Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life

“Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you…Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.”                                                

                                        ~ Florida Scott-Maxwell ~

On a beautiful, light filled Thursday afternoon in August of 2010, I learned that my mother had lung cancer.  I remember standing stunned in the dooryard; the phone pressed tightly against my ear while my mother’s voice drifted in and out of focus.  I recall very little of what we said that day, only that I commanded myself to sound strong and in control and braced myself as best I could, knowing all too well that from the moment I heard the words,  lung cancer,  the world as I knew it was never going to be the same again.

I immediately arranged to fly to Florida and to take a leave of absence from my psychotherapy practice in Maine.  I stepped onto the plane as my mother’s frightened daughter, and disembarked as her primary caregiver.  Between August of 2010 and November of 2012 I would make frequent trips between Maine and Florida, doing my best to keep track of my mother’s treatments and medications, to comfort and keep her fed and clean when the chemotherapy and radiation proved too brutal, and prepare myself and my family for what became more and more inevitable.

Within three weeks after rejoining my family following my first four emotionally and physically exhausting months in Florida, Kevin, my sweet husband, the man whom had represented safety to me throughout my entire adulthood, fell apart.  Besieged by agonizing and unrelenting panic attacks for the first time in his life, he found himself one morning too weak and too ill to get out of bed.  He felt trapped by his pain, by his panic, and by his life.  He’d left the corporate world, and sacrificed his six-figure income in order to engage in more meaningful work, only to discover far greater dysfunction than he’d ever confronted in the corporate world.  He struggled for months attempting to accomplish the impossible until he collapsed, broken down and worn out by the sense of helplessness, anxiety and futility that he’d carried day after day.  Leaving his job and abandoning his career was an act of both desperation and courage. At fifty-two he found himself unemployed, his future uncertain, and our income pared down to one fifth of what it had been.

Two weeks after I returned to Florida to resume my caretaking duties, I received a phone call informing me that Kristen, my precious only child, had been hospitalized for post- partum psychosis.  She’d grown delusional, battling urges to put her fingers on the burner of her stove and observe how long it took them to burn to bone, and had been hiding in the closet with her children, certain that ‘they’ were coming to take one away.    When I learned of her illness, I immediately made arrangements to fly home, terrified for my daughter while devastated at the same time to be abandoning my cancer ridden mother.  I remember sitting stiffly on the plane, my jaw clenched and my stomach in knots, enduring alternating waves of guilt and fear.

After being placed on a waiting list for far longer than I would have believed possible under the circumstances, the treatment Kristen received was far from adequate.  For close to a year, she, her father, husband, and I stumbled through a ghastly twilight zone as diagnoses shifted and the number of heavy-duty psychotropic medications she was prescribed grew at an alarming rate.  I struggled to contain my mounting panic as my beautiful child drifted further and further away from her family, exiled by mental illness and the medication that was supposed to cure it.  And I, a seasoned mental health professional, could not bring her safely home to us.

Note: Continued in Part three