Take it from me, this bipolar thing can leave a jumbled pile of wreckage in its wake.  For me, it’s mostly about people.  Spouse.  Kids.  Relations.  Friends.

But let’s not forget the star of this little drama:  me.  Or, more specifically, the person suffering from the disorder.  I didn’t just cause the wreck.  I got all tangled up right in the center of it.

Remembrance Of Things Past

There’s no way I remember-or will ever even know-all the heartache that this condition occasioned to those around me.  And myself.  Especially since-and this is one of my favorite gags-“I’ve gotten to the age when I can hide my own Easter eggs.”  But even if I can’t remember all of it, I know there’s no shortage of heartache.

But there’s one incident that that has periodically come around in my memory, over and over, like an old LP record with a scratch in it.  (Is there anyone out there willing to show your age by admitting that you remember what LPs are?)

It’s about a guy named Binker Blanchet-at least that’s how I knew him so many years ago.  His real name is Dave.  Although he’s a year older than me, we were high school buddies.

What Couldn’t He Do?

When I think of Dave, the first thing that comes to mind is skiing.  He was grace personified on the snow.  The second?  A dry sense of humor.

We shared a backpacking tent one night just below the Continental Divide in the Colorado Rockies.  Between the bumps and the lumps, I couldn’t get comfortable.  “Man,” I said in  the dark, “this is an uncomfortable spot.  I think I wound up on a rock.”  “Here,” he offered, “would you like to borrow my hiking boots for a pillow?”

We spent three summers during college working in Colorado ski resort towns. First, clearing trails during the early days of Vail resort.  Then two in Winter Park, just over Berthoud Pass from Denver on US 40.  He worked for the US Forest Service.  I dug ditches for Slim Manley.  

After school, he joined the Forest Service in Alaska.  I quit digging-and didn’t really know what to do next.  Not long after Dave got to Anchorage, he climbed Denali-Mt McKinley, which, at 20,000 feet, is highest peak in North America.  He invited me on that trip; I couldn’t afford it.

At some point, he came to Denver to visit his mom.  Not long before, his father had died in an horrific boating accident that occurred while he was in Alaska visiting Dave.  While he was in town, Dave called suggesting that we get lunch.  We met at a restaurant-now long gone-that was just around the corner from my law office near downtown.

Food Poisoning

How the subject of abortion came up, I don’t know.  But I was probably the one who dragged it out; I was still militantly and self-righteously pro-life back then.  Anyway, by the time we left the place, we were both so upset that I was pretty well convinced that we’d probably never see one another again.

And except for that occasional, painful scratch on that part of my LP, nothing changed for decades.  Until, without warning, that “POP!” came around again this summer.  And, for some reason, I decided to do something about it.

I googled him in Anchorage and, sure enough, David J Blanchet, came up big as life.  No phone number-of course-but there was the address.  So, I resorted to that hideously outdated form of communication: pen and paper.  And cast my bread on the waters.  And, just as Ecclesiastes says, it came back to me-but in the form of a 21st century email.

Death Works Backwards

In the note’s second sentence, Dave said he didn’t even remember the argument.  And that there was no cause to apologize.  He sympathized with my struggles with bipolar, especially since he has suffered though bouts of depression himself.  And to think I’d been held captive for years by bitter memories and fears.

We’ve exchanged several more emails, filling each other in on our families, what we’d been doing, etc.  I got the phone number of a friend in common that I’d lost track of decades before.  A week or so later, when he’d returned from a mountaineering trip outside Anchorage, we spoke at length on the phone.

In his children’s fantasy book, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe C.S. Lewis, the famous Christian author and Oxford don, describes Christ’s sacrificial death and then resurrection as Death “working backwards.”

I suppose that every act of reconciliation on a human scale is a repetition, writ small, of that divine act of reconciliation that was writ so large, so long ago.  And I guess, for me, that means that I no longer need to dread this particular scratch on my LP coming around again when I least expect it.  And, to that extent at least, death has worked backwards.