A Beautiful Unkindness

What makes us who we are? If Nie was burnt over 80% of her beautiful young body, and her face is unrecognizable to herself, and her life as she knew it is as strange and gone as her fingerprints, is she still Nie? If I have a panic attack and an anxiety streak that rattles my bones and my teeth and my nerves so soundly and cruelly that I mew in my husband's arms like a wet drowned kitten and cannot mother my children, am I still Maggie? The essential me? When my Grandmother Elizabeth was dying of Parkinson's and the disease had robbed her face of it's expression lines and her eyes of their windows, when she was trapped like an emaciated moth in the cobwebs of her old and broken mind, was she still Elizabeth? When my Grandfather M.D. came into old age like a lion turned to mouse, after years of paranoid schizophrenia turning him into an abusive, raving, hated and feared father and husband, when old age softened those hardened cells like beans soaked in water and his benevolent love was more shocking than a raised voice or cruel comment, was he still M.D.?

I never knew my father. I never had anyone to compare him to before he became the man I feared so deeply and profoundly I have spent my adult life peering over my shoulder, hoping not to see him. I grew up with his madness. Where was he? Was he in there? In that genius mind, that endless rubbernecking articulation of lies? Was that my father throwing fruit at the wall, screaming at Mom, a tassel of bananas exploded in yellow against the cream paint- he looked remarkably like a lion, 70's hair still framing his strong handsome face... was my father made of exploding bananas and fingers thick and foul as the cigars he smoked? Or was my father the young man my mother fell in love with, sweet and passionate and gentle and loved by everyone who knew him- the man he insisted he was, the same man who cradled a dying girl in the hospital and wrote songs for his daughters? Did he know these daughters could not hear his music? Only his voice, loud and vibrating and embarrassingly, humiliatingly, terrifyingly out of control. An adult male not in control of his temper, not in control of his mind, not in control of his life. That was my father.

Was it?

The last time I had a episode of what I think of as my ' panic disease ' and I suppose could be called ' generalized anxiety disorder ' or ' post traumatic stress syndrome ' or ' depression with severe anxiety ' or ' panic disorder ' but all end in the same room, with my head in my husband's lap, my face as I see it in the bathroom light completely ugly and unrecognizable except for the freckles and blue eyes. I stared at my face the last time round, in the flourescent light, stared through three days of almost nonstop crying and shaking and pills and looked as hard as I could into my blue eyes. Who is in there? I wondered. I looked SO HARD. I wanted to see what was left of me when I was mentally ill. Who was I when I was not funny, or strong, or sweet, or even functional? My eyes were smaller than normal, bleary, terrified, young and horribly old at the same time. Yet I thought, looking so hard my hands white knuckled the tiled bathroom counter, that I could see myself in there, the same Maggie I remember knowing, something essential, from my earliest memories.

I have spent my life testing myself. Am I my father? Am I my mother? Am I an entirely different creature, or bound by blood to a legacy I cannot escape? I have done cruel things and watched to see how far I would go, the detachment that was such a part of my life until only the last ten years marking me Observer, while the physical me took cues and took action, then stood back and looked up at The Observer: Are you happy now? I had terrible PPD after Dakota was born. I wasn't born myself- 20 years old, barely survived childhood, still in shock at what my life was. I had this boy and my hormones went bad. My chemicals went bad. I was a swamp of evil foul smelling things that must be brought up and exposed to light and air, lest they kill me. It was expose or die. I had to see myself for what I was, I had to find out. I did shitty things, finding that out. I don't know how else to live with myself but to remember what my life was. I got help, so much help, I stuffed help down my throat like a bulemic vomits food- books, friends, articles, biographies, movies, quotes, anything that could help me find my way out. I found out what Holocaust survivors know, what great psychologists and humanists and scientists know: we can only rise so far, human beings, in rotten trash, we bake, we struggle, we keen, we cry in our cribs Come Get Me I'm Not All Right- but if there is no answer, for too long, no hands reaching to our skin, no comfort in relentless misery, suffering and despair, we fall. This is why- you know?- how we say?- Only Human? This is why.

So I screamed and fought and demanded help, and I was lucky, because I had help, the right kind, yes I was a lucky one. I cry for those who have not been so lucky. I cry for my sister who was helped too late for me to keep my hands on her boat, to keep her from sailing past the horizon. I have not seen her in seven long years.
I looked into my own eyes in the bathroom's gross light, and realized I could still see myself, but it was simply because I was not sick enough. If I went further down the abyss, if I sailed past my husband's grasp into the rock, rock, rock of insanity, I would not find myself- I would not know to look. Where would I be, if I were not in my own mind?

Why do we love the people we love, and how do we keep loving them when they are not themselves? When a child dies, the parents have terrible odds of the marriage surviving. I know if the impossible happened, I would not be the same Maggie that Mr. Curry married. I would be someone new, certainly essential parts of me would be distilled and brought along, but still. Nothing is above the relentless change of nature, of human nature. Not our memories even, as my Grandmother's dying taught me. Not our bodies and not our youth.

It is the incredibly poignant qualities of human life that surround these truths and make an essential distillation where a madness may rot. We hope despite death. We love despite loss. We heal despite decay. We make love despite hate. We cleave, and we come apart, and if we are terribly lucky, like I am, we are tossed about the waves with tears in our eyes and palms full of salt but the wind blowing a thrill through our hearts just the same.

I do not know who I am, essentially. But I believe that looking, and demanding answers of myself, requiring a practice of moral rigor and 'sharpening the blade of the soul' as C.S. Lewis said of his dying wife's struggles against cancer, are what will give a depth, a finite and infinite moment that brings peace to the troubled human heart- a grain of salt, a piece of the fabric of the Universe- and this is the 'me' i saw in that bathroom mirror, the me I recognized- fucked up, so far gone! but still looking for a way out., still fighting. I know I have done hard work, the work of love, the work of life, and I can rest, even as my failures and faults try to define me, I refute their claim with my back to the wind.

Rage, rage!!!! Against the dying of the light!!!

Yes. Oh hell yes.