March 11, it is raining

Today is March 11, and it is raining.  It is another anniversary, a happy one, twelve years now since we took our second son, Jon Eben, to Emergency, and ended up going with him to 6 Lane (Long Stay) where he was confined for about three months.  “March 11, it is raining,” is what he wrote that day.

Today Lorraine and I had lunch at the Summer Savoury Restaurant on the second floor of the Halifax Infirmary.  We were there with my mother, who is a patient on 8.4 of the Infirmary and had already had her hospital lunch because we couldn’t get there earlier.  However, she had a couple of sections of a cinnamon bun and a small cup of coffee with plenty of cream and sugar.  She said it was a real treat just to get out of her room and eat something different from what they served her in the hospital.

For Lorraine and me it was a time to remember our visits to the Summer Savoury a little under twelve years ago.  Once Jon Eben had been on the locked ward long enough to be allowed out with us, one of our excursions was to walk from there over to the Summer Savoury.  It was often a difficult journey, since he often had to be persuaded to go and that he could actually make it.  It was a long trip, after coming down in the elevator, to make our way through the long tunnels that connected the various hospital buildings.  Often we had to stop and rest or reassure him that it was going to be OK.  We always saw ourselves as trying to provide a safe space, a small sphere of normalcy, within which he could more easily walk through the corridors.  It was always good if the restaurant wasn’t crowded, and we’d try to find a table far enough away from others, because in the early days it was easy for him to believe that everyone there was talking about him.

It did change over time.  Lorraine insisted that the physical activity of the walk, as well as the possibility of moving through places that were not the ward, made a significant difference to Jon Eben’s state of being, and she was right.  The walks to the Summer Savoury and the time spent there eventually developed into walks outside the hospital and finally to day trips out to our house, until the time came early in the summer that he was able to leave the hospital for good.

The years since he was discharged have not been without incident or difficulty, but Jon Eben has prevailed over them all.  His present life as successful writer and editor, loving husband and father, and beloved brother and son is due in part to the professional care he has received and continues to receive from some caring and capable psychiatrists, counsellors, nurses, and other therapists, but it is also a tribute to his determination and courage and self-discipline and capacity for love. 

Today is March 11, and it is raining, but this evening Jon Eben will not be in the hospital like he was twelve years ago.  Instead he and S. will be going to a poetry reading featuring bill bissett, Steve McCaffery, and others, and tomorrow he’ll attend a Roundtable Discussion on Contemporary Poetics at a local art centre. 

His voice on the phone earlier was, as it always is, gentle and kind, and we are all grateful that he is starting his thirteenth year after that sudden onset of illness on March 11 1999 on such solid ground and in such good shape.  We are, as I have said before, all blessed by Jon Eben’s continued health and by his presence in our lives. He is our miracle.

Yesterday was March 11 (again)

Today is March 12, and once again I can say, Yesterday was March 11. Yesterday was, like today is, a gorgeous sunny late winter day, with the promise of spring in it, a happy day.

When we came in last night, there was a message on the phone. It started, as JE’s messages so often do, with his gentle and thoughtful voice saying, Hi guys. He went on to tell us that he would be out later and that he phoned because it was his “Champagne Anniversary”. I didn’t immediately figure out the champagne reference, but then I remembered champagne birthdays (mine happened when I was two and I doubt that I noticed it). It wasn’t that I hadn’t been thinking about it often throughout the day, since March 11 is as important a day in our lives as September 11 is in some other people’s; it is, after all, the anniversary of the day we took JE, our second son, to the Emergency Department to try to get some help. We drove past the Abbie Lane yesterday, looked up at the windows on the sixth floor, and remembered. It is the day when he said, eleven years ago, “March 11. It is raining.” And it is the day he was admitted to 6 Lane Long Stay for diagnosis and treatment of something that roughly matched the list of symptoms for bipolar disorder.

Yesterday it wasn’t raining, the sun was bright, and the chickadees had begun to sing their spring song. The song sparrows were also around, also singing. The jays were busy at the feeder and suet cage. A hairy woodpecker stopped by for its feed. And the bright and agile crows were calling some message from the tops of our maples.

JE, who also notices birds and would have happily noticed if he were here, called yesterday on his champagne anniversary. I was sorry we missed the call because there was much we could have talked about: the peregrine falcon that landed on his fence a couple of days ago, what the inimitable M has been doing and saying as her world and the words she uses to describe it continue to expand exponentially, how the balance of the semester is shaping up for S, and how he himself is doing and what he is thinking eleven years after the fact.

We will talk about those things when we connect, but that last one is one that we already know something of the answer to; his March posts give some indication, and our recent visit tells even more. Our son, who has struggled with mental illness and the side effects of medications and who has had to make himself and his condition known to a number of different psychiatrists over the years and then to try to forge a good working relationship with each, has managed through self-discipline, self-reflection, and continued vigilance to establish a life and a way of being that is creative, productive, and filled with love. As our friend Brian, himself a psychiatrist, told us, JE's life is like a miracle.

It may be that, and it is a champagne anniversary, a celebration of a difficult struggle, strengthened by adversity, a day to celebrate.

March 11. The sun is shining.

Blessings

Today has been a day when I have been made aware of blessings in my life. It started most significantly this morning when I attended a mental health conference here in Halifax. My intention in going was to hear Dr. Stan Kutcher speak about mental health and illness in young people. I went because I met Dr. Kutcher just over ten years ago when he has the lead doctor on our son’s medical treatment team at 6 Lane, a closed ward at the Abbie Lane Memorial Hospital, a hospital for treatment of mental illnesses. I remembered Stan’s attention and intelligence, his way of talking about mental disorders and our son’s condition, and his acceptance of Lorraine’s and my presence in Jon Eben’s hospital life and on/in the ward far beyond the boundaries of visiting hours. He was not the only person who was instrumental in Jon Eben’s recovery, but his role was key to the process, and we have always considered ourselves blessed that our postal code led to Stan Kutcher becoming Jon Eben’s doctor.

Stan’s talk was great, just like the other talks I heard him give many years ago. He has a way of making sense of the mysteries and helping us who listen find our way through the incredible turmoils and complexities of mental health and mental illnesses by his clear, informed, and down-to-earth approach. So I was blessed today by hearing his talk and by his reminders of what we can, and need to, do in order to try to make the environment we live in a better place for dealing with mental disorders and helping people who suffer from them; and I was blessed by the memory of our son’s illness, his recovery, and his present state as a loving and caring husband and father.

I have puzzled over the words “bless” and “blessed” and “blessing”. I want to avoid religious connotations, because I don’t especially care for the idea of some person or deity bestowing, like a kindly parent, some benefit or beneficence. To me the blessing is implicit in the thing or act itself and what matters most – in fact, the only thing that matters – is the consciousness or awareness of it. The fact that it comes to us in English from the French verb blesser, to wound, is significant. We are blessed through wounding, though I might take this to mean a wounding of our consciousness, a breaking through to a simple awareness of the blessings we have.

At supper tonight I told Lorraine, as I have said various times before, that I thought we were very lucky. She agreed. It was an evening, the first that needed a candle this season, to reflect on blessings, our blessings. I had a list in my head, today’s list. Some things on my list were probably – no, definitely – on Lorraine’s as well. Here is a partial list:

• our three grown children, and their loving partners, each of whom is a person I am proud to be connected to, each of whom brings his/her caring presence and attention to this sometimes difficult world;
• a handful of blackberries, so ripe they fall into your cupped palm, so sweet you can’t describe it;
• our three granddaughters, aged four, two, and one, each of whom is a privilege and a wonder to know, to hang out with, and to observe;
• a northern sky with clouds moving toward dusk, the light of it;
• two friends and former colleagues, who have been trying without success to have a baby, now in their fifth month of healthy pregnancy;
• steamed ruby chard with a little butter, honey, and balsamic and fresh bread;
• Ferguson's Cove, a small community of people who celebrated our neighbourhood today through a group picnic in our park with food and drink, games, conversation, and sidewalk chalk;
• a stretch of clear dry weather to get the wood in to the shed;
• the quiet of our house tonight, the lights of the city across the harbour;
• time to write this.

Yesterday was March 11

Yesterday was March 11, and here it was not raining, not until late evening at least, but ten years ago on this day it was. March 11, 1999 was a big day in our lives, and not because of the rain. It was the day that we took our second son in the early morning to the Emergency Department of the New Halifax Infirmary because he was in severe psychic distress and we didn’t know how else we could help him. You can read his account of the events and subsequent importance of that day in his life in the post he put up yesterday, and you may be able to guess from reading it the profound impact that day had on all of our lives. Yesterday, the 10th anniversary, was also a big day, a day to celebrate many things, not the least of which is the life of our son, lived and living with mental illness.

I sent that link to my friend R. who is a practising psychiatrist in the US. When we were together in Vancouver back in the late 60’s, she was in medical school, heading for her M.D. and not yet decided on psychiatry, and I was a graduate student in English, not yet knowing where my life was going to go. She read the post and wrote to me about it and about the job she had recently started at a Veterans’ Clinic there. When she mentioned that the ages of her patients ranged from 23 to 87, I had to recognize that no longer does the word "veteran" mean someone older than me, in the US or here. She described them as “all more or less mortally wounded (mentally, that is, and often physically too)” and wrote that one of them had told her the day before, “We don’t get out alive.” I read it as a comment not on life but on the ravages of making war; they are hard words to hear, profoundly saddening in this battering and battered world, and I take some small comfort from knowing that there are caring people like R. doing the work that she does.

She also commented on the fact that we appear to have “a much better system of treatment” here in Canada, simply because we were able ten years ago to have our son admitted for care to the Abbie Lane Hospital, and said that he was “lucky having insurance to help out”. My first thought was that he didn’t actually have insurance, because he didn’t (the jobs he was carrying then didn’t provide those benefits), but then I remembered that theirs is a different country because unlike here not everyone has health coverage. I never think of it as insurance, though I do remember it was called that when it was first introduced; rather it is the medical coverage that we pay for in our taxes and never have to think about because it is always there, and has been for close to fifty years now.

When we took JE to Emergency that day, March 11, 1999, we had run out of things we could do to help him, and we didn’t know what was going to happen there, but we did know that he would be cared for. Without question. Ten years later, his recovery and the medical system that helped bring it about and that continues to be there whenever he might need it are, like R’s work with wounded veterans, events to celebrate, especially in a world and time that is in serious need of such things.