Everyone had nodded. It was thought to be a good omen for the graduate’s future. As she left, Olli’s aunt gave him a kiss on the cheek, hugged him and whispered, “Thank the Lord, Olli, I can see you have some of the Suominens’ no-nonsense rectitude, which my brother, your poor father, doesn’t seem to have inherited at all, for some reason.”
Olli’s father wasn’t a particularly encouraging role model. Diabetes was eating away his feet and making him old before his time. In his final years he huddled in a wheelchair, sighing and constructing monologues that oozed with bitterness and injecting himself with insulin whenever he happened to remember to.
But at his graduation party, with the help of those two photographs, Olli broke free of his grim inheritance and turned his gaze towards his grandfather. Things became clearer. He would take his notary grandpa as his model and handle his affairs in such a way that no one ever need pity him or be ashamed of him.
And life had indeed gone smoothly, until that autumn when the girl in the pear-print dress appeared in his dreams. Olli touched his grandfather’s portrait, took a breath and straightened his back until it cracked. He made a decision. He had built his life through a series of firm decisions up to this point, and that was how he would put things right. He fetched pen and paper, sat at the table and started to make notes. Solving a problem always starts with a thorough outline of what the problem is.
So. He had become estranged from his wife, his family and his life. Why? Because he was in love with someone else. Not any real person, but a succubus that had sprung from his memories.
That made things easier, in a way. There was no lover or illicit relationship to hold him. The problem was contained inside his head.
That meant that he had a psychological problem.
This realization made him feel faint. Olli turned on his computer and typed a search into Google: psychological problem. After correcting the spelling a couple of times, he hit enter.
One result was a text about the effect of mental-health problems on relationships.
A spouse’s psychological problems can have an effect on the whole family. When a person has a mental illness it can touch the lives of every family member. Feelings of shame can be associated with mental-health difficulties, particularly in the early stages of the illness.
It was true: shame was pressing on his chest, squeezing his ribs so that it was difficult to breathe.
How to recover from this mental-health problem, to clear his head of this tenacious dream, which was beautiful, but was confusing his thoughts, his feelings, his whole life? He could turn to expert help. He could make a call. A doctor he knew wouldn’t hesitate to help him or direct him to a specialist, a psychologist or psychiatrist. He could get a diagnosis and get help and everything could be all right. That’s what people did in these situations.
Things have a way of working out, Notary Suominen used to say. Olli felt the same way, but he knew that before they worked out they might become unbearable and hard to handle.
Olli Suominen, mentally ill.
Now Mr Suominen, be a good boy and take your medicine and go back to sleep and that girl in the pear-print dress will stop haunting you in no time…
At the film club they had watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Olli didn’t want to become a patient. He still had his faculties, after all. A survivor. A Suominen. Not like his father, who was weak. Surely for him milder methods would be enough. A few visits to a therapist and the right medication would no doubt help him get the contents of his head in order.
Olli decided to call the doctor at the first opportunity. First thing in the morning.
He postponed making the appointment, however, when he thought about how to explain the situation to Aino. Not that he wanted to keep the matter secret. He didn’t like secrets.
At work, though, it would be best to keep his mental-health problems to himself. His employees didn’t want to hear that their boss was teetering between sanity and mental illness. Their publishing projects would come to nothing if everyone was constantly expecting the publisher to have a nervous breakdown.
That day at work Olli went over the sales strategy for a book of popular psychology with Antero. He thought he would try to make a joke about Freudianism, but what came out of his mouth was a personal litany of wet dreams, romantic longings and deep melancholy. “I have a bit of a psychological problem, I guess,” he said finally, trying to sound humorous but ending up sounding wretched.
Antero froze and stared at the floor.
Olli realized he had made a mistake. Now that he thought about it, he and Antero didn’t really know each other very well. They just worked together.
That thought was followed by another: he didn’t really have any friends. He had hundreds of acquaintances and colleagues, of course. He was constantly interacting with people and doing wonderful things with them. But when he thought about it, he realized he didn’t have anyone to talk to about personal things like mental-health problems.
He explained, “Well, it’s a very small problem I’m talking about. Like the flu, but in your mind. In here.” Olli tapped his temple. “I just mean that it would be interesting to hear what sort of cryptic diagnosis one of these psychological theorists would think up for me if they got a look inside my skull.”
Antero looked at Olli for a long time and said, “It’s pretty simple. You’re having a midlife crisis.”
Olli must have looked sceptical, because Antero went and fetched a book from the shelf and read a section from it aloud. It was a book they had published a couple of years earlier titled Ageing with Dignity:
An awareness of the limits of his own life can make an ageing man cling to the fading shreds of his youth and take a sudden interest in the lost, golden age of his life. A fear of death will often drive him to behave inappropriately and cause embarrassment to himself and discomfort to those around him.
Thousands of books and hundreds of films have been written about the ageing man’s tragicomic struggles against the inevitable. It’s best that a man familiarize himself with such works as he approaches middle age—if for no other reason than to avoid their most clichéd mistakes.
As an example of the middle-aged man’s methods of seeking out a vanished youth, the book mentioned taking up bungee jumping and other new hobbies, having a mania for exercise, exchanging a conservative style of dress for more youthful fashions such as piercings, tattoos or off beat hairstyles, or changing spouses or professions.
A particularly classic symptom that was mentioned was throwing oneself into a relationship with a younger woman.
The book warned that some men stricken with a midlife crisis abandon their families to begin a “May–December romance”, burning their bridges behind them and almost invariably regretting it bitterly in the end. The author did have some consolation for the reader, however: if a man suffering from a midlife crisis kept a cool head and learnt to be content with his life as it was, the symptoms would eventually diminish and he would be able to age with dignity and avoid hurting anyone or bringing shame on himself.
So there was no need to get treatment. Olli was a textbook example of a midlife crisis. But in his case the May–December romance had showed up in dreams that reached back to his youth.
This was presumably good news.
And yet Olli felt dejected as he carried the copy of Ageing with Dignity home with him and embarked on accepting his life as it was.