Author Archives: Peter Sanford Kahrmann

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About Peter Sanford Kahrmann

Writer, disability rights advocate, civil rights advocate.

The Bottom Dropping Out

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We are walking on the beach when the bottom drops out. It comes from out of nowhere. One minute I am walking along doing just fine,and the next, all my strength is gone. I feel like I’ve been unplugged. I am light headed. Christine immediately notices the change. She later tells me I suddenly went pale, started sweating, looked worried. I was worried. I was scared.

The very steep set of stairs leading off the beach is maybe 100 yards away. It feels like 100 miles away. I know I have to get out of here, get back to the car. I need to sit down. I’ll feel better, I think, if I can just sit down.

Walking slowly towards the foot of the stairs things aren’t getting easier. I want to lie down on the sand and sleep. I want to sleep in the worst way. I don’t lie down on the sand and go to sleep because I am suddenly afraid if I do I’ll never get up.

Christine gathers up our shoes at the foot of the stairs and we begin our ascent. As I start climbing the stairs I decide I will not stop climbing until I reach the top. I don’t care what happens. If I collapse, I collapse. I will not give in. I am not volunteering for whatever it is that is taking a run at me.  Am I making the smartest decision? I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. It was the decision I wanted to make and so I made it.

I know I’ve been sick for a couple of weeks and my sleep has been sporadic and while I had been feeling better, it is clear I tried to do too much too soon. That’s the way it is sometimes. It’s kind of like when your eyes are bigger than your stomach. After not being well for awhile your mind is often ready to take on a level of activity before your body is.

In the car I am feeling safer. We get to a roadside food place. I eat and drink a bottle of juice and feel a little better.

Later I rest. Talk with Christine. Quietly thank God I am still alive. Remind myself (as if I need reminding) that the days are numbered for all of us. And, I remind myself once more that no matter what, I should remember to live. So should we all.

 

On Suicide

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There is nothing easy about the subject of suicide and whenever the subject enters the realm of my awareness, I am internally stilled and quietly shifted into a chilly lonely place.  I’ve lost a mother, brother and birth-father to suicide and so know firsthand the carnage it causes. Reading this week about the suicide of Robert Enke, the goalkeeper for Germany’s National Soccer team brought tears to my eyes. The young man battled with depression and, reaching a point where he believed death was the only way to free himself of the pain he was in, ended his life. He as 32.

I am not against suicide in all instances. I think if one is terminally wants to end their life with the dignity, they have a right to do so. But suicide, the ending of one’s life, is like many things in life. The choice can be made for healthy or unhealthy reasons. I can tell you that in the instances of my brother, mother and birth-father, all three made the choice for unhealthy reasons which makes their choices all the more heartbreaking.

What I can say is this, when one is contemplating ending their life, it is likely they are feeling out of control of all their life and the ending of it is the one thing that do have control over. I think each individual deserves to discover that while they honestly and understandably feel like they are out of control, they are not. And if there is a way for them to discover they do have control, the have a right to know about it. Once the decision to end life is acted on, the light is out. However, when one explores the possibility that they have more say over their life than it seems and discover that this is so, lights go on.

Life is better with the light on because this way you get to live it.

Reasons to Go On

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There are dreams to be had and breath to be drawn, lest you think the sun has set, there are always reasons to go on

Movement shifts the land beneath your feet, the sky shifts as clouds pass by, and a songbird sends notes like jewels into the sweet morning air

There are dreams to be had and breath to be drawn, lest you think the sun has set, there are always reasons to go on

The morning coffee holds hands with the whisper of the day’s paper unfolding as sweet mist rain bathes the county fair

There are dreams to be had and breath to be drawn, lest you think the sun has set, there are always reasons to go on

……….even if you can’t see them you can be sure they’re there…for you too….they’re there

Carnage Moments

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Deadly violence leaves no space for words and less space for thought. It leaves room for nothing but the experience of overload. If, and I mean if you are fortunate enough to live through the violence, you know there is no point in describing it. Even though the moment of the experience has passed, there is still no space for words and as for thought, none can be shaped into any form of coherent expression. At least I can’t do it.

The recent carnage at Fort Hood and the hideous media feeding frenzy about it reflects so much of what has gone wrong with our species. The unchecked media jumps all over it, primarily salivating over the chance to increase ratings, only some truly caring about the dead and wounded along with their loved ones and those in the vicinity who were reminded that brutality happens in the blink of an eye and is anything but predictable.

My heart is with those who lived moments in which they believed they were going to die and did, and those who believed they were going to and, thankfully, didn’t.

 

Feeling My Oats

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I am feeling my oats this morning, I truly am. While I am battling some kind of respiratory bug, no fun at all, I braved the elements, so to speak, and succeeded in replacing the belt on my clothes dryer. The belt is the thing that loops around the dyer drum and makes the thing spin.

I am constantly amazed – and deeply grateful – for the gifts of sobriety. I will be sober eight years next July and when this dryer belt snapped I fully expected myself to be launched into the familiar crisis woe-is-me mode. But it didn’t happen.  That’s not to say my spirits didn’t droop when that bad boy snapped last week. They did. But I wasn’t at all overwhelmed which both surprised and delighted me. I immediately jumped online and went to a terrific site, www.repairclinic.com , punched in the model number of my dryer, and ordered it. I then went to some sites to get instructions to learn how to go about actually replacing the belt.

Present through all this was the undercurrent belief, born of my history, which says Peter Kahrmann can’t succeed at things like this. But I learned some time ago that while my history might be inundating me with some message about myself, I am wise to recognize it as bogus and relieve it of any decision making power.

And so I went down to the dryer, accompanied by my German Shepherd, McKenzie (you never know when a dryer might act up), and went to work. It took an hour, but I got the job done. From not feeling well at all I didn’t and don’t have much energy, but I am doing a wash now and am smiling ear to ear knowing I’ll be able to dry my clothes.

Life is good, even better when you’re sober.