lost and found

Later today I will be co-hosting a journaling workshop for members of ISPS-UK who are family and friends of people with lived experience of psychosis. The theme I have chosen for this session is 'lost and found.'

Loss is uppermost in my mind, as I have recently witnessed the decline and death of an elderly friend, as I wrote about in this last post. This friend lived to the age of 82 and I'd like to share a bit about her life.

She suffered from post-partum depression and psychosis back in the late 1960s and was hospitalised accordingly. Treatment included several courses of electroshock therapy and a lifetime on lithium medication, which eventually impaired her kidneys such that she required dialysis for the last eight years of her life. Repeated bouts of madness occurred throughout her life, punctuating the years she spent caring for a domineering mother and for husbands in her two unhappy marriages. When I think of her life, it is impossible not to consider the lost potential and lost opportunities afforded by her circumstances, the times she lived in and the stigma she faced.

However: she found peace in her final decades. Once free of those demanding relationships, and able to live independently, she experienced the most stable and peaceful period of her life. She found a community of friends in her neighbourhood, and was well-known by name by all the shopkeepers and cafe owners she chatted with so engagingly. Funny isn't it, that once her circumstances changed, her mental health improved considerably. It's almost as though the problem didn't lie in herself and her own faulty brain chemistry, but rather in the context and relationships surrounding her. (Forgive my sarcasm, I just feel the injustice keenly. She lost many years to her 'illness' but I don't think she was ill in herself at all.)

So. Lost and found.

I had planned to spend my holiday break in reading and writing, and recuperating from a busy year of work and travel. Instead I spent many hours on buses and in hospital rooms, in a long vigil over her final days. I lost my holiday, and my exhaustion has been deep and bone-weary from the emotional toil of this deathbed watch.

But I found instead an experience that I can only describe as sacred. It was nothing short of a privilege to sit by her bedside, holding her hand, helping her sip water from a straw or swallow spoonfuls of yoghurt, struggling to hear her speak in her weakened state, and finally sharing our farewells as she let go of the struggle to stay alive.

I suppose it is our human nature to focus on loss, to grieve what we could have had or could have done, to complain about what's missing. But we can just as easily focus on finding. If we could reframe madness accordingly, and look for what can be found within the mad experience, we might learn an awful lot and we might find redemption in our loss.

Anyway, I must end here and prepare for the workshop. Thank you for reading, and please do reflect on your own life's losses and findings. It's good exercise.

photograph: e.macintosh