Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary
Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling,
meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who
lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self
for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands
of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new
people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him
different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or support
groups for therapy. These people he has accidentally come across were the paths
through which Dr. Jedidiah could look back on his own life, being truly honest
with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food
for thoughts in life….or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.Episode # 37. Edna’s life bombed by her husband
Edna had bitter years since her husband left her for good. It was not divorce or separation due to some cacophony in their marriage. Peter was all the man she had until the night she heard the most unbelievably devastating news from NPR on her way back home from work. “Around 5:30 this afternoon, there was a huge detonation of a bomb at a concert hall downtown Los Angeles where hundreds of people gathered for celebrating the end-of-the-year with classical music. More than 50 people reportedly died on the spot. The suspect of the bombing in this murder-suicide has been identified as a 35 year-old man named Peter Ashraf who’s been allegedly associated with terrorist groups….” Edna could not believe her ears. ‘Peter Ashraf….in this murder-suicide?......what the hell have I heard? Oh, God….’
Since the nightmarish incident that shocked the whole country and the world as well, Edna had run the gamut of emotions. Anger, frustration, despair, sense of betrayal, and sympathy as his spouse. One day she had inexplicable furor against her husband who had kept his devilish plan under the hat all along, and the next day she pitied her beloved man who had to end up
victimizing his life in the name of extremist Islamist beliefs without telling his wife about it. She thought over and over again about why and how Peter came to be a part of that secret terrorist group and eventually put his own life on the front line, masterminding the whole incident in his own community. Our weekly
therapy meetings at my office along with prescribed sleep aids, Xanax, Zoloft
did not work to help ease off the melee in which Edna had been forced to
be situated. She would resort to some scotch on the rocks on most of her
sleepless nights, which was not of any help for her to carry on. Her questions
in our therapy sessions always came down to one thing. Trust. “Dr. J, I’ve been
wondering night and day since Peter was gone….if I was not a safe person for
him to confide in. Hadn’t he trusted me at all? Did he ever think that I’d
report him and his evil plans?....He knew me so well. He must have thought that
I’d talk him out of it all.” I could not agree with her more. It was not
that Peter didn’t love her. To the man, this crooked conviction to save his own
race and religious faith in someone else’s country was too strong to hold back
or put aside for the sake of his own pleasant life. Edna and I both knew this,
but kept silent. Truth always cuts like a knife, and this silence in the middle
of our conversations filled my office so loud and painfully.
As a doctor, I am not supposed to take the attitude of a revisionist historian or impose any of my guessing like 20/20 hindsight on my patient. Edna’s sad eyes at the end of our meetings still linger on in my mind, which bring back my late wife Demi’s words in our days of hell. “Have you ever tried to see what was going on in me? Were you there with me even once when I was struggling to survive this deadly depression?” I was lost for words back then and even now with my own patient. I can't be a Jedi in anyone's life, but feel helpless being no help in them. Shame on me.
Expressions
1. cacophony: harsh or jarring sound : dissonance
2. murder-suicide: a
double act in which a person kills one or more others before killing him- or
herself
3. to
run the (whole) gamut of…: experience, display, or perform the
complete range of something
4. to
keep ….under the hat: to keep …. a secret
5. extremist: a
person who holds extreme or fanatical political or religious views, especially
one who resorts to or advocates extreme action
6. to
mastermind something: to act as the leader of some complex plan
or scheme
7. melee:
confused fight/ skirmish/ scuffle
8. to
confide in somebody: tell someone about something very private
or secret
9. to
talk someone out of something: persuade someone not to do
(something unwise).
10.
revisionist historian: someone who examines and tries to change
existing beliefs about how events happened or what their importance or meaning
is
11.
20/20 hindsight: Choices
that seemed difficult in the past now seem clear after the person knows what
happened as a result of those choices. This expression comes from the way
people describe good vision. A person with normal, good vision has 20/20 sight.
Hindsight is an understanding of a past event.
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