Some days when my mother’s illness surprises even me and she screams and talks and calls out for twenty hours at a stretch I wonder about the fragility of the human mind, a collection of impulses and chemicals modern science is only just getting to grips with and about which it still lacks a good understanding. A foreign country filled with unimagined delights we find hard to interpret having no phrase book, but which rules us, defines who we are and in my mother’s case, who we were and to what extent we have trodden the off track roads too rough for anyone to willingly want to travel.
But I wonder also can people whose chemicals are not in imbalance claim any normality on a planet hurtling through new regions of space every second, wrapped in a bubble of atmosphere assaulted by radiation of many kinds every moment and now with bodies and minds saturated in our own chemical soups? Don’t we also mourn those we loved and lost, call for those who died when we were children in our own ways, wish some things had been different, wish with all our might some days were better than they had been, some decisions brighter than they turned out?
Isn’t my mother just shouting out what we all want to say, only like artists since the beginning of time, she has the guts to say it.