TheBanyanTree: Carrot Cake and Birthdays

[Pam Lawley]

Happy Birthday Stew!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 3:30 PM, Monique Colver <monique.colver at gmail.com>wrote:

> Back when Stew was alive and living in Washington, January 10th was
> celebrated with all the pomp and circumstance possible, considering the
> circumstances. January 10th was Stew’s birthday, another milestone achieved
> under somewhat arduous conditions. Stew stopped celebrating birthdays in
> 2008, at least here on earth. I don’t know what goes on where he’s at now.
>
>
>
> But I do know that here on earth, when we were together either as husband
> and wife or, later, as “only” friends, we celebrated. The last few years we
> couldn’t plan ahead much, never knowing which days were going to be bad,
> and
> which days would be good. Which days might he be out of touch with reality,
> and which days might he be devoid of any feelings at all, expressionless
> and
> lost to me. Talking to him like this was like talking to a wall, except
> with
> a wall one doesn’t except a response, or a person stuck deep inside to come
> back out. Talking to a wall, in these circumstances, is more fulfilling.
>
>
>
> Celebrating a birthday with a blank wall seems a bit pointless.
>
>
>
> Fortunately the blank wall scenario was less often than the paranoid
> schizophrenic scenario. At least there’s a real person being schizophrenic,
> someone with feelings and emotions, though they might be a bit skewed.
>
>
>
> Just a bit.
>
>
>
> And then there were the periods of surface normality, when he could
> function
> as sanely as anyone else, or at least as well as I could, though some may
> dispute how sane that really is. As long as he wasn’t thrust into crowds of
> people, or overwhelmed with a staggering array of choices, or subjected to
> loud noises that might penetrate so deeply into his skull that all his
> senses would be attacked. As long as his environment was calm and contained
> few people, he would be fine.
>
>
>
> On his birthday we’d usually go out to eat and then, if the situation was
> holding, we’d go to Barnes and Noble and spend gift cards that one or the
> other of us had gotten for Christmas. If I had gift cards I’d give them to
> him, and if he had gift cards he’d buy me a book. He loved books. He loved
> shopping for books. Books and electronics.
>
>
>
> It may not sound like much of a celebration, but when one has a severe
> mental illness the little joys in life become huge, and the possibility of
> getting through a day without self-harm or psychosis or seeing demons
> sounds
> like heaven.
>
>
>
> Sometimes we’d both laugh at things he saw, that weren’t there. People on
> top of buildings, that sort of thing. That was easy to laugh at. The voices
> inside his head, not so much – they were internal, and there was no way to
> ignore them, and they were intent on harming him, on making him harm
> himself. Once they told him to go to a political rally with a knife, if you
> can imagine such a thing.
>
>
>
> I can’t. I didn’t find out about it until he came back home. He’d gone, but
> he had turned around before he got all the way there, and he returned,
> frightened at what the voices had asked him to do.
>
>
>
> I’d told him that we couldn’t ignore that sort of thing, and that if we had
> to send him to a hospital, we would.
>
>
>
> He hated hospitals. Other than a few trips to the ER, one when he was
> dragged in by police for being a suicide risk (and I wasn’t there, they
> came
> to his apartment and surrounded it with police cars and scared the crap out
> of him and took him away in handcuffs, all because he’d called a crisis
> line
> and then hung up, and when I came to his apartment to check on him I
> couldn’t find him, and it was locked, and he wasn’t anywhere to be found,
> but his truck was parked, and I couldn’t imagine what had happened to him
> and I started to panic, but then he called me, once they’d given him his
> phone back), there were no other hospital stays, not until the cancer.
>
>
>
> I apologize for that previous paragraph, most especially for the overly
> long
> parenthetical aside.
>
>
>
> Carrot cake was Stew’s favorite – we always got him carrot cake on his
> birthday.
>
>
>
> He got through all that. Not only did he get through it, but he started to
> get better. He stabilized. He stopped hearing voices and seeing things that
> weren’t there. He stopped cutting himself, at least cut back on the
> cutting.
> He would have liked that phrasing. He would have laughed. He had a well
> developed sense of humor and could laugh at anything, once he’d survived
> it.
>
>
>
>
> He started to imagine a future again. Working, going back to school,
> dating,
> being in the world. Recovery. As one my friends says, recovery rocks.
>
>
>
> And then the cancer got him, and it killed him. It came from left field.
> The
> danger was always the mental illness, and by the time the cancer became the
> obvious risk it was too late.
>
>
>
> Not to digress, but for my Mom, the danger was always her heart. And then
> cancer got her too, a few months ago.
>
>
>
> Cancer and I are no longer on speaking terms.
>
>
>
> But today is January 10th, and it’s Stew’s birthday, and for him I say,
> “Celebrate your life, enjoy what you have, whatever it is, and have some
> carrot cake.”
>
>
>
> --
> Monique Colver
>