Steve's grandfather is dying. Of course he and Sarah and Sean had to go, but it's a long trip, raising the specter of sleep deprivation, challenging childcare, disrupted schedules, and possibly missed medication doses. Sarah's health has seemed a bit vulnerable lately--her doctors want to change her meds but they're not sure yet how--and she was concerned that the trip might trigger a relapse.
For a while she considered just not going, but she's close to the grandfather, too. The candidates' group discussed the matter (it's really the first time we've functioned as a real-world problem-solving body, not a college class) and decided that Sarah should go, but that one of us should go, too. That way, Steve could focus on making sure his wife ate and slept and took her pills on time while someone else entertained Sean and kept the boy fed, hydrated, and in clean diapers.
Somehow, I was chosen.
So I cleared my schedule, and got on a bus--and I stayed on that bus, or inside one or another bus terminal, for almost three days.
You'd think that inside Bus World, as I came to think of it, would be the most prosaic, least magical place imaginable. Buses are dirty, most bus stations are worse, most of the people one meets in that world are crabby, and basically you're all hurtling across America in a fossil-fuel-powered, air-conditioned box while surviving on fast food purchased at truck stops. It is a world of strangers, most of whom have probably never heard of sustainability or magic or deliberate communities founded on kindness and wonder. And yet, on our last night on the bus, while Steve and Sarah slept leaning on each other and Sean slept cuddled in my lap, the man sitting next to me started talking.
He told me this long story, beginning with the fact that he had once had a wife who also had schizophrenia, and that they had both known she couldn't handle the stress of living closely with someone (why not? Sarah seems to draw strength from living with Steve--but of course I did not ask), but they had married anyway because they loved each other and wanted to honor that love while they could. And a year later, still loving each other, they divorced so she could seek the solitude she needed.
The story went on from there. Much of it was convoluted, and most of it was sad. Some of it involved guilt, shame, and uncertainty. But the man seemed to need to talk, and so I listened. Finally, as dawn started to color a world that had got flat and agricultural and arid over night, he slept.
I felt as though I had been treated like a priest. And I suppose I had been.
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