I’m pretty sure there’s a Columbia House employee that
thinks I have an unnatural obsession with Russell Crowe. And he may be right—Russell
Crowe is a handsome and talented man. The truth is, when you get 8 DVDs for $10
and 3 of those that you select star Russell Crowe, there’s a very real
possibility that you have a problem.
I was not an early adopter. As it happened, DVDs became THE
THING while I was in law school. I still had my trusty VCR, along with a bunch
of tapes ranging from Bear in the Big Blue House (teaching all about how to poop!)
to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (that Donny Osmond is almost as
good as Russell Crowe) to Dead Poets Society (my favorite all-time movie. Or at
least top 3). When I graduated, my parents decided that I needed to come to the
age of enlightenment, and they bought me a DVD player as a graduation present.
I still have that DVD player. Maybe I need to graduate from
something else so I can upgrade to Blu-Ray.
At some point I realized that it doesn’t do a lot of good to
have a DVD player if you have no DVDs to play on it. About that time, Columbia House
decided that I was worthy of an exclusive invitation to join their club. I
could get 5 DVDs for just a dollar, and then 3 more for the cost of shipping.
All in all, 8 DVDs for ten bucks. What a bargain—I think I will buy some.
I got all through the process, right up to the payment page,
and then decided I didn’t want to have to explain to Clorinda why I was buying
all these movies (or why I would have to buy 5 more in the next two years at
regular club prices), so I exited from the page. Columbia House didn’t see it
that way though—somewhere I must have clicked a final acceptance that constituted
my enrollment in the club—I was a member! Woohoo!
Sometime later we sat down to watch one of my Russell Crowe
movies. It was A Beautiful Mind, the
true story (as interpreted by Hollywood) of John Nash, a mathematician that we
learn [SPOILER ALERT] is plagued by mental illness. Nash doesn’t know of his
illness (neither do the audience or the woman he marries) and he ends up with
relationships with 3 people that don’t exist—one a college roommate, one a
government operative that hires him to do cryptography, and the last a little
girl.
Nash is tortured by his illness. He believes that he is part
of a top-secret government project to decrypt messages hidden in magazine and
newspaper articles, and deliver his analysis to the government operative that
hired him. At one point in the movie, his wife discovers the thousands of
clippings in his office and eventually comes to learn of the illness. Nash
begins treatment, and for all intents and purposes it appears that his illness has
been brought under control.
Until his wife discovers a secret room filled with more
clippings. The illness is back, and she is absolutely despondent.
Towards the end of the movie, Nash asks a young student if
he sees someone across the way. He jokes with the student that he has to make
sure because he’s never sure who is real. The old college roommate, the little
girl, and the government operative are his constant companions, but he’s
learned to remind himself that they aren’t real.
When the movie ended, I felt a surge in my gut. It welled-up
into my chest and my head and I started to cry. I sobbed, almost uncontrollably.
Feelings that were buried deep inside me clawed and scratched their way to the surface
and burst through my eyeballs.
I didn’t know that anyone else understood.
My tears were not for John Nash. My tears were for his wife.
She understood me.
This is a hard piece to write. It is unlike anything I think
I’ve written before, and I hope that you’ll be kind as you read this. Mental
illness is unfairly stigmatized, misunderstood, and, unfortunately, a source of
embarrassment. Clorinda has shared elements of her story from time to time. We
don’t share it looking for sympathy or anything for ourselves—our lives are our
lives and we are doing our very best to live them. Our hope when either of us
share these experiences is that it can bring strength to someone.
Clorinda and I are both the oldest of 8 kids. Not the same 8
(it feels like I’ve used that joke before). It seemed to be some type of a sign
to Clorinda, and she believed we would also have a large family. In 1997, we
were blessed to have Marien, and then Clayton arrived 15 months later. It was
about that time I decided I needed to go back to school, so that I could one
day afford to buy DVDs from Columbia House. At the end of my first year of law
school, Kathryn was born.
Law school was not easy for me, but it was harder for Clorinda.
She had 3 small children at home, no income to provide for them, and a mostly
absentee husband. I graduated early and took a job with Clark County, clerking
for a judge in the district court. For Clorinda, that meant two things: one, I had
a paycheck, and two, I had health insurance. We were really behind schedule on
those 8 kids, so we needed to get cracking.
That was, of course, the fun part, so I was a willing
participant. And it worked! By the end of spring we were expecting.
I was also enrolled in a bar preparation course that was every-night,
Monday to Friday, from 6 to 10, after I’d finished a full day at work. The bar
was weighing heavily on me. It was scheduled for the end of July, and it was my
WHOLE LIFE. It seemed every waking moment was spent reviewing torts or
commercial paper (OK, that one’s a lie—I never studied commercial paper) or
contracts or community property. I poured over outlines and Bar-Bri books and
listened to bar-review CDs in my car (I may not have had a DVD player, but come
on, I was a little bit civilized).
Ten days before the bar exam, Clorinda miscarried. She was
devastated. Crushed. Lost.
I was not even present. I like to tell myself that I must
have at least said sorry, but it’s more likely that I said something like “we
shouldn’t have rushed into having kids right after school.” I was tired and
stressed and impatient and I FAILED. This was NOT a husband-of-the-year moment.
It wasn’t even a husband-of-the-day moment. I’m lucky it wasn’t an
ex-husband-of-the-day moment.
About six weeks later, she apparently had another
miscarriage, although we weren't certain then, and still aren't sure now, how
she could have even been pregnant again. It was a very difficult time, and it
sent Clorinda into an emotional tailspin like I NEVER would have expected.
Since that time, she has had all kinds of depression. At the
outset, I was of the get-yourself-out-of-bed-and-get-to-work mentality and was
not very patient with Clorinda. THAT is not a good mix for a marriage. I’m
going to avoid specifics, simply because my purpose is not to disparage Clorinda.
Suffice it to say, there were hours and days and weeks and months and years of
hell in our house as she struggled with the realities of depression and I watched
my idea of a perfect marriage be stolen from right before my eyes. It was like
living in the hell of the upside-down sinners.
Again, out of respect for my wife, I won’t go into details,
but it took YEARS before we started to see some type of consistency in the benefits
of the treatments. Years. Even now I don’t know when it’s going to decide to rear
its ugly head again and thrust itself into the middle of our lives. I wish I
could say that it was gone, but it’s not, and it likely never will be. It’s our
own little girl, college roommate, and government operative, just off to the
side as a constant reminder of OUR new normal.
Hell of the upside-down sinners indeed.
[I need to insert a note here. This whole thing probably
sounds extraordinarily selfish, because it’s Clorinda, not me, that is fighting
the illness. I know that—believe me I know that. This is a VERY difficult
subject to write about. Clorinda’s own hell-of-the-upside-down-sinners is
different from my own, and I cannot speak to her experience. And that is not my
purpose here, other than to witness that her experience is real. Instead, my
purpose is to share my experience as the spouse of someone suffering with a
mental illness.
My wife is an angel, and this illness has done its best to steal
her best-self from her. Through it all she constantly and consistently strives
to be happy and good and true to who she is. I love Clorinda with my whole soul.]
* * *
My parents have been married for 47 years—that’s pretty
remarkable in today’s society. For the last decade and a half, my dad has
suffered various ailments as the result of his type II diabetes, and about 4
years ago we watched in some combination of awe and horror as he went from
being able to walk to being almost completely paralyzed from the neck down in a
period of only 3 ½ months. He underwent surgery on the discs in his neck—they
came in from the front and from the back—and he was confined to his bed for
months. With a great deal of effort, he relearned how to get up and take steps
and ultimately walk—first with the aid of a walker and then just having things
nearby to grab if necessary.
Through all of that my mother stood by his side, his
ever-faithful companion, nursemaid, and cheer-leader. She cared for him, fed
him, watched over him, and encouraged him in his recovery. I know there were
lots of sleepless nights and thankless days for her. Finally, over the last
year or so, things had gotten much better for them.
In December my folks came to Las Vegas to see Marien, who
had just come home from her mission in North Carolina. When they arrived at the
hotel, my dad was in a great deal of pain in his back. We got him a heating pad
and he stayed at the hotel to rest. Late that night, my mom called to tell me that
dad was worse and asked for me and John to come to the hotel.
Ultimately, he went to UMC where they determined that he’d had
a heart-attack caused by MERSA attacking the valves in his heart. After 3
horrible weeks at the hospital, we were finally able to get him released to
home health in Cedar City, where he had nurses come daily to administer meds
and physical therapists come to try to help him out of bed. Through it all, his
back still ached, and he was stuck flat on his back in bed.
Once again, my mother cared for him. She fed him, watched
over him, cleaned him, and cheered him on. When there was seemingly no progress
in his recovery, she took him to doctor appointments and advocated for him. When
the infectious disease doctor discovered that the MERSA was still lodged in his
spine (surprise—that’s where the pain was so terrible, but nobody wanted to
check until the heart was cleared up), she was there to help him endure another
round of meds.
He finally started to see progress, and was able to get out
of bed, get to the restroom on his own, and get his own new-normal. Until last
week, when he woke up in terrible pain again. The heart doctor is convinced the
MERSA has returned to his back. And my mom is back to having no answers. But she’s
faithful. She’s right by his side.
* * *
I got a text from Clayton today. He had been listening to a TED
talk about a woman that had crashed her bike and broken some 30 bones in her body.
She spent 6 months in an ICU and had hit rock bottom. The lessen, the quote
that Clayton gravitated to, was that you never learn how strong you are until being
strong is all you can do.
I’ve learned that. I’ve learned that about my wife (honestly,
I don’t know how she manages. She’s come to terms with the illness and she just
keeps moving forward). I’ve witnessed it—with awe—in my mother and my father.
But I have also learned how incredibly weak I am—how quick I
am to lose sight of what’s important, to become impatient with the illness and
lash out at my wife, only to be reminded (eventually) that the illness is not
Clorinda, and Clorinda is not the illness. Then I have to humble myself, repent,
remind myself that I need to, and can, do better. It’s a process. I can only
hope that I can one day be the type of patient, caring spouse that my mother is
to my dad.
There are a lot of times that I want to just exit from the page,
just click the little X in the top-right corner and not get the 8 DVDs in the
mail. But life is like Columbia House. Whether it’s depression or MERSA or broken
bones or MS or cancer or infertility, or it’s having a spouse go through it,
life has a way of saying congratulations—you’re in the club!
