You don't know, what you don't know.

Last week I traveled across the lower edge of the Northern part of the state. When I entered the town of Brainerd I noticed that the demolition of the State Hospital was still in progress. I had driven by last winter and that was when I noticed they were tearing it down. I had thought it was still a functioning hospital. I was wrong. I remember thinking "if these walls could talk". The demolition had an eerie quality, for some reason it is being dismantled brick by brick.  It is many large square buildings. The windows have been removed creating a vacant eye kind of look. There are large lots where some of the buildings are gone but many more that still need to come down. For a brief moment I thought about taking a picture. I didn't. Looking at it with the naked eye was enough I didn't need to capture it forever.

Then there is this: In 1980 Marty and I bought 40 acres in Northern Minnesota. We were two kids from a moderately sized town that had a dream of an adventure. Marty was 26 and raised on a dairy farm and I was 24, always a kid from the city, we knew nothing of "frontier living". I had the knowledge of years spent camping, Marty had the knowledge of a lifetime of fixing things and building. Together we thought we could do anything. We bought raw land at the end of a dirt road in one of the poorest counties in the state. I look back on those years with a form of amazement. We "moved North" and for the next 2 decades we built a life from nothing. For the first year we lived in the north woods, Marty continued to commute to his job in the cities. I applied for and was hired as a nurse at the old State Hospital in a nearby town. I had worked in the nursing field since I was 16 but nothing and I mean nothing prepared me for this job.
When you are 24 you think you have seen and heard.....alot. You don't realize the naivety that is still a part of everything you think and do. I went through the rotation of each and every department, unit, cottage and floor in that hospital. I was assigned to the admissions unit for the mentally ill, it was 4 years of an education that absolutely nothing in my life had prepared me for. I had grown up in a home of security and love. I never had to fight for anything. My role models were balanced, productive and intelligent. I was sheltered. I thought I knew, what I really didn't know.
The admissions unit was just what it implies. It was the first stopping point for a number of personalities, many of whom showed no signs of actual mental illness. It was the start of an education of a side of life I didn't know existed. I never once felt superior, I spent four years feeling deeply humbled. It was nursing in a way I had no experience with. It was court ordered medications and 72 hour holds. It was the stripping of dignity and power from people that had never felt either dignified or powerful in their lives. It was the sheltering of the vulnerable, protecting the innocent and allowing space and independence to people that felt caged. I learned an important lesson early on and I never once forgot it. If you back someone into a corner, either physically or even mentally and you keep them there long enough. They are going to come out fighting. It is not a matter of if. It is always a matter of when.
My unit housed a large number of young people that had lost the will to live.They were between the ages of 18 and 30 and they were depleted. Exhausted of life. They were admitted and monitored. Guarded so they could do no harm. Not to others but to themselves. They were cutters and jumpers. Kids who had overdosed and tried to hang themselves. There were serious risks and others that just wanted or maybe needed to be seen by someone....anyone.They were survivors of circumstances that they could no longer endure. The trick for all of us was trying to figure out, who was who. I personally had no concept of the desire to die. I had never once in my life given thought to anything other than trying to live, as long as possible. It was an arrogance of the purest kind. When something is so foreign to you that you have no mapping point, you make up a theory, you create a bias, you decide you know what you really don't know.
Her name was beautiful. She was beautiful. She was young and vulnerable and broken. She came into our care a high risk. She spent her days curled in a fetal position, she spoke to no one. We pulled out all the stops, we cared for her to the best of our ability. She got better. She smiled and laughed. She was kind to everyone. She had a family that loved her and cared. She went to all her therapy, she took her medications. She talked the talk and she walked the walk. After months of hospitalization she earned a weekend home. I can still see her as she turned to wave good-bye as she walked off the unit. On Sunday afternoon she walked willingly and purposely into the rotating propeller of a small airplane.

This is what I know: Until 2006 I held fast to what I thought I knew, that I really didn't know. Many years had passed since my days at the state hospital, I had grown up alot but still held on to theories that were preconceived and arrogant. I would have said I couldn't understand suicide, that it left those left behind holding what couldn't be held. That is was a cowards way out. I didn't know, what I didn't know. In 2002 dear friends of ours lost a son to suicide. I knew this boy since the day he was born. I loved this boy. He was funny, out-going and happy. I tried to console them with inadequacies. Everything I said to them I am ashamed of. Everything I thought I knew that would help was me thinking I knew something. I didn't. Somewhere inside this boy he reached the limit of endurance. I think if he had tried to tell anyone what he was feeling, he would not have been able to relay the right feeling.He had reached the end of not what he should be able to take but what he really couldn't take. Maybe there aren't words for the emptiness of hope.

In 2006 Mike was killed in an accident. It started me on a journey of trying to live.My whole life of optimism and happiness was erased. I had lost someone I couldn't live without. It erased my desire to live. I went from my arrogant attitude to complete understanding with the loss of one life. People would tell me I needed to be strong for Marty and the girls. This feeling was deeper than that. It was personal, singular and entirely mine. It was an individual decision that only I could make. It transcended me as a Mother, Wife, Daughter, Sister or Friend.  For months and even years I was consumed by confusion. I couldn't think beyond each day, sometimes each hour. I was in lock-down mode of a sort I had never before experienced. For two years my hands were clenched so tight I would lay in bed each night and slowly open my fingers to let go. I felt inside, shattered. Unable to believe that I could figure out how to continue to live. I wrote a letter to my dearest friend, a co-worker from my State Hospital days. I told her that I now knew what back then I couldn't even imagine. I was empty of hope. Each day I pretended. I tried for normal but I no longer remembered how to do it.  It was life running against the clock.

Last week a dear friend lost her Grand-son to suicide. She poured out for me a story of anger and loss. Sadness so profound. Confusion and disbelief. The story was hers but it may also have been her Grand-sons. I listened, I said nothing. The story I would maybe tell her is the one written above. For this boy and for my friends son, we don't know what we don't know.

At the end of everyday, it is Mike who saves me. It is the knowing in the deepest part of me that I will see him again someday. It is the knowledge that if I arrive one day, one second sooner than my destiny, Mike would be sad. Mike was all about life. What people should have told me was not so much that I needed to live for Marty and the girls but that I needed to live for Mike.

I was only ever physically in the State Hospital in Brainerd, one time. I spent four years caring for the mentally ill in another institution. The walls of those buildings contained the absolute rawness of life. I wonder sometimes where those people are. I know where they are, they are where we all are. They are living and trying and sometimes they are leaving for reasons known only to them. We don't know what we don't know.

Marty told me once when I was so low, so full of despair, empty in a way that causes desperation. When I said, "I can't do this", he didn't call anyone, he didn't hover over me, he didn't watch my every move. He knew the individualness of what I said, that the decisions we make are our own. He knows me better than anyone on the face of this earth. He said three words. "You have to."

till next time.