TheBanyanTree: Perspective

[Monique Colver]

WARNING: not cheerful. Tomorrow I'll do something cheerful and amusing.

Organizing my office I find a box of materials that have been sent to me
that I haven't looked at, and I pause from organizing to start leafing
through the thick sheaf of documents that encompasses Stew's disability
claim, and I look at notes from his doctors, his psychiatrists, his
therapists, from the very beginning of his illness on. I can't help myself.

I read the papers with a surprising amount of sadness. I have not forgotten
those times, but I have remembered them as I experienced them, and now I'm
reading about them from his perspective, as he told his therapists, his
psychiatrists, his people, and the stories aren't the same as I remember
them. I seem to be as disturbed as anyone else in these retellings, I as
much as anyone share the blame. I am distant, I go out with other men, I
break up our happy home, I make him take care of me, I use him, and I don't
make him feel safe or protected. Afterwards, when he's moved back to
California, the notes say he had his first breakdown after a bad divorce,
and I want to say "No, wait a minute! That happened before anyone thought of
the word divorce, that began eating away at him, at us, long before that, it
was the other women I couldn't abide anymore, it was his ability to fall in
love with anyone else that was the last straw for me, and that was long
after his first breakdown."

            But there's no one to say it to now, and there's no one that
really cares, is there? It wasn't his fault, of course not, he was ill for a
long time, and he doesn't remember things the same way I do, and of course I
had my difficulties and my issues and even, one memorable summer day, my own
crisis when I suffered my own personal breakdown and there was no one there
to help me but me and a nameless organization that charged me $200 that I
didn't have to talk to me and make me promise not to hurt myself. Not that I
wanted to hurt myself at the time, but I couldn't stop crying, I couldn't
take any more pain, and there was no help for me except for the psychiatrist
who gave me an assortment of meds that ended up making me worse than I was,
and eventually I gave up all those meds and continued on my regular
anti-depressants and did much better.

            Still, I like to think that I did the best I could with what I
had, and I like to think that I helped him and kept him safe despite his
attempts to drive me away, when he didn't want to be a "bother." There were
days when it was all too much for me, and all too much for him, and he was
too much for me, and so in the notes it says that when he was working I was
not, and when I was working he was not, and certainly there were days when I
just wanted to curl up and hide and neglected my work, but mostly, I
remember, I was trying to work and trying to take care of him all at once.
It wasn't particularly easy. Hell, it wasn't easy at all.

            And I know I have my faults and my periods of intense
depression, but I like to think that I'm, overall, functioning pretty well
in an imperfect world. As my husband tells me, it's hard to be perfect in an
imperfect world, or something like that.

            It wasn't his fault, but it wasn't my fault, but it makes me
sad. It wasn't anyone's fault, but things happened, and no one was a bad
person, though at times he thought he was, or so he said, and at times I
thought I was. Reading the notes, I get the feeling he often thought I was,
but how could that be?

            Well, he was ill. There was that. His reality was often
distorted. During a psychotic break he'd think the worst of me, and it
floored me, it really did, when he accused me of wanting to harm him. Me?

            He never understood how his declarations of love for other
women, women he'd never met in person and women he had, could have been a
betrayal. We agreed on most things that happened, but that was one issue we
could never agree on. He always said I cheated on him first, and he could
never understood how his emotional affairs were the last straw for me, the
straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, so we agreed to disagree and
not talk about it, us who could talk about most anything to each other.
Cheating on him was not something I set out to do. I said, "Look, we're done
being married. I can't do this. You're in love with (fill in the blank)
today, tomorrow it'll be someone else, and I can't do this. I'm nothing more
to you than a caretaker and your chief means of support, so we can't be
married anymore." Then I dated other men.

            He actually expected me to commiserate with him when he couldn't
be with the object of his affection. He actually expected me to be
understanding, and oh, how I tried. But I couldn't do it, and I decided I
could only do it if I wasn't the wife anymore. That I could do, and so I
did. He didn't need a wife -- he needed a caretaker.

            Anyway. I keep looking for more clues in the paperwork, more
clues of the reality I missed, and even though I know that I did the best I
could, and even though I know I'm not really a bad person, I keep looking
for more evidence that I was, indeed, bad, harmful, negative. These
psychiatrists and therapists and doctors, they didn't know me except for
what he told them, and so that's what they wrote down, and now that's what I
have left. At least it's not all that I have left, for that would be sad.
            Five things I learned during that phase of my life helped me
survive, and helped me to help him, and those five things are going to be
shared to help others going through similar situations. They are the things
that made me stronger and gave me a semblance of peace and contentment. I
am, mostly, pretty damn happy these days, which would make Stew happy, for
that's what he always wanted for me. But I still grieve. I grieve for who he
was before he became mentally ill, I grieve for the person who fought so
hard to recover, and I grieve for the person who died at the age of 37. I
grieve for who we were when we were happy with endless possibilities in
front of us, before the illness took over. There's no getting away from
that. I grieve, but I move on. He'd want it that way. And I remember that
there were entire weeks when he couldn't remember what had happened the
afternoon before, so I don't fault him because his version of events doesn't
match mine. It's all a matter of perspective.

M