To the editor:
Today, after 20 years of counseling by the Aroostook Mental Health Center (AMHC), I terminated my weekly 2-hour sessions.
I was enriched psychologically, socially and spiritually by over 100 employees in that span, including those of the Adult Crisis Stabilization Unit in Presque Isle, the Acute Psychiatric Unit in Fort Fairfield, the Franciscan Home in Eagle Lake, Shyanna’s R.C.F. in Houlton, the Limestone Manor, their clinics in Caribou, Fort Kent and PI , and Bangor’s Acadia Hospital, BMHI, and EMMC.
I owe the taxpayers a lot of money, and I owe society a lot of grateful love for taking such good care of me. I don’t know how I can ever repay them. I’m told I have one of the thickest folders in AMHC’s files, as crisis after crisis drove me to nervous breakdowns, suicidal contemplations and several sincere attempts.
But in deep, frequent retrospections I often sense a much higher intelligence and power than mine protecting me and coordinating and synchronizing my many magical meetings with workers and sympathy-needing fellow patients. I feel like we were pawns on a cosmic chess board of the gods who themselves are in subconscious awareness of all future moves, not just for their own amusement, but for the psychological and spiritual awakening of all.
Feeling that these gods have finally so awakened me, I have taken the bold step away from expensive dependence on AMHC’s psychiatric counseling. It’s something they can be proud of. And so can all the loving institutions I was processed through.
I am so grateful to all the individuals involved, and to society at large, that this 76-year-old man hereby pledges his next life to charitable public service as a Robin Hood of the highest spiritual order. For as the late, great Indian mystic, Meher Baba, often said, “The greatest master is also the greatest servant.”
And really, it is they who are writing this letter with my hand, though they, too, are the summations of many genealogies preceding even the dawn of man, as we know him.
Valmore Vardamis
Southern Acres
Residential Care Facility
Westfield
