Your Health in Mind and Body (trigger for death)

I'm bipolar, and I see several parallels between my wellness of mind and my wellness of body. People who bark in both circumstances, "Pull yourself up by your boot straps!" may have the best of intentions, but there is a terrible weight that is more than our body and skin that pull us down, make us think we are not worth it, to give up, even to die. When one is at that lowest ebb, no amount of a-- kicking is going to work. It is the simple things, really. Merely getting up out of bed. A shower. Combing the matts out of your hair, which I had to do once after almost a month of not bathing or taking care of myself. And when we are trying to improve/rebuild our body, sometimes our sadness and shame hang around our neck so heavy that it seems impossible to change. And yet here we all are, and that means that there is change happening. Even if you clean out that damn refrigerator, then sob in your bed, or sleep for hours, change is there. You get back up. You try again. You come to MFP and reach out, or not, but you do your best to get back to the road of wellness that winds through this place.

But what if you can't try again? What if your despair leads you to the darkest of places? "Sack up," some say. Certainly monumental effort is called for. Certainly. But there is other help besides MFP. There are doctors, and meds if you are comfortable with that, there are people trained to help.

Let me tell you about my brother. Thinking of Robin Williams, thinking of some of the terrible sadness here, I want to say what happens when people are left behind. And why we must try with every fiber to take care of our mind, so the body can then follow.

My brother would have turned 43 years old this year. But he killed himself at the age of 18 by jumping off a 10 story building.

Last year my mother told me that she and daddy were at the funeral home working on the arrangements when his body arrived from the airport. My mother needed an open casket, she told me, because she was afraid if she didn't see him she would always think he wasn't really dead, that she would torment herself with the idea that he might come through the door someday. I don't think people outside of our immediate family understood that, but I get it. As awful as it was to see him like that, it had to be done.

My mother asked the funeral director if it was even possible for the casket to be open, given the way my brother had died. The director, a truly lovely man, said, Give me a moment. He came back after 15 minutes and said it could be done. Then, very very gently: But you can't touch him. Matthew could be put back together, but only so far. His body would cave under our fingers if we pressed too hard. He was such a beautiful looking man and he was so ugly the last time we got to look at him.

That's what it's like. That's what we leave behind. And don't get me wrong--we have the right to choose our own death. But when in the throes of the blackness, it's hard if not impossible to think of who you are leaving behind. And that any possibility for a happy life--filled with love, fitness, health, friendships--is gone

Here' this last thing. A good thing. A few months before my brother died, he and I took my aunt and uncle's dalmatian Danny Boy for a walk in the middle of the night. It was in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, where some of my mother's family live. Wellfleet is pristine. The air is sweet and the land is so well protected by the National Seashore that it's not overbuilt at all. Just a beautiful, rural beach community. Anyway, the memory is just this: We walked in the middle of the road toward Duck Harbor, not worried about getting run over by a car, smoking Marlboros while Danny Boy walked far ahead of us like a beacon. It was so dark I could barely see Matthew's face, just the orange tip of his cigarette. But Danny Boy glowed in the dark. His white fur acted like one of those cheap plastic stars you paste on your ceiling as a kid. As if he had absorbed the warm sun for hours during the day so he could light back up again at night. It was one of the most peaceful, happy moments of my life. We could hear our smoky breathing and we could see the black sky. The air was cold and clean. And we had a glowing dog way ahead, scouting the terrain, leading us through the dark.

While you're still alive, follow the glowing puppy ahead of you, share that moment with someone you love, and remember it's not all about our body; the body is just a piece of the whole.