Rosemarie is back to the hospital, as of this past Thursday. For several weeks she'd been sliding into a hypomanic state – we refer to it as “taxiing down the runway, ready for takeoff.” Her previous episode, over the holidays, was a bottomless pit of depression; she spent Thanksgiving day in a hospital bed, catatonic: immobilized, speechless, unable to open her eyes to see her family at the bedside. Her only movement was to avoid the hand I reached out to touch her hand, to pull the blankets tighter around herself.
Hypomania, taxiing down the runway, is easier to take. With Rosemarie, it runs in short cycles of talkativeness, exhilaration. They would be happy times except for the warning signs: the mood swings are internally generated, none of them relate to any people or events in the world around her. She, and I, and our daughter Kate, have all learned to recognized the symptoms; but the exact progression of them is never the same twice, so we always end up blindsided.
These episodes, the depressive and the manic, have followed each other regularly now for the past four years.
The pain of them never fully subsides for either of us. I've grown numb to the enforced separation of our souls while Rosemarie is battling through one of them. At some moment during the onset, I have to switch from being present to her, to being present to a syndrome of discordant behaviors that are collectively only an imitation of her.
This has been going on for so long now that it's not easy, even in thought, to undo the numbness. When I do, I am overwhelmed with images from Dante's Inferno: Rosemarie, whose tenderness towards myself and towards our daughter Kate has been inexhaustible, is tortured for crimes she never committed, burned, whipped, forgiven, comforted – and then sentenced all over again in an unending Karmic cycle.
She comes back from each episode a slightly changed woman. No one suffers such torment passively. This is not a matter of merely adjusting a medication, or modifying the parameters of an ECT session. Against the shifting chemical tides of her own brain metabolism, Rosemarie conducts her own personal battles; and each battle takes something away, even from her victories.
3:35:59 PM 
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