Mike's Story - Part 2

By Jenna Orkin

   One morning a few weeks after he'd settled in to my apartment in Brooklyn, Mike said, "Honey?  I'm having a hard time this morning."

   He was supposed to call his therapist but the prospect was causing him such anxiety, he broke down in tears.  I comforted him until the storm abated - at which point he said, "Would you make me breakfast?"

   Is that what this was about?  An appeal for pity so I'd make him breakfast?  

   "Why?" I asked suspiciously.  I provided the first B of B&B since he was otherwise homeless, and the ingredients for the second since he was living on donations from his long-time followers.  But why in God's name should I have to make it?  Was he seeing how much he could get away with?     

   Mike's lifeline was honesty.  A legacy of AA, it was what had bought him his sobriety from which flowed his connection to other people, their affection and help, his sense of belonging, his credibility, his integrity.

   "I want to feel taken care of," he said, but it was not so much an explanation as an admission.  The question had brought him up short and he was retreating with the grace that marked his many apologies, both public and private.

   We sat down with our respective breakfasts, obtained by our respective selves.

   "How does it feel to be taken care of?" I continued, veteran analysand that I am.

   "Loved.  Indulged.  Worthy."

   Indulged.  Exactly.

   "Those feelings may come more readily to those of us whose birth was not met ambivalently by our parents," I commented.

   "My parents weren't ambivalent about me; they wanted me.  My father did, anyway.  My mother may have wanted me in order to please him."

   On another occasion, Mike had said that he believed his mother married his father in order to escape her own father.

   "They'd tried for a long time to have a child," he went on now.  "I was two months premature.  My mother spent the two months before that in bed.

   'I was pronounced dead at birth.  I cried on the way to the morgue."

   It was my turn to cry now.

   "Who are you crying for?" Mike asked.

   "Your mother...  I don't know."  I believe that in addition to losing a baby before Mike, she also lost one after him.

   "I met the doctor who delivered me when I was twenty-five.

   'He remembered it.  I had no pulse.  I was blue.  They tried to get my heart going.  Then he handed me over to the nurse and I cried."
   As he put his dishes in the dishwasher he continued, "Some spiritual people have said I'm a take-over, a soul waiting for a body to enter."

   Perhaps it was this entry into the world, or at least his awareness of it, that accounted for his upset when we once happened upon a news article about terminally ill newborns.

In light of these beginnings, read Mike's last Facebook post:

I pray to all things seen and unseen, known and unknown, for we are all One.

The prophecies are being fulfilled. The hour of birth is at hand. The waters break and rend. There is blood. There are screams of pain. There is death and much anxiety in the air. Things look very bad for our Mother and all of her children.

The Truth awaits just on the other side of the ever dissolving veil where all the screaming and the mess is going on. The Truth opens its arms wide to lovingly receive the newborn and to comfort it.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” The Truth exclaims.

I am your scout and this is my report.

Mitakuye Oyasin. [Lakota for, "We are all related" - JO] 

Jenna Orkin is the author of The Moron's Guide to Global Collapse