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Showing posts from August, 2014

The Year of Mourning

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We've talked about it before, ritualized grief. It is healing, if executed well. And at the end of an official year (especially if you do it the Jewish way) one feels different, as if a millennium has passed. We're returning from Ruby Falls, a tourist trap in Tennessee. I had the front seat of the van on the way out, but am in the back now, hosting three very little, dirty and exhausted children. They are engrossed in movies. I can stretch out my legs. Not a bad way to travel. Gazing out the window, road trip lyrics come to mind: Let us be lovers, We'll marry our fortunes together. I've got some real estate here in my bag. So we bought a pack of cigarets. And Mrs. Wagner pies, And we walked off to look for America . America, the Bookends Album Hard to get the  Bookends song out of my head. Now you've got it. That's what we do in my family, pass off songs. My son asked if we could take a short vacation, come for a visit this summer. So just before the year of mou...

Robin Williams and Bipolar Disorder

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Robin Williams I know he denied it, but it does seem that Robin Williams had bipolar disorder. So based upon the presentation, at the very least I'm going with a Bipolar II. You only need one manic episode for that one.   A depressive episode took his life. I get my first world news updates from Robin Meade's early morning  show. Her voice is calming. In therapy, people who work on a morning news show are at work at one a.m. They will tell you that to get through that shift: You drink a lot of caffeine . Many of us do, too, drink a lot of caffeine, if only in the morning, and it makes us a little  manic (I am typing fast) and we wouldn't trade the feeling. Half-caf is a suitable alternative.  There is a world of difference, however, between the manic feeling associated with two cups of coffee and the "manic" in manic-depressive, or bipolar disorder. We now really only use the term, bipolar disorder . I don't know why. One of my first posts on this blog, back ...

Enmeshment and a Proper Ending

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We haven't talked about family of origin in awhile, so why not get back to it. I was going to write about guilt, anyway. I have an optometrist who made me a pair of rimless glasses about fifteen years ago, glass.  "Treat these like jewelry," he warned. "They are very fragile." Random building,  random car, not the car or building in the story . The Story: Five or six days out of the week I swim. At the same time, as I walk into the looming multi-unit building, a frail older man in a white shirt and tie, black suit and hat, is leaving. A large SUV waits at the curb. The gentleman struggles with the passenger front door, steps up carefully into the car. He and his driver are likely off to morning prayers. The windows are dark, but I assume the driver is his son. I can picture the older man tossing the cane into the back seat. Hating myself for judging, it bothers me that whoever it is picking him up, for whatever reason, hasn't popped out of the car to help. I...