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Reed Cosper
Like Ralph, I am enjoying the opportunity to write, sometimes civil liberty / mental illness, sometimes memory, sometines just something that needs to come out. I do not write fast, a page a day re-written seven or eight times is about my speed.
In Memoriam
It was May 1945, and it was World War 2 in the South Pacific. It was one month after the bloody assault on Iwo Jima, and it was three months before the atom bomb on Hiroshima.
Our mother was a recent college graduate. She, along with a boat full of other young American women, volunteered to sail to Hawaii at government expense to do good works and to pair up with American soldiers. Our father was a Marine Corps Sergeant just returned from battle at Iwo Jima.
After Iwo, my mother and father were in a hurry to get married. They were an impossible match.
They had a rocky marriage. In the seventh year of the marriage there was a great reconciliation. They fell in love for a second time and had a love child. It was my brother Dwight, born on January 19, 1953.
I don’t think that Dwight’s childhood was easy. His older brothers, I at least, tormented him mercilessly, and after that I ignored him. When Dwight was seven, our mother returned to teaching. He was placed in a lady’s home during the day. This was before there was something called “day care.” The lady physically and emotionally abused him. This we learned long after the fact.
Dwight was a smart kid living with two smart older brothers. Brother Bill was a terrific drummer, and our home was hang-out for 1960’s adolescents who liked folk music. Dwight soaked up the teenage action.
By sophomore year in high school, Dwight was writing poetry, a habit for life, and he was fed up with his public high school. By then I was in college coming home summers with new opinions and reservoirs of confidence. Dwight soaked that in too. I decided for the sake of a better education Dwight belonged in a private school. In January 1969, he enrolled in the Colorado Rocky Mountain School just outside Aspen. He hated it.
After a month at CRMS, a grown-up college friend of mine, Judy, showed up in Aspen, communed with Dwight for a day or two, and abruptly, without consulting anyone, pulled him out of school. There began a four-year odyssey with Judy, a darkly exotic, gorgeous, smart first-generation Chinese-American woman from Seattle. They traipsed around the southwest, slept under the stars, dipped into the Yucatan Peninsula, and drove up the California coast to Seattle. Dwight tested for his GED and enrolled in a junior college. Two years later he got a scholarship at a liberal arts college—Western Washington State—in Everett where he got a good education and graduated an art major with honors. Somewhere in there he married Judy. It was 1974, he was barely twenty-one and he was a college graduate.
Dwight’s marriage was an unequal exchange. Judy was boss and he was appendage. He was oppressed and restless, and after his degree he shipped his college art projects home to Aurora.
He left Judy and hitchhiked to Boulder. He was six foot three and one hundred eighty pounds with ash blond hair and gigantic, sincere brown eyes. An Adonis, and a flower child.
He did not want, ever, to work a conventional job. Period, full stop. And though this meant an unconventional life and being broke, he never deviated. He was a poet and an artist. He studied Buddhism. He enrolled in the Naropa Institute . He lived free. He experimented with drugs. He seduced girls, girls seduced him. He took psychedelics. He mixed in with Boulder street people and drunks. He went four days without sleep high on more than just one drug. He woke up in a hospital with a chronic psychotic illness. This kind of thing happened in those days.
He enjoyed the mania and the psychosis. He learned that the quickest way out of a hospital is total cooperation, signifying to “them” that you’re stable. And then it’s back on the street writing poetry, drinking-drugging and learning to walk the line between safe insanity and involuntary hospitalization. And now he was the kind of guy people back away from after brief conversation. Still writing poetry.
He became an expert skier. He took a jump off a mogul straight into a tree and shattered his left leg. He found a stray dog to love. He followed an itinerant evangelical into the southwest. His leg didn’t heal. He came to Colorado and doctors proposed amputation. He had a second round of surgery and his leg got three inches shorter, but no amputation. When he recovered, he found work as a carpenter. He worked in a warehouse. He drove a big truck all over Colorado. Made home deliveries of renal supplies for people with kidney failure. With help from Kathy, see below, he bought a house. He still wrote poetry.
He was fortunate to have access to a good community mental health system in Colorado. He developed a long relationship with a psychotherapist. He bonded with other people at the center. In therapy Dwight learned to manage medications, sort of. He learned that he has to take a pill every day, but not a whole pill, half dose will do. It kept him on the right side of the line. When he woke mornings with anger, he took a whole pill. This regimen kept him out of the hospital for the next four decades. He wrote poetry.
He lived with severe persistent mental illness. His pride and determination would not let him apply for disability benefits and Medicaid. He kept writing. Two poems were published in a journal at Arizona State University.
In 1991 Dwight went to the twentieth high school reunion for the public high school he dropped out of. Maybe it was a joint reunion for Aurora Central and Hinkley because he ran into Kathy Drake, who went to Central. Kathy was the girl who lived two doors up the street. And though none of us knew it, she and Dwight were in love before they knew the words. They never dated. They went to different high schools, he dropped out. In 1992 they were married. He wrote his poetry.
He sold his house, moved to Illinois to be with her. She was soul mate and angel. They both knew that. Living with Kathy liberated his artist soul. He performed in community theater: Played Chief in a stage performance of “Coocoo’s Nest.” Had a singing role as the butcher in “Fiddler on the Roof.” Taught an adult education class in ceramics. They stayed married twenty-five years.
It was not easy for Kathy to be Dwight’s wife, but she did it with grace and with love. And even at the end, after his last long psychotic episode, after his demand for a divorce, after his fall into homelessness and a nursing facility, she loved and supported him. No one expected Kathy to die first.
On March 13, 2022, Kathy was found dead, sitting in her Lazy Boy in front of the TV. There was no need for an autopsy. She simply passed. Three weeks later to the day, April 3, 2022, Dwight died in a nursing facility. The Death Certificate indicated a cardiac infarctioin. It may as will have read “broken heart.”
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