts. Over the weekend I went to a wedding. It was a joy. The bride was a dear friend and a long suffering friend who deserves all the joy and happiness she can get.
Originally I was a friend of the bride’s first husband. He and I met at college when he found me drunk and more or less passed out at the feet of our university’s icon, Sparty. This was way back in 1977. After that night of rescue he and I socialized for years. We went to hockey games. We went to the Kentucky Derby. He alone offered me an introduction into things that became part of the some of the most important moments in my life. Thanks to him hockey has been with me for 30 years plus. While I don’t go to the Derby anymore the stories from my attendance at that event can fill up entry after entry of this blog.
Things happen and for the relationship between me and the bride’s first husband bipolar happened. Sometime in the early 1990s my friend, hell he was more than just my friend he was in my wedding went into a manic phase. He had been hospitalized years before for something like this but he had never disclosed it to any of those of us who knew him or to his wife. As the manic phase began to surge he started doing things like talking about buying a chain of fast food restaurants. Then he pitched us on buying a horse farm. He wasn’t a farmer he was from metropolitan Detroit. Then came the 90 mph drives down a 30 mph road. Eventually intervention had to happen and he ended up hospitalized. I played a role in this and he has never forgiven me.
Up to this point I had always though his wife disliked me. Whenever we talked or got together she seemed a little bit distant. The husband had always suggested she didn’t like our drinking and dope smoking ways. But when push came to shove and we stood up to get him some help she started talking to us. Turns out that over the years she had been told repeatedly that we did not like her. Or that we were not her kind of people. The gulf that existed had been made by neither the bride nor us but rather by her husband’s painting divisive images of one to the other.
After his stint for re-grooving in a rural psych ward things were different. The bride and I became friends. When our little coterie did things conversations flowed amongst the whole of our circle and her husband no longer acted as the gatekeeper. Joint holidays were more fun. Annual traditions were more communal and not such a mine field. I actually ended up the Godfather of their daughter in this whole process. Time passed. But then he came off the rails again.
When this happened for the second time things were different. At the first go round we were able to get her husband to actually voluntary engage the commitment process for himself. On the second go round he didn’t want to go. This time testimony was required in open court. I had to take an oath as did another friend to talk about the aberrant behaviors we had observed. We had to show the Court events were concerning. My now former friend fought this one but the probate judge commenced the involuntary commitment. After that my friendship with her husband was done. Since that date we have spoken only once. When we talked all he did was rail at me one time about missing his daughter while he was hospitalized. But that ended it. He doesn’t acknowledge to this day that he knows me.
About the time this second visit for psychiatric rehabilitation occurred my friend’s wife decided it was time to end their marriage. She had taken the quirks and the grand slides toward the great out there for long enough. It was tough but for her own mental health she had to walk away. As the years passed what lay between was never easy. My former friend found meddling and troubling ways to intrude into his ex-wife’s life. Some have been benign and annoying. Some have been a little bit closer to criminal at least on the misdemeanor end of the spectrum.
Still she soldiered on in a way that was almost saintly. The two of them had a daughter. My goddaughter is bright, vivacious and a high achiever. She has played varsity basketball. She went to the University of Michigan. She has travelled the world doing internships and taking adventures. Her father always wanted to limit the risk of the world but her mother offered the guidance needed to make wise choices, to aim for growth and personal expansion.
The battles over vacations and parenting time seemed from the place where I stood like the things most divorces generate but with an added oomph of weird. The stories go on and on about odd and odder demands. But in the end Mom stood her ground year after year until the education process was ended.
The now bride and I would from time to time get together for lunch. When we did she would talk about the harsh world of dating in your late forties and fifties especially with the wild card of you bipolar ex floating around in the background. She struggled and it was not fair. She deserved better. You could see in her eyes she needed to meet someone, somebody who cared, somebody that appreciate who she was and what she had been through.
It appears the man she has met fits that bill. He seems to have lived a life that has had its own challenges. He seems to be quiet, soft spoken and genial. This is so much in keeping with the bride’s needs that all of us who knew her could only smile.
So on a Saturday afternoon on the front lawn of a rural farm in West Michigan a group of friends, a number of whom had come to be friends from the bride’s ex-husband sat and celebrated as a quiet dignified wedding of quiet dignified people occurred. There were clouds but there was no rain. There was instead dancing and dining and the things that one does when life is given its due and savored and honored.
I have a glow. A little of it is from a radioactive isotope. A larger portion of the glow comes from the celebrity of life, of unity. There should be joy when a life’s challenges are given balm. There should be happiness when two souls find the healing nature of love.
No comments:
Post a Comment