By Diane Roston, MD
WEST CENTRAL BEHAVIORAL HEALTH
My friend Ben who works at a landscaping company dropped off a mountain laurel bush that looked like a stick covered in crisp brown leaves.
“No one will buy this because it looks dead,” he explained as he unloaded the bush from his truck. “Plant it. It might sprout.”
Given that the bush looked dead, I hypothesized that it was dead. Nonetheless, in good faith to a friend, I planted the shrub at the edge of the garden.
I don’t know why I sweet-talked that plant. “Come on, drink up. You can do it,” I’d say each morning as the rest of the garden, parched and drought-dry, looked on. “Surprise me. Just one sprout. You can do it — I know you can.”
In my mind, I pictured the deep green glades of mountain laurel in the hills where I spent summers during medical school working at a clinic near Hazard, Kentucky.
What I said to the dead plant reminded me of what I said to the women in my weekly aerobics class at Hazard Town Hall, but I didn’t sweet-talk them. To the unrelenting pulse of “Y-M-C-A,” we pounded in place as I hollered, “You’ve got this one! Just one more time! You can do it! I know you can!”
Somehow these porch-sitting, tough-talking, pie-baking women caught the beat until we were all rocking in unison in the hot summer sweat.
After class, the women told stories of floods, tornadoes, murders, black lung disease, accidents in the mine, lost pregnancies, lost love, lost dreams. Each had a story to tell, or two or three. We wept, and laughed. Back then, I didn’t have stories, so I listened.
They challenged each other: “You think that’s bad! What about this!”
After medical school, I stopped spending summers in Hazard. I completed an internship and residency in psychiatry and took a position as a psychiatrist at a community mental health clinic. One patient, in recovery from an episode of serious mental illness, told me, “Things are going so well. I’m worried that something bad will happen.”
I knew I couldn’t reassure her about that. “I understand. Of course you want to feel this good forever,” I said. “But you’re right. There will be sorrow. There always is. When sorrow comes, you will get through it. I know you can.”
My own sorrow happened many years after those sweltering Kentucky summers. My children’s father, my husband, died. He didn’t just die. He succumbed to suicide, leaving a scar of “complex grief” on all who knew him. I thought back to those mountain women, all they had survived.
We each have stories. Losing a parent, a child, a partner, a dear friend, a pet; getting through or living with a serious physical or mental illness; a painful divorce, break-up, or rift within the family; abuse at home or work; neglect; disaster; homelessness; hunger. As the cast of the Broadway musical, Hamilton, reflects after Alexander Hamilton’s son is killed in a dual, “There are moments that the words don’t reach, there is suffering too terrible to name… (we) are going through the unimaginable.”
Writer Joan Didion reflects in The Year of Magical Thinking about the year after her husband died. “Life changes in an instant.”
It has been fifteen years since I lost my husband. You’d think I’d have grown beyond it by now, and mostly I have, but every year on the anniversary of his death, I find myself weeping in my goggles as I swim morning laps. I’m willing to barter, bargain, plead. I want him to come back. Then a voice within me says, “You know he’s not coming back. You can get through this. You’ve got this one. You can do it. I know you can.” And I get through; each year I get through that day. Those Appalachian women pounded their way through unimaginable heat, gleaming with pride.
After three weeks of unrelenting hope, I realized that the mountain laurel stick wasn’t coming back to life, that sometimes things really are dead, that no amount of water, or prayer, or encouragement, will bring them back.
And that’s okay. And, like the mountain laurel women, I’m okay.
Diane Roston, MD, is Medical Director at West Central Behavioral Health, Lebanon, NH, and a member of the West Central Zero Suicide Implementation Team.
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