Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  I was so broken at the time, I couldn’t even think of another good way. I could have stuck the car in the garage and turned it on and kissed the world good-bye, but I didn’t think of that. I just limped along.

  About two weeks later, she and I went for lunch, like we usually did, at Wendy’s, then I went one way to work in my office, and she went the other way. It was snowing pretty hard. I went along for about ten paces, and all of a sudden, out of pure impulse, I stopped. I turned around and I watched her walk away from me. She was wearing light-colored slacks. She had on a blue parka and a white knit stocking cap. You watch things disappear when the snow is falling and you start seeing snow and you don’t see them anymore. So her cap disappeared, and then her trousers disappeared, and the last thing to go was the blue parka. All of a sudden, it was just a sheet of white from the snow. I couldn’t see her . . . I had this tremendous pang—I was almost in despair—I said: “Jesus Christ, what would happen if she were gone tomorrow? How would I go on living?” About a minute later, another thought popped into my mind. And that was: What would happen to her if you were gone tomorrow? I stood there in the snow for a long time. I finally realized that it was unethical, immoral, to take your own life. I’ve had people say to me, “It’s my life, isn’t it? If I blow it away, what do you care? What does anybody care?” That’s wrong. Because your life is not yours. Part of your life is part of everybody else’s life who loves you, who cares about you. I thought: If I kill myself, I would kill that part of her that she had invested in me. And I would kill that part of everybody else I knew who knew me as a friend, a teacher, whatever. And that’s murder. Suicide is one thing, murder is another. I can’t murder. All I could do is plead for relief, but I can’t murder some piece of someone else.

  So I found myself in the position of standing on the edge of a deep, black canyon. All I had to do was take one step forward and I was gone. But I couldn’t do it. So I hung on. And about a month later, I began to have this totally irrational feeling, that in some sense I was being held, protected by a higher power—that I was being spared. Yes, I’m a scientist. But I’m a mystic, too. I believe that there are things beyond science. I am a card-carrying scientist and I am a card-carrying mystic. Call it God, call it the laws of physics, I don’t know . . . Whatever it is that gives this world its incredible order. Look at this flower—the daisy there on the table. It’s a sex organ of a plant. Its sole function is to attract insects to fertilize the plant. But it’s beautiful. It has symmetry, it has elegance. Why? Why couldn’t it just be an ugly little thing that exudes the right scent to attract the insect? You don’t know. I don’t know. My conclusion is, there are layers and layers and layers and layers of articulation and organization in this world that go far beyond anything that you and I can either perceive or understand.

  I finally got back to Boulder. My friends had arranged for me to get a one-year fellowship back there. Really, it was to get medical treatment. The doctor started me on a new antidepressant, medication that worked, and within three weeks, I was up and running again. I had been spared. That taught me that sometimes, even though things are so utterly black, you can be spared. Five years later, I was sitting in Quaker Meeting, meditating, and I asked myself: Why is it given to us, some of us, sometimes, to have to go through the deepest darkness? Is it a test? Is it a trial? Is it a punishment? All of a sudden, I got the answer. It’s a child’s answer, the kind of answer that only a kid would know: When you are in the deepest darkness you can best see light. It is a gift. This whole thing exploded in my brain: Hey, I’m an astronomer! If I want to go look for a galaxy at the twenty-third magnitude, so faint that it can only be seen with the largest telescopes, I don’t go out at noon, I go out in the deepest darkness. It’s in the darkness that if you can look in the right direction . . . Then I realized that in Quakerism we talk about God’s Light and our inner Light, that part of God’s Light is reflected in us at all times, but we have to follow this inner Light.

  In 1996, ten years later, I got cut by the other edge of the sword—not depression, but mania. It wasn’t just this benevolent mania where you become very energetic; I was in a really manic state. It’s the difference between a saber-toothed tiger and a house cat. The classic mania pulls your guts out. You’re doing stuff that is just off-the-wall crazy. I was spending money, I was having an affair, I was doing stuff that was professionally damaging—I was just totally out of character. There have been really manic people in the world. Look at van Gogh—he was bipolar. In the last year of his life, he painted two hundred masterpieces, almost one a day. He would work on ten or twenty at once, just to get the light right as he was working on them. William Blake. He’s as crazy as they come, man. He was off the wall. But he was crazy in a very intelligent way. Mozart was bipolar. When he was up, he could write a symphony in an afternoon; when he was down, he couldn’t write anything. He died wanting to finish his Requiem.

  In 1997, I was driving from Boulder to the Denver International Airport and I ran into the end of a guardrail. I ran smack-dab into the end of that guardrail going over eighty miles an hour. And I don’t remember anything—because when you get a traumatic brain injury, it’s gone. I was unconscious. People tell me you can still see a great big cross on the back of my head, where the scars are. Blood was pouring out of my head and arm. There were two people who came and found me. They did two things: they had a cell phone and they called the police, and they also bandaged up my arm to help contain the bleeding. Passersby. And then, apparently, they vanished. They were not there when the police came. My daughter says they were angels. What do I know? Maybe there are angels—I don’t know, you don’t know, nobody knows. All I know is that they called the police, the police got me to the hospital. I was there for maybe a week. They did MRIs, they determined yes, there was injury to the brain: there was blood on the frontal cortex, there was blood on the occipital lobe. But there was nothing life-threatening. I don’t remember any of this . . .

  Then my daughter moved me here into the Rehab Institute of Chicago. All of a sudden, for inexplicable reasons, I went into a deep coma, a psychotic coma. I was thrashing around constantly, I was screaming all the time, I was struggling to get out of bed. They had to tie me in. I was having all kinds of wild psychotic dreams. They said, “Your dad’s got encephalitis.” They took me to Northwestern and at their radiological center they did three sets of MRIs. They sent them back: no sign of encephalitis.

  The doctors were puzzled. My daughter had had five years of chemistry before she became a lawyer and so she started reading the medical literature. What she found is that I was showing all the classic signs of lithium toxicity. They had me on lithium to control the mania. I was taking it, but it had just stopped working—that happens. While they were feeding it to me, I was getting dehydrated, so the lithium level in my blood went up and up and up. She got a nurse to show her my chart. My lithium level was three times therapeutic and twice toxic. She convinced the doctors to stop the drip. Later a staffer told me, “At that point, your estimated time of arrival for the big airport in the sky was forty-eight hours.” So I was that close—forty-eight hours. I would have died . . . My daughter saved my life.

  The Rehab kept only minimal staff at night. My daughter was afraid I’d still try to get out of bed, fall on my head, and do more damage. So she hired Lydia to look after me at night. A big black woman from Bermuda. Lydia used to read to me every night before I went to sleep, just to put me off into dreamland. She would always start with Isaiah 43. It says: “I am Yahweh. I created you, Israel. I created you, Joseph. Fear not. I have redeemed you. You are mine.” She always used to emphasize that. “You are mine. I have called you by your name. And when you are in the water, you shall not drown. And when you cross the river, you shall not be swept away. And when you are in the fire, you shall not be burnt. And the flame shall not consume you. For I am with you.” So every night she would read that. It took me maybe a week to understand it. And longer to believe it. When I did
believe it—and I still do—I started getting well. This really pushed just the right buttons. I just said: OK, He says I am his, He’s called me by name, I will not be swept away by the river, and I’m not going to be consumed by the flame. So what the hell. I began to heal. [Laughs]

  You pop out of the womb and into this hostile world and you start crying, that’s it. That’s life. You’ve got it right up to the moment when death comes and the brain goes flat. That’s death. In between, there are things we call living and dying. Those are active words. They’re not nouns, they’re verbs. We make a choice: every moment of our life, we can either choose to live or to die. I know people like you, who are a lot older than I, who are so alive it’s unbelievable. And I know people who are thirty years younger than I who are dead. Death hasn’t come yet, but they gave up. It’s terrible to see . . .

  I have had psychotic experiences. When I was still detoxing from the lithium, I was wildly psychotic. I was convinced that I was in a hospital because I was mentally ill, not because of an accident. It was all hallucinatory. I’d hear people talking at night, trying to make a plan to overthrow the hospital administration. While I was totally out of my head, I had a series of psychotic dreams. They were like visions—horrible ones. One is burned into my memory: I was walking along in a place that was like a jungle. I saw in this clearing two gigantic figures that looked like pre-Columbian gods. They were running a big machine that had a great, big, old-fashioned hopper on top, taking things that looked for all the world like human brains, and throwing them. There would be a grinding sound and out the other end was coming something that looked like a gigantic white river of pus. I finally screwed up my courage and asked one of these guys, “Who are you and what are you doing?” This guy is awesome. He looks at me real fierce and says, “It is given to us to take the souls that have not made it beyond this point on their path to enlightenment, and to facilitate their reincarnation into a new soul.” I said, “What must a person do to avoid this particular stop on their path to enlightenment?” He said, “You must understand that there is only one human emotion that has any value whatsoever in this world.” I said, “Oh . . . what is that?” And he said, “Compassion.” At that point, the dream faded.

  I went to see a doctor in Albuquerque. I was getting suicidal again. At the end of 1997, my brain chemistry was so altered by taking Depakote instead of lithium that my old antidepressant failed. He said, “You’re in danger. You should go into the hospital tomorrow. It’s the best thing you can do.” I thought: Holy shit! If I do, that’s on my record: I’ve been hospitalized for mental illness, all this crap. I’m going to be working at Los Alamos, security problems. I don’t want that. Then I said: Hey—listen to yourself. You’re doing the same damn thing that you’ve told other people with this disorder not to do . . . You’re listening to the stigma. This illness is the most stigmatized illness in the world. So I said, “Screw it! I’m not going to be stigmatized. I’m going in the hospital.” And I did. Ten days later, I was released. The doctor said, “You’re OK now. We expect you in every day as an outpatient.” I showed up the first day. We’re sitting at a great big oval table, fifteen, twenty people. I recognized a lot of them from on the ward, people detoxing from alcohol, from drugs. There were some drug pushers there. There were some prostitutes there. There was one guy who was a Vietnam veteran suffering from extreme post-traumatic stress syndrome.

  I’m sitting there thinking: I’m a distinguished professor. What’s a nice boy like me doing in a place like this? I was being priggish. Then they started talking. These were the women who had been raped repeatedly by their fathers or their mother’s boyfriends or an uncle from practically the minute they were born—they became the prostitutes. And these were the boys who had been beaten repeatedly, within an inch of their life, by their fathers, their stepfathers, their mother’s boyfriends. These were the people whose lives had been destroyed when they were young—very, very young and helpless. I realized that this is where compassion comes in. This was the fulfillment of the dream. And then I said to myself: “You know what? This is just like a Quaker Meeting.” Because in a Quaker Meeting, people stand up and talk about their deepest spiritual and emotional experiences. And when they do that, they are standing naked spiritually and emotionally, in front of the Meeting, and asking for the compassion—not just of the Meeting but of God. So I said to myself: “You’re in a Quaker Meeting, behave accordingly.” I sat with those people for three weeks, I learned from them, and I taught them what little I could. It was quite an experience. That was a real healing experience—that was a big one. Out of the darkness has come the Light.

  These days, in the morning when I wake up, my cat is up on my chest purring. I open my eyes, it’s light out, and I say, “Hey, I got another one . . . and it’s a freebie.” Because I’ve already been dead four times. Twice by suicide I could’ve been dead. Twice as a result of the accident and then the coma. Four times. So what am I gonna do? I’m going to get up and I’m going to use the gifts that I have been given. They are very considerable gifts. I have a lot of intelligence, I have a lot of understanding now. Not really about people, but how what I do here locally does perturb the Universe. You put van Gogh in front of the canvas and he knows what he has been given to do. He doesn’t think about it—he just does it. You use the talents you’ve been given. And while you’re at it, you be as nice as you humanly can be to everyone around you. That’s the bottom line. My illness has become my greatest gift. My life has been touched by Grace. I know it.

  A View from the Bridge

  Hank Oettinger

  He is a retired printer. He spends most of his retirement days reading all sorts of magazines and newspapers and visits his favorite alehouses. His obsessive avocation has always been and still is writing letters to the editor. He has written thousands.

  MY GRANDFATHER Adam Oettinger fled Germany after the German liberal revolution failed in 1848; he settled in Wisconsin. They’re called the forty-eighters, and they were the basis of Wisconsin’s liberalism, up until the days of Joseph McCarthy. My grandmother was a member of a Catholic sect from Bavaria where the priest became disgusted with the pressures that were put on him by politicians—and he took his parish, congregation and all, and settled in St. Nasians, Wisconsin, close to Fond du Lac. He set up a Catholic-communist settlement. It became quite famous in Wisconsin history. One of the members of his congregation was my maternal grandfather. He was married, and they had five children—they settled in Peshtigo. My father was born in the last year of the Civil War. So I am a second-generation American.

  My family consisted of eleven children—I’m number ten. The first four died in infancy from scarlet fever. The other seven were remarkable in their survival. I’m a good example of that because I am now eighty-eight years old. All seven and our parents survived until I was sixty-four years old. There was not a death in that family. My mother died at the age of ninety-six, and my father at eighty-eight. All the rest of the brothers and sisters were in their high seventies or eighties—a great survival rate. I have never had any disease except mumps when I was maybe six or seven years old. Never had any major operations in my whole life. Believe it or not, I was never vaccinated. I probably picked up immunity from my older brothers and sisters who probably had some of those diseases. I don’t have any troubles physically. I’m drinking my beers every day at the Old Town Ale House and Billy Goat’s and sleep well.

  But there’s one thing: I can feel the approach of Alehauser’s disease—that’s my name for it. I can see that it’s starting. The loss of certain memories that were usually so clear, fast, in my mind. But nothing to worry about. There was only one case of Alzheimer’s in my family, and that was my father. In those days they called it the “insanity of the aged.”

  I was brought up a very strict Catholic in a German Catholic family. My father had the job for years of ringing the church bell for Angelus at six in the morning and six at night in the little town of Crandon, Wisconsin, way, way
up. He would oversleep too often, but Father Schmidt didn’t care about the morning Angelus anyway. Eventually, my father got confused and sometimes he would ring the Angelus at four-thirty in the afternoon . . . [Laughs] My mother had me pegged for the priesthood. From the time I could talk she taught me the responses for serving Mass. I was so religious I even set up a little altar with a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and said my night prayers before I went to sleep. I was disgustingly religious.

  In 1926, when I was fourteen years old, I started at the printer’s trade on the weekly newspaper. Started out setting type by hand before I got a Linotype. About two years after that, here I’m still strict Catholic, an old German printer by the delicious name of Engelbert Schimmelvennick would talk to me and give me hints. One day I mentioned that I was going to go to communion, and he says, “Oh, you’re going to practice theophagy.” I said, “What are you saying?” He says: “God-eating. It’s very common in many ancient religions, they eat their gods or symbols of their gods. You’re practicing theophagy.” So that started me. Then he would give the other examples. He had me going—and he recommended readings.

  In high school, I am the champion orator. I win contests all over. It comes time for the contest and the principal says, “Well, Henry, have you chosen a subject for your speech this year?” I said, “Yes, I’m very interested in Robert Ingersoll.” “What?!” [Laughs] Ingersoll was an atheist. I think one of his sayings was an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions. I wanted to make up my speech from the writings of Robert Ingersoll. The principal says, “That damned atheist! No, no, no, no—that won’t do.” So I gave up the idea.