the haunt of death
In those years, it seemed as though death simply wanted to remind me that it was there. I heard the hawk squawk and I should have watched the chick in the crab grass closer; I saw the hair fall out of Mrs. Cane’s head and I should have known the race was drawing to a close; I made fun of his hospital-bleached skin and I wonder why I thought he would ever rise from the dead. Death, everywhere all at once, in the drought enveloping California, in the drooping avocado trees, in the mental illness that consumed a friend’s mother. The baby chick, carried off to a nest high in the sycamore trees by a biologically driven bird of prey, was the only natural death I would witness for the next twelve years.
Death swept past my windows and the icy chill of grief crept in. I couldn’t seem to get warm. Even transporting my corporeal form to the Midwest in the middle of humid summer heat could not rid my bones of the cold they had trapped within. Every breath was labored. My kitten died, hit by some careless driver on Mother’s day. I bawled. I didn’t even really like that cat— it had peed on my mattress one too many times. The Preacher wrote Ecclesiastes as if we were connected through space and time and he could peer into my soul and find the words to describe my depression.
The man who wrote Proverbs is said to have written Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes. I felt that discrepancy well: wisdom, passion, hopelessness, an endless cycle. I had only Solomon, Louisa May Alcott, and L.M. Montgomery who seemed to understand me. Their words ripped my tiny heart open and stuffed it full of stories before mending it again. Wisdom, passion, hopelessness.
I can look back and see how they saved me from giving into death. Living in the margin of reality and fantasy allowed me to survive. They were the only candles that could stay lit in my little house made of wet, cold stones. Friendships spurted and sputtered and died. Adventures raged and waned and abandoned me at the doorstep of my own life. But the words on the page were already written, already pressed into print by some industrial machine, already waiting for me, and they never left. The madness of artists made me hope I was one- or else my own madness that I could not name was absolutely useless, and as a girl in the evangelical church, uselessness condemned me to hell.
Even God was useful- God healed, God saved, God spoke, God created. But I was not, not yet, unless I could convince myself that I was an artist well enough to become one. And so at twenty-four, I am freshly diagnosed with Bipolar, and I realize my visions of greatness might be less about God’s plan for me and more about the mania.
I’ve been medicated for nearly two months now and everything is a little clearer. I still get chills and can’t seem to get warm. Death is here, waiting for me, waiting to strike at my edges, I see her in shadows when I sleep. I cannot escape Death and I cannot escape God. They are two sides of a coin welded into my skin.
