Every once in a while, the frontier psychiatrist newsletter does a little bit of creative narrative nonfiction. Today is one of those days..
“No. I don't want to. I don't want to.” Sometimes, however, you have to. A person in my life pointed this out once, when I grumpy:
“you have a gift, Owen, which unfortunately means you have an obligation. There is a verse in a famous Jewish text, pirkei avot/ethics of our fathers that has been made into a song and translates to
Lo alecha ham'lacha ligmor, V'lo ata ben chorim l'hibatil mimena.
לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לְהִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה.
Translation:
It is not your duty to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
My heart… hurts. It hurts because I let it hurt. Because if you don't let your heart hurt, you don't learn what you need to learn from the things that would hurt it. It hurt for good reasons.
I've lost people people I cared about—over a dozen in two bad years between 2017-2019— to “deaths of despair.” This term somebody came up with recently, and I don't know who, and I'm not going to bother to look it up. It doesn't matter—learned helplessness? The way people die can be sadness amplifying.
These include death by overdose and completed suicide. In my family, my paternal grandfather was the first person who died by suicide. I wasn’t there for it. It was before I was born. It still became part of my inheritance.
My dad was born in 1933 in Meriden, Connecticut. His family were not wealthy. He would later become wealthy by his standards—but the early poverty never left his mind. He was a junior. Arthur Joseph Muir, Junior. His father was Arthur Joseph Muir, but Senior. I only know about the junior-senior dynamic as the result of the one time my dad talked about his father with me. He gave me something his father gave him: a knife. This was a knife I used as a child to cut down sticks. I called them trees. They were, in retrospect, clearly sticks at best.
I was born in Torrington, Connecticut, at a hospital called Charlotte Hungerford, which would show up again and again in my life, not because it's a good hospital, just because it was there.
Litchfield, Connecticut, is a quaint town. Small. About 8000 total population, maybe 3000 in the township proper.
A classic New England vibe. Every house was rumor-enhanced when George Washington “slept there.” It has first law school in the country. It had very few people who were not white. As the child of an Italian woman and a Scottish man, I was not white-enough in the town of Litchfield, circa 1979-1989. The house in which I grew up was gigantic—4000 ft.² A mansion of a house on North Street. Did George Washington sleep there once? That's the rumor. My mom's best friend had a child around the same time as she did. He grew up in the birthplace of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Our church, Congregationalist in orientation, in which I attended regular services in my youth, had Lyman Beecher as its second minister.
The house was large, with an ample basement. It was painted white. It was often photographed for architectural magazines after the work my mom did on it. It was landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, the same mind behind Central Park, Prospect Park, Genesee Valley Park, and other parks I have lived near. The house I grew up in was not so much understood as a house but as an unbelievable vista on a beach tree. The backyard, which Frederick Law Olmsted unbelievably graciously appointed, was about one and a half acres of Lawn. In the manner of things Frederick Law Olmsted, there was a reflecting pool in the back. That was never part of my life because it was overgrown with very thin trees. Sticks. I called them trees. They were too young to be trees. They were sticks. I would Hackett them with my knife. My knife used to be my grandfather’s knife. The head Arthur Joseph Muir Senior, in the leather, inscribed.
The beach tree was massive. I can still see it when I close my eyes. The sunset in a reliable way behind that tree. It was the story of that home. It was the story of my childhood. The people who bought the home after my parents cut it down because it ruined the view.
Such is the way.
I mentioned the amply spacious and well-appointed cavern of a basement because it is the home of my father’s drinking for many years. He traveled 5 days a week. He drank on the road. My parents met at a wine tasting. This should have been a tip-off.