Some Rambling Thoughts From a Troubled Mind

It is warm today in northwest Wyoming, 73 already at noon. The high comes at 5-6 so it should hit 85 at the least. The sky is a deep, rich manganese blue, a few bold, white puffy clouds tease in the distance dancing above and scraping the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains as I gaze out my window.
This window in the west wall of my little room, my little world some 20x25 feet is my contact, my touch with what society deems, "the real world." Perhaps my world is more shaped by my mind and thoughts than by physical attributes. On the east wall behind the bathroom door, my computer. The south wall, my bed and closet. My north wall three book shelves. In that corner my Laz-e-Boy recliner, then the table, cabinets and back to the bed.
In the middle floor between the path where my wheelchair fits is my easel and paints. It is my world, my domain, all that I have at the age of 60 when I should be a the apex of my employment, happily married, children grown, grandchildren to spoil and the thought of retirement, travel, the good life.
My good life for the past 50 years has been a path of frustration, betrayal, hopelessness, exasperation, love and laughter, joy and pain, heartache. For the past 12 years I have been divorced, at least the kids were grown and on their own. I lost my wife of 25 years, my job of 25 years as a professional mining manager, my home also of twenty-five years and and began a decade of pure hell.

October, 1997. Yes, yet another episode of SI (self-injury) as my smashed fist was driven into a cement wall in an effort to transfer the hellish pain of mind to the comfort of physical, something to recognize and understand. Then,I could no longer function as a human being. I lay in bed for three weeks until I am finally forced by my family physician to a mental health clinic in the city.
Bipolar is the diagnosis and finally, after suffering since the fifth grade, I have an answer. An answer, but no cure. And the nightmare not only continued, it worsened. After trying medication after medication and counseling in 2002 I made a valiant, serious attempt at suicide. It was thwarted by a friend in Norway with whom I was visiting with on the Internet and made the error of telling him how many pills I was swallowing. Somehow he managed to call the local police and fire dept who promptly beat down my door, hauled me away and jammed tubes down my throat. A few weeks later I was taken to the Wyoming State Hospital.
New medication, a new start, but still alone. As a man I hunger for the touch of a warm woman, to hear her breath, to know she cares. When alone at night the shadows come and dance about the room taunting and teasing, the walls whisper and shout and I lay awake holding on to what I do not know. A few years later another suicide attempt that landed me into a long term care facility. I also suffer from a rare bone disease, having had some 18 fractures. My hips deteriorated and had to be replaced. I transferred a year later to the Wyoming Retirement Center to be closer to family, my daughter and her husband, their three kids.

After a few years of coping, my meds quit working and I fell into yet another deep, dark depression and was sent to SLC, Utah for a series of electrical shock therapies. I returned a zombie and four weeks later, Christmas Day, I cut my wrists. It earned me another, longer stay at the state hospital.
New medication on the market combined with old seems to have leveled me out. I still get manic but not hyper- manic. I get depressed but not in the bottom of the deep, dark well. I promised my kids that when I die they shall bury a father that didn't blow his brains out, but passed silently, graciously in the night from a heart attack.
Today, as I talked to my therapist, we addressed the issue if I would ever be able to live alone again. it is my desire but between my hips and two replaced knees, my mobility is hindered and I go between a wheelchair and a cane. I need help with personal hygiene, I need help with my 22 pills a day I take in 4 varying installments. I am quite intelligent and productive, I keep to myself and write and paint and once in awhile get out with someone, even my ex-wife at times.
Today my therapist asked me point blank of why I am still alive. he stated, quite truthfully, that I am like a bullet fired from a high powered rifle into a steel box and I ricochet and ricochet; when will the head flatten and the bullet stop. What will it penetrate?
I honestly don't know. I only know the promise I must keep to my children, I only know that some unseen intellectual force drives me on to write that next poem, to create something that only I can create.
And then, as I finally rest, I can say, it was worth it, it was one hell of a ride, but I did. And perhaps, just perhaps, some little corner of the world is just a little bit better off for it.
But now, it is time to look back out the window, past the barb-wire at the beloved beauty that is my Wyoming. Perhaps I am where I am supposed to be.