Unconditional love

I am partial to listening to interviews when there is enough time given to really explore a life and get beyond the surface details. Thus, I found myself quite engrossed in the life of Carrie Fisher as I listened to her being interviewed over the period of an hour. She's a remarkably honest woman and she spoke of her drug taking and her diagnosis of manic depression. (She says she doesn't say 'bi-polar' because it says nothing about the condition whereas 'manic depression' does, not to mention the fact that 'bi polar' sounds like one is describing a gay polar bear.)

I listened carefully to the words she used to describe the condition and I made notes (of course!). She noted that there are two types of bi-polar, 1 and 11, and that one is more difficult to live with than the other. Whichever one is hers,(she wasn't sure) it is the more difficult variety. The least difficult of the two bi-polars is, she said, "more portable". You can take that variety to a party.

In her case she said that she felt that either "the tide is in" or "the tide is out". Either life is "all good" or you are "not insulated" and "everything hurts".

In the manic phase, you "go faster than everyone, even yourself" and "your thoughts get banked up". The two phases definitely did not have equal time, she said, although it was hard to tell since by the time she knew she was in a certain phase, she had probably already been there quite some time. As well, there is a third phase, she said, somewhere in between those two extremes.

Medication and shock treatment (ECT) were marvellous, she explained, but ECT was the best because it did quickly what medication does slowly. She encouraged her interviewer not to think of images like 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' because these days it was a very simple procedure and very much to her benefit.

She acknowledged that it did make her forgetful, mostly about what occurred recently rather than long term memories and she did sometimes find it hard to find the right word. Still, she was more than prepared to accept these side effects to receive the benefits.

When not properly medicated, bi-polar made her feel that she "wanted to give up"; not suicidal because she would never do that to her daughter, she said, but it was an indescribably dark place.

Rehab provided her with the funniest moments of her life. "You find your community." You find the other people who have it and it is a sort of gallows humour, she explained. Certainly, I related to finding "my community"!

I related to Carrie's story in other ways too. I was reminded that my father had shock treatment when I was a very small girl. We didn't talk about it back then but I remember him telling a close friend about it; that he lost some memory but that it was a good thing and helped him, and it would help his friend too.

I remember being that little girl and finding my father in bed one afternoon and asking him if I could help him. "Where's your mother?" he wanted to know. I went and found her for him.

In fact, my father did not have bi-polar or any such condition but had convinced himself that his doctors were lying to him and that he was about to die and this spun him into a depression that the shock therapy lifted. I don't remember him being manic or depressed, but I do remember him being rather obsessive and needing everything to be 'just as he wanted it'.

He checked the lock on the door many times; that sort of thing as well. That is an interesting trait to me because I inherited that need to double check things and I made note when my third child said to me last week that he did the same thing. In many cases, we can't change who we are so being loved unconditionally is vital. Anyways, who of us doesn't have some trait that is rather 'odd'?

I heard a documentary maker talk of Glenn Gould, the famous pianist and Canadian readers particularly would know of him. The documentary maker had unearthed much new material about his life and the interviewer asked if he felt sorry for Gould at all?

He did. He said he was a man who needed to have things done in a particular ways - a perfectionist - and that stopped him having the intimacy with others that he so craved. It didn't seem a good enough explanation, I thought at the time of hearing that, but perhaps it speaks to the huge judgements we make of those in our lives and our inability to embrace them for who they really are. It is a very sad thought to think that a man who gave so much beautiful music to the world was unable to receive the love he so obviously craved.

I think I went through life not entirely sure that I was able to give my father what he wanted in a daughter. I didn't speak the language of cricket or football and he didn't speak my language of books and thoughts and ideas. Horse racing was the hobby we shared and I have fond memories of many afternoons spent at racecourses across this State.

But, I knew that I never could never give him the succor that only my mother could provide, no matter how hard I tried. They were deeply, profoundly connected. When he was dying, my mother, who cared for him day and night was exhausted to the point of collapse and I took a plane back home to give her some respite. I sent her into town to get her hair cut and have a few hours to herself whilst I cared for my father but it became a clock watching afternoon.

"When will your mother be back?" he seemed to ask every five minutes.

I really felt quite redundant.

My father's inexhaustible quench to live kept him going long after the doctors had specified and eventually I needed to return to my young family, back across the sea. I would telephone him, of course, but he was always rather into his own world after that.

One afternoon, with kindergartners about the house, I had an urgent need to talk to him and I rang him at the hospice where he had been for only a couple of days. We talked in the way we did. He was deep in denial and the hospice was a sort of hotel in his mind and he said the service was very good.

At one point I could hear a nurse asking him to end the call for her to do something and he said he had to go. We said our goodbyes but something deep inside me told me that I was unlikely to hear his voice ever again and I held the phone to my ear, waiting for I don't know what. And I heard,

"That was my daughter calling me from America."

They were the last words I ever heard from his lips. On some level, he had known it was me reaching out to him and those final words meant more to me than I could ever say. We didn't say "I love you" but it was there - there in his voice; there in so many moments of our shared lives.

He had loved me unconditionally and I loved him unconditionally too: accepted his idiosyncrasies as he accepted mine.

As we grow older, I like to think that we grow softer: more ready to accept, less willing to judge. We all want the very same thing: to be loved just as we are.