Need

I couldn’t pay for my health insurance. I had already missed my payment for the month before. I would lose my health insurance, and with it I would lose access to the pills that make my mind work right.

It had been a bad two years financially. The law firm that my brother and I had started was struggling. I had blown through the small inheritance from my father. I probably hadn’t needed all of those vacations.

Clients were hard to come by. In San Bernardino, it seemed that anybody could get a free public defender. Few criminal defendants could hire a lawyer that they had to pay for or thought that it paid to hire one when they could get one for free. The prosecutor who did the misdemeanor plea-bargaining in the downtown courthouse said that even doctors were getting public defenders.

Maybe they had had a couple of years like I had had.

So I lay on my bed staring up at the ceiling in the dark. I could barely make out the contours of the ceiling from faint light coming though my window.

1. Remembering the past, fearing the future.

There had been a time when I deliberately had not taken the medicine prescribed for my mind. This was after many hospital commitments had taught me that my brain didn’t work well without chemical help. But I had decided that I didn’t need the pills. I don’t now remember why. Maybe I thought that I’d outgrown paranoid schizophrenia.

For a few months after I stopped taking the pills, everything was normal. But then it seemed to me that people were acting strangely. Then I deduced that they were accusing me of crimes that I hadn’t committed. My persecutors would be in one place; then I would drive somewhere else, and they would be there, too.

I was afraid in that time of renewed paranoia, but my memory worked fine. I knew that what I was then experiencing tracked my past experiences. I could trace the future through the past. First, there was a local conspiracy. Then it would become state-wide; it would become nation-wide; it would become world-wide.

As the supposed conspiracy grew outward, it would also draw close. At first, it would be driven by strangers. Then I would discover that people I knew were part of it – even friends, even family, finally everybody.

I would flee and find no place of safety. Then I would hear voices. I would see visions. They would seek to cut me with my own blade.

Even though the conspiracy seemed as real as anything I had known, I thought of the pills. There seemed to be no harm in going back to them. Maybe, I thought, they would help.

The pills ended the conspiracy like walking out of a theater leaves a frightening movie behind.

So in my right mind, on my bed looking at the ceiling, I dreaded the prospect of losing access to my medicine. It was like a death sentence. But I wouldn’t know ahead of time the day when the guards would come for me, and, unlike a prisoner, I could flee from them across the landscape – in my car until I could not get gas, and then on foot until the executioners caught up with me.

That was a time when I believed that God had rejected me and would not change his mind. I won’t go into detail about that. But in that state of mind, I didn’t have even a faint hope of heaven to cling to.

2. The solution.

In the morning, I did something that I didn’t want to do. I was helping a relative with his son’s legal problem. It had required hours of work and several trips to Los Angeles. He’d offered to pay me, but I don’t like charging relatives for legal work. But I decided that I had no choice. I e-mailed him and asked him for enough money to catch me up on my health-insurance premiums – two months worth. He quickly sent a check.

Problem solved.

Since then, finances have been up and down, but I’ve never since looked over the edge of the long drop like I did on that day. I hope that another day like that never comes.

3. What I learned.

I wish I could say that since then I’ve lived my life in a shrewdly frugal way, always in preparation for future money-droughts. I’m better than I was, but not as good as I need to be.

Over time, I’ve learned the virtue of a modest car and simple meals. I sometimes buy clothes at thrift stores. I bought a sports-coat at Goodwill. I wore it to a Christmas dinner, and my cousin’s husband complimented it by saying that he had one like it.

This learning continues. But disrupted cash-flow, when it comes, drives my thrift more effectively than habit. I suppose that this puts me out of the sympathy of the wise.

But my experience with need gives me more sympathy for those who struggle than I knew before my own hard times. And it makes me more grateful in good times. Remembering hard times makes me glad when I can contribute to the nation and the state. I’m proud to give money to my church.

Some time ago, I heard that a city was proposing to ban from their libraries people who smelled bad. They had the homeless in mind. Because of my past, I can relate to someone who stinks and seeks refuge from hardship in free literature. It could be me. Truth be told, nobody is further from that than from a catastrophe lying in wait. Nobody knows what illimitable mice might inexhaustibly nibble prosperity bare.