Real and troubled: Claire Danes as Carrie on "Homeland"

I’m about halfway through catching up on a program, Homeland, that wrapped its first season some months ago. It could not be much better: a Federal agent (Claire Danes, as Carrie Mathison) tries to exorcise her guilt over the botched intelligence of 9/11 by preventing the next big instance of domestic terrorism from occurring. She becomes convinced that a former Iraq POW, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), now returned and trying to adjust to American life, is working on carrying out such an attack. Once convinced, Carrie is not the kind of person who’s likely to change her mind.

One of the best things about Homeland is Carrie herself: an intense workaholic who is both an asset and a liability at work. Early on, we see her struggling with a medical issue, then we learn that it’s a mental issue, next that it runs in the family. Throughout, this woman is persuasive. She has a knack for convincing her colleagues that the things she believes are really happening.

Hell, she convinces us.

But Carrie’s lows are dramatic. She cusses, rants. Has alcohol-fueled impulses, sleep disturbances, crying jags. Declares that I just can’t do this anymore (never mind this is her life, her passion, all she seems to want to do). Naturally she does these things. I’m not sure you can depict a mental patient in fiction without showing them.

That has never stopped anyone. What was Splendor In The Grass, Girl, Interrupted, or Basic Instinct, if not a walk on the supposedly exotic side of mental illness?

“You are a lazy, self-indulgent little girl who is driving herself crazy,” says a nurse to Susanna (the Girl of Girl, Interrupted). Asked if she likes playing games, the novelist-wacko of Basic Instinct replies, “I have a degree in psychology. It goes with the turf.”

“I haven’t any pride! I just want to die!” insists Deanie in Splendor In The Grass. A few years (years!) at a hospital that looks like a resort are all it takes to restore her pride … and send her home with a brand-new guy (a doctor!).

Is being a few aces short of a deck really a hot-chick affliction? Movies say yes; and that mental illness can be a helpful first step in meeting a guy (50 First Dates, Final Analysis, Fatal Attraction). Also, those it afflicts seem to be very good at whatever it is they do (A Beautiful Mind, The Hours, Black Swan).

Lies. All lies. Homeland knows this. Watching Carrie unravel is an unromantic, harrowing part of the story. It’s not the story itself, but it’s also not a quirk, not a “gift”, not in any way a personal advantage. Carrie’s illness is part of what happens to her — and to everyone in her life.

Which is why it all resonates with me. As those who have any personal acquaintance with mental illness know, being sick in this way is not exotic. It does not make the sufferer special. It is a family affair, and not a nice one: everyone is along for the ride. It deprives people of support, financial and social. It ends careers and relationships; it launches terrible habits. And yes, sometimes it kills people.

But we like watching pretty people in stories that end happily, so what we get onscreen is the attractive mental patient who meets the person (or the place, sometimes the thing) that will save her. Or him; more often, the mental patient is female.

Worse, we tend to get mental-patient-as-force-of-evil: a singular experience. In Hollywood, there is nothing scarier than a beautiful person who is just one pot and a rabbit away from wrecking your life.

On the other hand, what could be funnier than a girl with no life skills? Who bursts into song for no reason? Who does not know what “sexy” means?

I watched an episode of The New Girl (a big, if confusing, ratings hit) with my uncritical kid a few weeks ago, and that was actually the storyline. This (new? As in, on this planet?) girl had so little idea of how to get intimate with her new boyfriend that she asked her roommates (all male! none of them romantically involved with her! because that totally happens!) for some Sexy Tips.

The New York Times has called this program what it is: a throwback to an earlier time, when a pretty genie or a sexy witch needed the protection (and control) of at least one man. The show “seems quite old-school,” said the NYT, calling it the story of “an appealing, clueless heroine who bewitches male protectors.”

Bewitches: their word, not mine.

This implied witchcraft might be okay, if the heroine had any obvious talent or skill. Or some old-timey special powers. I just don’t see wearing glasses as evidence of talent, or random singing as a skill. But I don’t watch the show, so how would I know? That might be one gifted dingbat.

God bless the non-dingbats. The smart single women of TV may be flawed, but their flaws give them dimension. They may be the book-smart girl whose perfectionism is a problem, the anxious compulsive baker, the girl with no filter, the wily workaholic, the resentful workaholic, the polished workaholic, or Carrie, Homeland‘s workaholic-with-a-mood-disorder. But it’s okay, because these characters share DNA with the paranoid Federal agent, the OCD-afflicted workaholic, the rocket scientist, the bright guy with Asperger’s, the histrionic geek, the wildly successful narcissist, and the scientist who was always just a little bit off.

All men.

When it comes to fictional depictions of mental illness in media, Homeland is a real step forward. Crazy is not sexy, nor is it productive. And helpless isn’t cute. Real people, like me, have to deal with the former every day. More onscreen honesty about that kind of life makes living with it a little easier.

Why does the Western idea of the year end (and the next begin) in the dead of winter? I  mean, I know how cultural the thing is: Pope Gregory XIII decided on ours, in Islamic culture it’s in spring, Judaism places it in fall, and here again the Chinese have the edge on us, both in solid terms of years lived and really good origin stories. And of course North Korea passes recorded time in a very Kimilsungian way.

If we measured the year in terms of our own entry into life (birthday to birthday), that would be so American. Many already do this, if unofficially.

2011, the year I lost my Dad, got me thinking about the whole journey of life: not just how it begins but how it ends. About a year before Dad left us, I was present at the birth of my youngest nephew, on — fittingly enough — the longest day of the year. These were not entirely different events, yet our culture celebrates the birth and fears the death. Interesting.

The truth is that there is beauty in both: arrival and departure. I know this, as I know that I want 2011 gone more than any year before it. (I actually wanted to corner it on the way out and beat it senseless.) I know that getting to see life begin and end, having a role in each, has been the highlight of midlife for me.

I don’t get to resent the year just past for what I lost to it. I’m beyond the age where one loss gets that kind of power. Life accelerates in a certain direction; I won’t get to keep as much as I’ll have to lose. And I will lose more. I can’t rip whole years, of kids’ birthdays and sunlit days and laughter, off the calendar because of things lost within them. My father never would have done that.

Goodbye, 2011. Not good riddance: goodbye. And thank you for the education.

Arrival

Departure

As for the baby, he was enjoying his time with the real Mommy. My sister had to induce: and here’s an odd thing about life, that someone else can choose your birthday for you. Obviously, someone can also choose your date of departure, but that’s much less legal, not to mention little cause for celebration.

Very early on the morning of the summer solstice, I joined my sister, brother-in-law, and mother-in-law on the trip to the hospital. On the sunlit trip through the sleeping town of Matthews, we passed under a sign strung across the street: the community theater production of “The King And I” was about to open.

It was the best morning of the year. We were all so excited. I remember looking at that sign, thinking: Shall we dance?

Honestly, I could have.

Inside my sister’s delivery room, a nurse wrote “Happy Birthday Abby’s Boy” on the whiteboard. She told us that the baby would be born by noon. The baby had other plans.

Inside my sister (we could now hear him on a monitor), the boy shifted and snoozed. Then he got the hiccups. I hadn’t known this part: we can have hiccups before we are, in medical terms, alive. That blew me away: as did the fact that the boy had a little nightmare on his last day in utero, and we could hear it.

Poor Boo Boo, I remember thinking.

Early in the pregnancy, my sister had taken a business trip to the West Coast, and I spent an evening with her. As I greeted her, I was aware — same as when she was pregnant with Abby — that there was someone else there. A different energy, this time, no less bright but more … active?

“Hi Boo Boo,” I said to him, that night. This one had a Boy vibe going on.

Now it was months later. Inside the delivery room, Boo Boo seemed in no hurry to meet any of the rest of us. He was exactly where he wanted to be.

One of the nurses, in the middle of that long day, paused in my sister’s room and said, “I’m feeling a Jonathan in here right now.” I listened as my sister told the nurse the story of the day Abby said that her brother should be named Jonathan Michael. I’d been lobbying intensely, if quietly, for that name since the year started. But I’d have gotten nowhere if it hadn’t occurred to Abby too.

Settled: Jonathan Michael went up on the whiteboard. “Jack” would really be the boy’s name, though. His parents knew: this kid was too quick a spirit to be anything but a Jack.

For those keeping score, here’s another thing other people get to choose for us in advance: not just our birthdays, our names. Beware: the terms the world will use in dealing with us for all time may be decided by a three-year-old, a hospital employee, a blogger with a thing for Jon Hamm, and two people who think the height of comedy is “That’s what she said.”

As my sister watched (and then tired of) 90210, as my geeky brother-in-law synced the remote to the TV and then waited some more, as Abby’s Grandma and I made a pastry run, the boy’s arrival approached. It was late in the afternoon when the nurses told my sister it was time to push. I would be one of the support people for this activity: the one on the left. (Such a good spot!) As we took our positions, the nurses decided to make Boo Boo’s birth a teaching moment.

A young woman in uniform would walk in. “She’s new,” one of the vets would say. “Can she watch?”

Smiling, my incredibly calm sister would greet the newcomer by name. “First week? That’s great.”

Understand: we are not talking about the drugs here. My sister is just very good at this birth business. Unusual thing to be good at, but there you go.

There ended up being about ten of us there to witness The Birth of Baby Jack. It didn’t take much, maybe three big pushes, and there he was.

I was the first to see the boy’s little face. (He looked surprised, and very interested.) I was also amazed to see, for the first time, the hemispheres of the brain. It hit me that the whole construction of the human body works in a certain way to facilitate our arrival.

My sister and I both cried. I called my parents and told them they had a new grandson. Auntie JuuJuu, at home with the new big sister, got the word and started to get her little best friend ready for the trip to the hospital.

The truth is that I only remember these things because someone else told me they happened. There is a charge in the moment of arrival that just lights up a space, and everyone in it, for hours. (No wonder the room filled with trainees.) You’re just having the best day. That kind of radiation is more contagious than the worst airborne virus.

I do remember Abby’s face when she walked in and saw her brother for the first time. This was her Big Present, probably the biggest ever. She knew this in the moment she saw him, but she’d had no idea before. How big this gift would be, how cool. And the person she’d been before she got her present, well — that was nice, but this was AWESOME.

My sister and her husband had brought a gift to the hospital for Abby. (We can get to thinking the older child will feel “left out”. What adults we don’t know of The World Of Kid is vast.) Abby liked her gift, but after the appropriate few minutes of enjoying the new doll, she was right back to needing to touch her baby brother.

The boy didn’t mind the attention. (He still doesn’t.)

Late that day — very late — I joined The Away Team (my brother-in-law, JuuJuu) on the walk back out of the hospital. We passed by Emergency this time: trailing balloons, flowers, other things. I remember the giant orb of our joy touching the subdued space of the ER waiting room; being aware of that, and sorry.

We were lucky. It was stark, almost brutal, how lucky we were. I knew as we moved through the automatic doors to the wall of summer night outside, that this was a singular feeling. Remember this, I thought.

A year later, I would.

Dad struggled to understand it himself. Months later, we would find handwritten notes he’d made. “Hart attack,” says one, dated February 17. “Thank them for the gifts,” it adds. “Flowers and fruit.”

As his children recognized the enormity of what had happened (was happening) with Dad, we planned the annual family gathering with more attention than usual. It was understood that no one would make the mistake of sitting this one out. No one, that is, except Dad.

He just never spoke about it. August. San Diego. My mother would talk to him about these things, but he never really responded. To Dad, it was as if they did not exist.

Of course he was right. That event simply wouldn’t happen for Dad. We didn’t want to hear anyone say this, but it was true.

Dad’s last illness started around the same time Baby Jack reached his first birthday. Mom noticed that Dad wasn’t eating; on a day they’d spent (as they spent many others) walking in the Arboretum, Mom got concerned enough to call my Dad’s doctor. They told her to bring him to the hospital. From there, things moved quickly.

The clothes he was wearing for that day’s trip to the Arboretum went into a bag, pushed onto a shelf in his hospital room, forgotten for days. This was the same room he’d occupied six months before, when he was moved from ICU to the ward: 218.

Day after day, Mom kept telling us that he was coming home the next day. (Did she ask my Dad? Because he’d have disagreed.) He kept having to stay: another day, another. Finally one of my siblings spoke directly to a doctor, and that’s how we learned what was really going on.

My siblings all arrived to see my Dad on the same day. Jim and I drove down from San Francisco, getting in late that afternoon, in a retracing of the trip we’d taken Thanksgiving weekend the year before. When I arrived, Dad was awake. Really, really awake.

“Oh, here’s Annie,” he said. He looked delighted.

There isn’t much I can say about that day and night. It passed. I didn’t read any of the books I’d brought. For the most part, I watched my Dad’s face, listened to him breathe.

And remembered the day in that same room six months before, when we learned he’d be discharged, and I started helping Dad dress for the trip home even before the nurses took out his IV and everything. I was taking my Dad home! So excited.

I knew that would not happen, this time. So did he. In all the time I was with him, Dad never asked me when we were going home. He knew he wasn’t.

From the hospital we moved Dad to hospice. Dad’s next bed was by a window in a two-bed room whose TV he never watched, whose lights he never asked us to operate, whose other resident he never acknowledged. I don’t think Dad knew that Robert, the foulmouth in the next bed, was even there.

(One day my sister overheard one of the nurses asking Robert what had happened to him. “I fell,” he told her. “How did you fall?” she asked. “I don’t know,” he mused. “I just fucking fell.”)

Dad had always been an active guy. His body was where he lived — walking, juggling a soccer ball, gardening, riding bikes — and for the most part it had treated him well. A bed is not an ideal location for a guy like my Dad to spend any part of his life. He was aware of this, at first: shifting, moving his legs and feet. Much as we tried to make him comfortable, it was often impossible.

But the day came when Dad wasn’t moving his feet anymore. I had been reading to him in the days before, even playing music, and I understood at last that he was no longer interested. He was still there, though; I’d called the staff to lower the rail on his bed the day before, so that Dad could use what strength he had left to embrace my Mom.

To the end, Mom was all my Dad wanted. That woman was his life. If you have any chance to see this kind of love happen, or take part in it, don’t miss it.

By July 11, something had changed. Dad’s legs lay quiet. Still, when he was awake I could look into his eyes and see the light that was my Dad: banked, waiting. In the afternoon of that last day I began again, telling Dad about his grandchildren.

Dad’s breathing evened out. He listened, as I named the kids and told Dad who they were, how old, what they loved, how they spent their time, things they said. On the sheets between us, Dad moved his hand into mine.

Night fell, and the seven of us — siblings, and my husband — took my Mom to a Pasadena restaurant we remembered from childhood. There was some kind of karaoke night happening, and at one point, a singer did one of Frank Sinatra’s standards. My mother put down her fork and started to cry.

She knew.

We stayed through dessert, but Mom wasn’t really eating. She told us finally that she wanted to get back to hospice, to “say good night to Dad.” So that’s where we went. On the drive over, my sister told the story of a queasy car trip her in-laws had taken with a girl their other son was dating, once. It’s a great story, and Ellen nails the telling of it every time. We were all laughing when we piled out of the car.

Dad was asleep when we walked in. Mom said good night, kissed him, and then told us to take the photos and books from his bedside and bring them home. We were a bit surprised by this, but she was right, it was getting cluttered in there, and besides, Dad couldn’t turn to see them anymore.

We’d been home for about a half hour when Jim, writing a piece about my Dad for his blog, asked Ellen to recite The Soccer Prayer so that he could include it.

She paused. Looked to her left. Crying a little, she said it.

About ten minutes later the phone rang. It was hospice; Dad was gone.

The eldest of four in his own family, the boy who’d watched war come to London, who’d run telegrams to and from young American soldiers, who buried his mother and left his father while still a boy, who sailed for Africa in his twenties, who married the only blonde in town almost 50 years ago, who raised six children on two continents and coached countless more, who danced at all six of his children’s weddings, who celebrated the 21st century by becoming a citizen of the United States, was gone.

In birth and in death, it’s amazing how completely the person arrives, and goes. In the absence my Dad left, we worked: packing up his clothes, so many of them, for Goodwill. My husband opened that bag from Dad’s hospital room, reached into the pocket of the last pair of trousers Dad had worn, and pulled out something wrapped in tissues. He looked at what he’d found, then handed it to my brother: a folded stack of $20 bills, more than a thousand dollars’ worth.

Months, maybe even years before, Dad used to run his little car to the store: buying bananas, buying milk. He’d tell my Mom he was going, she’d hand him a twenty, and off he’d go. But at some point, money went from being something Dad needed to something he carried. Like his body. Like his life.

It’s not that money didn’t matter. Dad’s college degree was in Economics; he knew it did. It’s that he was headed someplace where it would be profoundly beside the point.

I miss my Dad. I’m sure I always will. But there was a dignity in the time he had, together with Mom in those last months, to watch his own sunset approaching, to measure his days, to love his wife. To say goodbye. There are parts of my father’s life I would not wish on anyone.

The end is not one of them.

Never say never.

In my favorite story of this week, snowboarder and TBI survivor Kevin Pearce did the one thing he’s longed to do since his horrific accident on the last day of 2009: he got out on his board and rode.

I love everything about this.

Kevin was a leading contender for the 2010 Olympics, and in fact was a week away from trials, when he hit his head on the halfpipe during practice runs in Mammoth, CA. There were those who doubted he’d survive, never mind walk, talk, or use his working memory again. I was all kinds of sad. For Kevin, snowboarding again seemed out of the question.

Still, there he is.

What a great story, awesome kid, and terrific family. Back in 2010, I said that I wanted to prove that the love in the Pearce family had the power to heal their wounded son and brother.

It does.

It’s a good life, isn’t it?

"They just oughta leave it the way it is. Kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world."

The Towering Inferno was on cable last night. I have thoughts:

1. How could I have seen this movie if I was eight the year it opened? I’m sure my parents watched it on TV. Which means that I did, too.
2. Disaster movies: I remember a lot of them. Earthquake was a standout, and not in a good way.
3. It’s amazing that I can even leave my flat.
4. All the people-running-on-fire scenes: could this be why we kids spent a decade of nights in stiff, smelly, itchy, flame-retardant PJs?
5. Because the 70’s were like, “Go ahead and die on your skateboard if you want, but I’ll be damned if you burst into flames in your sleep.”
6. A tower 135 floors high? You’d be have to be nuts to design something like that, Paul Newman.
7. After September 11, so many of the exterior shots of the building are just creepy to watch.
8. But the thing doesn’t collapse. And why would it?
9. Thanks to that scene near the end with Jennifer Jones, I have been afraid of high-rises for as long as I’ve known what they are.
10. I also must have believed that public-servant heroics (the little helicopter gondola! The million gallons of water!) were possible in a disaster such as “skyscraper on fire”.
11. And that they’d work.
12. This would be why, when I spoke to my sister-in-law early on September 11, 2001, I asked her, “What happened to the people on the planes?”
13. “This is one building that I figured wouldn’t burn.” TITANIC MUCH?
14. The scene with William Holden loading people into the elevators in the burning building: “ Just 12 at a time, please”? That’s hysterical.
15. This might be the only movie ever made with not one (O.J. Simpson), but two (Robert Wagner) actors who probably killed their wives.
16. If someone put all the actors in that stinker New Year’s Day into a movie skyscraper, and set it on movie fire, I might go see it.

Want more disaster? You do.

• I think I’ve seen this before!
• What was it about the 1970′s?
• It’s the end of the world as we know it. Again?

You know something's bad when these people agree to hate it.

Hi all. Despite a huge response from Teh Internets, and steady pressure from giants such as Tumblr, Mozilla, and many others, SOPA is still on the table for our completely out-of-touch Congress.

Keep up the pressure. Spread the word: This is not China. Freedom of speech leads our Bill of Rights. We will fight for it.

What you can do:

• Call your member of Congress.
• Contact the Motion Picture Association of America and share your thoughts. (Also, maybe let them know how long it’s been since you paid to see a movie made in the United States.)
• Contact the Chamber of Jackholes Commerce. (How about sharing your feelings on corporate hiring this year?)
• Get informed. Start here.

Thanks!

I discuss “The Man Of The House” here. If you like sharp analysis, loving recollections by smart people, and lingering close-ups of Jon Hamm, you should watch it.

I’m down to once-a-day viewings, myself.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!–Great God!

- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Oscar Wilde said it best: when the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers. I wonder whether this nation, in its most ardent prayers, could have asked for a more perfect product of its wants and needs than Kim Kardashian.

Everyone wants to be famous, right? Kim does! She’s the kind of person who releases personal news early on a Monday morning, to make the most of the week’s news cycle (and encourage posts like this). If you can’t act, sing, dance, write, or perform any other kind of art or service, I guess it’s fair to make money being a jerk.

Everyone wants to be rich! What if you could make 18 million dollars just for having a wedding? You’d do it, right? You’d think about doing it for sure. You’re thinking about it right now, I bet.

Doesn’t everyone want to be perfect? Kim does; a pretty girl to begin with, she’s spent lots of money and time making herself look even better. And what could be wrong with wanting attention, wanting people to look at you, even more than they do? Where’s the harm in a little cosmetic procedure here and there?

I am just not sure she will recover from this one.

Kim Kardashian’s marital procedure has me thinking. What is attractive about getting married? What makes it something anyone would want to do anymore? If you can pick someone out of a herd, meet and get along and get engaged and then married and file for divorce a year to the day after your first date, isn’t that just a very long kind of joke?

Long con. That’s what I meant to say: isn’t that just a kind of long con?

Let’s say that you and the person you love decide to marry each other while on a road trip: leave your car, go to a convenient hilltop, and promise each other your undying love. Done and done. If you decide to call it off a week later, who is the worse for that?

Well, you are. But chances are you probably won’t call it off. When you do love each other, it’s just not that easy to stop the love.

If it were that easy, we would. Stop, I mean. There are days deep in any relationship when you simply can not stand the person you love. He has stupid hair, and his socks! The socks. Ugh. All his comments are sooooo five months ago, he can never follow your nimble train of thought, how can he even pretend to know what you want in your omelet? He doesn’t understand you at all, he never did! Just look at this stupid set of pillows he gave you. HE NEVER DID.

And you wish, down in that secret place you never tell him about, that he’d just get hit by a bus. Then you and Jon Hamm could finally be together.

But we stay. Love, damn it to hell, makes people stick around.

There might be people who stay married because they think marriage is important. (I don’t know any of them, but I’m sure they exist.) I suspect most of us stay married because love on its worst day is still a mixed blessing. It’s better to love someone and be with him even when you don’t like him than love him and be without him. It’s better to leave the big shovel under the stairs than use it to bury his lifeless body under the flagstones. It’s not marriage that forces these bargains, it’s love.

At a time when plenty of people have great reasons for being mad at Kim Kardashian, I am not just angry with her because she did this cynical thing in a nation that still forbids about ten percent of its adults from marrying each other. I am not angry with her because I watched the wedding or bought the magazines or did any of that, because I didn’t. I haven’t cared who this girl is or what she does. Until now.

I am angry with Kim Kardashian for taking something sacred, something delicate and marvelous and terrible and as fleeting as life itself, and shitting all over it. That something isn’t marriage, it’s love.

But what makes me angriest is the culture that handed her the script. The culture that said, in one way and another, No, it really is all about you. The culture that gave Kim attention for her beauty, and for that sex tape; that gave her family a reality show and then gave her one of her own; that buys her perfume and clothes and whatever else she sells, also finally bought her a wedding. Now that she’s exercising her legal right to end that union, I’m upset because she made money on it. Really, marriage is the most exquisite torture, taking years to perfect, and how dare anyone do that for money?

But what good American ever does anything, if not for money?

I am angriest with us. Kim is the monster we made, and she’s just getting started.

For this relief much thanks; ’tis bitter cold
And I am sick at heart.
Hamlet (1.1), Francisco to Barnardo

Question: what does a good American do when she feels terrible?

I knew the answer, and that for me it was different. Let me repeat that: I knew my answer. But I wanted not to know it. On the side of not-wanting, I knew that I would meet with support. So I went there instead.

My father had a heart attack in late January of this year. He survived, but it was frightening to Mom, and to my sister and brother and me, when we saw him. The doctors said he was better. A terrible shock, they said. They released my Dad from the hospital in early February. But something was wrong. Dad was sick. He had been for a long time, we knew. This was something worse.

As my mother and he began to confront his convalescence together in March, I fell into my own deep darkness. Inexperienced, I called it depression.

Doctors, good ones, had diagnosed me with depression before. I have had several major “episodes” since my twenties. I believe these were real, and that at least one of them responded to treatment. The darkness of March felt somehow old (I think now that it’s been there for years), and familiar enough for me to seek the classic measures. In this country, those measures are drugs.

Still, all my wanting was not enough to make me sick in a way that drugs could touch. On some level I knew this; even as I faithfully took the drugs, I noticed that they didn’t work, and was not surprised. I knew I wasn’t sick in the usual way. Not in my body, not even in the old serotonin dance of the brain.

I was sick at heart.

I have of late–but wherefore I know not–lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises …
Hamlet (2.2), Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Because I was sick at heart, things got only worse for me. I would rise momentarily from my funk by reading a good book, seeing a movie, having a lovely night with my husband. But I could not ever truly rise. I literally moved more and more slowly: crossing a room, a street. I was even afraid to drive.

And my father was growing ever more ill. Which I knew.

Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn’d defeat was made. Am I a coward? …
Hamlet (2.2), Hamlet (soliloquy)

By the time May rolled around, the word I was using to describe my state of being was “stuck”. I was truly homebound: moving in any direction was an effort. I had great doctors who cared for me; one of them is the first psychiatrist who has truly been able to help me. In her office, I begged her to tell me why my “recovery” was taking so long.

She didn’t have an answer. How could she? The answer wasn’t medical.

I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;’
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do’t.
Hamlet (4.3), Hamlet (soliloquy)

June. By now I knew my father was dying. There is a way you feel when the death of a loved one is happening in your own body as well; it’s tedious, undeniable. Neither eating nor sleeping goes well, for any reason you can explain to others. And it got worse.

My dad was waiting for me. I knew this as well as I had ever known anything in my life. Why didn’t I go?

Reasons, reasons: I now believed that I was too sick to travel. I clung to the friends caring for me at home, to plans I’d made, thinking these had some magic that would keep everything on track. Bizarrely, I believed my next job (I haven’t had steady work since Dad’s heart attack) was just around the corner.

They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.
Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Hamlet (4.5), Ophelia

On June 27, Mom took my Dad to the doctor when he could no longer eat. His doctor, noting his heart rate, called an ambulance. Dad was admitted to the hospital — for just that night, we thought. Then another night. And another.

Dad would never come home.

Now I had to go. This was the very last thing I wanted to do. What I did want:

…To die; to sleep,
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
Hamlet (3.1), Hamlet (soliloquy)

The time comes when the last thing you want to do is the only thing left.

The strangest part: that tidal pull, the incessant internal demand, ended when I got in the car with my husband and started the drive south. We stopped just south of Gilroy and bought cherries at a roadside stand; I don’t remember eating them until we got to our destination. And we did stop for a sandwich, but I downed mine in minutes. The clock was ticking.

The hospital. I fought the urge to run because I knew he was still there, waiting for me. We found his room and I walked in and Dad and I saw each other.

That longing, the thing I had been calling sickness, ended. Just like flipping a switch. It has not returned.

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting,
That would not let me sleep …
Hamlet (5.2), Hamlet to Horatio

I spent the night of my arrival with Dad in the hospital. He and I spoke that night of some things; he was amazed by the wind-tossed palm tree outside his window, and talked about it. Dad asked me about my journey. I told him of that day, and also the weeks. He nodded: Yes, I know.

Late on July 11, my father died in hospice. He’d lost the power to speak shortly after his move there, but he was listening until the end. My mother and siblings were with him. We had time, so much time. On the day Dad died, I sat with him and named and described each of his grandchildren once more.

A week after the day of my father’s death, the brightening I longed for through the months I faithfully took the drugs has come. It is, like all the experts and all the books say, in every leaf on every tree, in every face, in every moment. But I think that my drug cocktail did not put it there.

I still take the drugs, in different combinations at different times each day and night, just to see if I feel any different. I get occasional halo-effect headaches, and that’s funny, but it’s not bad. I wonder what would happen if I stopped taking them all at once. But people say you shouldn’t do that.

My doctors were and are terrific. They have acted in every way that highly trained, intuitive medical professionals should. The responsible party in this situation was me. I consider myself a good listener, but I did not listen: for months, even years. I was able to make things right in the end, but I threw a lot of money and time into making them wrong first.

I am not a chemical compound. And even if I am my brain, my brain is not chemistry. It is memory, it is time, it is empathy, and it is love.

… the rest is silence.
Hamlet (5.2), Hamlet to Horatio