I was my own Judge and Jury
By Robert B. Dillaber, former Board Member of Oakland Community Health Network
I have never written about this side of my story before, even though it happened 42 years ago, and I have written much about this story since then. So here goes.
In 1977 my life was wonderful. I had just married the absolute love of my life, all three of my young children had come to live with me, I had a great job, a cozy little house on a friendly street and the first ever feeling that I had found the meaning and purpose of one’s life. Then, just four years later in 1981, the love of my life left without warning, my company went bankrupt, I had no money and my then 12 year old son had slipped out the window sometime in the dead of the night with money from my wallet and keys to my brand new, beloved Firemist Grey Buick Riviera which was given to me as a bonus by my company for a job well done.
He, too, vanished like my beloved wife had just done. Days passed in anguish, knowing nothing. On the fourth day the phone rang. It was the police from somewhere in Kentucky where they held my 12-year-old son in jail after arresting him trying to break into a warehouse in the dead of night. They caught him and the hitchhiker he had picked up somewhere along the way in a different car. One he had stolen when mine ran out of gas somewhere in the city of Indianapolis. With a borrowed car I traveled to Kentucky and retrieved my 12-year-old son. Then somehow, I found my abandoned and now vandalized Buick Riviera and arranged for it to be transported back home.
Upon returning home, to a place where half the furniture, dishes, linens, and closet hangers were gone, any sense of meaning was also gone. As though it had never existed in the first place.
Perhaps I was searching for it when I shortly thereafter set out on an unplanned road trip with the vague idea of California spinning in my mind. The car drove and drove and drove itself. Desperate nights spent in some desert, looking for a place for it all to be over. The car slowly returned to its journey and continued on and on until it was finally stopped by the Pacific Ocean. I could go no further. My tank was empty. Somehow, I stumbled to the solitary phone booth there on the darkened beach. My call was answered 3,000 miles away in the middle of the night by my friend and savior Anne Gurka. My co-host on a weekly radio show we did called “Straight Talk About Mental Health”. She found out my location and told me to go back to my car. It had to be less than an hour later when someone with a flashlight knocked on my window. He asked if my name was Bob. His friend secured my car while he drove me to the San Diego airport. A ticket was waiting, and I flew back to Detroit. Anne met me there at the airport and drove me to the hospital where I spent the next 10 days in a continual daze of confusion, sadness, anger and countless other feelings. I was a mind without
a body and a body without a mind. I existed but didn’t. It was then that something miraculous occurred. How or why it happened I will never know. It wasn’t something I thought of or willed. It just happened.
As I was sitting at the lunch table that day, lost in tears and a racing mind which was going somewhere and nowhere all at the same time, I knocked over my glass of water. In a fit of anger and thoroughly disgusted with myself I lashed out and said, “You clumsy ox. What the hell is the matter with you? You screw everything up. You’ll never amount to anything.” At that very moment, those torturous words reverberated over and over again in my consciousness. Something seemed very wrong about them. I didn’t know what. Or why.
As I looked down on the table and saw the glass of spilled water, I began a new life without knowing it was beginning. I saw the spoon on the table which I had unknowingly set the glass down on, causing the glass to spill over. I had been my own Judge and Jury, instantly convicting myself of being unworthy. Guilty of being deficient. Of being unlovable. Words heard in the past from those who felt that way about themselves. Slowly I began to think about, to see, how mean I had been to myself. How many mean things I was saying to myself over and over. Accusations I accepted without even knowing, say nothing about defending myself against. That spilled glass of water led me to the sudden realization that there was no pill, no doctor, no nurse, no book, no therapy that could protect me from me. Only I could do that.
How I came up with what I did next I have no idea of, but I did it. I slowly walked up to the Nurse’s station and asked for a rubber band. Back in the quiet of my room I slipped it around my wrist. I decided I would pull it back each time I was aware of one of those mean thoughts and let it snap back. I would then admonish that thought and tell it to go away. I would follow that with a truthful and kind thought about myself – spoken to myself. One that wasn’t a repeat of what someone else had told me long ago. My wrist was pink when I finally left the hospital, but it didn’t hurt. I felt somehow good. That spilled water glass was my first step on a journey of a thousand coming miles. Without it I would have been gone long ago. Without ever knowing why.
All of this happened 42 long years ago but I still remember the lesson of the “Spilled Water Glass” almost every day. Today I know that I always do the best I can do. I make the best decisions I can make at the time I make them. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail. I do the best I can and that’s as perfect of a life as anyone can live. Or so it seems to me.