FROM THE FASHIONABLE EAST SIDE TO IRELAND'S TREES OF LUNATICS, PATRICK TRACEY says he traveled a twisted road these past 25 years. Nonetheless, today his family memoir -- including stories of his mother, Mildred White, a Rhode Island and Massachusetts attorney, and his father, a well-known gambler and restaurateur, has been called by Slate online magazine "One of the Best of 2008."
He said, "Now that I'm back in New England, I'm still drawn back to Providence with the fondest of memories. In fact I was down there last week for a lunch at McFadden's, which was right around the corner from my old stomping grounds, the Met Cafe and the old Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel where we heard great bands like The Young Adults and Roomful of Blues."
Our talk drifted to Waterfire and, in an exchange about dreaminess and romance, lovers and marriage, his thoughts turned to pain and forgiveness. Here is an interview with Tracey whose words capture the essence of man devoted to his sisters' and determined to escape the captivity of schizophrenia.
Pain and forgiveness:
"You can never truly understand your pain," he says, "until you forgive it. I think most of us have always had it the other way around and, in fact, have had it backwards.
"I think most of us believe that if only we can figure it all out and grasp every facet of, say, a broken relationship or an unfair loss, then we will we find peace with it, come to terms with it. But maybe the truth is that we can never fully understand until we forgive. We can't hold out and decide to forgive it until we've got it all figured out. It doesn't seem to work that way. I learned the counter-intuitive lesson the hard way and it took a half a lifetime to get it."
Women who don't get it:
Tracey had talked with me about broken relationships and women who simply did not want to accept that he was both a confirmed bachelor and in his words, "not daddy material." He was concerned especially about the family history of schizophrenia, and how it might affect children if he were to have them. He also says he had a drinking problem that he was able to overcome seven years ago. But it was in searching the roots of his family illness that he learned acceptance and forgiveness.
Confronting the family illness:
"With the schizophrenia in my family (my two sisters, an uncle, a grandmother and its roots in Ireland), I went to Ireland to try to understand on an intellectual level this illness that is idiopathic, having no known cause or cure." Schizophrenia, a chronic and severe biological disorder of the brain, is characterized by auditory and visual hallucinations that can induce delusions, fear, immobilization, and agitation.
A book that saved his life:
"I truly felt that if I didn't figure this thing out once and for all, then I'd probably take up my old life again. But it didn't turn out that way. I got through Ireland without a drink and wound up writing a book that reveals the utter necessity of forgiveness for the deep sense of loss, for myself for the survivor guilt that can torment you, for the drinking that was a form of self laceration, for Ireland and the English who set in motion that famine conditions that fanned the flames of Irish madness, and for schizophrenia itself for taking two of my beautiful sisters away with the fairies.
"In that sense the book is a very public display of a man talking out his demons as he tools through Ireland in a camper van asking questions of doctors and folklorists and ordinary people who have the illness coursing through their bloodlines as it does in ours. But as I muse on it, it's the forgiveness that reveals itself slowly through the narrative. That's the way it feels to me, anyway, in re-reading my book."
Forgiveness, great and small:
"Not to put too fine a point on it, but this forgiveness stuff has been a great lesson in life that I am able to apply to all troubles, great and small. This notion that you can't understand something until you forgive it is a radical one, to be sure, because it also suggests that complexity may be a smokescreen. The intellectuals can't have that!
"I think a strong case can be made that forgiveness is the daily way out of over-thinking our problems. Don't you often feel that over-thinking can be a bit like overeating? It can just weigh us down. So even though it's this great abstract notion, forgiveness lightens the load in a very practical sense of putting resentments to bed."
Patrick now lives in on the North Shore of Boston, where he landed rather randomly. "But it's a nice little gem, right on the water and right next door to Kelly's Roast Beef!" he said. Patrick Tracey Op-Ed in Providence Journal
NB: Have you read -- Married men and Chick magnets or Year of the Cougar? They are still posted. Happiness/ RitaE
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