TheBanyanTree: A Five Year Anniversary

[Theta Brentnall]

Thank you, Monique.  You said it just right.

Theta

On 5/31/2013 12:24 PM, Monique Colver wrote:
> Five years ago today I stood at the bedside of Stew Young and held his head
> while he died.
>
> That sounds overly dramatic and sad, when I say it like that. How about
> this:
>
> Five years ago today I had a very bad day. For Stew, it was the last very
> bad day in a long line of them.
>
> After years of living with mental illness, it was cancer that got him. I’m
> never sure if I should be participating in cancer walks or mental illness
> walks. Stew would find that amusing.
>
> But Stew should not be remembered as the guy with a mental illness, or the
> guy with cancer. Those were not his primary traits, those were things that
> happened to him, and those things don’t tell us anything about him. None of
> us are defined by the things that happen to us, by the illnesses and
> accidents and events that distract us as we go from here to there. We are
> not those things.
>
> Stew was a writer. He co-authored the book we wrote, though it wasn’t
> published until several years after his death. The delay was my fault, not
> his. He was a good writer, but not, as he would happily concede, as good as
> me. I’m not sure that’s grammatically correct, but I said I was a good
> writer, not an excellent one. We would argue about comma placement,
> punctuation being one of the ways we kept the rules of the world straight.
>
> He made me laugh. Even when things were at their worst and I didn’t know
> how I was going to pay both the rent and utilities, not to mention his
> meds, he would make me laugh. It helped me get through the times he wasn’t
> all there with me, when his mind would be in such chaos that he couldn’t
> function at all, when he could only think of harming himself, or when there
> was no expression at all. I always had hope that the person he was would
> come back out and he would make me laugh again, and he always did.
>
> The laughter was often in relief, but still, we take what we can get.
>
> He had an amazing relationship with his parents. When they couldn’t
> understand his illness, because they had no experience of it, they learned
> everything they could. They were always supportive of him, of me too, and
> all they wanted was the son they knew to come back from wherever he’d gone.
> And Stew just wanted to make them proud. He did, of course, because they
> loved him no matter what – it wasn’t conditional upon anything.
>
> Stew was intelligent, so very intelligent. His dream job was to analyze
> data and make it into something meaningful. Or being a screenwriter. One or
> the other. Something other than the crazy guy on disability. He was
> politically conservative (to my dismay), loved corporations and big pharma
> (who he credited with keeping him from complete destruction), and loved to
> debate online.
>
> He loved our dog, Honey, though when she first moved in he thought, because
> of her inherent Chowness and love of me, that it wouldn’t work out. But of
> course it did, and when she stayed with him she slept on his bed, and he
> would do anything for her. She gave him a sense of responsibility, and she
> gave him a reason to go out when he mostly wanted to hide from the world.
> But the dog had to be walked, and though he’d often come back and tell me
> of the things he’d seen that didn’t really exist, it was good for him.
>
> He’d learned to live with the hallucinations, and later on they subsided.
> The voices were worse because they told him things no one should have to
> hear, and fighting voices coming from inside one’s head is so much harder
> than those coming from another person. It’s hard when you can’t tell if
> it’s you or them, when they’re telling you that you deserve to die and you
> know it’s not you, but the voices are inside of you, and they’re demons.
>
> I can’t imagine it. The voices telling me I’m unworthy were implanted long
> ago, and I know, mostly, that while they’re a part of me, they’re not
> necessarily accurate.
>
> Sometimes he forgot that life wasn’t all bad, and so I’d watch, and wait,
> and when he laughed or smiled or was having a good moment I’d turn on him
> and say, “Hah! Look at that!” It was so easy for him to forget that in a
> life filled with pain, there were still plenty of shiny happy moments.
> There was still the light bouncing off the Sound, the dog who would let you
> cuddle with her, books to read, pizza, watching me eat crab (which he
> always found amusing), and even the dark clouds of a Seattle day, heavy
> with rain and the promise of a good cleansing. He loved the dark grey days.
>
>   He loved his family, his friends, his dogs, and me. Later, he loved my new
> husband. That’s how he was –he wanted me to be happy. He always wanted
> that, no matter what happened between us. When people rejected him because
> of his illness he would react with anger, because it made him sad. Stew was
> always willing to help people, always seeing the good side of people. He
> fought his battles the best he could, and he had plenty of battles to
> fight.
>
> A day or so before he died he told me he was afraid of doing it wrong. Of
> dying, that is, as if there’s a right way and a wrong way, as if the
> process should come with some sort of instruction manual. That’s how he
> was, he wanted to do things the right way, the proper way. I told him that
> he was going do it just fine, that there was no wrong way to go about it,
> and that so far, he’d done everything just right.
>
> Sometimes just doing things the only way we know how is the only right way.
>
> No one with mental illness is just that person with mental illness. It’s
> just something that happened to them.
>
> It’s what we do with what happens to us that matters.
>
> Stew wrote because he wanted people with mental illness to know they
> weren’t alone, and he wanted people without mental illness to know what it
> was like. He wanted to increase our awareness, and he wanted others to not
> have to go through some of the things he did.
>
> But mostly he liked people to be happy, and he liked to laugh and get
> others to laugh. He loved his family and his friends. That was his thing.
> On this day I remember him for his life, not his death. It was his life
> that mattered, and death was just something that happened to him.
>
> Laugh. Be happy. Look for the rays of light.
> *
> *
> *We appreciate your referrals!*
>
> Monique Colver
> Colver Business Solutions
> www.colverbusinesssolutions.com
> monique.colver at gmail.com
> (425) 772-6218
> .
>