Chapter Two: Songs

Chapter Two: Songs

She killed herself.

My first wife was beautiful, intelligent and was my first head-over-heels case of arrow through the heart love.  In her presence the world, for me, was wonderful.  Birds were always singing.  Flowers bloomed even in winter.  We married after a very brief, intense and lusty courtship in the way of which only people in their late teens and early twenties are physically capable. 

This was in the enlightened sixties.  Enlightened in the aspect of the "Age of Aquarius" sort of thing.  The "Free Love Era".  Simply one of the best eras I can remember in American history - except for the fucking Viet Nam War.  Why bother to get married in the "Free Love Era"?  Because you just received your "Draft Notice", that's why.  I was raised in a military family.  I knew from eighteen years of observation, you can't pick your nose or fart in the military unless you have documentation - in triplicate. - signed by somebody with some kind of a title.  Any title will do.  Living off-post with your girlfriend is not possible.  Wife - yes.

I am not intending to speak lightly of anyone's death under similar circumstances.  It's horrible.  It's horrible to be the surviving spouse or other family member.  I speak with the authority of living through it.  There are chunks of my memory that are missing, chunks of my life from the days and weeks following my first wife's suicide that are simply missing. Walking around like a mannequin.  Making the movements of a living person, but not feeling anything.

Standing on the sidewalk in the sun, standing in a pool full of water – no difference.  Survival instincts intact, emotions totally missing. 

I don't remember if I called the police/hospital, or her father.  Of whatever emergency people there were in those days, up to three days later, I have only a blurry gray slide show of images.  From when they carried her from the house on a covered gurney, until standing in a funeral reception line, days later, there is just fog.  Very little idea what I did...or said to anyone.

A crack appeared in the ground and I fell into it. I will not claim to have been a perfect husband or lover.  But she was everything to me. Everything good and beautiful. Just seeing her made me feel that I did know what real love was, being with her was the only place I wanted to be. Even though we had some really awful fights on occasion, first love like that is your oxygen. Without that person right beside you, you just cannot breathe. For the first time in your life you truly, very truly, feel no longer alone in the world. When they are totally gone, forever, no chance of ever seeing them, being with them again, brings on a pain so intense to go on living seems simply impossible.

There is no oxygen, no sunlight. My legs would not work.  My arms would not raise my hands to wipe the tears. I did not scream or wail.  I did not curse God. Some part of me died when she pulled that trigger, though I did not know it until I found she was gone. That part, forty years later, is still gone.  A portion of my soul was raggedly amputated, with a dull rusty infected knife. It will never heal and the infection has and continues to slowly and painfully rot bits of that soul to this day.

Yes, I blame myself. Can I forgive myself? No!  What could I have done?  What should I have done?  Why didn't I see the signs?  Was I such a horrible person, this was her only way of getting away from me? 

In my heart there is screaming; "Forgive me! Oh my love, please forgive me!  I will give my life if you will come back! I should be the one who is dead!  You were the beautiful loving one!  Oh God!  Take me!  Not her?"  To this day this is what my heart screams. From morning till night. In my dreams. For forty years and will continue until my spirit leaves this life.

As hard as it was, has been and is, however, I now know I will wait until my spirit leaves of its own accord.  It is not for me to make that happen.

One thing I knew; I had two very young children who were in child-shock.  They needed me.  My heart went into mama bear mode.  Unthinking, protective.  Keep moving.  Periods of such intense weeping I actually lost eyesight for brief bits of time.  They didn't treat much for trauma such as that back then, but I know I went through several episodes of intense emotional shock.  I could feel my heart stop, then race like a rabbit, then stop.  Trouble breathing.  Unable to get air.

I was a man.  Manly-men-men did not openly weep or show a broken heart in public.  Much of my actual natural reactions I hid.  Going into whatever bathrooms I could find, turning on the fan, flushing the toilet, whatever noise might mask my sobbing.  In a military family from a very stiff Protestant heritage, men were in control or they were not men.

            Yes, even now I often hide behind attempted humour or sarcasm to keep my head held up.  To be able to deal.  With life.  With getting up in the morning.  With whoever I am working, when I can hold a job.  Being regarded as a wise-asse is less painful than being vulnerable.

When I speak of a bipolar motorcycle journal, I am referring to being bipolar.  Or, writing a motorcycle journal about having bipolar disorder and riding a motorcycle and how writing about riding helps.  I can write this memoir now because, in part, I believe I did take up motorcycle riding several years before I had my most significant mental breakdown. 

It has been forty-one years since my first wife took her own life.  For nearly all of that time, up until very recently, I never told anyone about how she died.  Except my second wife.  I said she had had a long lingering illness.  I blamed it on her diabetes.  I basically just lied.  It seemed humiliating.  Embarrassing.  Embarrassing?

I had loved her more than anything.  We had had our problems, but the love was there.  Yet I felt humiliated and embarrassed by the way she died!  Hiding the pain, lying about it, living with it.  Every minute of every day.  Getting remarried and having four more children in addition to my first two.  Pushing it down, pushing it down.  First with alcohol.  Then with increasingly severe rages against life, my children, my wonderful second wife. 

The last fifty years in our American culture much has happened.  Civil Rights.  Women's Rights.  The Americans with Disabilities Act.  A greater, deeper understanding of individual's rights.  When my first wife found her brother's twenty-two and used it against herself, it was the Dark Ages of mental health awareness and treatment.  This preceded all the recent progress.  The options if you began to experience mental problems were almost nil.  Drink or use drugs until you couldn't feel anything and watch your life fall apart from addiction.

Or, take it out on everyone who loves you until they can't take it anymore and abandons you.  Or, let the mental illness take over and be institutionalized.

In the mental institutions there were two treatments.  Give you drugs so powerful you became a vegetable.  Have your brain periodically fried until you became a vegetable.  In all cases of understanding and treatment available, sanctioned or self-adopted, you were going to become a vegetable.  You and your family were going to be labelled and shunted.  Avoided.  Lepers.

We have no way of knowing today.  No way to go back in history and perform proper diagnosis or surveys.  My belief is that prior to about 1980, the very first symptom of the vast majority of true mental illnesses, or actually chemically unbalanced brains, were successful suicides. 

At one time in recent medical history, contracting diabetes meant a slow lingering painful wasting away until death.  Then the use of animal extracted insulin was discovered and diabetes became, in the best case a mere inconvenience, even in the worst case it was still possible to increase an affected person's lifespan by decades. 

Diabetes?  Take your shots, move on.  Mental Illness - well, you're just a bad person!  Weak and pitiful.  Can't be trusted.

Today we are much aware of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  I will avoid getting political, but PTSD has become a major hot topic for all the returning vets from all of our recent combat conflicts. When most people experience life and death stress, even one single event, the organic physical nature of the brain changes. For many, if not most, this change, or changes, can dramatically affect the functioning of their brain.  Stress in social situations, in the work place, in simple daily life can become a nightmarish roller coaster of highs and lows. Uncontrollable reactions.

Tremors, heavy sweating, angry confrontational mannerisms. It is as though the whole world has become the enemy.  

The whole question of "Why?" is ludicrous to the severely depressed. Conscious memory began with lots and lots of doors, just like everyone else.  Our reality is where every day it seems as though a door has closed. But no windows opened.  The windows begin to disappear. The very walls become more and more drab.  The colour in our lives begins to flake away from everything.

We find ourselves in a room with four walls, all painted a dull battleship gray. The only door is steel, also gray, locked and has no door knob on the inside.  There are no windows. Every day the room gets just a little bit smaller. One day a window is there, in the middle of a wall.  It is open, but it is all blackness outside. You know it is oblivion, but it is the only solution for escaping the room. You have been trapped in the room so long that window begins to.....

That's why.

Finding myself on the freeway my first day of motorcycle riding, when my first major psychotic episode hit I was terrified.  Today, this day, as I sit on the back deck of this rented house on the banks of a small pond in the woods of rural Virginia, my mind wanders. It is August again.  August is a very odd month in my life.  Mary killed herself on August sixth, 1976. August is the month when I most often changed from teaching at one school to the first few days at a new school.

This day, today, the sun is shining, it is beautiful.  The year I took the motorcycle safety course and got my motorcycle was in August. The day I rode, for real in traffic, was a super-hot super-humid day. Today there is a cool breeze. Fall is in the air...change of seasons. Here in this climate zone, today is unusual and I know there is a lot of very hot summer ahead of us.  But I'll take today for today.

At the mental health conferences I have attended, there is a common theme that runs through the lives of many of the participants.  It is almost never addressed in any speeches or talks. Even as we meet to discuss ways and means of fighting the social stigmas of mental illness and disorders, this one topic is still off limits.  Suicide.

Many of the other participants I have spoken to over meals or coffee, or in small discussion groups, will bring up their own attempts or suicides of close relatives.  Parents, uncles, aunts, even children.

Suicide is, in my thinking, the ultimate act of madness. However, I also believe most of the time suicide is also almost accidental. Many of us, when standing on the edge of an extremely high ledge get the feeling of wanting to jump. It is so common to human nature it's almost natural, normal. But we don't. We feel like doing it, but we know it is actually wrong...even stupid. We aren't birds. We won't instantly grow wings and fly.  We will plummet like big pumpkins and splat in a bloody mess.

If we step off that ledge, if we pull that trigger, if we swallow those pills - it will be the last thing we do. And there is so much evidence from those who came within a single molecule of doing it, and failed or were rescued, who state almost the first thing, "It was an accident.  I didn't really mean to do it."

The first ten miles of real life riding, in traffic at traffic speeds, on a machine as dangerous as a motorcycle are the most potentially lethal.  Then the next one hundred miles.  Then the next one thousand.  And so on. The farther away you get from no experience towards a lot of experience, the higher are your chances of survival, or safe riding.  But you can never forget you are on a motorcycle and there are no crush zones or air bags between you and death.

There is an obvious parallel to mental illness. If you don't admit and accept that living with a mental illness can be dangerous, it is exactly like riding a motorcycle on the freeway at high speed and not admitting, or accepting, that that is dangerous. You truly have no protection other than fully understanding your vulnerability.

I've never thought of myself as being very big or scary, but even though I'm not very large in stature I have to admit to being maybe disproportionately strong. And during those times when the rages came over me I could be extremely scary to other people... I guess. Of course, she did the right thing to leave. Although I have never struck another person in one of my rages. The thought of ever striking my wife or children has never ever crossed my mind.  I simply could never do that.

All the destruction I have carried out must be horrible and terrifying to witness. Tazzering or putting me down with a rhino dart would seem like a good idea.

Being abandoned. Never having a solid home, a neighbourhood, always being the new kid at school and being forced to confront the school bully every single year.  Never having a best friend for more than a few months at a time. Growing up with an alcoholic mother who ran out of the house many nights when I was a small child.  Having the first love of my life leave me - permanently - by putting a bullet through her own head.  That is my madness.

All things are relative. All situations. All life experience. For many their lives have been much worse and they have overcome much greater challenges. But it is all relative. For nearly every fully able rich man who has died trying to climb Mt. Everest, there is a disabled person who has succeeded. Tragedy can come and destroy the most privileged and blessings can come and bring about triumph for the most wretched.

I was to be safely in the care of a trained psychiatric professional. So I spent most of that summer alone, walking on a beach and trying to pull my head out of the bucket of shit into which I had plunged it. None of my children, except one son, would speak to me. My wife wouldn't answer my calls.

My son said, "You have nothing left now!  The only reason you're there is because you have nothing left!  You destroyed everything else."  And he was correct. Now I had to figure out what to do next.  I had no idea.

It was August before my wife would speak to me again.

Have you ever put a real crystal, one of those small facet-cut globes of pure clear crystal, hanging in a window?  When the sunlight hits the crystal, tiny dots of rainbow sparkle are everywhere on the walls around the room. Even in a room with flat gray walls any light source can create some of those tiny rainbows. Sunlight is best, but even a small candle, placed adjacent to the crystal will work. If enough focus, enough courage can be found it can be used to spiritually grab one of those tiny rainbows.  As soon as the gift of that tiny key is held even for a second, a keyhole will appear in that gray steel door.   It can be used to open it. 

This is a supremely difficult task to perform, but it can be done. A real life, the purpose of a true life is that small crystal globe. The truth is like that crystal when any kind of light shines upon it, millions of tiny rainbow keys are everywhere around us. This task of grabbing onto even one of those keys will draw the attention away from that window to oblivion. 

We have to force ourselves to believe, that the situation will not last forever.

With my bipolar condition this includes as one of its cycles, deep deep depression, or days and sometimes weeks in that tiny gray room.  I have to force myself to believe that the situation will not last forever. I hold onto that crystal rainbow key and occasionally, even if for only an hour once in a while, I can get away from that window and out that door.

When I do, speaking only for myself, these days, I am usually on a motorcycle.

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My website can be found at http://dalepeterson.us