I have a good memory for stories. Your sister’s friend’s boyfriend won the lottery, or your husband left his work to become a king crab fisherman. You had a hard time conceiving and then your experience with the hospital at the birth of your daughter was terrible. This is a useful skill as a psychiatrist, along with not being a linear thinker. I don’t do mnemonics because it’s just easier for me to remember the list directly than the cute trick to bring the list to mind. My thoughts aren’t organized, just all-consuming, big wet splats across the warp and weft of reality. One of my kids is the same way and it’s really something watching her manage the linear slog of schooling.
Every time I have to take a board exam I just speed-read through my little copy of the diagnostic criteria for the DSM5 but if you asked me to list all the criteria for depression right now I couldn’t tell you except as a derivative of another person’s story of poor sleep, no energy, suicidal thoughts, and all the rest of the little suite of horrors that makes up clinical depression. A list isn’t real, a person is, in three dimensions, and indelible.
It’s strange, then, that I can’t remember myself before I got sick. Perhaps it is a natural consequence of my own radical acceptance of my own mistakes and lack of regrets. My missteps just were, and with all the information I had at the time I would probably make the same mistakes over again. But then we do a lot to avoid feeling grief.
What I do remember is energy. I could travel and go out with friends. I wrote several times a week. I went to work and wrote presentations and kept up with people I knew all over the world. I picked my kids up from school and went to all the after school events and made a bunch of money with speaking and writing in addition to my day job. I took guitar lessons. I wasn’t paid to teach but it was important to me and worth the long drive into the medical school and getting home at 7pm.
I remember doing those things but not how I managed it. Its an untangled knot, an indigo inked mystery. Even now some months past my last unexplained fever I still sometimes marvel that I can be fully present for the late concert or be a back-up for the jazz band carpool.
My life was in its way very large and then it became…provencial. Just me in my bedroom and the office next door and the slumbering cats and the dog and resting besides. I quit my practice, my big job with my employees and coworkers because I didn’t have the energy. I needed a working environment where I could rest a lot of the day.
I pay a lot of money for disability insurance, but part of my hope to get better was to keep exercising more. And disability companies send private investigators after you, so I could only imagine an investigator taking pictures of me on the peloton from the neighbor’s yard. Honestly I would get paid as much working part time as disability would garner me.
I went from someone remarkably useful and helpful to just barely holding on. I’m fortunate in that I’m a universalist (4th generation on my mother’s side) so the lack of meaning or value of what I do doesn’t detract from my value as a human being. I exist and that’s enough, and there’s no point in despair despite all I lost.
I could have lost quite a bit more. That dripping thought splatter across the loom of memory and experience can imagine quite a lot and I retained almost everything essential even while I lost everything else of a modern broadly productive life.
Do you remember what it’s like to press your face against the glass in the car window when it’s raining out, and your father tells you not to mess up the glass? Almost everything I did messed up the glass and had to be rubbed out and it would have been a problem if I did regrets.
The memento mori is a gauche reminder of death, au courant or not. The pandemic was a big fucking splat of a memento mori and took out a lot of people on the edges. Some people rose up and thought they couldn’t die if they refused paxlovid or the vaccine or all sorts of stupid shit (I’m not going to be kind to the antivaxxer in my substack, seriously, go elsewhere.)
The opposite of a memento mori is the song Stay by Hans Zimmer from Interstellar. Yes some of it sounds like he fell asleep leaning against an organ but it’s worth a listen even when you are dead, even when you are a shadow of your prior life, even when you are a universalist who used to teach so you wonder what happens when people follow you to new places and new ideas.
I was dead, but only not alive. I could be resurrected. Stay.
You seem to be writing about your fever/fatigue in the past tense. Do you think they are gone? Did you do any interventions or did they go away as mysteriously as they came?
Are there any things you like better about your life now?
How did your declining health impact your relationships with your daughters and husband?
I wish you the best. I’m so sorry you have had to go through all of this