Point of View: Glad Tidings From Mars

My sister, who has agreed that she was “a basket case” not so long ago, has made a complete turnaround, thanks to an Egyptian-born psychiatrist who utterly revamped her medications with what I would call miraculous results, “and, ultimately, God.”

Or He and Allah.

I wrote a while ago that I, for my part, had faith in her — though that faith was shaken during a period in which everything (soul, body, mind) seemed to go south, and during which she told me she was no longer talking to God. 

It seemed as if she were throwing in the towel, and we didn’t know what to say other than to persist in urging persistence and in cheerleading, in trying to make her laugh, which had worked for me and Mary — an even better cheerleader than I — in the past. But there did come a time when it seemed there was nothing more we could say. 

During my last visit to her, recently — the one in which I found her vastly improved, much more lucid and calm, lighthearted even — she said she had had suicidal thoughts in the previous months and had thought more than once of jumping out of a window. “Thank God you were living in a first-floor apartment,” I said.

And the interesting thing was that on that weekend trip, she, who had been saved by Dr. Ayyash and by God, saved me from getting us hopelessly lost while exploring Mars in my rental car. Yes, Mars, for that is where she is living now, Mars, Pa., having moved there from Moon. I’m not kidding. And, of course, I am the Star of the East . . . Hampton.

Well, I shouldn’t go that far, but she was happy to see me, and I’m glad that, homebody though I may be, I made the trip — through the airport where there’s a statue of Franco Harris making the Immaculate Reception.

Actually, her recovery is like that! I remember running from our car — we’d been Christmas shopping — into a hair salon in Sewickley to find out what had happened, and everybody was going crazy: The Steelers, they said, had just beaten the dastardly Oakland Raiders in the last seconds of the A.F.C. divisional playoff game! It had been a miracle.

As has been my sister’s recovery. 

It’s fourth-and-10, the ball is on the Steelers’ 40-yardline, there are 22 seconds left. . . . Bradshaw, under pressure, is scrambling to his right. . . . He lets it go. . . .

The rest you know.