Several times a month someone asks how I got to California. The questions startle me no matter how often they intrude. I usually say something funny, gesturing to my car and identifying it as the propelling vehicle. Or I shrug and suggest that they would have to pry me with a smokey single malt and promise to drive me home for safety before I’ll disclose the truth. They smile, nod, and acknowledge that they have such tales themselves, ones we keep secret unless liquor loosens our tongues.
Once in a great while, though, I give them a one-sentence truth: A devastating divorce; closing my law practice; selling my beloved Brookside bungalow; building a tiny house; heading west. The heads bob more quickly. They turn away with a sideways glance. Faces grow impassive and distant. Further conversation dies away.
That’s why I keep the story to myself.
Four days a week, I sit at a desk in someone else’s file room, writing trusts and wills using easy if frustrating software. With no California law license, I also have no genuine standing. Callers consider me slightly less important than a secretary. Never mind the forty-three years as a member in good standing of the Missouri Bar. Forget nearly six decades of political activism. Dismiss the published essays, the newspaper articles, the poems, the book — each with my name as the by-line or on the title page. I might as well be invisible, or absent, or a wall with dingy, peeling paint.
On the other three days, I stand behind the counter in a shop that I founded which sells local artwork. My mind wanders. People step through the door and I flash my Midwestern grin. I inquire after their names and home towns. With sweeping gestures, I explain the layout and answer their questions. When they ask which art is mine, I demure. I tell them that I write essays, but we’re out of my book. I feel the interest fade.
The other day, at the California lawyer’s office where I make a living, I felt myself grow light-headed as I studied a file. The client’s last name was the same as an old client of my firm in Kansas City. My heart pounded. Beads of sweat raised on my forehead as I remembered this man, a colleague of mine, a brother at the Bar.
Jim had hired me because his fractured mental health had taken a fierce hold on him. He found himself unable to effectively practice law, struggling with nightmares, anxiety, and tremors. He grew nervous and tense. The VA determined his condition to be service-connected and provided treatment, but he sank further and further into depression. I worked with him on a private disability policy that he had purchased, striving to prove that he qualified for payments. When we succeeded, he used the backpay to buy a house in another state, where he thought he could lead a simpler life.
On Thanksgiving afternoon shortly after Jim left Kansas City, my then-husband called for me to come into the room which he used as his office. I didn’t immediately respond. He repeated his summons, more urgently and louder. I excused myself from our guests and came to where he sat at our shared computer.
“Is this a client of yours, messaging you,” he asked, gesturing to the screen where a chat box window had opened. I read the type and realized that Jim was online from his new home on the east coast. His words terrified me. He had reached out to disclose that he had decided to end his life.
I can’t take it anymore, he explained. I don’t recognize myself. I was an attorney, a husband, a brother. I’ve lost all of that. But I wanted to thank you for everything. You never looked through me like I didn’t matter.
I ran to get a portable phone. I begged my husband to keep talking to Jim. I knew the town to which he had moved, and I got ahold of the sheriff there, while my husband typed sentence after sentence to my old friend and client at the other end of a cold messaging program. I summoned help, and waited for them to arrive at Jim’s faraway door. My husband leaned forward in his wheelchair at the keyboard, acknowledging the pain that Jim felt, telling Jim about his own downward spiral, urging him to persevere.
Jim did not die that day. Help got to him. He lived another eight years, moving to Florida to be near his sister. It was she who notified me of his death. I helped her with some paperwork, got her connected with a probate lawyer, and sent my sympathies. I did not think of him again until I picked up a file, a decade later, in somebody else’s law office, where I barely recognize myself most days.
I’m sitting at another keyboard now, thinking about Jim. I remember him as thin, haggard, unshaven, holding an unlit cigarette between two bony fingers. I see Dennis, my husband, in his electric wheelchair, hunched over a computer encouraging a man whom he had never met to hang on just a few more minutes. I hear his soft North Carolina voice telling a desperate person that life was worth living, while I stood a few feet away listening through the telephone receiver for the reassuring voice of an emergency call-taker.
Both of those men are gone now. But I hold their memories in my heart, even if their spirits lie motionless and silent until something reminds me of their faces. Two damaged souls, strangers to each other, trading words across a virtual wire. One longed to be free of the pain which gripped him. The other painstakingly pieced together phrase after phrased, hoping to keep the connection between them alive. I can see them even now, and will keep them in my heart like that forever.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
The Missouri Mugwump®
In Loving Memory
James E. O**** [Name withheld for privacy]
08/27/1955 – 05/03/2017
Dennis R. Lisenby
03/13/1951 – 07/11/2024
GONE BUT ALWAYS REMEMBERED