Hope

Many Wednesday evenings I can be found at DBSA-Boston (Depression Bipolar Support Alliance); I often facilitate the newcomers group. I orient first-time visitors to our groups and our culture. I always share a five-minute version of my experience with manic depression. I want people to feel comfortable, to know that this is a place where experiences with mental illness can be discussed openly and support can be given and received.

Each group is different: there can be three newcomers or twenty, mostly women, or a more balanced mix. The ages range from eighteen to seventy-something. Usually a majority of the group members have a mood disorder, but sometimes about half are family members struggling with a loved one’s illness. For some an unexpected episode is recent and raw, others have dealt with their illness for years.

It’s a sacred experience, sharing our stories. The time I came closest to tears was when a young woman, perhaps twenty years old, looked at me with tears in her voice and deep pain in her eyes and asked, “Does it get better?” Her vulnerability caught me off guard. Distress and confusion permeated her whole being and I ached for her. I had my first psychotic episode in 1983, and was hospitalized in 1995 and 2003. Over the years my manic depression has informed my identity but I don’t often feel the excruciating pain of those earlier times.

All I could whisper was, ‘yes’, and hope she could feel hope. Without hope, it’s hard to get better.

Describing psychosis

Several months ago, a psychiatrist I know from DBSA-Boston contacted me, looking for people with schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorder. He is a psychiatric consultant for a pharmaceutical company and wanted to have a “Patient Day” where the researchers could meet people with mental illness.

A friend of mine, who has schizo-affective disorder, agreed to present and I asked if I could tag along as an observer.

That morning, it became apparent that they expected me to speak as well. I don’t have schizophrenia, but I have experienced three psychotic episodes, so I did have something worthwhile to share. We each had twenty minutes to talk, after which there would be a Q&A session. Nearly every week I tell a five-minute version of my experience with manic depression to a group of newcomers at DBSA-Boston. I immediately started to compose my thoughts for my presentation.

I expanded my standard five-minute introduction, describing in more depth what psychosis feels like, and expressing my frustration with the side effects of olanzapine (Zyprexa), which probably causes hand tremors that make it impossible for me to handle a sewing needle or a soup spoon. (In my former life I made wedding dresses for my sister and my daughter.) Among side effects, it’s mild, but it does impact my life. My memory problems are probably a mix of meds, the manic depression illness itself, and normal aging. My memory is definitely poorer than most friends my age.

The presentation was exhilarating. I had none of the negative reaction I unexpectedly experienced with the church mental health panel. It felt more akin to my experience at Girls' Camp 2018. I felt a connection to the researchers. Not insignificant is the fact that my dad was a research chemist for Merck, a pharmaceutical company. Besides his work with steroids, I’m very proud of the fact that I inspired his work to find an antibiotic to kill pseudomonas bacteria, after I nearly lost my leg to a pseudomonas infection when I was 18.

Talking to these research scientists about my experience with mental illness gave them insight and inspiration. And the office was just down the street from Joanne Chang's Flour Bakery. I brought home sticky buns, triple chocolate mousse cake, and pecan pie to share with Jim and our niece, Carla.

Berlin and home again

After Dresden, it rained, so on our first evening in Berlin, we had an abbreviated tour of the neighborhood. Afterward, Jim and I wandered and found a vaguely French restaurant, where I had ‘Flammkuche’. Who knew, this rectangular, pizza-like dish: thinly rolled dough covered with white sauce and toppings, is Germanic. According to Wikipedia, it is, specifically, from “Alsace, Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz region. (northeast France, south Germany).” It was ‘lecker’.

Next morning, we took the U Bahn (subway) to central Berlin for a tour. The tour guide was excellent, but I never bonded with the city.

We had to detour around a church where Angela Merkel and other dignitaries were attending a service in honor of “Unification Day”. On October 3, 1990, just ten months after the precipitous fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East and West Germanys reunited. Berlin became the unified capital as it had been before the partition in 1945.

We had the afternoon to ourselves and our first act was to touch the column of the Brandenburg Gate. It is so named because it leads to the city of Brandenburg, made famous by Johann Sebastian Bach’s six concerti. Here's number three. Since the gate was in Soviet-controlled East Berlin from 1945 to 1989, I never imagined I would actual touch the iconic gateway.

We spent quite a bit of time at an outdoor exhibit about the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi). It is chilling to follow the timeline and realize how quickly they built an efficient and effective political machine and dismantled civil liberties. Within weeks of gaining power, dissidents were being systematically arrested, tortured, and often murdered.

For our last evening, we went to supper with our tour group, all 26 of us seated at a long wooden table in a noisy restaurant called ‘3 Schwestern’ (Three Sisters). As our guide, Caroline, predicted, where twelve days before we had been complete strangers, we were now all friends. It was a delightful evening. I think Caroline was hoping for some nightlife by herself, but she sensed our collective panic at the idea of finding our way back to the hotel without her (none of us had come near to mastering the public transit system), and agreed to lead her ‘ducklings’ home once more.

Next morning, Jim and I arose early, took a street car to an express bus to Tegel Airport. I won’t bore you with the frustrating  details, but we were ‘bumped’ from our flight and spent an anxious time wondering when we'd get home. British Airways took pity on us and their seats were more comfort than those on our outbound flight.

Now we’ve been home five days. Today we were trying to remember each of our hotel rooms. The memories are already fading. I wish I’d taken pictures of each one; it would be so satisfying to have a memory aid.

I so enjoyed practicing my German. I tried to decipher each billboard and sign. Jim said I noticeably improved as the time went on. Returning home, I’ve decided to continue studying German for the next six months and then evaluate. It’s not as practical as Spanish, which is one big reason I haven’t kept it up since college. But it has given me such pleasure and satisfaction to study and improve. I love the German language. And with my German heritage, it could be useful in family history.

And now in Berlin

This evening we said good-bye to our Dutch driver, John. Auf Wiedersehen! Tschuss! He’s been great: flexible, good-humored, an excellent driver. We marveled at the corners he turned and how he skillfully maneuvered the bus into tight spaces. When traffic jams were reported, he spent his break using a paper map to find a better way.

He made a funny joke. I’m not sure it translates well, but I’ll give it a try. In Bavaria, in southern Germany, the common greeting is ‘Gruss Gott!’ (Greet God). Trying to be authentic, I boarded the bus on our Munich morning with a sunny “Gruss Gott!” He replied, “I’m not going that far today.” Confused, I asked him if I’d used the wrong greeting for the area. No, he replied, it’s something we say: we aren't planning to go all the way to heaven today. Dutch dry humor.

It’s been cold all day and then rainy as we entered Berlin. We’ll stay here two nights and fly back to Boston Thursday morning. It’s been a wonderful experience, but we’re both ready to be at home in our own bed.

I’ve fallen in love, again, with Germany and the German language. It’s the land of my heritage: my dad’s mother’s parents spoke German and were born in Prussia. My mom’s mother, Lola Marie Bader, came from German stock as well. Because of that, I chose to study German in junior and senior high school and continued in college, reading Goethe and Schiller.

After Cologne, we stayed at medieval Bacharach, on the Rhine, and toured Rothenburg, another medieval town. Then we rode to Bavaria and toured King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein Castle, Oktoberfest in Munich (it's so much more than beer), and Nuremberg.

Then we drove into the former East Germany. Having studied German and Germany in the 1970s, when Germany was divided by the Iron Curtain, I never expected to visit this part of the world. Erfurt, a beautiful, modern city with a medieval old town that wasn’t bombed during World War II, is where Martin Luther became a priest and later a monk and professor at the university. In Wartenburg castle, we saw the room where he hid out and translated the New Testament into the modern German language he crafted.

Today we visited Dresden, which has risen from the ashes of the February 13, 1945, fire-bombing, introduced to my generation by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five.

I’d love to visit Germany again. I could stay in many of these places for longer to enjoy their beauty and explore their history. But I won’t say ‘sicher’. When I was 16 years old, as I prepared to go back home after my summer in Germany, my German mother said she hoped I’d return to Germany and visit them. I enthusiastically said, "Sicher!" “Was meinst du, sicher?” (What do you mean by certainly?)

She explained that she had already had a heart attack (she was about 35 years old) and that nothing was certain in life. It was sobering. A few years later, I learned that she had died. “Was meinst du, sicher?”

Yes, indeed.

Lünenburger Heide

When I was sixteen, I desperately wanted to work on my Uncle Dan’s wheat farm in Montana. My brothers had done it and I wanted a piece of the action. But my aunt and uncle wouldn’t hire me.

My mom suggested I ask their friend, who frequently worked in Germany, to find a German family that I could help out for the summer: a nanny of sorts. I’d studied German for three years in school with the formidable Frau Disbrow.

I paid my own airfare and lived with the Bauer family in a tiny village, Nierswalde, part of a slightly larger town, Goch, near Nijmegen, Netherlands. As an experienced mother, I now recognize that I was more of a burden than help: my German parents basically added a moody teenager to their family of three active boys.

For me, it is still the trip of a lifetime. Being immersed in German, I became Frau Disbrow's star student that following fall of my senior year. (I had been afraid of her up to this point, and I'm pretty sure she didn't like me.)

My German parents took me on trips to see a Roman amphitheater and the nearby castle at Kleve.

We also drove on the Autobahn to the Lünenburger Heide (Heath), stopping at the medieval city of Celle (established by 985 C.E.). In the Heide we visited some farmer friends. They invited us to their cherry orchard, where we spent several hours picking  from ladders, then sat around a huge bowl of cherries and ate as evening fell.

I have never eaten my fill of cherries since. We sat and talked until dark, a magical day during a wondrous summer.


Jim and I are on a Rick Steves “Best of Germany” 13-day tour. We flew into Hamburg on Saturday. Monday morning, I discovered that we would be travelling through the Lünenburger Heide. In fact, our prima tour guide, Caroline, had arranged for us to visit a working dairy farm, Hemme Milch. As we drove through the countryside I reveled in my return to the Germany of my youth. Northern Germany is not usually a tourist destination for Americans, but it won my heart long ago.

Tonight we’re sleeping in the medieval town of Bacharach on the Rhine River after touring the Cologne Cathedral. Cologne was the farthest south I got in 1973 and the cathedral was the most magnificent building I had ever seen (and I grew up just 25 miles from Manhattan). I was a little apprehensive that it had grown too large in my imagination, but the vaulted ceiling still hung impossibly high above me, a marvel of stone in air.

A Casket

August 31 was an odd anniversary: the day UMass Medical Center called Jim to say they were finished with David’s body and we could have it back. Jim and I were on a Boston On Foot walking tour of Beacon Hill in Boston. Jim took the call while we were outside the Statehouse.

In an immediate panic, I thought we had to answer them right away, make plans to immediately take possession of the body. Jim was calmer and convinced me that we could wait to respond until we did have plans in place.

Now, I realize there was no rush. The medical center must have a refrigerated morgue for such cases. I was badly thrown off: just as I'd gotten used to the idea that they might keep David’s body for two years, they were finished. I had struggled with his body being in some strange and unknown place, then suddenly had to deal with burial arrangements, 19 days after they took him away.

It all worked out. The burial was Saturday, September 12.

The morning of the burial, there was a heavy ground fog in the cemetery. As we stood near the open grave, a small flock of wild turkeys sauntered by. Some colleagues of Jim’s were there: I was touched. The Jones’ brought a small basket of purple flowers to decorate the grave.

Peter and Xiomara came from the Bronx. Victoria was exactly a month old and I felt joy through my tears as I held her. Andrew had played a similar role at my mother’s funeral, two years before. I remember my bereaved father holding his newest great-grandchild.

I have never wanted an elaborate casket. Funerals are for the living, and many people find comfort in choosing a beautiful hardwood casket with a satin interior for the body to rest in. I prefer a plain pine box. So I chose the most inexpensive casket available at the funeral home. At the cemetery, I suddenly had second thoughts. I was embarrassed at having scrimped on the casket. I was relieved that it was covered by the large American flag. (David had been in the army, so he had a military honor guard.) However, after the prayer, two soldiers stepped to the casket, removed the flag, and reverently folded it. They marched over and presented me with it.

Looking back, I’m sure no one was judging me and my frugality. I was among friends and family, who wanted to share this sad moment with us. They didn’t care what the casket looked like. They cared about us and mourned with us early on that foggy morning.

In the Dust

Yesterday I tripped and fell on the dusty Fullerton Loop Trail in California, walking with my sister, Maggie, back to her house. I felt myself stumble and instantly started to run, hoping to overcome gravity. Just as Maggie said, “Good catch!”, I realized that gravity had won. I braced myself with my hands, hoping to protect my face, but no, thud went my heavy skull, just like a toddler, contacting the ground with my chin.

I immediately assessed the damage: nothing badly hurt but my vanity. Maggie came running up and I quickly said, “I’m okay.” Then I rolled onto my back in the sandy dust, my hand resting on my chest, feeling my racing heart.

There was only a drop or two of blood, where my metal glasses cut into the bridge of my nose. Minor abrasions, now blooming with colorful bruises. About a minute after I fell, I asked Maggie to take my phone and stop Runkeeper, the fitness app that uses GPS to track my mileage and speed. Until my tumble, I was averaging a 16 minute, 34 second mile on our 4-mile walk. I didn’t want to lower my average while lying in the dirt.

The mind/body connection is fascinating. Today, each time I relive my fall, even for a moment, I feel an acute shock at the level of my tailbone. I don’t know if chakras exist, but I know that when I think about a disaster, real or imagined, pain to myself or a young child, I instantly feel it. When I see a child teeter, it’s as if I am falling. There are regions in my body that react to even a transient thought of disaster.