My darling Janie aka Beth Lindsey, Lamden

My former psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, the late Beth Lindsey, MD, reincarnated into Lamden, a Buddhist nun, at the Manjushri Centre in England.

During the nearly 20 years of my bipolar disorder, I saw many psychiatrists, switching when I felt the need to move on.

I found this piece in one of my hundreds of disorganized writing documents, polished it off, and hope you'll enjoy it.

It's also in sync with my spiritual daughter Sarah's account of the 10-day visit of the Dalai Lama to Washington, DC. Read her report on the Huff Post.

JANIE, MY NEW PSYCHIATRIST

When my illness first came upon me, like a big black blanket with see-thru holes, I talked about it for seven straight years to anyone who would listen.

Even if they wouldn’t listen, I still talked.

I remember one time I talked to Sarah’s school counselor over the telephone. She was a fine woman with black hair, Jewish like me, name of Dody Magaziner. And I spoke to her from the dark kitchen where our beige phone hung on the wall.

I went on and on talking about manic depression and how they tied me up in the hospital and how they gave me an injection and I couldn’t think and I couldn’t pee and I could barely remember my name or who I was in love with and while we were talking I was looking out the window at the parking lot below as the cars came in and out and watching for the big yellow schoolbus that would bring my chiidren home.

Dody Magaziner interrupted and said, Someone’s knocking at my door, I’ve gotta go.

There were the fine psychiatrists I talked to who nodded their heads in time with my voice and said There there and each one served as a steppingstone while I crossed the wide river of manic depression.

I loved them all and wrote poems about some of them but the one I never talked about much was Maude Turner. For the record, that’s not her right name since I’m gonna tell you something shocking about her, but the rest of them – Glijanski and Edelstein and Larry – I made their names known to the public. But, Maude, well, let’s change her name once again, this time to something more youthful: I like Janie.

She was not a well-dressed woman. That was the first thing I noticed about her. She wore frumpy clothes and had a bit of fat around her jowls but that woman sure knew how to listen. I imagined when I sat there she had a red ribbon attached to her forehead and she swung it out to me and I attached it to mine and we would talk and listen talk and listen until the clock said it was time to go.

I knew nothing at all about this woman and didn’t even care. She was unconventional. Not only her frumpy clothes but at her office in the ritzy Benson East which towered like a chess piece over the other suburban buildings, she kept copies of the New England Journal of Medicine on the topmost shelf and had barley sugar candy in bowls sculpted by one of her patients.

She had me bring in poetry I wrote when I was 8 years old that held the secret to my diagnosis and she congratulated me on sending my daughter to Brown – you did that singlehandedly, she said, wagging her finger as she sat on the winged chair across from me.

It was only right, I said to her, me, a Temple grad, believing I had nothing to do with it.

After we dissected the secret in my poem, The Mull-a-ger-ing, there was no reason to keep on seeing her. I placed the last check for one hundred and ten dollars on her desk and left, wishing I could take a New England Journal of Medicine as a souvenir, or look out one last time at the view from the sixth floor.

Why she went to jail for not paying child support remains a mystery. But a bigger mystery lies beyond that. My friends Bev and Sheila called me. They were now seeing Janie as their therapist. Where had she gone? Why doesn’t she answer her phone calls? Why is her door locked?

My darling Jane had abandoned her patients. She had made me well. The red ribbon between us was curled up now invisible in my topmost drawer. But she abandoned everyone else. Beverly has finally returned to work as a county specialist in finding help for the homeless. Sheila moved to California where she tends lemon trees in her front yard and waits to kill herself after her mother dies.

And I go on too. More interested than ever in not talking about myself.

But there is an epitaph about Janie, which I discovered on the Internet a year ago.

Her real name is Beth Lindsey. While in jail, she read Buddhist literature. After her release, she began practicing again at the Benson East, now named The Colonnade, its offices infested with mice, I’m told on good authority.

All the while she was studying to become a Buddhist nun.

Sure enough, a Buddhist center in England drew her like a magnet, and our Beth sailed away, joined the Manjushri Centre and became the Buddhist nun “Lamden.”

Curiously, a few months after ordination, she was diagnosed with a virulent form of breast cancer. Despite treatment, this woman who helped so many people, yet broke others’ hearts into a million pieces, died on December 9, 2005, at age 53.

You know what? I think if she and I saw each other again, we would enfold each other in a cosmic hug, and I would feel the silk of her gown pressing against my skin.

Namaste.