What If?

My 24 year history of mental illness has been regularly marred by tragedy. I still remember the call to tell me of the first suicide of a friend. She had manic depression-we still called it that in the mid 1990s. We had been in hospital together. A nurse we had always got on well. All the time I knew her she seemed neither manic nor depressed. Just unhappy. I'm told the day she hanged herself she turned up to the ward, said she was bit down, went home and killed herself. By that stage I had been cast into the outer darkness of the untreatable. But Bernie's little band whose world the great genius would save were not allowed to talk about it. They were angry. We were always angry in those days.

As the years passed by I would lose 9 friends to suicide, a cousin, an acquaintance and a student. Many others died too young. In fact the dedication in A Pillar of Impotence is to my friends who died too young. Each death cuts deep and hard. But we must move on.

If it is someone I knew as a practitioner I am forever left with the what if question. I have lost 4 people I worked with. And with each I have asked the same question. If I dwell on it it is certain my madness will return. Most of the time I don't.

Today a memory was stirred that once again has made me think what if?  It hurts like hell. I'm at home trying to stay warm, listening to music and trying to switch off. I know I could have done little more but still my loneliness eats me. A great debate has been raging recently in my world about who is responsible for what. I'm not important enough to answer that but an answer will come. The question is can I and we handle that answer. And that is what drives the anxiety. What if? It probably won't happen but it is not easy. Tomorrow I must go back to the fight and put it aside. If not I am lost.

I Heard a Voice.