The Great Unpacking Of Love
Part 21: The End

Dearest Adèle,

I am writing to you, without assistance this time, to tell you that I have been living in Brussels for a year. I found Happiness with Saliha, my wife, whom I love more than anything. She helped me find the path to peace, just like you, you paved the way for me to hope.

I am overjoyed to tell you that we are expecting our first child, a little girl. She will bear the sweet name of Inâs which means “kindness” in Arabic.

Thank you my beautiful fairy of resilient Love.

Hulk to serve you!

Doctor Yang,

Even if I don’t really respect conventions, I really wanted to share this writing with you.

It’s been two years now since I came down from La Montgolfière. With all due respect, I hope I never go there again. You helped me put my life in order, far from being a long, quiet river.

When I look back on my past and look toward the future, I tell myself that my life is not just one, but three. Three totally different lives but which flow from one another.

The first started when I was born until my mother’s sudden disappearance. A life started in complete innocence and carefreeness that I should never have left. However, fate decided otherwise.

During my second life, I never stopped filling the immense emotional void created by my maternal leap to death.

My third life began as soon as I left La Montgolfière. A life relieved of the pain of the past, leaving room for all possibilities in the rediscovered existential lightness.

However, I ask myself: “How can we learn something positive from a life journey as winding as mine? »

At first glance, one would tend to believe that it is impossible to recover from a life that began so tragically. If it is true that the twists and turns of my existence have plunged me into the deepest abysses of my suffering, looking more closely, I ask myself the question of whether a life in a straight line, without pitfalls, is smooth , without passion would have allowed me to meet so many wonderful people. To encounter human empathy in all its splendor, its benevolence, its luminosity.

The blows of fate that I have experienced have forced me to draw from deep within myself the strength to raise my head above water, to dare to turn around and surrender to the outstretched hands of existence and no longer fear Love, the driving force of all reconstruction.

Doctor Yang, arriving in the middle of a shipwreck at La Montgolfière, who could have imagined that I would emerge two months later with so many projects in my head and dreams in my eyes? Not me anyway !

Hats off, Mr. Yang, as well as to your entire team of hope and happiness knitters! But isn’t that the primary goal of any psychiatric unit, serving men and women who have fallen to the depths of their existential abyss?

I can tell you and I affirm to you that La Montgolfière was my lifeline, a buoy to which I clung against all odds. I am proud to have survived the tsunami and to find a peaceful (mother?) sea.

Yours sincerely,

Adèle Ying

Madame Ying, Adèle,

It’s my turn to break conventions. I am obviously very touched by your writing and absolutely wanted to respond to you.

The desire to create a unit such as La Montgolfière responded to a glaring lack of psychiatric structures on a human scale developing values ​​of kindness towards patients, while defining clear limits and offering varied supervised activities, with therapeutic purposes. We must also not omit the medical and medicinal aspect as well as psychological monitoring. The whole thing forms a real gift offered to patients in the impasse of their lives. It’s up to them to unpack it or not. And that’s where it all comes down to it! These ghosts locked in their suffering must still agree to come out, at the cost of efforts which often seem superhuman to them.

You see, Adèle, psychiatry is nothing without the support of the patient and the patient is not nothing without caring and humane psychiatry.

Adèle, I think the Hot Air Balloon page is definitely turned on for you. Have you noticed that at the beginning of your missive you use the term “Mom”, which was so difficult to use not so long ago? Ah, the unconscious! The unconscious so dear to Sigmund!

I am convinced that the thread around your intrinsic suffering is cut forever. Do not hesitate to adhere without moderation to the great unpacking of love, the source of all reconstruction.

Good luck, Adèle, on your path of life or rather, your new path of desires. Everything remains to be written…

Doctor Ying

Epilogue

The story of Joséphine, Clara and Adèle was freely inspired by my painful life experiences, which fell upon me from a very young age.

Through these three slices of life inspired by my personal and professional experience, I wanted to show the crucial importance of humanity, tenderness, affection, love, kindness in any “healing”, which it either physical and/or moral. The key is to agree to let yourself go into the outstretched hands of volunteering.

Fortunately, no machine, no technological advance whatsoever, will ever supplant human warmth… at least, I sincerely hope so.