The fact of the matter is that loving someone with a mental illness is to invite an unseen third into the relationship, who’s always just off to the side, a bad houseguest you can’t get rid of. This is, I suppose, not as sensitive to the mentally ill as I could be, but then neither is the fact that I am exhausted by my wife’s depression sometimes, even as I accept that it’s inextricable from all of the things that make me love her. I want to say, sometimes, what about me? What about all of the people who love someone who can turn at any moment into a hurricane? What do we get to say?
We don’t talk about mental illness in the United States, not really. We’ll quote statistics, or we’ll point out that the number one cause of gun deaths is suicide (my wife refused a gun in our home even when we lived in the far more gun-happy Midwest for this reason), or we’ll talk about how we need better mental health care in the US, but we don’t do anything, because we believe, on some level, that we can snap people out of it. The thought that a problem can’t be fixed, only diverted, isn’t just harrowing — it feels wrong somehow. We are at once too polite about it and at a loss.
So if we don’t talk about mental illness, we really don’t talk about those who lived beside it and recognized it and didn’t know what to do, those who have lost and been lost. Or, as Jimmy and I might think, we can’t talk in polite company about how you can see her lying there, not looking at anything. You know she’s there, but she’s gone. And who’s going to come to comfort you?
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