When Life Attacks!

One thing anyone who writes has to endure is reality.  This week I've had a lot of that.  I had an ear infection that left me deaf but has cleared up.  My wife Nancy, however, had some swelling in her legs, which it turns out was caused by blood-clots.  She's already endured a broken elbow and bronchitis since the end of November.  Naturally that's not all--our 16-year-old cat Pyewacket had six ounces of fluid drained from around her heart.  Turns out it contained some cancer cells, so needless to say there is little to do.  Besides her age, another reason is vets do not do chest surgery on cats.

Why do I mention this? Because all these events  directly and indirectly affect my writing.  This is probably true for all writers, but certainly true for good writers.  At some point I'm sure I'll incorporate every bit of this in something I'll write.  Everything in my life is certainly grist for the mill.  Sometimes, however, you have to think a bit about it, let it age, let the painful aspects grow more emotionally distant.

I've considered doing just that in writing a novel about my first wife.  Vicki was an incredible woman, who traveled across Europe, most of Asia Minor (including Iran and Afghanistan with a hashish smuggler) and the Indian subcontinent, as well as Thailand and Taiwan.  She became a practicing Tibetan Buddhist and was even blessed by the Dalai Lama.

She was, however, also bipolar, with schizoid affect, and had had several episodes starting in college.  The illness was probably genetic as her sister, her mother, and grandfather all had been diagnosed with the illness.  Only Vicki's version seems to have been much worse.  She could be energetic, brilliant, and aggressively sexual on the highs, but depressed and eventually suicidal on the down side.

I'll say that I adored her.  She was sexy older woman in my life. (She was eight years older than me.)  We did things I'd only read about in sleazy novels.   But in 1984, both my father and her father died. In the next year her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  I don't think she could cope.  Two or three times in the following year she tried to kill herself with pills and alcohol, but I always came home from work before she succeeded. But at some point the voices in her head told her to go to India and she left me.  During that period I met Nancy, but barely a few months into our relationship I received a phone call from Vicki in which she told me the voices in her head said I was lonely and she had to return to Oklahoma.

So I broke off my relationship with Nancy, and tried to make a go off it with Vicki.  Then one day she was gone and the day after I got a call at work that she was in a Tulsa hospital.  She had checked into the Doubletree Hotel in Tulsa, about ninety minutes away and attempted suicide.  She had failed.  I drove up to get her, took her to the psych ward at St. Anthony's hospital in OKC where her psychiatrist was on staff,  then went home and called Nancy.  The next day I filed for divorce.

Eventually Vicki's psychiatrist managed to get her into a program in New Haven, Conn. (not associated with Yale) and she went there, worked briefly for mystical self-help guru Bernie Siegel and then went off to Thailand, seeking enlightenment I suppose.  By then Nancy and I had been living together and then were married.

Did that have an effect on Vicki?  I don't know. Perhaps.  I just know that I had a good idea she would kill herself and her brother-in-law would call to tell me.  In May 1991, that's exactly what happened.
So it's been over twenty years and only now have I even begun to think about writing a novel with her as the protagonist.  (She does make an appearance in my forthcoming sf novel The Gonaymne Weapon where she's the insane wife of the main antagonist.)

So just other day I found a copy of Jason Elliot's An Unexpected Light, about his travels in Afghanistan in the 1990s and I realized it was about time to tell Vicki's story, although admittedly in a fantasy style.  I'm not sure people would think she's believable in any other fashion.  I just know it's time.  In fact, I don't think I could have written this piece until now.

So I write in part to deal with my past, realizing I'm the sort of person who needs to forgive and to understand rather than someone who writes in anger and fury.  That's true even if it takes two decades to realize it.

(copyright 2012 by Nigel Sellars)