THANKS FOR KEEPING ME COMPANY

         As I come to the end of this chronicle , I do understand that life was unbearable for Andrew and in some ways that made his life unbearable for me. His suffering and much of my suffering is over. For that, I am grateful.

It is certainly good to be able to talk about Andrew with family and friends and to write about the time I had with him. I feel peace on many days.

And then I remember that I will never see Andrew again. This thought fills me with a feeling of having all the air sucked out of the room and it takes my body a while to recover.

Many of you have shared your own losses with me. I truly appreciate all of your support. I am sad that I have come to the end of this reminiscence. Offering my thoughts to you and receiving your care in return has taken me to a place that I don't think I could have gotten to on my own.

Thanks for keeping me company as I remembered Andrew. Please keep us in your thoughts. 

Love Marge 

I MISS ANDREW

I miss Andrew. I have great sadness at the loss of him. As Marnie and Eileen have their children it creates a longing for the children that Andrew will never have. The grand children I will miss. He will never age beyond his 28 years. He will be like John Kennedy, always young and smiling back at us from his photographs, as the rest of us move along the graying timeline

FINDING THE ANGST WITHIN

     Despite the study of pathophysiology and related pharmacology,  mental illness is still barely understood today. There is a lot in the news about research and findings, but not much that is changing lives. We see the results of untreated or poorly treated mental illness in the paper daily, particularly when it results in violence and death. I suspect if we had an all-out public awareness campaign on the impact of mental illness to society we might come up with some new collective approach to diagnosing, managing, and treating it, that takes out the darkness and puts it into the mainstream, much like diabetes or birth defects.

          I often think what would happen if we made a TV series, that had mental illness as its focus. To mainstream and normalize discussion and understanding of the different manifestations might help to see affected individuals as ill rather than as criminals or ne’er-do-wells. 

     I know this will happen someday. Right now we  may not be ready, as individuals, or as a collective, to lose this convenient scapegoat for our shared anxiety that the mentally ill provide. It is so much harder to find the source of my angst within.