“Bonanno doesn’t pretend that smiling is a magical elixir or that laughing will cure the hardest-suffering patients. Grief isn’t a single track, he’s found, but a long private journey that splits along three rough paths. Ten percent of us experience ‘chronic’ and relentless grief that demands counseling. Another third or so plunges into deep sadness and gradually begins recovery. But most of us—’between 50 and 60 percent,’ Bonanno said—quickly appear to be fine, despite day-to-day fluctuations. Scientists used to consider these patients tragic actors, shoving their feelings into the core of their bodies, where they would only explode with volcanic violence in dreadful ways later in life. But this, Bonanno says, might be the biggest myth of all. ‘If you think you’re doing okay,’ he said, ‘then you’re doing okay.'”
“[Rockwell’s world] is a place of safety and security, and it’s a place where there can be problems but where problems have solutions and the solutions are often provided by the people who live next door to you; if not the girl next door, then maybe the old man next door, and a doctor will take time to hear you out and will not ask you for paperwork, and will not ask you who is paying your health insurance. It’s a world where Americans will stop and pause and listen to one another and basically take care of one another. It’s a very caring place.
“I see a lot of him in the paintings. I know a lot of people keep saying to me, oh, his life was so different from his art, but I see some of his alienation in the art. If we talk about the Thanksgiving picture, for instance, ‘Freedom from Want.’ It’s interesting to me that no one in that painting is looking at anyone else. … It’s toasty warm but it also, I think, raises questions about why none of the figures are connected to one another …”
The writer on losing his mother to cancer, and on the science of grieving:
My mom died on July 18, 2013, of pancreatic cancer, a subtle blade that slips into the host so imperceptibly that by the time a presence is felt, it is almost always too late. Living about 16 months after her diagnosis, she was “lucky,” at least by the new standards of the parallel universe of cancer world. We were all lucky and unlucky in this way. Having time to watch a loved one die is a gift that takes more than it gives.
Psychologists call this drawn out period “anticipatory grief.” Anticipating a loved one’s death is considered normal and healthy, but realistically, the only way to prepare for a death is to imagine it. I could not stop imagining it. I spent a year and a half writing my mother a goodbye letter in my head, where, in the private theater of my thoughts, she died a hundred times. In buses and movie theaters, on Connecticut Avenue and 5th Avenue, on crosswalks and sidewalks, on the DC metro and New York subway, I lost her, again and again. To suffer a loved one’s long death is not to experience a single traumatic blow, but to suffer a thousand little deaths, tiny pinpricks, each a shot of grief you hope will inoculate against the real thing.
An examination of Colorado’s mental health care system after the Aurora theater shooting. The state passed a $25 million initiative to restructure its crisis system for mentally ill patients, but still has a lot of work to do:
Colorado has underfunded mental health care for decades. Exactly how much is uncertain because there are at least 34 separate mental health line items in the state budget. “At the state Legislature, we cut provider rates for Medicaid and for drug and alcohol [programs] in 2002, when we had the downturn,” says Moe Keller, who spent 16 years in the state Legislature and is now the vice president of public policy and strategic initiatives at Mental Health America of Colorado , the local outpost of a national group that advocates for mental wellness reform. “We cut beds, and we closed a couple of units around the state. We never really re-funded that when the economy came back.” Then in 2008, the state again cut Medicaid providers and closed more units along with consolidating and reducing services. “Today, the prison system is by default the largest behavioral health center,” Keller says. “Police are the first responders.”
Health care workers are attempting to eradicate polio by penetrating remote areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan controlled by the Taliban:
Because all the Afghan polio cases in 2013 have been reported here in the eastern half of the country, these National Immunization Days have special importance in this region. As with the global campaign writ large, polio here has receded greatly over the past two decades but with serious setbacks along the way: Although cases dropped after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, an outbreak in 2011 brought 80 new cases and a general sense of emergency. And so the eradication program—which is government-run but supported financially by who and unicef —ordered a “surge” in Afghanistan. They doubled the international staff and cracked down on underperforming and corrupt officials. This year, the surge has paid a huge dividend, in that the war-torn south of the country, for a long time the greatest problem area, now appears to be free of the virus. It’s the inaccessible areas in the east, where Jalalabad is, that are now the main concern.
Our recent Longreads Member Pick, now free online: Gordon Grice’s devastating essay about the loss of a child:
That was my daily routine. Sometimes the woman I loved would come with me. I envied her. She seemed to know how to grieve. To let herself feel things, to take time. She wrote letters to our stillborn daughter. She ordered photographs from the hospital and put them in a scrapbook. She talked. Most of these activities were strange to me, though I clumsily tried to emulate her for the sake of my mental health. I wanted to have my private scene at the cemetery, unwitnessed, and be cured for good, or at least for a little while.
“Hoffman rolled up his sleeve and pressed the container—mesh side down—to the inside of his forearm. He felt a tickling sensation as the mosquitoes pricked his skin. Five minutes later, he removed the canister; an Army scientist examined the mosquitoes to confirm that each had sucked Hoffman’s blood. Five other volunteers did the same.
“For the next several days, Hoffman and the other volunteers bit their nails and hoped the vaccine would keep them healthy. (Those who come down with the disease are given drugs to kill the parasites.) By day ten, three volunteers were sick, but Hoffman and two others felt fine. Excitement began to swell; no injected malaria vaccine had come close to 50-percent protection—and this was its very first trial. ‘We thought we were going to win the Nobel Prize,’ Hoffman says.”
E.A. Mann is an engineer and freelance writer living in Warren, R.I.
I’ve read just about every issue of The New Yorker for the past seven years, and despite all of the big, important journalism I’ve read in those pages, this minor-key piece about a small town druggist has resonated deepest with me.
As readers, we bring our pre-conceived ideas of what an article will be, and I assumed that this character study would pull back its camera and end as a commentary on the state of healthcare in America. But its author, entranced by his subject, instead burrows deeply into Dr. Don’s outsized life in the lonely town of Nucla (population: 700 and falling), where the lonely landscape causes “wives [to] leave the passenger’s side empty and sit in the middle of the front seat, close enough to touch their husbands.” What the author ends up with is a haunting study on community, regret, and the essential mystery of other people.
Thanks to Longreads Members’ support (join us here), we’re able to bring you outstanding stories from publishers and writers around the world—including today’s Member Pick from This Land Press, which is doing some incredible work out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and whose story by Kiera Feldman, “Grace in Broken Arrow,” topped our Best of 2012 list.
Today’s story is “A Stiller Ground,” a devastating piece from Gordon Grice about the loss of a child. The story will be featured in an upcoming issue of This Land, and we’d like to thank them for sharing it early with Longreads Members. A brief excerpt is below.
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I walked in graveyards, gathering trash and fallen branches. I pulled weeds that obscured the names on old headstones, and when I was through, most of the names I’d revealed meant nothing to me. I took special care with the graves of children. I put the ceramic animal caricatures back on the stones they’d fallen off of. After a rain, I thumbed mud from the Lucite-covered photographs set in stones. I took the time to read a turn of the century marker made of crudely hand-lettered cement. On it was an asymmetric heart pieced from small stones. I subtracted compulsively: death year minus birth year equals age, give or take one.
I started, almost always, with the graves of my own ancestors and cousins. My mother’s mother, dead before I was born. Carved next to her name was my grandfather’s. He was still alive, though his name had been written in the city of the dead for thirty-four years. My cousin, a suicide at twenty-one. His epitaph declared his heart too big to last in this world. I read his stone with double vision: the disdain I’d always had for such sentiments; the tolerance I had now for anything, anything at all, to ease the pain. I walked along the rows, taking care of people past caring.
That was my daily routine. Sometimes the woman I loved would come with me. I envied her. She seemed to know how to grieve. To let herself feel things; to take time. She wrote letters to our stillborn daughter. She ordered photographs from the hospital and put them in a scrapbook. She talked. Most of these activities were strange to me, though I clumsily tried to emulate her for the sake of my mental health. I wanted to have my private scene at the cemetery, unwitnessed, and be cured for good, or at least for a little while.
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