The Pulitzer Prize winning play
Next to Normal tells a painful story. It portrays the tangle of mental illness, and loss. I went with two relatives who helped our family survive my mother's rocky years, and other people dealing with their own versions of not quite normalcy.
It felt awkward to have the audience be
small enough to rival the number of performers, yet they did not diminish the depth of their voices. We were enough of a reason to give generously.
One of the tender conversations that happened as we stopped for gourmet ice cream on the way home was with a friend who knew my parents peripherally. She was at a church camp with them many years ago, and witnessed them taking the sacrament of Holy Supper together. It felt especially poignant to her, and my father
found her afterwards to talk.
"That was very significant for us to be connected in worship tonight, because we have been desperately estranged for so long," he told her in confidence.
"I think I have been holding that memory all these years, until I could give it to their daughter," she mused. We hugged.
I picture my parents together in eternal life. The photographs of them in their later life, though,
don't resonate for me. Their shriveled bodies were like the husk around a sweet ear of corn, and were shed when they left this world behind. Like the couple in Next to Normal, they were separated in the end, yet felt hopeful.
"I don't have to be happy to be happy I'm alive," was one of the lines that stuck with me. Happiness was probably in short supply at the ends of my parents' lives. Dad was hobbled by an oxygen tank and emphysema. Mom was lonely and
weak with cancer. Yet they had memories like the one at church camp to hang on to, as a guiding light through the abyss of mental instability.
Now they are both alive... and happy.
