Compassion

So I read this article, "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother".

I know how mental illness can be inherited.  How your mom's dad had issues, was depressed in between the births of some of the children.  He wanted to die.

I strongly suspect it might be why Superman has never had any children.  He'd be the type not to have children because he wouldn't want to pass on the gene.  Or maybe not have kids who would have a father like him.

(I'm not having kids because I can't guarantee that I'll be around.  Not the issue of CS or depression, even if I was on an even keel, I'd be a victim of fate.  Like my own father.  Real life has enough to be sad about, even if your brain chemistry is fine.)

"20 is within the age of risk".

You are 8.  I pray that as you age, your own brain chemistry will remain clear.  Strange things happen as kids turn into teenagers.  I hope we always remain friends. That you can turn to me (or at least someone) when things go wrong.

Even now, I'm dreading the day when I'll move out or move away.  I hope we keep in touch.  (There was a roommate in my life, like an older sister, still)

I have no idea what will happen.  To us as people, to all these characters we have swirling around us in real life.  I hope that this blog will always exist somewhere on the internet.

I hope that you can always look this up and see the beautiful boy that is in the next room.  I'm trying to paint a portrait of you.  Of us and the world we are in right now.  I want to create a world of safety and Love and to make this moment in time as real as possible.  The 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Maybe someday, if I can, I'll try to share this with Superman. And your Mom.  This is how I understand life.  And the only way I can express Love to everyone.

PS I'm writing this while listening to the 43rd Christmas Show of Jonathan Schwartz on WNYC.  The Pizzarellis, etc.  American Songbook type stuff.  Not your Daddy's Jazz.  Turn it on.  (The hourly news just came on, about more of the shootings in CT.  I'm leaving to get some coffee.  Maybe I'll hug you if I can.)

The Park by the River with the Dog

The Dog and I walk by the river.  40 blocks each way, from the bridge down to the big gym.

We saw a hawk. Who had seen a rat in the grass.  The Hawk saw us and posed, but he didn't attack the rat.  He flew around and his wings were bigger than you'd expect.  Like a giant feather hug.

This is what the river looked like.  The dog is looking at the bridge. And when he turned, this is what he saw.

It's good exercise for both of us.  We think a lot about life and the river.  And how the River is a lot like Love.  And also like Chocolate.

You can get lonely or sad.  You forget that the River exists.  And then you go for a walk, and wander.  And it makes you happy to see it, to experience it. To remember how close it is to you.  And like with chocolate, you remember there's a stash.  And it just simply makes you happy.

Sometimes you need someone else to bring you there. Because it is easy to forget unless it is right in front of you.

Your Desk

This is what your desk looked like as of 3 weeks ago.  The balloons are from my friend's surprise birthday party.  You put them to the best use.

There's a picture you printed out of a mushroom.  You and your father and your father's girlfriend (I don't want to use any names here at all, for any of us.  Not yet, at least) had gone for a walk in Inwood Hill Park.  You took a picture of a pink mushroom on her iPhone.  Then pressed "print"  (and used up a good chunk of your dad's expensive printer ink from his new printer.

So here's what it looks like, up close.

We sat down to draw.  I don't have what you drew that day.  You found a face in the mushroom.  I drew this:

It's on my wall.  I love it.  I love drawing with you.  It's the time of my day when I can stop judging myself or my output.  I don't think of you as a kid at all.  We are peers.  If anything, you are the one that teaches me. About drawing, about laughing, about life.

Thanks.

Invisible Woman on Sunday Morning

"Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky" a line from Khalil Gibran.  I wonder if I can teach this to you someday.

It's Sunday morning.

I woke up at 8, you were already up. Getting paper for drawing.

You turned the Xmas tree on and I plugged in the string of Santa head lights,

You pointed at their reflection in the glass and said how cool it was that the heads looked like they were floating in space.

We found a bag of balled up wrapping paper and taped some on a paper and added stickers.  Yours looks professional and abstract,  your father thought it was a new piece of wrapping paper.  But it's his Xmas card.

Then your dad and his girlfriend woke up and made breakfast.  BACON.  Like they do every weekend.  In fact, the apartment is usually suffused with the smell of bacon on many mornings, I have lost track.

You have discovered the word "humping" and "connection", which we think you think is the word "copulation".  the conversation turned "awkward!!", like you like to say.  (Rising intonation, singing it, to prolong the awkwardness of any moment).  But I was grateful to turn the conversation away from gun control and how we are so lucky for every day that you are not in the same room as someone who might pull out a semiautomatic.  Like in Newtown, CT.

You then played a Disney videogame about an alligator who wants nothing more than to take a bath.  You take your finger (or mine sometimes) and draw a path for the water to find its way to the right pipe.  Sometimes there are bonus duckies.  We are trying to get you to slow down and READ some of the words, which, by nature you are fighting.  Your father is good at coaching you to break down the words into sounds (something called "chunking").  

Your dad stopped you after too long, and told you that it was time to read.  You countered that all your books were boring.  I suggested you write a book of your own. Something good.  You had a minor misunderstanding with your father  about whether this was a justifiable replacement.  You got a little whiny and your father got into his grownup voice and I escaped to my room while you guys hashed it out.

You wrote a great story about Rob the goldfish turning into a Rudolph figure and saving Christmas.
I wrote a story about a tree knocking on our door and you turning it into our Christmas tree.

When your cousins from Vermont arrived, you asked me to make an announcement so everyone could be quiet and you could read your story out loud.  You did and it went over quite well.  Even your dad was pleased.  (I think it made you happy too!)

Just a note about myself.  This is the only place where my stories will go.  I've been very depressed lately.  (No work, no money, few friends, our neighbor who is depressed and not available to be the friend I need-someone to cheer me up). Thank goodness I can write!  Your mother was astonished everytime I told her about any of my art projects, "At least you can do that!"  The Mousetraps, the ink doodles, the watercolors, everything.  She didn't have any of that.  No outlet.

While you were doing the video game, I read a story in the section of the NYTimes, about a sister who gave up trying to deal with the Mental Health system and has learned to just exist with her mentally ill brother.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/fashion/modern-love-providing-comfort-when-a-cure-is-out-of-reach.html

It hit me close to "home", I would love to just exist with your mother and with Superman down the hallway.   But the BiPolar Dragon rears its ugly head. She will never forgive me for forcing her to get help during her whirlwind.  And Superman doesn't like to talk to people.  At least not me.  Even though he has written HUNDREDS if not thousands of emails to me.  I expect him to write to me today, "a note just to say hi".  Sometimes, it is hard for him "to even communicate in such a light form as writing".

I take him at his word, but it is lonely & painful for me.

And so your family came and went, crazy with children and your father trying to relate to his brother whom he rarely sees.  This was me meeting them for the first time, or at least the first time to have a conversation.  I tried to feel out the situation; your father hadn't invited me to brunch.  And the conversation turned into itself like a Bey Blade battle, words sparking off each other.  But I was as useless as a Lego character, off to the side.  I went into my room, but kept the door open, just in case.  

(If this was your mother, she would have made sure to invite me.  To have me meet everyone.  To bring me along.  She did when her sister & family came by this summer, a week before her Whirlwind.  We all sat together around the big table at 181, by the window.  I crawled under it to sit next to you in the windowseat, remember how funny?  Even your father was there, and we were all nice to each other.  Genuinely nice.  The last time.)  

Cody kept coming in to my room when everyone was running around.  Keeping me company.   Rubbing me with his nose, looking pleadingly into my eyes. Knowing that we would be the ones left home alone.  

I know now, how my grandmother must've felt.  Ignored for not speaking English.  An old woman.  People see me, but I don't get a seat at the table.  I used to tell this to your father, and he mentioned how I reminded him of your mother.  Of her own loneliness.  Her living across the street from her previous life.  So I don't fight for attention anymore.  I only talk to my computer.

I'm useful in helping you turn your reluctance of reading into something you can be proud of.  My quiet little pieces of art, that even your aunt seemed amazed by.  But here I sit, with tears in my eyes.  Lonely and useless and wondering where my place in this world is.  Still trying to figure it out.

What I Wish I Had from You

Dear W,

I wish you could call me.

When you see you have too much food in your fridge, and invite me over for a bite.

That French Press you have?  2 cups of coffee, huh?  How about you make two batches and we talk over our coffeecups?  Measure our lives in coffeespoons?

I wish that on nights after the great tragedies of life, shootings and horrors, that you'd come to knock on my door.  To see if I'm alright.  I wish I could do the same for you.

Because this is the "stuff of life".  Not just music and food, as you say.  Contact.  You run back to your cave.  Or you are a social animal, as you keep telling me-I only know what I see.  I'm a good person to talk to or I'm someone who needs to be put through some kind of impossibly long series of tests in order to be casual friends with you.

You tell me to have Patience (I think you are hoping I will wait out your depression,  But NOW is when I need someone to help me out of mine.  And I need so little.  But you can't offer anything now.  And I don't care if you are Mr. Popularity in your manic phases.  I want a few words now.  I know you can.  I want you to try harder.

I want you as a friend.  (And you seem to want me) Because when we talk, I'm honest with you.  And I think you are honest with me.  Maybe that scares you.  Or maybe you can afford to throw away friends.  Maybe I come off as pitiful or desperate or lonely, as the one person you think you can look down on as being even more crazy than you are.

But I know that nobody called you for your birthday.

I know you feel like an orphan in the storm.

I know you think of yourself as "very social".  And I'm glad for you when I hear that you've invited people over for pizza.  Or a grand party for Thanksgiving.  Good for you. (I just wish you could be more sensitive to me, as I've tried to be to you)

Because you are not the only one who gets depressed.  Because it is hard (REALLY HARD) for me to write to you, or smile everytime I see you.  Especially when I feel like crying.  Because sometimes trying to be friends with you makes me feel even lonelier.

Once, I was very sad and I saw you in the hallway.  I asked if I could come shopping with you.  And you shrugged and said, "Sure," in such a sweet and easy way.  So simple for you to be generous.  And, as you have said so many times since then, it never took you out of your way.  I used to think that was just a phrase.  But coupled with, "Nobody is telling you to go away," it is a phrase of lost opportunity.  You have the ability to reach out to me in these moments when I am asking, actively fishing for a suggestion that this is a Friendship.  And yet you do nothing.

Maybe I will stop writing.

Who knows how long I can afford to live in this building?  I'm good at disappearing.  Even now, I have begun to stop writing to you.  Since Thanksgiving.  Since I realized how much you can't reach out to me.  When I need it most.  I am pulling away, and you don't seem to notice.  (Maybe because I'm not pulling away completely, because I break down and reach out)

You live right down the hall and except for that Whirlwind, you have never knocked on my door.  You live right down the hall.  And you make me feel so lonely.

I was trying not to write. But I sent a message of Peace to you.  You sent something back.  In the middle of the night, you agreed with me.

I wish I could hear your voice, or that we could talk.  But it is nice to have something when I wake up at 4:30 in the morning.  A little gift.

A Different Kid on Lined Paper

From the Sandy Hook School, a kid in his last moments.  On lined paper, not a strange and terrific sea creature, but a message of Love in the moments before the bullets came for him.  

(I was so happy to see you coming home w/your friend D on a Friday afternoon.  She was wearing a red Christmas dress and you watched Rudolph on DVD.  And were giggling.)

The Definition of Love

Dear Grown Man,

I remember when I was a young teen, after my Father passed away.  Trying to figure out a definition of Love.  Magazines and girls at school were going on about it, romance and sex and “the right one”.  There was also friends and family and my 8th grade teacher, who merited a special place in my heart.  But what was the common denominator?  Somehow I arrived at something so perfect, I’ve never been able to let it go.
If someone dies, and your world is shattered.

That is Love.

I have been lucky that many people have fit into that category in my life.  My best friend Julie, my Mom, the old neighbor lady Gladys with the 300 dolls.  
Love to me has always been measured in potential loss.
Not what I have at the moment, but what I am afraid to lose.

When she had her “whirlwind”, you referred to her as “a really messed up chick”.   No compassion. I saw her posting something on FB, “It’s disgusting” about the school shooting.  Maybe it’s a kind of amnesia, but definitely a lack of empathy and compassion.
You see, life is impossibly difficult for people.  And we are all pushed to extremes.  How we ultimately react is within our control (we hope), but there is unlimited rage out there.  

We need to be compassionate beforehand, before it gets to that stage.  We need to be kind.

After the whirlwind, when I went to Massachusetts and wasn’t going to come back, I thought about you. I thought about you constantly.  What if someday . . .

By then you had mentioned things to me.  We had brought up the subject.

Parking your car at Fairway, I said the word “S-------” out loud for the first time in 25 years.  I thought to myself, “You’re a grownup. You can say it out loud, just like anyone else, and it won’t mean anything.  It doesn’t mean anything to him,”

And you wrote me about the singer, who had written a song (maybe an album?) in a hotel room.  The lowest point in his life.  And I wrote back, “The next time you think about it, I have just one word for you.  DON’T”  And you responded with a line of question marks.  I reminded you how you had brought it up before, it was something you struggle with, correct?  “It turns out that it is very good to know you, Miss ____ ____.  Very good,”

And I have held those words as sacred.

Everytime I doubt you.  Everytime you run and hide in your cave and I am lonely and want someone to talk to, but instead I have to go back to my room and cry, I think of those words.

And so in Massachusetts, after you had stopped writing to me and I to you.  After I thought you had deserted me.  Before you told me that you had your worst episode in 25 years.  I thought about you.

I thought of you there, alone, in an apartment.  With real metal in your hands, not just the pantomime of a gun.  I thought about what it would be to know you were there, alone.  And hearing about it afterwards.

And then I thought about you calling me.  What if I had to do it all again?  To be the one to read the words that told me that everything was in place right in front of you?

(The horrible echo: “The antifreeze that I had bought to drink.  You wouldn’t have been able to stop me if I had drunk the antifreeze I bought”  Where is it now?  “Next To Me,” )

And this terrible horrible awful scene played out further in my mind.  Because you are taller and obviously stronger than me,  I could never wrestle it out of your hands.  The cops couldn’t break in.  But maybe I could talk to you.  Get you to put it down.  Get you to not feel alone. Diffuse the bomb.  Starting it all now.  As if anyone can save anyone else.  (At least I can try)

And then I thought back to not being there for you.  I had been planning to cut off all contact with anyone who had a hint of mental illness (diagnosed or not). Granted, with all my crazy artist friends, this would leave me tremendously lonely.  But I couldn’t take being that close to death. So what if we never spoke again? Life would be easier for us both, right?

And I realized, even if there was nothing I could do, that I already cared too much about you. (And about A. for that matter)  I couldn’t stop being friends (or trying anyway).  I would not be able to ignore you in the hallway, or turn my face away from your beautiful smile.

I don’t know what my role will be, or if it will cause me pain (or how much).  I love you too much to lose you.  And I will do everything in my power to keep you alive on this earth and in my life.

So I know that I email you sometimes in the middle of a workday, and you respond “Very Busy”.  But I wish you could figure out your other issues, so that you can respond to me when you are NOT busy.  And do some "work" from your side.  Because choosing to keep you in my life was a very difficult decision, and everyday your Depression makes it harder.  

And not having you as a friend is like not breathing.  It’s not something that I can do.  “You gotta go where your heart says go, isn’t that so?” said the great philosopher, Lyle Lovett.  And believe me, in Massachusetts, I was ready to let you go.  Speeding down a country road, trying to shake you from my mind.  But I couldn’t do it.  I wrote to you, saying how much I missed you.  And you wrote back immediately, saying you were just about to write to me.

I haven’t told you, but it was then that I accepted everything. Whatever your future holds, I’m there and I want to support you to be the best person you can be.  So I really don’t know what you are afraid of.  I think there may be a little agoraphobia, or you hesitate to “socialize” with people when you are feeling down.  You have darkness, I know.  

You asked me if I know, if I really know what it feels like to want to destroy yourself.  Trust me, I know.  (Someday, I’ll tell you my story) It’s all terrifying.  

And there is only one thing that can destroy it.

Invisible Magic. (i.e.Love)  The kind that will persist beyond all the petty annoyances and will remind us that we are not alone, no matter how crazy we think we are.

I still Love A.  I love you. I wish someone had been able to communicate Love to that boy who shot those 20 children and 6 adults.

And I cannot lose you.