Stabat Mater Dolorosa

It all started over a decade ago.  I didn't understand what mental illness is.  How it dips and dives and screeches back into hiding under the guise of normality.  I learned about it first and foremost through one woman. She was large-boned, had an impressive voice that reverberated in the house's walls.  Don't get me wrong, there were harmonious scenes of domesticity.  One day she would ask for pancakes, another for an omelette.  Support staff would wheel her up to the breakfast table. Yet nothing would stay steady for long.  With no warning she'd fall into a funk and yell insults at her housemates.  The room would clear. Some nights she'd call your name in her insomnia hallucinations.  She had other illnesses which complicated her health: diabetes 2, arthritis, congestive heart failure.  But  nothing as random nor as vindictive as these mood swings, sometimes spilling over into "psychotic episodes." Once, an experienced staff said the night had gone something like out of the movie "The Exorcist," various husky voices and head spinning?  I didn't ask. So into the psych hospital she'd go.  And out again, with yet another regime of medications to settle things.  What is it about this beast of mental illness, coming at her like a bull might a young 11 year old girl in a country field, without warning, on a gorgeous May Spring day? And then there is the underbelly of this beast.  It was said among staff who knew her from long ago,  that her mother, still a devout Catholic, drank heavily in her youth.  And when she was pregnant she drank.  So was her mother's indulgences the source of her compromised state?  Or was that mere rumor.  I don't know.  Yet, when I knew her she had periods of enjoying manicures, meals in restaurants, joking with another young woman who bantered with her about desire and handsome men. She flattered me when she genuinely raved about my salads. But I'll never forget the first time of many times she relapsed, that her meds dropped suddenly below the horizon and she was left with this beast.  I cried at her bedside as the hours passed and the hospital took her off her meds, only to rebuild her during the following days.  I had yet to understand how a phoenix could rise from the ashes, repeatedly, as she inevitably did.  One precious moment stands out in my mind, however.  We were in her van, going somewhere, and she was singing along to a popular tune.  For the moment her singing voice conveyed she knew exactly what the song meant, what the world still mute could not know or say about her. It was airy, it was pure; she had entirely risen above her body's plight.  Ironic, then or blessed as some would say, that she died quietly in her sleep one night, with nothing foreboding predicting her departure.