Manny,
I’m grateful to hear from you. Truly, I am.
I understand your reticence about reaching out to me, or to anyone, given the magnitude of the last few months for you. No doubt this hasn’t been an easy season.
I understand, to some extent, the pain that such feelings of loss, or rather (more specifically) a loss of control, can entail. You may be wary of those who offer you support or words of encouragement. Mental health is stigmatized in much of society, not just ethnic, religious, or political circles. My own father struggled with periods of intense swings of mania and depression that I remember clearly when I was a younger adult. It was something that I did not know how to handle then, and it took many years to learn to live with him and love him through all of the most difficult times.
I’m telling you this because I had to be by his side while he battled the final stages of a rare type of blood cancer, recurring on and off for the past four or so years. He finally passed a little over a month ago. Now that the dust has settled and the stream of calls, emails, and cards have slowed to a trickle, I can look to regaining some semblance of normalcy. Yet a genuine period of grief must follow, and distraction or medicating will not do. Our culture has largely forgotten how to mourn.
This week I’ve picked up Sufjan Steven’s latest album, Carrie and Lowell, released earlier this year on Asthmatic Kitty. In a series of mild, mostly acoustic, and spare songs, he unpacks and processes the loss of his own mother, passing away after a difficult life struggling with schizo-affective tendencies. The emotional climax of the album, for me, is the heartbreaking “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross,” where Stevens’ voice teeters on the edge of breaking, quietly recounting how his mother’s death launched him into drug use and despair.
It’s important to acknowledge when our programs for happiness come up short. In the face of such suffering, perhaps it is only right, even necessary, to exclaim “Fuck me, I’m falling apart,” as Stevens does at the song’s end. But the song points to a deeper reality than that. The Shade that the singer speaks of, for me, is the comfort that we seek to escape some sort of pain. When confronted with the reality of sin and evil, the Cross does not allow us to escape even death. In order to reach the Resurrection that Jesus shows, we have to experience death first. Jesus could not ascend to heaven without fulfilling his purpose. This is an archetype for all of humanity, and the transcendence of God eclipsing our broken spheres of influence. The Cross is not some brutal, petty settlement of debt that God “requires” to “satisfy His wrath.” What made sense to medieval sensibilities is rendered meaningless and unfulfilling in the face of tragedy like this. The meaning is redeemed in that, even at the pinnacle of our suffering, God shares in all of it. It is also, thankfully, not the end of the story.
I would gently invite you to consider your own path of healing as one to accept the small “death” of whatever programs you had put together for fulfillment. To consider taking your own life is, yes, an unfortunate product of chemical imbalance, but also an explicit acknowledgement that we cannot make it under our own steam. Our egos all need to “die” in some way.
It is up to you to see what emerges on the other side.
You are in my thoughts and prayers,
-Dr. Miller
the mixtape letters 