Perspective puts a new face on pain

Whenever I’m inclined to whine because something hurts, I stop to think about the people whose very lives hurt, and I realize how little I know of pain.

What started me on this path of thought recently began with two men I saw in a shopping crowd along Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. They were adults whose minds were locked in the child’s kingdom of Down syndrome. I was shuffling along nursing an aching back when they passed.

I watched them move through one store and then another, slow dancers in a bustling environment. They were following a woman who was obviously their caretaker, and sometimes they’d stop and stare at visions discernible only to themselves, fantasies shared by them alone. The older one smiled at what he saw and glanced back at it a second time, and then all three vanished in the crowd.

The glory was in their survival, and in the compassion of their caretaker. Beyond cure, they were still children of the sun, occupying their own space.

After that experience, I met Allen Wilkinson, a lawyer and author, who shared a fragment of his life with me, about crawling back from the horrifying darkness of mental illness.

Wilkinson was a recent law-school graduate when he joined the office of Melvin Belli, San Francisco’s legendary king of torts. He collaborated with Belli on the book “Everybody’s Guide to the Law” and wrote articles for legal journals on his own. Meanwhile, his marriage was falling apart and, seeking psychological help, he was told he was suffering from depression. He tried different drugs to lift his spirits, but nothing helped. The marriage ended in divorce and, as though fate was shoving him deliberately into an abyss, a good friend died. His life spun out of control.

Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, lithium and Ritalin either worsened his condition or did nothing to better it. His ability to function as a lawyer was fading. Episodes of agoraphobia kept him trapped in his apartment, terrified of the outdoors. Losing all color perception, he existed, literally, in shades of gray.

In an article for California Lawyer, Wilkinson wrote, “Depression dragged me down to the depths of unimaginable blackness, to a level of hell that Dante himself could not have imagined.” At one point, he placed the barrel of a gun in his mouth “and sat that way for 10 minutes, going over the reasons why I should or should not pull the trigger.”

After years of thinking he might never again be able to walk in the light, Wilkinson found the right combination of psychiatrist and chemicals. He’s back practicing law, consulting and writing. Like the two slow dancers, he endures from day to day, ever hoping that tomorrow will be better.

A woman I’ll call Mary feels the same. A person of amazing resilience, Mary has lived a life of despair from infancy, but she still sings of the future as though the sun will never set.

I’ve known her for years but only recently have come to realize how difficult it has been for her to simply survive. Born into poverty, she suffered from tuberculosis as a child, was raped twice as a teenager and married a man who beat her in the days when there seemed no escape from an abusive, alcoholic husband. She bore the beatings for 19 years for the sake of her two sons, even though there were times when she had to protect them too. She wrote me, “Few people know what it’s like to live with someone they’re afraid of.” Near the end of a violent marriage, her sons were protecting her.

Already damaged by life, Mary found it got even worse. Both sons died, one in an automobile accident, the other of cancer. She was devoted to them, remembering them as boys, their times at the beach, their camping trips, their long drives, their laughter. “The funny, happy times,” she calls them. And now, “there is no one to call me Mom.” Their absence has left a hole in her life that neither antidepressants nor psychiatrists can fill. “Tears,” she wrote, “are always just beneath the surface.” Yet, now, married to a man she calls “my rock,” she doesn’t fear the future. She will, she knows, be with her boys again someday.

What I celebrate today is not the despair of those who grace this column, but their willingness to march on, to see things we can’t see, to remember things we can’t imagine, to endure the unendurable. I think of them when I am wallowing in self-pity, and it makes me stand a little taller. They’re my heroes.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.