Chris
Rice Cooper
A
Jolly Good Damn!
The Journey
of Mental Illness to Joy in Second Blooming: Becoming the Women We are Meant to Be
In the first week of December of
1926, Agatha Christie (www.agathachristie.com) had a huge argument with husband Archibald and he walked
out. She disappeared within the next 24
hours in what some believed was a suicide.
On December 19, 1926 she was discovered as a guest
at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel (now Old Swan Hotel) in Harrogate,
Yorkshire.
Two doctors diagnosed her as having
psychogenic fugue, but some experts believed she suffered a nervous breakdown
caused by depression exacerbated by her mother’s death and her husband’s
infidelity, both within the past year.
Four years later she conquered her
demons and married Sir Max Mallowan, and ten years into the healthy and
nurturing marriage she made this statement:
“I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when
you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations and suddenly
find—at the age of fifty, say—that a whole new life has opened before you,
filled with things you can think about, study or read about…. It is as if a
fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.”
Agatha Christie Mallowan in 1940, the year she turned 50.
Susan Cushman (http://susancushman.com) was
inspired by the quote and christened her anthology of essays by twenty women A
Second Blooming: Becoming the Women We
Are Meant to Be, Mercer
University Press (http://www.mupress.org), March 1, 2017.
The twenty essays are organized into five
sections:
I. Blooming through Surrender;
II. Blooming after Loss; III. Blooming in Place; IV.
Blooming Again…and Again; and V. Blooming in Careers and Communities;
and cover a variety of topics.
The one topic that connected with me the
most is that of mental illness which I have. I believe we all encounter it, rather it be from circumstances like a broken
romance to chronic depression.
BLOOMING
THROUGH SURRENDER
“Beyond
This Point There Be Dragons”
Suzanne Henley
Suzanne Henley has to conquer numerous
demons: a deceptive husband, a marriage that has been dead, severe panic
attacks, and consistent suicidal thoughts.
She seeks help with her psychologist Kip, and spends eight and half
weeks at a psychiatric ward. She is
discharged from the psychiatric ward three weeks early without effective
medication, only to have her depression, panic attacks, and suicidal thoughts
return with a vengeance.
My depression was not just an emotion, mental
pain; it pinned me to the bed, exhausted and withering. Writhing, black, prehistoric lizards from a
tarry pit-scaly tongues flicking and wrapping around my lungs, dirty claws
digging into my ribs – gorged on my heart and stomach, circling for the best
attack, having flayed ends of jagged flesh as they consumed me from the inside
out. I lay in bed sapped, paralyzed by
their weight, sorting through different ways of killing myself.
Suzanne was placed back in the
psychiatric ward, put on suicide watch, and forced to go to group therapy where
her therapist made her get on the floor, crawl to each person’s chair in the
circle, and give each person one different reason why she should not kill
herself.
The humiliation was intense.
But I was also stunned by the paradox
that in humbling myself, kneeling prostrate before each of these once-dismissed
fellow patients, I was in fact crawling toward healing. It was an epiphany, and I think I caught a
glimpse of Jesus outside the door giving a high-five to a passing aide.
After medication, ongoing visits with her
psychologist, a friendship with a fellow patient, returning to her family of
three children, and attending her local church she was on her way to healing to
the point where she was able to say:
Failure
simply means an opportunity to begin again.
And she did, finding the man of her dreams in her eighth decade and able to honestly say she has no regrets.
BLOOMING AFTER LOSS
“My Brother’s Keeper”
Julie Cantrell
Julie loves her
younger brother Jeff intensely and tries to call him on his 19th
birthday numerous times not able to reach him.
She learns that he succumbed to his depression and shot himself in the
head with a shotgun.
She not only had to
struggle with her loss and her grief but her anger at her brother for causing
such pain to her and their family.
After a period of years Julie came to
understand her brother and the choices he made, and considers him not a
perpetrator but a victim.
In
the end, my brother did not “commit” a crime.
He did not even die of “suicide.”
His life was cut short by the overwhelming force of depression.
Julie refuses to view Jeff as dead but thriving,
and
describes
her relationship with Jeff to that of Castor and Pollux.
When Castor was killed Pollux offered to
share his own godly immortality, and this loving act inspired Zeus to place the
brothers together in the heavens, where they are the two brightest stars in the
Gemini constellation, sending the guiding light known as St. Elmo’s Fire.
Instead, I believe he is experiencing a
second bloom of sorts, somewhere out there in this vast universe of ours. Truly, in the eternal and infinite scheme of
time and space, there is not much separating Jeff and me. So instead of grieving his passing or
focusing on the missing pieces in my life, I choose to picture my brother
shining his star beside my own, the two brightest lights in our own private
constellation.
BLOOMING IN PLACE
“Abuse: A Survivor’s
Message for the Vatican”
Kim Michele Richardson
Kim Michele
Richardson’s essay is a blockbuster testimony of sexual abuse of children by
religious leaders and how that abuse affects the child for all of their life
–well into adulthood, both for the male and the female.
People like the CEO, also a former
orphan and victim of clergy abuse, who has to lock himself in his office
because he’s having a “bad day.” His
“bad days” happen when the memories of physical and sexual abuse become too
strong for him to function as a regular working adult.
There is also the
woman who suffers from crippling PTSD because of her abuses by clergy. She writes that she may not be contacting me
for a while because she will probably be back in a “dark place” and will have
to seek mental health institutional care for her “latest bout” – a bout
directly caused by predator clergy.
Graffiti on a Lisbon wall depicting a priest chasing two children
Kim gives the victims
of sexual abuse the power – that of a voice to demand that the religious
apologize for the horrors that were inflicted upon them.
To do this, the church must be
willing to publicly help these deeply wounded, still-suffering victims and
survivors. Start the cleansing by
reaching out to us, answering and also disclosing records of predatory clergy
that have been protected by the Roman Catholic Church for decades.
My name is Kim Michele
Richards. I am waiting, along with all
those voices around me.
BLOOMING AGAIN…AND AGAIN
“A Second Chance at Empty-Nesting”
Susan Marquez
Susan is a mother enjoying
her next life as a 50 year old empty nester with her husband Larry in her
home-state of Mississippi.
But all that comes crashing down
when, on August 29, 2008, their 25-year-old daughter Nicole accidentally falls
six stories from her New York City apartment building.
Nicole in February 2008
Several vertebrae in Nicole’s neck were crushed, as was a
vertebrae in her lower back. Her pelvis
was broken, and she had broken several ribs on the left side. One of the ribs punctured her lung, which
collapsed. It turns out that was her
most life-threatening injury.
There was huge relief
and gratitude when Nicole walked out of rehab on January 21, 2009, but the
transition was a mental strain: it was like taking care of a newborn that
weighted 100 pounds.
My life and my time
were not my own. I struggled to be
positive. My mind tried to wander to
some dark places. On the one hand, I was
angry at Nicole for pulling such a stupid stunt. . . . On the other hand, I (was
deeply grateful that she had not only survived but was doing so well.)
The traumatic event taught
Susan to look on the positive and healthy aspects of the event: while her daughter was in New York she
figured she wouldn’t be able to see her only once or twice a year; but due to
the accident she was able to spend quality mother-daughter time for a period of
two years. 
Nicole has moved on
now. She has found love with a patient man who is amazed by her story and her
determination. She has become a successful
motivational speaker and travels the country sharing her message of
perseverance and hope.
And through it all, Susan experiences the same things her daughter
speaks to others about: perseverance and
hope.
I am happy. I am at peace. I know that everyone I care about is all right. My nest is empty, and my life is full!
I am happy. I am at peace. I know that everyone I care about is all right. My nest is empty, and my life is full!
BLOOMING IN CAREERS AND COMMUNITIES
“Something Has To Die”
Cassandra King
King has to come to terms that her church does
not support her, nor does a husband – who refuses to recognize her need to
change, and venture into the next stage. As a result, she maintains a façade in
a marriage and a church that produced a cauldron “of misery and depression,
compounded by guilt and self-hatred.”
And the most heaviest and dirtiest chain was worrying about what people
thought of her.
Fighting the depression was nothing compared to
the effort it took to put up a second front.
Soon King comes to the realization and
the gut wrenching truth that she has lost her authenticity of self, and has
been living a façade all along, all to please a church that didn’t care for her
and a husband who no longer had the wisdom to see within her depths.
King finds solace in her Greek
mythological self – Cassandra the princess of Troy, but unlike the Princess of
Troy, King decided that she would not remain in a life that she found herself
to be oppressed, which required she kill her false persona.
I
had to kill her off; that phony non-person I had created to please others. And I did it the only way I knew, with the
only resource that had ever given my inner life any true meaning. I closed the door and started to write.
Using a pen instead of a sword for her weapon
she wrote what was in her heart and not was what in her church, and was then
finally free.
I’m finally freed of that prison of my
own creation, the even deadlier urge to please others, to let what others think
of me become more important than what I think of myself.
These essays created a second blooming
within myself to view mental illness not only as a disease but a journey of
healing that, yes, can be a painful journey, but a joyful one, too.
But more importantly it taught me to be responsible, not in solving everything, but knowing who to go to for help. This gave me the power to finally be able to joyously say what Cassandra King says in her essay:
And
for the first time in my way too many years, I knew that I didn’t give a jolly
good damn what anybody else thought.
What a wonderful post. I read every word. Inspiring stories of powerful women turning their lives around. Thank you Chris and all involved.
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