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Sailing in the Wind's Eye: Charting My Mother's Bipolar Journey
By: Christine McKenna Leigh, Ph.D. (ABD)
My mother was fifty-nine when she took her life. She had had many intimate dealings with suicide and knew it well; this final act was the last in a long history of incomplete attempts. On the afternoon of her thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, seven years after my father’s death, she cut her long hair close to her head, swallowed a prescription of barbiturates and drank a bottle of old French brandy which, it appeared, she had been saving for this occasion. She died quietly in her sleep.
Twenty years earlier, when my mother was thirty-nine and I was thirteen, she had been diagnosed with a severe, and particularly stubborn form of bipolar mood disorder. I think this dark seed had been quickening, unattended, for most of her life. When it finally came, the diagnosis confirmed what my mother already instinctually knew: that her mind was violently cyclonic, a chaos of fluctuating and subversive moods over which she could exert no control. It was with the artist’s sure hand that my mother chiseled the story of her first plunge into despair. She was nine and her father had died suddenly in a tornado, trapped under a fallen building in St. Louis. During those desolate days of synchronicities — or perhaps foreshadowings — my mother’s appendix ruptured. Even then, it seems that she was unable to distinguish grief’s suffering from agonizing physical torment. She withdrew into dark silence, not telling anyone about her unbearable pain. Finally she was hospitalized with nearly fatal peritonitis. Within days after he died, the tornado that killed her father had begun its metaphorical work in my mother’s mind and had drawn her body into its first brush with literal death.
Manic depression swept a broad path across our lives. The halcyon grace of early mania inevitably deteriorated into days, or weeks, of fierce and relentless incoherence; of smashed dishes; of neglected animals, plants and children. She did not bathe or change her clothes during these episodes, nor did she eat or sleep much. She sustained herself with vodka and black coffee--and those in enormous quantities. Friends, neighbors, and, of course, I, were horrified, helpless, embarrassed. She, on the other hand, was in the murky realm of the underworld gods. With them at her back, she swaggered righteously through the darkness, laying waste to everything and everybody in sight.
When my mother turned fifty-five, the drama of her cycles of depression changed with neither warning nor explanation. No longer were there periods of grace that presaged periods of certain disaster. One day, it seemed, the flights of creativity simply stopped; vanished like smoke into the air. For the next four years, my mother was a cyclone that thrashed between episodes of violent destructiveness and suicidal depressions.
My brother found our mother several days after she died. When he phoned me with the news, he told me her face was peaceful and composed, as if she had fallen into a deep sleep. It seems that in the space between life and death, as in the moments between euphoria and melancholy, my mother planted her seeds of grace. I keep a handful of those seeds with me.
My mother’s absence is a presence. It is an emptiness that beckons me to enter so that I can, more soulfully, be in life. Jungian analyst James Hillman reminds us that "any careful consideration of life entails reflections of death." Death is at the center of our deepest and most complex concerns, the seed point of our inquiry into the knowledge of our selves and of reality. Nowhere is the problem of death so near as in suicide. It is, perhaps, the weave of our own paradoxical lives we see in the troubling image of suicide. Life and death, however, are not opposites. Rather, each is implied by, and
contained in, the other. To hold off death, writes James Hillman, is to prevent life.
In a recent New Yorker article, novelist Annie Proulx coined the phrase "absent presence" to describe the peculiar emptiness that carries essential and unspeakable meaning. My mother is an absent presence to me now — like the space between the notes on a musical score, or the stillness in the breath between cycles of inspiration and expiration...Not all people who die from suicide are artists, but suicide is deeply imbedded within the art of life, and as such is both a window and a mirror to the soul. Kay Redfield Jamison says it this way: "The great imaginative artists have always sailed in the wind's eye, and brought back with them words or sounds or images to counterbalance human woes. That they themselves were subject to more than their fair share of these woes deserves our appreciation, understanding, and very careful thought."
Would my mother's life have been different if she'd received the level of professional help her mental disorder so necessitated? Most probably so. And of this I am very sure: therapy, time, and a lot of grace have helped me chart the bittersweet legacy of being my mother's daughter.
Christine McKenna Leigh, Ph.D. (cand.), is a writer and editor living Palos Verdes, California. She is a doctoral candidate in Mythology at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
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