🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured.
A few months before my memoir Pathological comes out, my father calls mid-morning on Sunday. I answer and ask how he is.
“Well, not very good.” His voice has the strain of someone who’s more confused than in acute pain. He tells me that he hurt his back. He fell but doesn’t remember falling. All he knows is that he fell and hit his head because there’s a wound on his forehead.
My father doesn’t have pain—or doesn’t talk about it; he complains only of arthritis in his hands. Even then, he minimizes it, saying it’s not that bad.
“I’m not going to be able to meet for lunch.”
His voice is so apologetic it makes me tear up. Then a pit forms in my stomach, the guilt for the way I treated him during the twenty-five years I struggled with serious mental illness. We were often estranged, sometimes for long periods. Now that I’ve recovered, I look back on a lot of my life with regret, the feeling that I lost a quarter of it to psychiatry’s myths that the media and so many clinicians perpetuate (psychiatric conditions are biological, caused by a “chemical imbalance,” and lifelong). If only I’d known that none of these is true, I might have gotten well sooner. I might not have pushed my father away. I might not have become so hopeless I couldn’t live independently and was suicidal. That Sunday, I haven’t worked through the regret and grief that makes mental health recovery so hard.
I ask if he needs anything and I’ll miss seeing him. My stepmother is with him, so I don’t worry too much about him going through this alone. I tell him I love him.
“I love you too, hon.”
My chest surges with love, and the pit of regret hardens.
*
Hours later, he texts me. He’s in the ER. Immediate Care sent him there because his condition warranted more serious treatment. They’re going to keep him overnight for observation.
My sister calls. He actually fell yesterday. He’d been in the basement. Suddenly, he woke to find himself on the stairs, having fainted on his way back upstairs. He didn’t notice the gash on his forehead until a woman at the desk of his health club told him he was bleeding. Then, that Sunday morning, his back started to hurt.
The doctors diagnose him with bradycardia. His heart beats too slowly. A slow heart rate is typically a sign of good health. It’s the goal of exercise, meditation, and good sleep hygiene. But bradycardia is life-threatening. Not enough oxygen-rich blood pumps through the body. Undiagnosed, it can lead to cardiac arrest and death.
My father will have surgery the following day. The pacemaker will send electrical signals to his heart to make it beat faster. It’s a routine procedure. Minimal risks include infection, blood clots, and maybe a collapsed lung, but there are always risks.
That night, he texts. He says he doesn’t like being in the hospital. The next line practically breaks me: It’s lonely. I call and tell him I love him. He says he loves me too, his voice brittle and weak.
*
That night I start a gratitude practice, something I’ve never been drawn to. Gratitude can have a punitive ring to it: You better be grateful. But it will end up being pivotal to my recovery and continued mental health.
Although some authors claim that the research on gratitude points to its positive effects, the science of gratitude is still a nascent field. Even the University of California Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the country’s gratitude hub, readily admits that gratitude studies haven’t, for the most part, been replicable, meaning they’re more theory than proof.
Part of the problem is that researchers can’t agree on what gratitude is. Robert Emmons, professor of psychology at the University of California Davis and reigning authority on gratitude, wrote, “Gratitude has been conceptualized as an emotion, a virtue, a moral sentiment, a motive, a coping response, a skill, and an attitude. It is all of these and more.” Gratitude depends on the person experiencing it and the context, but Emmons and his colleague Michael McCullough define it as “recognizing that one has obtained a positive outcome” and “recognizing that there is an external source for this positive outcome.” The source is often thought of as a benefactor, but it doesn’t have to be a person; often, it’s God, the universe, fate, etc.
To read or listen to the complete Cured, choose the discounted annual subscription for $30—about the price of a hardcover book. Each purchase brings awareness to mental health recovery.
You can also gift ‘Cured’ to someone in need.