Terrible news...

I took a psychopathology class from a curmudgeonly and fascinating woman named Lorna Benjamin once. She wanted to change the world for the better. She was on a one-woman crusade to change the manner in which psychologists view psychopathology. She revived the concept of a circumplex model (this would be Tim Leary’s good idea – the one he didn’t pursue because he got, well, distracted). It’s a rare pleasure to be taking a class like that from someone who not only knows the material, but knows the material behind the material. Lorna was a tough cookie (and probably still is – the past tense is just because I haven’t seen her in over a decade). She didn’t graduate a student for years and years after she got there; picking her to chair your committee was reportedly the height of rash vanity.

Lorna spent one of her precious class periods talking about the meaning of life – a subject integral to the topic of psychopathology. She also spent time talking about the role of will in the development and course of psychopathology. It was her opinion that there are brilliant people walking around maintaining ego-integrity through sheer force of will. She may be right – I didn’t find out until years later that one of the most brilliant, compassionate and gifted therapists I worked with suffered from psychotic depression; nearly intractable psychotic depression, actually. She told me about it, sitting in her office one day. She told me about how the medication she took gave her migraines, and how sometimes it was a tough decision just to stay alive. Lorna knew her well – she may have been in that class with me. I confess I can’t remember. She was finishing as I was starting, so most of our overlap was subsequent, and in a different setting. Maybe I’ll write about her another time.

Lorna’s discussion about the meaning of life revolved around the pictures or her grandchildren she circulated around the class that day. My son was still a toddler, then. I talked about what it was like being a parent – anguish and ecstasy. Everything else has paled, in comparison.

So once I found the substance for my latest in a series of trite comments today, and came back to the blog to post it, I found Topazz’s message about Isonomist’s son – the 19-year-old son whose Leukemia had recently returned. Isonomist – a Fray friend, and someone I care for, and respect. Topazz related her son had a cerebral aneurysm today, and is not expected to live.

Perhaps it was related to his chemotherapy. Perhaps Leukemia predisposes one to aneurysm: I have no idea. All I know is my brave friend from New York, who has been facing the potential death of her son from leukemia, is now facing the imminent death of her son – a son she describes as brilliant and unique. A son she describes in the way I might describe my own son.

So, I’m grieving tonight for Isonomist, a good friend I’ve never met, and imagining the way I would feel were he my son, or daughter, and how one more death on this planet of billions can shake the universe from it’s moorings. And I’m trusting in her will, to keep her bound in the face of the most awful of pressures, even though she lose an essential piece of her being.

Everything that ever was remains crystallized in the fabric of the past, and the people we love remain connected to us – even when separated by distance, or time, or unbreachable gulf of circumstance, or even death: and continue to influence us because they’re never really gone from us – they’re part of who we are. And a comfort when they’re gone, I hope; seems a bond so strong should leave more than a void in absence.