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Mental Health
Spring
This is what my mother, in the end, couldn’t bear: the forward rush of possibility, the hum of new life buzzing in the air as winter opens to spring. Surrounded by such sweet promise, she felt as empty as a footprint pressed in dried mud.
February 2000January 2000
Fear is nearby. God seems impossibly distant. Fear comforts me in a voice that’s so familiar. God’s voice comes to me as the barest whisper. I’m rarely quiet enough to hear it.
January 2000Windows
Moonies, congealing gravy, calls of the sandhill cranes across the river
November 1999The End Of The Line
A jumper on the Bay Bridge, a last Christmas present, a drink of water
October 1999A Dog Named Hopi
I tried to tell myself that he only wanted to rape me. I thought of all the women down through the ages who had been raped and silently asked for their help. I asked their spirits to hover over us and lighten the dark corners of this man’s mind.
August 1999Wild Things
Several years ago, I began working as a patient simulator, helping third-year medical students learn to recognize the psychological problems that sometimes underlie patients’ symptoms. I applied for the job on a dare.
July 1999Distance
Rain pounded on the train-station roof like kettle-drums. We were the only two foreigners in the waiting area, and faces turned each time we spoke, watching and listening. But this didn’t bother us. We had been in China long enough now that we were immune. We could say anything in public, as long as we said it in English.
July 1999Photographs By Gary Walts
Gary Walts had many occasions to photograph his father, Aubrey Guy Walts, who supported a family of twelve by working as a machinist for the New Jersey National Guard. In particular, Gary documented his father’s deteriorating mental health over a two-year period in the mideighties. When Aubrey Walts took his own life in 1987, Gary filed away the undeveloped negatives and didn’t retrieve them until ten years later, after a colleague’s death brought back memories.
June 1999For No Good Reason
I remember clearly how it started. I was fifteen years old. It was the middle of winter, the house hazy and yellowish with dry furnace heat. I had eaten a Lean Cuisine lasagna dinner — a dish that had fewer than four hundred calories (good for me) and required no preparation (good for my mother) — and gone upstairs to my room to finish my homework.
May 1999
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