TheBanyanTree: A Five Year Anniversary

[Jim Miller]

I wrote Monique privately; we're still doing taxes, but I must say this for
you who are listening:

Every word Monique writes moves me. This tribute was at least a times 3. It
was a most beautiful and poignant remembrance.

Jim


On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Theta Brentnall <tybrent at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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<http://www.colverbusinesssolutions.com>
>> monique.colver at gmail.com
>> (425) 772-6218
>> .
>>
>>
>