Mani ki Kahani

(I am cross-posting few parts from Baraka's recent post with permission. She left me speechless for many minutes in front of computer screen).

"...........Before my cousin Mani committed suicide in May, he was homeless for one period, in jail for another. He was the last person you’d expect either of, with two masters’ degrees from reputable Bay Area universities, a job at Sony, and a devoted wife and adoring son - all the stuff that is supposed to signal success and protect you from becoming one of the unwashed crazies on the street. But when his first mania struck at the age of 32, within weeks he had lost everything. As his mind boiled with fantasies and conspiracies, he spent his savings, lost his job and apartment, and then left his family, reputation, and sense of self-worth behind, never to be recovered. Two years later at the age of 34, after great suffering and consistently refusing to accept his condition or seek treatment, he shot himself in the head while his sick and aging parents slept in the next room............

I locked his memory away without allowing myself to grieve in May, too busy tending to a houseful of distraught women, including his wife, and to a frantic child, his son. Five months later it is still too painful to imagine his agony and isolation before he died, believing that we didn’t love him, that we were all against him. I still have all of his e-mails and the replies I sent him, unbearably harsh now in retrospect, because I didn’t understand that it was the disease speaking for him............His tragic death - and my role in contributing to it - showed me how serious a medical condition bipolar is; how imperative psychotherapy, medications and empathy are; and how deadly the consequences of not informing ourselves of the lethality of the disease proved to be. Lithium is as necessary as prayer.

For the first time since May, I find myself mentioning Mani in detail, here, and to her, because I hope that by speaking of his death, she - and others - might live.........I hope that he knows that I love him. But my mind recoils imagining that he does not know, and at someday having to answer his now five-year-old son when he asks me how and why his father was killed."


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