All the Things We Never Knew (16 page)

We've all heard the term “survivor's guilt,” which refers to the guilt people feel after surviving a plane crash or a traumatic incident in which other people lose their lives. Survivor's guilt also afflicts relatives of people with severe or disabling illnesses. Survivors blame themselves for having their health when their loved ones become incapable of caring for themselves.

Nearly all relatives of people with mental illness feel guilty, according to marriage and family therapist Rebecca Woolis, the author of
When Someone You Love Has a Mental Illness
. She notes the effects of guilt as including the following:

               
•
  
depression and lack of energy for the present,

               
•
  
dwelling on the past,

               
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diminished self-confidence and self-worth,

               
•
  
less effectiveness in solving problems and achieving goals,

               
•
  
acting like a martyr in an effort to make up for past sins,

               
•
  
being overprotective, which increases your relative's feelings of helplessness and dependence, and

               
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diminished quality of life.

Woolis says that developing new ways of thinking about the situation takes time, patience, and a willingness to discuss your situation with others. She notes that many of us prefer to handle problems within our families alone or believe that we may appear weak or wrong if we ask for outside help. This approach leads to a great deal of unnecessary suffering for many families.

Our culture is ready to help when a loved one suddenly develops cancer or is in a devastating accident. Friends drop by casseroles; people write, call, and ask questions about how they might help the family. But our country's prejudice and ignorance about mental illness make it very challenging for family members to seek help when a loved one is suffering from a psychiatric disorder.

It is crucial that Americans begin to view mental illness as just another sickness of the body. We do not hesitate to ask for help when our loved ones exhibit signs of diabetes. The brain is just another organ, vulnerable to illness and capable of recovery. Feeling guilty about a loved one's affliction of the brain serves no one, and as with other medical problems, treatment must be sought in order for anyone to get better.

Chapter Eleven

It never occurred to me that our situation could get worse, but it did. David's father, who had been sick with heart disease for several years, suffered another heart attack. His mother called to say Lew did not have long. She pleaded with me to have David call. She knew very little of David's condition.

Two days later, he was packing a bag for Canada. He had only underwear and a pair of jeans in his duffle bag. “You'll need a jacket,” I said softly. “You don't know how long you'll be gone.”

He turned and left his bedroom without speaking. I wondered if he'd remembered his passport, his toothbrush, and his cream for the rash on his hands. I wondered if he'd crack up. Jill promised me she or her son would drive, so David wouldn't be behind the wheel.

Sophie asked to see her grandfather one last time. Everything in my body rebelled against the idea. I didn't want my daughter to leave, but it seemed terrible to deny her this time with David's family. I took Jill aside and whispered, “She is in your hands.” Jill silently agreed.

I held Sophie tightly before letting her pick up her backpack full of stuffed animals and clothes. I wanted her to feel safe, to understand on the deepest level how much I loved her. She took it for a moment and then said playfully, “Uh, Mom, you're squishing me.”

I kissed the soft skin on Sophie's cheek. Her cheeks were always
flushed, more so when she was in hurry or exercising, but even now, preparing for a road trip, the blood rushed to her capillaries in her cheeks and she glowed. Her lips looked just like David's, blood red and formed in the shape of a heart. When she was born, David said her lips were the biggest thing on her face. I missed them both, missed the days when all of us would have been packing to head to Canada. “Call me, whenever, however, a thousand times a day if you need to, okay, baby?”

Sophie rolled her eyes. “Mama,” she groaned, picking up a backpack three times her size, “I am not a baby.”

David stood, gaunt and exhausted just from the idea of traveling. I wanted to tell him goodbye then, that I wished I could have been a better wife, more understanding, or generous, or whatever it was that he needed. I had tried, but I was done trying. The tightness I felt in my jaw was the grief of letting him go, surrendering finally to what I wasn't capable of. I could not care for him any longer. I barely knew him. Jill gathered all of them up, a whirl of backpacks and duffle bags, and they were gone. The house was suddenly so quiet I could hear my own breathing.

While David, Sophie, and his family were in Canada, I spent my evenings viewing two-bedroom condos, the kinds of places I would have lived in when I was twenty. I could hardly imagine Sophie hauling her suitcase through a hallway of strange smells, of broccoli, garlic, and too many people living in such close proximity.

I'd fallen in love with our home before I'd even stepped inside. The architect had built the house himself, a modern, sophisticated hideaway on a dead-end street near Portland's famous rose garden. It was perched up above the rest of the homes, like a tree house in an old growth forest. Sophie spent her summers in the pool and her winters hoping for enough snow to sled on the steep hill above our place. The apartments the broker showed me were small and confining. I said no to every option.

When David and Sophie had been gone for three days, a particularly depressing rain drenched the city. I agreed to meet a friend for a drink; it had been weeks since we'd seen one another.

The bar where we met was moody, with low lights and a mix of “Pearl people,” young urbanites from the trendy Pearl District who had abandoned the notion of the house on the hill. I could be pretty anonymous here.

“So,” Jill said, twirling her glass of champagne by its stem, “tell me everything.” Jill was a journalist too, a friend who never wasted a sentence.

“Remember when you told me I'd know for sure when I was done?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I'm finished.”

I looked up to see a man walk through the door, stomping off the rain from his shoes and lifting his head toward us. I'd seen him before, at a fund-raiser for children with cancer. He was tall and lean, with salt-and-pepper hair and striking blue eyes. He wore a tailored white shirt, distressed jeans, and a black leather belt with silver rivets just like one I'd seen on Billy Idol. He stood straight, like a ballet dancer, and grinned widely when he recognized my friend.

“Oh, no,” I said when he started to walk in our direction. “Do you know him?”

She turned. “Hey, Colin. How are you?”

He leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. “Can I join you?”

Before I could say no, he introduced himself by holding out his hand and smiling. “I'm Colin MacLean. Have we met?”

His straight, broad shoulders reminded me of Woods, my college boyfriend.
Excuse yourself
, I thought.
Get up and walk out the door, away from the confusion and magnetic pull of this stranger.

“No, we haven't met.” I held out my hand. His fingers were long, and the silver cufflinks on his shirt were cast in the shape of small dice. His hand folded around mine gently, a first touch that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“I'm Sheila,” I said.

How could I even begin to entertain the possibility of Colin? It seemed unfathomable. But the emptiness of David had starved me, physically and emotionally. I had shut off the bone-rattling weariness of a dead marriage for too long, suffering from a kind of loneliness that could make anyone bleak.

Colin sat down across from me. He looked me straight in the eyes when he spoke. It was as if I was being seen for the first time in a decade. Ten years I'd spent in a troubled and complicated marriage. I wanted desperately to feel something other than the dead weight of responsibility and sadness. Colin's presence sent a surge of erratic energy through my body, a wave of attraction and guilt like a defibrillator waking up my heart. I knew I was in over my head, and I stayed anyway.

We talked about being out on “First Thursday,” a monthly event in Portland when the galleries stay open and artists and musicians bring their wares into the street. I hadn't even remembered it was First Thursday—it had been so long since I'd been aware of anything except David and the troubles he caused.

“I love it,” I said. “But it's way too crowded. I can hardly hear myself think.”

Jill looked at both of us, grinned, and excused herself to the bathroom.

Colin's eyes were steady and calm. “Well, maybe,” he said, “we should continue this conversation over a quiet dinner.”

 

MENTAL ILLNESS, THEN AND NOW

There have been enormous strides in the understanding of mental illness. In the early 1800s, when “proper” and (initially) “humane” mental hospitals were founded, it was believed that the buildings' “high walls would grant a sense of safety” and that the “well-ordered routines of a hospital would restore a sense of order and normalcy.” And, in these hospitals, “medical reassurance constituted an early form of psychotherapy.”

For nearly two centuries, mental hospitals maintained a level of care and success which, many would agree, was not perfect but which served patients at least somewhat sufficiently. In the 1970s, legislators began the massive program of returning psychiatric patients to the community under the pretense that they would be discharged to a network of group homes and community care clinics. It fell apart. Lack of money, and the reality that the private sector couldn't make a huge profit off of the care of the mentally ill, doomed those projects.

Edward Shorter, the Jason A. Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Toronto, writes, “Psychiatry's dirty secret is that if you had a severe mental illness requiring hospital care in 1900, you'd be better looked after than you are today.” He also notes that “despite a flurry of media hand-waving about new technologies in psychiatry, the average hospital patient probably does less well now, despite the new drugs, than the average hospital patient a century ago” and that “care of very ill psychiatric patients has gotten much worse.”

Many psychiatric units now offer stays of seven days, far too short to stabilize most patients and keep them safe. Very few services are available in the community, and adequate group housing is in short supply.

Many patients today find themselves on the street, homeless, or with no care at all.
More than 50 percent of the nation's prisoners suffer from a mental illness.

Chapter Twelve

The next night Colin and I had dinner at a Cajun place on the east side. The lighting was low; the booths were cozy and warm. We both ordered martinis, straight up, two olives. My head went light early; I let the warmth from the cocktail sink deep. There was a nice hum about the place. The bar was busy, but not overly busy; the acoustics were leveled out so that you could actually talk. The food I saw coming out of the kitchen looked fantastic, colorful, and plentiful on the plates. I was surprised by my own good mood.

Colin talked, and I had to remind myself to look at his face generally and not keep getting lost in his eyes. I'm not a sentimental person, and I was aware of the superficial things I found myself thinking:
He's gorgeous. Great hair. Nice teeth—so white.
I watched his lips open and close and entertained thoughts that were entirely inappropriate given the complexity of my life.

He'd been divorced four years and had two daughters, one nearly six, the other eight; he couldn't help but smile when he mentioned his girls. He took out a picture from his wallet, but the lights were too low for me to see their faces very clearly. I nodded appreciation, moved by how tenderly he placed the photo back in his wallet.