Two days after I reached Ottawa, autumn also arrived. I haven’t felt a fall like this since I left Boston six years ago, and it pulls me out of my California languor.

The warm, wet weather gave way to crisp air, radiant leaves, and the sound of water rushing under the house as radiators kicked on in the government housing my friend lives in. She has lived here since her divorce three years ago, when her ex-husband sold her house out from under her, pocketed the money and all of her savings, and left her and their two daughters to survive on their own, somehow.

Luckily, for citizens such as them, the Canadian government is a merciful one. The police (restraining orders), medical services (asthmatic kids), and the welfare system have helped cushion her fall.

Now, with her bipolar condition, Canada continues to care for her. 

She says, “When my father was not here, by God’s grace Canada was the father who protected me and the girls.” When some Muslims talk about “kuffar governments,” I think of her and the courtesies with which she has been met here. Then I think of Pakistan, the Muslim country which awarded full custody of her two minor girls to her ex- in the family court though he has not bothered to see or support them in over two years  

This Ottawa “ghetto” is the most charming of any I’ve seen: two-story houses integrated into a quiet residential neighborhood. The sole local prostitute is on friendly terms with the single mothers who live here,  the pharmacy and corner stores deliver medicines and hefty 18-liter bottles of water directly to the house when asked, and a group of thuggishly-attired young women and men cheerfully wave whenever they pass the kitchen window.

It’s far from idyllic though. The interior is threadbare with permanent stains and mildew,  garbage and food scraps litter the small communal square outside, toys rust in untended yards, and there just aren’t any men over the age of 18 around. And the monthly check, while nice, doesn’t exactly make ends meet even when most of your food and possessions come from Walmart.

A week into my stay, seeing some of the hardships she experiences just trying to keep herself and the kids afloat, I wonder how these contributed to her two stress-related breakdowns this year. Without my family and Basil’s financial and emotional support, I would be in a similar economic situation post-illness as she is post-divorce. And I would not find America as generous as Canada to those who fall from crisis into poverty. 

To some outside observers, the mental or physical illnesses of other people reflect a lack of faith or will on the inflicted’s part, or, else, divine punishment upon them. Neither is true, nor is there any shame in illness. One thing I’ve learned from living in San Francisco and seeing homeless people everyday: There is only the faintest line in the sand to separate me from them. We tell ourselves otherwise to feel safe, but it would be wiser to feel empathy. One catastrophic illness, mental or physical, and it could be me or you on the street instead.

Before my cousin Mani committed suicide in May, he was homeless for one period, in jail for another. He was the last person you’d expect either of, with two masters’ degrees from reputable Bay Area universities, a job at Sony, and a devoted wife and adoring son – all the stuff that is supposed to signal success and protect you from becoming one of the unwashed crazies on the street.

But when his first mania struck at the age of 32, within weeks he had lost everything. As his mind boiled with fantasies and conspiracies, he spent his savings, lost his job and apartment, and then left his family, reputation, and sense of self-worth behind, never to be recovered.

Two years later at the age of 34, after great suffering and consistently refusing to accept his condition or seek treatment, he shot himself in the head while his sick and aging parents slept in the next room.

When my best friend says, “You know, all that you are doing for me here is for Mani too,” tears tighten my throat into silence as I clutch her hand. I have come to comfort her and yet so often, even now in her condition, she steadies me as she always has.

I locked his memory away without allowing myself to grieve in May, too busy tending to a houseful of distraught women, including his wife, and to a frantic child, his son. Five months later it is still too painful to imagine his agony and isolation before he died, believing that we didn’t love him, that we were all against him. I still have all of his e-mails and the replies I sent him, unbearably harsh now in retrospect, because I didn’t understand that it was the disease speaking for him.

I honestly don’t know if I will ever get over the horror and enormous guilt of not having done more when I had the chance to instead of assuming – as estranged family members so stupidly do - that there would be time to reconcile, later.

My friend, my best friend who knows me so well in spite of my silence, is right. I am here because of Mani. His tragic death - and my role in contributing to it - showed me how serious a medical condition bipolar is; how imperative psychotherapy, medications and empathy are; and how deadly the consequences of not informing ourselves of the lethality of the disease proved to be. Lithium is as necessary as prayer.

For the first time since May, I find myself mentioning Mani in detail, here, and to her, because I hope that by speaking of his death, she – and others – might live. 

I also pray that in the grave, that place of which we have been told so little, some action of mine here in Ottawa inspired by Mani brings him peace. I hope that he knows that I love him.  But my mind recoils imagining that he does not know, and at someday having to answer his now five-year-old son when he asks me how and why his father was killed.

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