Anyway, it was already 5:00pm when I pulled into the parking lot of Emanuel Hospital to see my last two patients of the day.  I was counting on just dashing in, doing a couple of quick interviews, and dashing out to head home.  But just as I pulled into the parking lot and was ready to turn my car off, NPR started its coverage of President Obama’s press conference.  I turned off the car, but left the radio on, intent on just listening to his opening statement and then heading on inside to the ward.  An hour later, I was still sitting in the car.

I think I’d forgotten what it was like to listen to someone who actually sounded presidential.  Someone who could think and speak at the same time.  Someone who conveyed the calm confidence of the leader of the country and the free world instead of a swaggering bully intent on proving he’s the toughest kid on the school yard.  Someone who respectfully called the members of the press by name and noted their affiliation, instead of demeaning them like his predecessor who tossed out condescending and childish nicknames that only served to make himself seem even smaller than he already was.  Someone who could not only decide, but outline the various alternatives, weigh each against the others, explain the advantages and disadvantages of each potential option, and then spell the best one out to all to us in a way that makes sense.

I honestly don’t know how we made it through the last eight years.  I also sometimes think the nightmare isn’t over, especially as I watch the Republicans continue to espouse their failed ideologies and posture before the cameras like bantam roosters, even after having the living daylights kicked out of them in the last election, I honestly believe they think they did something good for the country and that if they can just cackle loud enough, we’ll realize how wrong we all were to elect that silly black man who doesn’t even have a southern accent, for heaven’s sake.  And accept their own explanation that the three weeks he’s been in office are actually what’s caused this mess instead of them running up the deficit, ruining our standing in the international community, selling off the wealth of average Americans to their corporate fat cat cohorts, and turning the world’s best military into what in a few years is bound to be the greatest PTSD factory ever seen. 

It would serve them right if the next elections were next week.  Perhaps if their rolls were slashed again by the voters they might finally get the picture that we’re just plain tired of all their empty talk and smoke and mirrors approach to economics, foreign policy, and our civil rights.  Maybe if what’s been trickling down to the average American trickled on them for a while, they might realize from the smell alone that it isn’t the prosperity they promised us, but something much more foul.  But I doubt it.  I really doubt it.

I hope the rest of the country can see how strong this truly young man, younger than me by eight years, actually is.  I look at him and see impatience.  I see his disappointment in the smallness of people who he so badly wants to rise up and be great.  I see someone willing to take the country where it needs to go and wondering where all the people are that should be right behind him.  But I don’t see fear.  And the way things look like right now, if there’s anything that he actually deserves to be, it’s afraid.  The fact that he isn’t, or at least doesn’t look like he is, is pretty much the thing that gives me the greatest hope that everything is going to turn out ok after all.

So I sat and I listened until  President Obama, my President, was through before I turned off the radio.  And actually wished he were still talking when I did.

And now I’m home sick.  Nothing major.  Just feeling blah and crummy.  I got home yesterday at a reasonable time, actually earlier than usual.  Even though I was feeling a little burned out,  I figured that I’d just get something to eat, chill out, and I’d be fine.  I even remember telling myself that I’d get up today and head for the gym to start getting back in shape.  If I’m really honest with myself, though, I knew in the back of my mind it would probably just end up being a normal, you’re-still-55, don’t get your hopes up too much big boy, day.  And I’d probably talk myself out of going to the gym in favor of an extra hour of blissful Tempur-pedic snoozing.

Well, that didn’t happen.  I actually woke up at 3:00am.  And felt nasty.  So nasty I picked my cell phone up off the bedside table and left my boss a voice mail that I’d be staying home sick.  In retrospect, I think waking up at 3:00am and leaving a voice mail on your boss’s phone saying you’re sick and won’t be in is probably a great strategy even if you aren’t sick.  No boss in his right mind would think you’d actually wake yourself up at that time in the morning just to pretend you’re sick, ensuring that he’ll give you sympathy while you’re actually taking complete advantage of his naivete. 

But back to the story.  I finally crawled out of bed about 11:00am, still feeling icky and consequently assessing myself as even more wussy than ever.  But then I suddenly got the idea for this post in my head.  And was instantly thankful because I know that, if I weren’t home sick, I’d be at work and probably would never have gotten around to actually writing it.  So here goes.

Yesterday had been a great day.  It started with my wife, Ruth, receiving her student loan check (she’s in graduate school for her Masters of Nursing and specializing as a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner).  And, although having the check was good, the real reason the day was great was because Ruth had followed through on my suggestion that she use a portion of her student loan money to buy a new state-of-the-art MacBook to replace her aging HP laptop.  The HP laptop had been superb four years ago but now was proving inadequate for Ruth to simultaneously review her class notes, write and answer email, and communicate with all the hundreds of people on Twitter who follow her vibrant and exciting life (In comparison, I have twenty some odd people who follow me, most of whom I recently discovered are actually public utilities, libraries, and people trying to sell me things I don’t want).  What really made the HP laptop completely inadequate, though, was when Ruth tried to do all of the previously mentioned tasks while also engaging in her most recently acquired on-line addiction, Second Life. 

She was off during the day and planned to pick up the MacBook sometime that afternoon.  I had to work, so I didn’t see her during the day, but I talked with her while she was picking it up at the Mac Store and could tell from her voice that she was back in the zone that she’d been in when we went to the Mac Store the previous weekend to check out the MacBooks.  It’s a really cool zone.  Almost surreal like….well, just read on.

Life would be even more miraculous if we had the ability to foresee the future.  That would have been so helpful during the early days of my relationship with Ruth.  I know now that, if I had just bought her a hard drive or some cool electronic gadget on our first date, she would have probably married me on the spot.  But no, I had to go through jewelry and flowers and romantic meals before I finally figured it out.  And that was after she married me.

I remember the moment it really hit me.  I think it was her birthday.  I’d bought her this beautiful (and pretty expensive) diamond-studded 14K gold heart on an equally nifty gold necklace.  It was partly an apology present.  I’d been fooling myself for a long time that I’d been a great husband to her, when in fact I’d been much less than that because of a whole host of things from the disaster and trauma of my divorce  that I should have just left behind.  But I’d come to see the light and had devoted a lot of effort (and therapy) into really turning the corner.  Even so, I was also afraid that she wasn’t yet to the point that she believed I’d be able to keep from slipping backwards into my previous self-absorbed state of pity, depression, and unpredictability. 

So I’d given a lot of thought about a present that I could use to cement my improved self as genuine and permanent in her mind.  I’d seen this one diamond heart that looked really beautiful, much more so than the cheap little gold hearts I’d seen around at a lot of the jewelry stores.  It seemed just the thing to tell Ruth that my love for her was eternal as diamonds and that she was more valuable to me than the most precious metal.  That sounds so chintzy now, but at the time I would have done anything for her to look at me and see the person she’d seen the first time she told me she loved me.  So I bought it. 

On the way home, though, I remembered a sale ad I’d seen for one of the nifty new digital cameras that people had been talking about and thought to myself, “Hey, that’d be a nice add-on to the necklace.”   It was an Olympus and had a whopping 2.2 megapixel resolution, which at the time was really good.  She’d been saying she wanted a digital camera and, having some expertise with cameras, I’d looked at the specs and thought it was probably just what she needed.  So I stopped and got the camera, too.

We had some friends over for the celebration that evening and, when it came time, I handed her the two presents.  She opened up the necklace and stared at it in disbelief.  I was feeling great and I could tell that she got the message I wanted her to receive.  She looked at me with this genuinely loving smile and just kept staring down at it and up at me again. 

The only thing I felt bad about was thinking that I should have given her the camera first as a distractor and then watched her be even more enthralled by the necklace.  Too late, though.  So I handed her the other package with the digital camera in it and waited while was tearing the paper off, thinking she’d be pretty underwhelmed.  Then she turned it over and saw what it was. 

That moment was what I still consider a true epiphany.  She didn’t do anything as drastic as toss the necklace over her shoulder, but I still remember the look on her face and in her eyes as she cradled the camera box in her hands, looked at me, and wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me.  I realized at that moment that salvation and redemption, at least in my relationship with Ruth, lay somewhere in the magical realm of digital technology.

So when I made the casual suggestion the other day that it would be fine with me and a great idea for her to spend a portion of her student loan money on a leading edge MacBook, I saw her face kind of glow a bit, more of a teaser for the look than the look itself.  But when we went to the Mac Store to look at the different models and pick out what she wanted, the look started to develop from that teasing glow to full blown epiphany-mode, which I can only describe as quasi-sensual….nope, now that I think about it, there was nothing quasi about it.  I know that sounds a bit over the top, but read on.

If you’ve never been to a Mac Store, you should run out right now, even if it means driving to the nearest metropolitan area that may be hundreds of miles distant from your residential setting.  If you want to know why Apple is rising when the rest of the economy is sinking, all it takes is one visit. 

You walk into this brightly lit, incredibly well designed environment with MacBooks, IPhones, IPods, ITouch’es, and everything else “Mac” you could think of arrayed in perfect symmetry.  And there’s no crummy screen saver that some stupid high-school kid has to unlock with a password for you to enjoy the experience.  It’s all up and running and ready for you to walk right up and use it.  Even more incredible, unlike at Best Buy or Circuit City or any other big-box office or electronics store where most of the seemingly pre-adolescent employees wouldn’t know how to plug in an AC adaptor, every employee at the Mac Store seems to be a subject matter expert on everything in the store.  They even have an employee whose job title, as far as we could tell, is ”the Genius”.  He or she is the one who upgrades memory, does magical Mac things in the back room, and handles problems the lesser-gifted employees can’t tackle. 

What’s most amazing to me, one of the country’s most cynical shoppers, is to find a place where the employees tell you not to buy something when they think you don’t really need it.  I saw that happen in Miracle on 34th Street, when Macy’s took Santa’s advice and started sending people down the street to Gimbel’s and telling people what store had what Macy’s didn’t carry, but I never thought I’d experience it in real life.  Not to mention that each of the Mac Store employees genuinely conveys the feeling that, if asked to choose anywhere in the entire universe to be at a given moment in time, the response would be ”Why, the Mac Store!”. 

So we headed off to the Pioneer Place Mall in Portland, Oregon, the store nearest our home across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington.  Once we got to the Mall, there was only one slight deviation along the way to the Mac Store when Ruth, usually someone who avoids sales promotions like the plague, suddenly stopped at this sales cart out in the center of the mall.  And made me come over, even though I was shaking my head no, no, no.  That brief stop resulted in me rubbing myself with salts from the Dead Sea, learning how to dab magic Jewish moisturizing oils on my face in what was probably some sort of ancient ritualistic Hassidic pattern, and spending $100 for the experience. 

I learned afterwards that Ruth’s deviation from her normal avoidance of such things was because Ruth thought the Israeli salesgirl was “cute”.   I do have to admit that the Sea Salt/Magic Oil experience turned out to be a generally pleasurable one, mostly because of the Israeli salesgirl that Ruth thought was so “cute”.  That wouldn’t be exactly the word I’d use to describe her, though I agreed with Ruth at the time.  But, being 55 and not wishing to end the exceptionally positive experience up to that point (or my marriage) by saying that I thought “hot” would have been a more apt description, I chose not to contribute that to the conversation.  Good choice.

So we left the Magic Dead Sea Scrubbing Salts place.  I walked Ruth the remaining fifteen paces to the Mac Store and guided her through the doorway.  And watched her shift to the aforementioned sensual realm the moment she walked up to one of the many MacBooks available, reached down, and touched it.

FYI, this is where it kind of starts to sound like a Harold Robbins novel, but writing in Harold’s style is the only way for me to accurately capture the essence of the whole Ruth/MacBook interaction. 

After Ruth’s hands made contact with the MacBook, I watched breathlessly as she lovingly stroked the beautifully crafted carved aluminum case, danced her fingers over the perfectly spaced, slightly cupped, and ergonomically placed illuminated keys, stared longingly at the amazingly clear, bright, and beautifully rendered true-color screen, and longingly caressed the large integrated no-button touchpad, gasping as it responded instantly to the ultimate of all interactive techniques, MultiTouch, intuitively expanding and contracting the active window almost as if it were responding to her will.  “Take me, Ruth!  Take me now!!”, Jeff whimpered…..No, wait, that last part was just in my head somewhere.   Sorry.

But you’ve got the picture.  It’s sad to say, but I really was basically standing there watching and thinking that, all things considered, I would have loved to be the MacBook at that particular moment.  But, on reflection, I think putting the idea in her head and thereby making the MacBook experience happen was just as satisfying.   Because I got to see her turn to me with that look in her eyes again.  And it was for me, not the MacBook.  Which made everything up until that point and afterward completely worthwhile.

But what it does is allow a doctor, if he can find another doctor or mental health professional to agree with him, which is absolutely always possible, to keep people in the hospital against their will for five court days.  There really is nowhere in Oregon law that the term “court day” is actually defined, but it’s generally understood to be a day when the court in the applicable county is open for business.  Weekends don’t count.  And holidays don’t count.  And days the court closes because of weather or a flooded basement don’t count. 

So a five court day hold actually sometimes works out to just five days, if you’re lucky and come in on a Sunday and there are no holidays in the mix anywhere the following week, which actually happens sometimes.  But there is so much that make that not the case.  The day you’re placed on hold (Sunday) doesn’t count (it’s essentially day zero).  So the first day that actually counts is the first weekday (Monday – Friday) you’re in the hospital, unless the first weekday is a holiday.  Or if court is closed for some other reason.  If that’s the case ,the first day would be the second weekday, after which you count off weekdays until you come to five.

Let’s say you come in on a Wednesday.  That’s day zero.  The first court day of the five court day hold would be Thursday, and Friday would be the second court day.  Since the weekends don’t count, the third, fourth, and fifth court day would be Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, respectively.  Unless Monday is a holiday, at which point everything shifts over a day, making Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday days three, four, and five.  Unless of course, Thursday is a holiday which means day four would make Friday day five.  Isn’t that simple?

So, in between court day one and court day three, I have to decide if the doctors were right or wrong  to place a person in my jurisdictional area on a Notification of Mental Illness.  If they were right, but the person clearly wants to stay voluntarily, I drop the hold.  If they were wrong, and the person was just having a bad day and said the wrong thing at the wrong time, I drop the hold.  And f they were right, but the person still wants to leave and kill themselves and everyone on the planet, I have to take them to a court hearing on the fifth court day, whenever that happens to fall in the Monday-Friday time frame. 

That means I have to write up a huge report documenting why I think the person should be court committed for up to 180 days, get witnesses lined up, see the person every day to make sure they haven’t suddenly had an epiphany and turned around, and go to court and testify.

If everything goes right, the judge rules in our favor and the person stays in the hospital on a civil commitment.  If not, the person is immediately free to go.  But to even get to that point, we have to convince our own attorneys to actually take the case to court.

Oregon has a very liberal interpretation of who actually should be civilly committed.  That’s because most of the people that actually count in Oregon, the people who live in Portland and Salem, are distinctly left-leaners.  And because of that, the Oregon Court of Appeals has gradually raised the evidentiary bar that determines if a person is committed or not to somewhere beyond the planet Neptune. Because of that, we now have to expend tons of energy explaining what is in essence a very simple case to an increasingly resistant set of attorneys.  Sometimes that’s very frustrating, since they tend to view these cases more in the criminal court model than the civil court model that it should be viewed in.   And, since they also focus on everything from property tax challenges to building construction codes to animal abuse, they naturally tend  to have competing priorities.  That isn’t right in my mind, because quite honestly, in a world that is reasonably focused, suicidal human beings who needs to be kept from killing themselves should trump cat collectors every time.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop just at frustration.  Lately getting them to focus correctly on these cases has been nigh on impossible, which is not only a shameful situation, but unnecessarily tragic for the mentally ill persons involved and their families.

That reached an all time pinnacle for me today.  I had a patient on a hold who everyone directly involved feels should be committed, just as I do.  He’s done some really dangerous things that I had people ready to testify about.  He had all the kind of classic psychotic symptoms that you’ve come to see on CSI and other educational programs that are not just television plots to us.  We see people who have bizarre thoughts every day.  But he is in the category that is pretty much our sole job to identify.  Instead of just hearing voices and feeling afraid of everyone and having delusions, he had begun to act on them.  And, because of that, he was going to hurt someone or himself.  All of his family members, neighbors, and even casual acquaintances were willing to testify to that effect.  

But when I had the case all tied up with pretty strings and bows and presented it to our attorney, I hit a brick wall.  Suddenly all the things that looked so dangerous weren’t dangerous in her eyes.  And all of that hit it’s zenith when I said he was the kind of person who, because he believes he’s invincible, would run out in front of a speeding car, believing he could stop it with his mind.  After which the attorney argued back, in a completely cold and eerie way, “But he hasn’t done that yet.”

Sigh.  Now we have to wait until they actually jump into the road to stop moving cars and be run over by them because they think they can stop them with their mind before we can take them to court to stop them from jumping into the road to stop moving cars and be run over them because they think they can control the vehicles with their mind.  I had this brief vision of us having to drag a flattened eviscerated corpse  into the courtroom to prove that, by golly, we’d better let them die before we commit them for their own safety.  So I yelled enough to get the decision changed and then came home.

This should not be so hard.  And someone who counts, which is clearly not me these days, should do something about it.

There was just something in the air I could sense, maybe because I just turned 55 and it wasn’t too hard to imagine myself there on the ward as a patient…a sense of loneliness and subtle desperation, and the other myriad emotions that people who’ve begun to lose themselves often experience. A woman had just come to the nurses station for the fifth time to ask when her husband, who was dead, was coming to pick her up. I suddenly had the following poem in my head, which I wrote out on the spot.

A Song to Sing

By Jeff Rogers

My mother said I wouldn’t like
The job I took in geropsych.
Helping people so in need
Seemed a daunting task indeed.

But it didn’t matter, at the time,
That I might never make a dime.
For the salary I longed to earn
Was helping all my patients learn

That all of us, both old and young
Have songs that yet remain unsung.
I had just one thought to impart—those songs
Could cure an empty heart.

But now I’m old. That’s what they say.
It truly seems to be that way.
My mind, once sharp, now dull with haze
That blocks my thoughts and steals my days.

It’s strange, it seems I know this place,
The subtle things that fill the space,
The smells, the noises in the halls,
The plaintive cries heard through the walls.

Someone told me it was true.
She said, “Of course, I worked with you.”
But if she did, I couldn’t say.
My memories leave me, day by day.

I simply know I’m not the same.
I ask myself who I should blame
That nights seem long, and days fly past.
I wonder what of me will last.

I must have yelled out from my fears.
A woman came and wiped my tears.
I asked her later, why she came,
When I didn’t even know her name.

She said they all had learned to care
From someone who had once worked there.
Who taught them all one simple thing,
“Just help them find their songs to sing.”

I thought I’d heard that long ago
But the one who said it? I don’t know.
Someone wise, of that I’m sure,
Who, in my song, could find a cure.

I mean, look at the van. It’s extremely well done. And the little bear is absolutely lovable. He’s so happy while pointing at all the nice baked goods that the company obviously makes that the Pillsbury Doughboy looks absolutely depressed in comparison. I checked all around the van, but there wasn’t anything that actually explained why the company, who went to all the trouble to have their vans (there must be others) painted very professionally while creating a cute scene with the little bear showing you the wonderful pastries and other available “Bimbo” things, didn’t bother asking someone whether the name was a good idea. Maybe in Mexico it would be fine. But here? I don’t think so.

And if you thought the sides of the van were kind of over the top with the big “Bimbo” logo, it was even better when you went to the back of the van, where you saw….

Read the small print at the bottom that tells you where to go to learn more. Yep, you can find out everything you want to know about their company by going to www.bimbousa.com . You just can’t make that up.

It was all a very good day to end a stressful week. I just checked out the website and found that the little bear is even cuter when he or she gets to move around on the screen in that little hat. The site is just as cute (although irritating as heck) with lots of little Flash animations in addition to the bear. In fact, I’m thinking of adding www.bimbousa.com to my favorites list on my browser at work. That should send the IT guys into a loop when they do their regular checks for porn on the work computers.

Just so you know, Bimbo is not only the name of the company, but also the name of some tasty chocolate pastries the company makes. Which could make for an interesting response if your wife asked what you wanted her to pick up for you when she’s at the store.

Let’s start with my grandparents on both sides.  My dad’s father died at a relatively young age, but that was due to a post-surgical infection for a non-critical problem.  Otherwise he was fine.  Except for that dying early part.  My dad’s mother was extremely hard-of-hearing, had diabetes, probably had some heart disease to boot, and died in her late 60s.  My mother’s father, after whom I’m named, was moderately obese, got almost no exercise, drank, chewed on big cigars (I never actually saw him smoke one), and ate a distinctly southern diet of fried everything.  He didn’t have many problems during his life, except for the little issue of dying in his sleep from a massive coronary at 67 years of age.  My mom’s mother outlived my grandfather by several years, but died from some unknown problem that was thought to be gallbladder disease that put her into some sort of massive shock reaction after she went into the hospital.  She never came out.  I personally think she didn’t want to come out, since life was very lonely for her after my grandfather died.

My dad was probably the most resilient man I’ve ever known in terms of recovering from illnesses.  He had a lot of practice.  Over his lifetime, he suffered from gastric ulcers, hypertension, partial retinal detachments in both eyes, cardiovascular disease that required quadruple bypass surgery, colon cancer, and lung cancer in both lungs.  The colon cancer required them to remove a healthy part of his large intestine, followed by chemotherapy and radiation.  Then he got lung cancer in his left lung that required removal of the upper lobe of that lung, which is basically most of it, followed by chemotherapy and radiation.  Then he got cancer in his right lung that luckily required removal of only the upper tip of his right lung.  Oh, yeah, followed by more chemotherapy and radiation.  So, balancing everything out, he probably had about a total of one good lung left and yet lived a life that was amazingly full right up until he finally died.  

My dad, to my knowledge, is the only person who ever had that little lung remaining and functioned without supplemental oxygen.  He finally died at the age of 77 from a second bout of congestive heart failure, but by then I think he was ready to go.  He actually was supposed to die the first time he went into congestive heart failure, but after we’d all been called home and were gathered around his bedside to tell him goodbye and his doctor turned his ventilator off with the full expectation he’d die, his oxygenation suddenly went back to normal, his heart rate stabilized, and he started trying to work the television remote control.  He lived a couple more amazingly good years until congestive heart failure struck again.  When asked if he wanted to go back to the hospital to play Lazarus again, he said no.  He fought a hard fight for longer than most people would have.   And he was ready to go.  Still, it probably wasn’t really his time since, like a lot of people in his generation, including my mother, he smoked heavily almost his entire life.  If he hadn’t done that, my bet is that he might still be around.

My mom preceded him by almost a decade.  Mom, although I may be missing a few of the less critical diseases and conditions here, suffered from hypertension, obesity, edema, diabetes, peripheral neuropathy, hypothyroidism, and a host of other problems.  Of course, all of them were exacerbated by an addiction to prescription opiates that was so bad that she had at least three doctors prescribing various narcotics for her, although I doubt any of them knew what the others were doing.  I’m 55 years old and a mental health professional who works with severely mentally ill people, many of whom have severe substance abuse and dependence problems, but I’ve never heard of any physician doing what one of them did.  He prescribed my mother injectable Demerol and even let her have ampules of the medication and syringes to use whenever she had one of her familially famous but never medically explained headaches, which were not surprisingly very, very frequent and often occurred when someone else was the center of attention.  She also had the greatest lack of insight of anyone I’ve ever met in over 16 years in mental health.  Which is the reason she never understood why her criticism of my drinking to excess in my high school years and my first year in college didn’t seem to have much impact.

I’m sure all of those diseases and other problems set her her up for a premature death anyway, but she died from lung cancer, which was what essentially killed my dad, too.  But unlike my dad, who died an essentially incremental death from his own carcinoma, my mom went the quick route.  She’d was one of the most heavy smokers I’ve ever known, and I always thought she might get lung cancer and even die from it.  But when she did develop it, at the age of 67, she was essentially dead before she knew she had it. 

Mom had a form of the disease called small cell, or oat cell, lung cancer.  It has the distinctly deadly habit of metastisizing all over your body before it even shows up in your lung on x-rays.  I was stationed in Berlin and getting ready to come back to the States for a couple of months to go to the Senior NCO Academy in Montgomery, Alabama.  Mom called me on the Tuesday before I was to leave on a Friday.  She sounded a little scared and said she’d be going into the hospital because she was very jaundiced and they thought she had a blocked duct in her liver that might be causing it.  But she also mentioned they’d also found what looked like a spot on her lung.  Her surgery was scheduled for Friday, the day I was leaving, so I promised to call Saturday morning, since I wouldn’t be getting in until very late Friday night.

I arrived in Montgomery even later on Friday than I thought I would, due to a delay enroute in Frankfurt.  I woke up early, though, and headed down to the pay phone to call the hospital.  I wasn’t able to get in touch with my mom”s room, so I had the hospital page my mom’s primary care doctor, who quickly responded and came on the phone.  He said, in no uncertain terms, that I should get on the next plane to Little Rock.  My mom had lung cancer and wasn’t expected to survive or even live much longer.  I hung up and called the commander of the Academy to request emergency leave.  It only took him 20 minutes to confirm my request and, by 2:00pm that afternoon I was on my way to Little Rock.

Mom was still conscious when I arrived, but just barely, after a surgery that had shown that what they thought was a stone blocking a duct in her liver was just one of who knows how many metastasized tumors off of the cancer they’d confirmed was growing in her lung.  She quickly lapsed into a coma and lived about three more weeks, during which the family sat a vigil by her bedside in a room that we’d arranged for her in the hospital.  Today we would have taken her home and had her in hospice.  In fact, she was well past the need for anything but palliative care the day she entered the hospital. 

My sister and I just happened to be with her when I sensed that she was close to death.  I don’t know how I knew.  Her breathing changed a bit and I could see something in her face that I stil can’t describe.  But that wasn’t it.  I felt something shift way inside myself, this little thing in my gut that I’ve since learned to trust in my work in mental health.  It’s this sense that something’s different in the room, something that can lead to a way into someone who’s been closed for a long time, or something that opens up in somebody I’m with where things that have been locked away a long time can finally be released.  That’s what I felt and, given the context, knew she was ready to go.

I told my sister to call the staff and moved next to her bed and held her hand.  Marsha had called staff and also contacted my dad, who was in the hospital guest house taking a brief break from being with her almost around the clock.  My sister and I both held her hand and I talked to her, mostly telling her she didn’t have to fight anymore or hurt any longer and just let go.  Which she did.  I don’t mean to imply that she slipped away peacefully.  Regardless of what you see in the movies or television, death isn’t easy and most people don’t let go without a struggle that can be painful to watch.  That was true for her, too.   But she didn’t fight that long before she finally breathed a long breath and then stopped.  And just at that moment, the feeling in my gut went away, too.

I didn’t have much time to process my own feelings right then.  My dad had run across the parking lot from the guest house, trying desperately to get there in time.  He had a severe limp due to the effects of an old football head injury finally catching up with him in his seventies.  So even though I didn’t seen him, I have this picture in my head of him racing as fast as he could, swinging his bad leg to try and catch up with his good one, across the parking lot to the hospital, probably knowing that it was already too late.  I learned, far too late in my life, that my dad and I shared a lot of things.  That gut feeling I mentioned earlier was one of them.  If there’s anything I owe to him that I prize above everything else, it’s his sensitivity and gentle nature, something that’s often as much a burden as it is a gift to men, but something I’d never give up just because it’s made my own life hard sometimes.  The benefits far outweigh the problems.

I was standing at the elevator when it opened and caught him before he could run down the hall.  Telling him mom was dead was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  Tears came to his eyes, but he just hugged me and walked on by.  When he went into her room, I stood outside and watched him, feeling a bit intrusive but drawn by what I saw in his eyes and the way he stood there looking down at her on the bed.  She wasn’t at all pretty anymore.  The ravages of her cancer had left her bloated and somewhat yellowed.  And even before she’d gone into the hospital, she’d disappeared inside of a body that, in my view, looked nothing like the raven-haired beauty I’d seen in pictures of her youth and especially in the images of her in college when my dad had met and married her after he returned from World War II.

 But I know that my dad, when he was looking down at her on the bed, didn’t see anything but the woman he’d fallen in love with in the 1940s.  You could just read it in the look on his face and the gentle way that he reached down and touched her face.  And when he told her softly that he’d loved her, there wasn’t any of the anger or the disappointment that I’d seen as he’d tried to cope with her descent into substance abuse and all of its associated self-centered symptoms.  You could say it was him just acting in the moment by putting aside all of that.  But I have no doubt that it wasn’t that at all.  Love, once you feel it, doesn’t really go away.  It gets smothered and covered over and buried in the detritus of people’s lives, sometimes to the point that they can’t stay together.  But you can’t unfeel what you’ve really felt.  And I know dad had kept those feelings somewhere all along.  And right at that moment, it was pretty much all he felt.  There would be time for him to come back to the negative things that defined the majority of their marriage, especially later in their lives, but not right then.  What I saw wasn’t tainted by any of that.

After my mom died, my dad went through some very bad years where his health deteriorated and his depression was to the point I worried he might take his own life.  But one day he called me up and said he was going to get married again.  I think he thought I’d be upset, but I told him I was happy for him.  I knew the pain he’d gone through when my mom died, probably better than anyone.  And I saw the happiness he felt after he married Juanita, his new wife who he’d actually dated in high school.  I was pretty much the only one who saw it, though.  My brother and sister just couldn’t.   They didn’t and still don’t seem to grasp how he could be happily married to a woman who was everything my mother wasn’t.  Where my mom was all about shades of gray and making you get through infinite layers of personality-disordered junk to experience any kind of genuine interaction with her, my dad’s new wife was nothing but black and white. She’d tell you exactly what she thought of you whether you wanted to hear it or not.  On the other hand, she was also the one who shepherded my dad through colon cancer, two lung cancers, and the host of problems that eventually led to his death.  Somehow, my siblings and others in my family didn’t believe he loved her or she loved him.  I suppose I can see how they’d believe that, but only because I know myself how hard it is to let go of illusions, however wrong they might be.

After Dad remarried, we became closer than we’d ever been.   We talked a lot about how troubled his life had been with my mom, as well as how lonely he’d felt after she died.  I’d wondered for a long time if he wouldn’t have been happier if he’d left her.  He even told me he’d come close to filing for divorce because of her inability to stop abusing her pain medications.  I understood at a deeper level, too, because I ended up divorcing my first wife after 21 years. I knew that what you go through after that life-altering decision is a personal hell, no matter how good the reasons were for leaving.  I think that by the time he’d finally let himself see her addiction for what it was, he was just too far along in life to make that change.  I think he knew that he couldn’t handle that.  But he also knew that, when I went to him to tell him I was getting a divorce, that at my age it was something manageable.  And he knew I needed his help to do what he couldn’t do.  When I went to him for help and support when things went terribly wrong in the span of less than a day, he couldn’t have been more loving or supportive.  And, after the divorce when I remarried and found new joy in my life with Ruth, my dad was probably the person who knew how important and precious and rare that was.  And still is after twelve years together. 

These days, every time I go to a new doctor or have to complete a health history form, every box that I check on the wrong side of the form because of my family’s health problems is a reminder.  The ones I check because of my mom’s health problems remind me that constantly seeking attention, instead of showering others with it, is likely the best way to end up completely alone.  Those that I check because of my dad, though, remind me that no matter how things seem to be stacking up against me or what frightening things seem to be lurking in my future, the only thing that really defines me is my last decision, my last action, and the last time I could look at myself and say I’d done something right and good in my life.  That’s why I know, when dad was in his second congestive heart failure and facing going back on a ventilator that would keep him alive, but torture him while it did, he was able to say no without giving much thought to the matter. 

Even so, I still struggle with living in the negative.  It’s what I grew up with most of my life with my mom and with a lot of things that went on during my teenage years where I formed my opinions of who I was supposed to be.  But I know that my own life is anything but negative.  I’m gifted and blessed beyond belief.  I have a wife named Ruth who loves me and, over time, has led me to see that I could be happy, once I got it in my head that I didn’t have to go around screwing up my life to meet my earlier imposed expectations of failure and pain all the time. 

And I hope she knows that I love her.  Not so I can look down at her or up at her some day when someone else is having some strange gut feeling that something is getting ready to happen in the room.  But so that when I roll over in bed and pull her close to me, or just glance at her sitting on the couch wrapped up in her favorite blanket-robe combination, she’ll know that I’ve finally gotten it all figured out.  And that one checked box stemming from her influence in my life trumps all the terrible ones on the other side.

But regardless of what I’m doing, or where I am, or whether I’m with someone or by myself, these little moments of peak emotion have shaken me a bit. It feels like part of my life instantly gets compressed down into its purest elements and washes over me, all at once. And it isn’t comfortable. Just powerful. Very powerful.

It finally hit me tonight why it’s been happening. I think I’m at a point in life where all the things in my past that hurt me, things that at the time were so emotionally laden that I put them away inside of myself, down in this neat little storage facility I’ve constructed over the years that’s the emotional equivalent of a black hole, have started to leak out.

But in a good way. Because I know now that all the pain, all the disappointment, all the failures, all the unmet expectations, all the wrong paths or the right paths that somehow went wrong, were all for a reason. They happened so that when I ended up where I am now in life, meeting with people in the middle of some godawful problem that feels like it’s going to eat them alive, I’ve been there. And I can open a window of myself to them and let them have a peek inside. And just knowing that their pain and angst isn’t unique seems to make a difference. Insight isn’t everything. But it’s a start. And sometimes that’s all people need to start moving in a different direction.

So whether it’s depression, crazy families, death, addiction, paranoia, or whatever, I’ve been there. Or been there when someone I loved or cared for was there. It’s the greatest gift I never wanted. A gift that was the last thing that the people I wanted to love me but didn’t, the people who I loved but didn’t appreciate it, the people who I wanted to be strong but couldn’t be, ever wanted me to have. But gave me anyway.

It’s the gift of experience. I always thought of experience as something that leads to wisdom. But in my case, it’s just something I have on tap that pours out at the right time. And I finally know, at the age of 55, that all the crap I’ve gone through was for a reason. And the resentment that I’ve felt for so long and used to maintain the integrity of that emotional black hole? It seems to have lifted and made me able to feel again. I’m not sure I’m completely ok with that, but I’m ok with being me. Which is something I’ve never felt before. I hope it lasts. I hope I can handle being in the moment and being myself. And, in a strange way, I want it to hurt more, be happy more, be sad more, and just be…well, whatever it is.

Whatever happens, at least I got here with the faculties to see it for what it is. A few more years of emotional blindness and it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Everyone has that point where what they’ve been becomes who they are. I doubt I was very far away from being unrecoverable as a genuine human being. I’ll keep checking in, though, since my experience is that people who run around proclaiming they’re truly real are the ones who most need a reality check.

And for the record, what started this post was watching an episode of Eli Stone and realizing at some point in the story that I was pretty much the embodiment of every enlightened and damaged character in the show. What moved me to actually write it was when I’d also watched the entirety of the movie “Elf” and realized that I was closer to being Buddy the Elf (Will Farrell) than I ever wanted to admit.

The news was pretty much what we expected. Over the next six months, while the Governor and the Oregon Legislature beat each other over the head while the various special interest lobbyists keep handing then baseball bats, we have to sit and wait to see what is really going to happen. While the outcome may be better than the complete disaster we’ve initially been led to expect, it will still be bad. And what makes it even worse is that the people who we’ve been told will be hit the hardest are the people I know are least able to lose any more of the already eroded services they so desperately need–mentally ill persons and senior citizens without insurance.

There was some good news. Because our function is required by Oregon law, those of us working in civil commitment will almost certainly keep our jobs. But the unspoken bad news for us is that, absent any radical reversal of the proposed funding cuts in mental health and senior services Governor Ted says are unavoidable, we’re very likely to be seeing a lot more suicidal and severely decompensated people in the emergency rooms and psychiatric wards that are our stomping grounds.

And it all comes at an odd time. I’ve been watching and listening to the Congressional hearings where CEOs whose suits probably cost more than most of the cars I’ve owned in my lifetime have come begging for us, the taxpayers, to bail out them out. So far, we’ve thrown sums of money that I can’t even wrap my mind around at Wall Street, the Banking Industry, and the Housing Industry. Now the Automobile Industry has come calling with hats (very, very big hats) in hand. And I have no doubt that there are other Industries out there just waiting their turn. Even though it seems patently absurd to save them from a situation they’ve basically created all by themselves, I’ve somehow been able to rationalize the necessity of what’s been going on.

That’s primarily because of what my Dad, a child of the Great Depression, told me all through my childhood about what life was like when unemployment in the country topped 30 percent. I now have this deep fear that, unless we save all these Industries whose deaths would cause a massive disruption in the Force, I might end up just like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. Dad’s stories were full of self-serving hyperbole about walking to school ten miles each way in the snow while wearing his only pair of jeans, while only having crusts of bread he found along the road to eat. But there was nevertheless something genuine about his fear of it ever happening again. Since I don’t want Ruth and I to have to pile all of our worldly possessions into and on top of her Toyota Tacoma and set out to find a new life somewhere, I’ve told myself that what the country’s leaders are doing must be necessary. And that there must be some moralilty in saving the country, regardless of how we go about doing it.

At least until today. Listening to my boss talk about the mentally ill and elderly persons I work with every day losing even the already limited services they have, while thinking about the richly arrogant Wall Street investment bankers and Auto Industry CEOs asking for and getting astronomical sums of our tax dollars, it suddenly struck me that the world really hasn’t changed that much since back in the Depression years. It’s like we’re all on an old passenger liner where the CEOs are riding First Class, the average working stiffs like you and me are reluctantly allowed to occupy Second Class, and the poorest people like the elderly and the mentally ill are tucked away out of site in Steerage.

Sitting in that meeting this morning, I suddenly flashed on the scene in the movie Titanic when the water was rising in the bowels of the ship and the poor immigrants in Steerage were begging for the crew members to open the locked gates and let them on deck. And the crew basically decided to let them drown rather than allow them to elevate themselves from Steerage Class to a higher deck where they might actually have a chance to stay alive. Except that in the current Oregon budgetary crisis, unlike the Steerage passengers in Titanic who overpowered the crew and broke free, the mentally ill and the elderly who will be losing their services don’t have a hero to organize a breakout.

I hope that, by some miracle, the kind of positive flow of emotions and optimism that led to the election of Barack Obama will find traction here in Oregon. I hope that we’ll see that the only way we truly succeed is if the least of us share in our success. And I hope that we don’t look back over our shoulder some years from now and realize that a balanced budget, while admirable in a time of fiscal irresponsibility, doesn’t mean a thing if it’s done on the backs of the most needy and helpless among us.

And we’ll hopefully avoid learning the hardest lesson of all. That, if the ship we’re all riding on actually sinks, it doesn’t really matter whether someone’s in First, Second, or Steerage Class. Because we all drown together. .

I also didn’t like the look of the site before. It had a pretty picture on the top I’d taken of a house in the Tualatin Valley on my way home from work. And it had nice colors that Ruth helped me pick out. But it didn’t have much of me in it. And the posts and pages had all been added willy nilly without a lot of thought or consideration. I hope this will be a better effort. Maybe even good enough that a few people other than Ruth might actually read it.

I thought about changing the name of the Blog, too. Synaptic Silence can be interpreted several ways. It can prompt the idea of a sense of transcendental peacefulness. It can be taken as a reference to spiritual emptiness. Or, depending on where you are in your life journey, it’s a pretty good way of describing what happens when you’re, well, dead. I’m hoping people don’t opt for the latter interpretation. But even with all that, I decided it was a pretty cool name for a blog, especially for someone who works in mental health and who also is perceived by a lot of friends and coworkers as someone who sometimes checks out mentally from everything going on around him. So I’m keeping it.

Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll be posting some of my favorite editorials I’ve had published and some that the editors simply weren’t enlightened enough to publish. I’ll also be adding the poems I’ve written that I think are worthy of people who aren’t related to me might enjoy seeing. And I’ll be commenting on things I think worthy of commentary. Hopefully it will be something people will enjoy going to when they want something different to read or explore.

I’ll be opening up most things to commentary, but since this is a blog my entire family will be reading, I’ll probably be reviewing the comments before allowing them up on the blog itself. I don’t have any problem with most content, but I’m a person who appreciates the honest and respectful exchange of differing ideas. Flaming is just not something for which I have a lot of tolerance. And if you catch me doing it, please don’t be afraid to point it out. I’ll actually try to pay attention and hold myself to the same or higher standards I have for others.

So here we go.