Today, I am watching a film titled Through a Glass Darkly. Directed by Ingmar Bergman, named after a quote from the apostle Paul, it shows the decaying thoughts of a woman leaning into the embrace of Schizophrenia, as well as the grief, the helplessness of her adoring husband, and the struggles of her family to cope. The husband is played by Max Von Sidow, and I recognize the deep, unflinching sorrow in his black-and-white shadowy eyes. I’ve seen mine like that, but in full color: a green that often drifted into gray. I’ve been through what he’s experiencing, and I recognize the expressions he wears like masks in a time of plague. Is he weeping in the film or am I, eavesdropping on misery, or do we both hold our anger close, then bury it with a shovel shaped like a pen?

How many times did I go to her apartment in the morning, with her trapped in quantum superposition, when I didn’t know if I’d find her alive or having taken the next drastic step toward deletion? I walked up the stairs, let myself into her apartment, went through the kitchen and down the hall, then saw her lying motionless in bed. I still had time to doubt. The curse of not knowing. I had to get close to hear her breathing, the sound of a furnace turned on low, blowing the faintest heat. Only then did I exhale, having defeated the first obstacle in a day.

On screen, Von Sidow takes notes, prepared to write a case study or perhaps a book about his wife’s condition. I wrote little poems describing the anxious hours and the loneliness of loving a woman who wasn’t there when sleeping, then became someone else when awake, bawling and raging, her face melting into black streaks of spider legs. Like Von Sidow, I appeared cold and calloused, detached from it all—how others must have seen me, and how others see him in the story. For both of us, the lie of our straining love existed in our eyes like those of dead fish staring up from a well, like naked singularities swallowing light.

"Our actions spoke Love in a whisper. We did the best we could with what we had."

In the days of the film, no one knew how to treat this malady except by commitment to an institution. Now physicians have a better understanding, although it’s flawed. They force-feed it a rainbowed assortment of meds, the best that bring sleep, the worst inviting obsessive diarrhea, spontaneous projectile vomiting, or a sense of burning in the skin, an itch that requires scrubbing every inch with a hard brush. There wasn’t much I could do to help when my love was clawed and left bloody by side effects. I cared for her by being there, offering her a shoulder on which to cry.

Von Sidow has lost all hope by the end. His wife, played by Harriet Andersson—a name I had to look up on IMDB because, unlike Max, I don’t know her—hears God behind the walls. She sees God opening the closet doors and coming through. God the spider, casting its hateful shadow upward and onto her as if leaping, trying to penetrate her with its holy profanity. She stands there terrified and enraptured like Saul on the road to Damascus, the man who would change his name to Paul and speak the title of this film.

My love never saw God, and the ones she believed in were more fantastic than spiders, some of them with almost as many arms to pluck her heart from her chest. She woke up trembling and sobbing before turning that around to lash out at me for not caring or caring not quite well enough. She loved me in the morning when I brought her coffee but despised me by afternoon and on through the evening into night. She called me “Fucker” and Facebook-dumped me twice for not being the psychopharmaceutical guru she needed. Then she’d return to me sometimes before bedtime, and after that, my morning ritual of mourning resumed. I was bound to her like a dogfish to a shark’s belly. Whatever the shark attacked, I was there with it, bathing in the blood.

I swam in colorful pools of emotion, hers and mine, merging like two galaxies off in the somewhere else of space. Whatever happened when we collided would be violent and terrible, rendering destruction, but invisible to the naked eyes of others. I threw her a life preserver, more than one really, but who would be there to throw one to me? I couldn’t swim in this ocean of suffering. I hoped I didn’t have to ride a coffin back to shore.

Von Sidow’s Martin escorts Andersson’s Karin to the ambulance that will haul her away to the prison-like cells of the local asylum, which the viewer never gets to see. After, he lingers with his sadness. His eyes have burned themselves to beads of coal thrown from the back of a train. He’s a man defeated, a man who’s given up.

I swore I wouldn’t do that to her. It was the only thing she asked of me in saner times. There would be no hospitalization, no serving time in medical jail.

For three years, I kept her close and cared for her as best I could, holding her hair when she vomited, bring her caramel lattes and Indian food so spicy it smelled like burning oil, pulling her to me while we watched movies she wouldn’t remember in a month, driving her to her appointments with the doctor who knew more about handing out pills than he did about any Freudian roadmap through the highways of the unconscious mind. I hadn’t seen the Bergman film yet and wouldn’t for many years. All the same, as if attuned to it and afraid to live out its scenes, just to be safe, I killed every spider, god or not, that made the mistake of entering her haven.