One of my old friends in my old town, a dear soul with horrifying psychosis, recently wound up back in the hospital.  One year ago, I accompanied her to the emergency room after a particularly damaging bout of inner trauma and spent an exhausting twenty-four hours arguing with doctors, nurses, and government workers to admit her (see Full Circle, March 22, 2010).  They finally grasped her situation.  After a week in the psychiatric ward, they placed her in transitional housing with a case worker and medication.  I watched the side effects of medication turn her into a veritable infant, drooling and shaking and shuffling, but she nevertheless walked nearly a mile to my house for some kind of comfort.  After many weeks, she was evicted from transitional housing for inability to pay rent and ended up in a women’s shelter, I think it was.  She applied for disability and was denied.  She struggled to find work, but even on medication, she suffered the effects of extreme stress and chronic illness, and she still couldn’t think straight.  Over the course of a year, she was bumped from one shelter to another and lost every menial job she found.

She struggled to survive, against such pain and anguish, I doubt anyone I know would last two days in her shoes.  Her only lifeline out of hell was an obsession with spiritual teachers.  Two weeks ago, she stopped taking her medication.  The police found her under a stairwell in the airport waiting for a flight to Arizona where she hoped to meet one of her teachers.

Every day for her is an earthquake and a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown, but she’s expected to move forward as though everything were fine.  I called her in the psychiatric ward, but she would not speak to me.  She is beyond posttraumatic stress.  She is the tsunami victim stumbling through the rubble dying of dehydration and radiation poisoning, while clueless relief workers advise her to polish her resume.  During my visit in December, after picking her up from the mall where she spent six hours applying for every job from fry cook to accessory cashier, my ex-whatever, Jimmie, told her she should approach local companies with a presentation about what she could offer.  After putting my jaw back on, I spent a good day whacking him in the head with reality and returning to the same refrain: “You know, it is actually humanly possible for a person to find themselves in an unsolvable situation!!!”  Pant pant.  “People do die in this world!  Some die alone and hungry!  And no amount of ‘pickin’ yerself up by yer bootstraps’ would have been enough!”

People died when the tsunami hit Japan.  People died when Hurrican Katrina hit New Orleans.  The World Trade Center.  The whole world jumps up and rushes to offer aid, but there are hidden tsunamis and invisible hurricanes, inner disasters that can take years to end a life… slowly and agonizingly and alone.

There are hidden tsunamis in my life, and my instinct is to scream for help, wave my hands in the air, and look for relief workers.  Sometimes, they come.  They pull me out of the rubble.  They feed me and nurse me back to health.  There is so much love in this world.  Then, another quake.  Another tsunami.  The disaster is some chronic disease combined with the demands of single motherhood.  Looking back at my life, I’m convinced now that it’s lupus.  My grandmother is convinced that it’s Addison’s disease.  The anemia is really bad now, probably because of the fluid in my lungs.  Regardless of the diagnosis, my mother bailed on medical care.  She offered instead to buy me a book on living with chronic pain.  She taught my son how to call her, and she’s making repairs to the house in preparation for my eviction.  I watched her replace boards on the wooden fence, and it was like watching someone build a coffin on one of those western movies where the hero is expected to die in a shoot out at noon.  The lease ends in May, and she often tells me how much of her retirement money has gone for my rent.  I cannot convey to her what each and every day is like for me… like crawling through the mud and broken houses, thirsty and bleeding, wondering how I will make it through the day.  The challenges are real and intractible.  They are consequential.  My ex-husband is making preparations to care for our boys in Holland.  I do not have the physical capacity to pack my things.  As near as I can imagine, I will crawl out of this house in May with nothing.

Every night now, after my boys are asleep, I make a hot bath with candles and kirtan.  Floating in the warm water, my body is soothed, and I let go of fear.  I breath, and I look up at the giant wave hovering above me, and smile.  No one is rushing to save me, and I’m not going to scream anymore.  I thought about committing suicide.  I have all the equipment necessary for a quick and painless death.  My boys are suffering because of me, and I continuously wonder if they would have a better life.  Yet, whenever I consider it, I just feel overwhelming love.  I’m not afraid of dying.  I just love everyone in this world so much.  Ha!  I didn’t make that happen in me!  It just happened.  To anyone sending love, I thank you.  Love trumps pain.  Love trumps fear.  What a strange discovery.  I don’t have it in me anymore.  Unless it becomes intensely clear that my children would have a better life, that option is off the table.

Then, as I sink into this universe of hidden tsunamis, deeply at peace, resting truly, no longer screaming or expecting to be rescued, moments of sheer joy rise up out of nowhere and delight my heart.  I sat out on the patio and watched my boys inflate and chase balloons in the backyard only to watch them pop, one by one, on the dry grass.  It was like watching loose chickens scramble around a farm.  I laughed so hard.  This morning I began teasing my five year old that he had a secret crush on Dora the Explorer.  Yesterday, I was driving on the highway when my seven year old had the sudden, overpowering need to use the bathroom.  You know how, when you have to go, it’s all you can think about?  I gave him an empty water bottle and an imaginary bathroom pass and started laughing hysterically, then we turned every song lyric on the radio into something about peeing.  “I tell you once more, before I get off I-4, don’t pee right now!  Ba ba ba ba.”  (That’s “Don’t Bring Me Down,” by Electric Light Orchestra.)

Dozens of birds visit my back porch every day to eat the birdseed that my five year old dumps on the ground for them, and they have gotten so comfortable with their visits that they drop in for a bite when I’m sitting right there on the patio.

Whether we see it or not, everyone is sitting on a building quake under a poised tsunami.  If you do see it, it might terrify you, and if you don’t have the option of ignoring it, it may bring enormous, unimaginable suffering, but it’s okay.  The forces of love and joy are apparently much stronger, and regardless of when death comes, they will still be standing.