Personal Resources I Brung to the Fray

Being a curious individual, I've thought some about why this illness may have chosen me. In recent years there's been a theory afoot that those contracting illnesses have in some way brought the misfortune upon themselves. This is not a view one often hears espoused by the ill. This contention seems both scientifically unsupportable and rather mean spirited. We are after all, awash in bugs, opportunistic viruses, contaminants and harmful environmental toxins. These agents seem quite democratic in their choice of hosts. It does, however, seem reasonable to assume that how you lead your life matters. You can make yourself an easy mark or you can make that vermin work to get a foothold. I have a lingering suspicion that I am complicate in my unhealthy circumstances. Sickness, Hippocrates believed, was a sign that nature had gone off course because of physical or a mental imbalance. The surest road to health, he advised, was through moderation and harmony. Aristotle's "Golden Mean" likewise stressed the importance of living a life of balance and temperance. Such counsel seems an eminently reasonable guide to maximizing one's odds. It's mysterious how such sage advice can be incomprehensible at twenty-five yet patently obvious at fifty-five.

I hadn't sprung fully formed into a forty-five-year-old man with MS. I had a history and one that Aristotle and his buddies might have thought predictive. I feel that the reader is entitled to a short synopsis of the earlier years. I am, I should say, extremely uncomfortable in foisting this upon you. My personal story is, I regret to acknowledge, the ignoble account of a life lived haphazardly. The details are not particularly novel, nor particularly interesting, but they do have a bearing on my perspective regarding later events. Perhaps if we try to think of it as an anonymous "case study," one illustrative of certain human foibles characteristic of a certain point in time we can get through it without undo embarrassment. And readers, should I later paint an overly sympathetic picture of myself, as I'm want to do, you will have something with which to balance your view.

I was by anyone's standards a very bad child. How bad you ask? Suffice to say that I was one of the very few kids who smoked at recess. So bad that my parents, reasonable people in most respects, were obliged on not one, but two occasions to load me in the car and drive me to what they claimed was the state reform school. As we drove into the long circular drive toward the imposing brick building I would repent in earnest and they would relent.

It's difficult to imagine how I drifted as far afield as I did. I grew up in an intact, imperfect family with two parents who were, I'm sure, fond of me. I wasn't traumatized in any way that might provide clues. I can only surmise that I was born with very prominent troublesome genes and a difficult temperament. As could have been predicted, my teen years went very badly. My preferred adolescent pastime was sitting alone in the pine forest with a six pack of malt liquor. I suspect that I was a full-blown alcoholic by the time I was sixteen.

Despite having shown earlier academic promise, I was expelled from high school. In a sum, I was the source of unrelenting disappointment and heartache to my dear mother. To compound matters further, the "sixties" were arguably the worsts of times for someone like myself to arrive at young adulthood. If you tended toward alienation, or were drawn toward the dark underbelly of life, the events of the day provided limitless opportunity. I was a part of that huge bulge on the population curve that came of age during the moral and physical squalor of the Vietnam War. We were, I suppose, all dealing with the predictable developmental issues of growing up and separating from our families of origin. The war, and the adult world that had fermented it, provided the perfect foil. There were so many of us that we came to occupy a mutually supportive, parallel universe. In this universe moderation was not a virtue. This heady brew, and the war that gave it focus was the most consuming reality of my young adulthood. I lingered there far longer than was wise. Way too long.

Perhaps those of you who have been on the planet for a while have had a similar sense that earlier parts of your life were lived by someone else. Or, maybe, like me, you've just wished that had been the case. This isn't so far fetched. The British philosopher John Locke argued that it is consciousness, not the physical body that defines the person. A person, he believed is defined by his conscious awareness of the present moment and the past actions that can be reflected upon by that consciousness. Should a man lose memory of parts of his life, should his present consciousness no longer embody the consciousness of past actions he could not be presumed to be the same person. I like this argument a lot. It's possible that a merciful God gave persons like myself the gift of the long running blackout so that we could continue to live with ourselves. "I'm aghast that you would deign me capable of such a thing" I sincerely contended time and again in those innocent days before the video camera. The entrepreneur who devises a method of inducing selective amnesia will most assuredly find a ready market.

I've come to think of the years comprising my twenties and early thirties as the BC years. That's before Carroll. And like the BC of old, a reliable chronicler of the time is hard to find. I was thirty three when I met Carroll. She was twenty-three. We'd both been living our lives with imprudent abandon. I, however had gotten started a good deal earlier than she, and I had those additional ten years to accrue consequences. On a good day I could still feign normalcy, but my bad days were gaining momentum. I'd discovered early that University communities were the best places to take refuge if you'd chosen a self-destructive path. Since the price of admission was adopting the mantle of the scholar, I'd stayed on for two degrees.

When Carroll and I met, I was employed as the Director of Milwaukee's first homeless shelter. We're now largely impervious to the homeless among us, but twenty five years ago their existence still shocked people. The throngs of people huddled around Milwaukee's sidewalk heating vents had become a civic embarrassment. The religious community wanted to help them and elected officials wanted them out of the public's sight. It's somewhat ironic that this coalition chose me to head up this effort in that I was only a short step removed from that state of affairs myself. I spent several months getting the shelter up and running and, thinking it unwise to stay anywhere for very long, had decided it was time to move on. I met Carroll because she worked as the assistant to the woman who had been hired to succeed me as the Director of the shelter.

It's not uncommon for those in the public light to be outed by the media for some pattern of tawdry personal behavior. These disclosures usually involve drugs, sex, ill-gotten money or a combination thereof. Before they are permitted to reclaim their place at the trough, the implicated are obliged to offer up a public and convincing act of contrition. We generally hear that their indiscretions, though lamentable, were a necessary ordeal en route to their current redemption. Some of the redeemed force us to suffer through their proudly seamy confessionals multiple times.

Despite my distaste for such accounts, I'm afraid I'm going to have to inflict a bit of the same. I don't think I'm being overly dramatic when I say that my life, or more accurately the half life that I was living before I met Carroll had gone completely to hell. The previous seventeen or eighteen years had been characterized by wretched excess of every conceivable stripe. I had become a person whose company pretty much filled me with revulsion. Mercifully, my memory of much of this is poor. Though the details are foggy, the emotion attendant to events remains all too accessible. It's a deep sense of shame.

It's my belief, born of experience, that if you tenaciously persist in the abuse of mood altering substances long enough you will succeed in extinguishing your essential decency. Such a fate seems to me far worse than the myriad of physical health problems that may not show up until years later. I think this was the precipice I teetered on when I encountered Carroll. It was at about this time that I had the good fortune of falling down drunk in a tavern parking lot and breaking up my face pretty. Maybe the fall jarred loose some vestige of my long absent sensibilities. Reflecting on my broken countenance the next day I concluded that enough was enough. I needed to check myself in somewhere, anywhere. At that time Minneapolis was to the chemical dependent what the city of Alexandria had been to the scholars of antiquity. It was the seat of rummy knowledge. I was privilege to be afforded an extended stay at one of their better regarded guests' facilities, St, Mary's Hospital. I'd matriculated in a couple of decent institutions of higher learning but I consider St. Mary's Hospital to be my true alma mater.