Friday, July 31, 2009

Sons and Daughters.


I have a great capacity towards self indulgence. The center of the universe is about two inches left of my couch. Occasionally I'm hurled into awareness. A friend's adult daughter is missing. A woman in her late thirties with over a decade's history of schizophrenia. She left Oklahoma and has puts thousands of miles on the family car driving in and out of New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and Kansas. Her gas card has well over a thousand dollars in charges from the last two weeks. Somewhere along the line she shaved her head. Last seen in Burlington Colorado, the sheriff's department put her up in a motel after she was evaluated as neither a danger to herself or society. On foot, now, she was gone the next morning.

Tomorrow family will leave Oklahoma and head for Burlington. Her father and her ex husband will travel together, pick up the vehicle she'd been driving and hopefully find and coerce her into coming home. Her sixteen year old daughter and mother are cleaning her house and waiting.

I don't know the lesson in this. I suspect it's that the connections between people must be present through marriage and through divorce. That the people you see mumbling and looking a little crazy, they're our daughters, mothers, sisters, wives, neighbors. That something as simple as taking your meds...isn't simple. Toss in a big pile of grateful. (There but for the grace of .....) Kindness to strangers. etc. etc. etc.

For me---I'll be making beads tonight. Riding my bike. And hugging the ex husband before he goes off looking for his daughter's mother. The woman he loved through a difficult marriage and still loves. Thankful for his big heart. And hoping she will be found.

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