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Mom used to pace, back when she lived at home, back when we all lived at home. Downstairs in the big white house with wooden strip floors ... she'd pace and pace and pace, back and forth--from the kitchen all the way to her little poetry office at the other side of the house. I could hear creaks on the wood when she passed the center of the house.
"I'm having a hard time, Ronnie."
She'd hug me, but I couldn't understand her pain. I could see it in her eyes--when she was seeing other things.
They were brighter ... bigger.
It's hard to explain. Her whole face would change--drawn and lean.
"I have a chemical imbalance," she would say, hugging me and telling me she was sorry, that she was sorry.
I was offered biological explanations from the time I was 12 until she died when I was 28. She suffered from bipolar disorder. It was very bad. It was, in her case, a debilitating mental disorder. She simply "did not respond" to medication, said one of her psychiatrists.
"Untreatable," he said. So sad.
This just happened, for no apparent reason, when she was 40 years old. I found that rather frightening. She lived another 17 years, in and out of mental hospitals. It ended on Veteran's Day, 1999.
She lived for several hours, but I called it: "It's all over."
I thought it was the end when I was 18. It was the thump we'd all been waiting for, but I was the one who heard it. Alone. I had a feeling that night. When I was leaving the house she said something about what to do if something were to happen. I guess it was kind of obvious, but she was always saying stuff like that. On the other hand ... I told my friend, S.C., to turn his Olds Cutlass around. It was a 1977, a big one. He dropped me off at the driveway and I walked up, went inside to the kitchen, and there it was. Thump. I waited a minute, maybe two, and then I walked upstairs to the bedroom. She was in front of the bed, on the floor at the foot of the double beds that were pushed together. Now I was 18: Old enough to make a call, even though I'd been making them since I was 12. It was every pill in the house, give or take, and I think my mind fluttered, just for an instant.
Come back in an hour.
"You weren't supposed to come home," she said in a drugged and frightened whisper, bordering on panic. " ... more pills ... "
There was a note. I saw it later but it didn't make much sense. Paranoid stuff about who to look out for, who was gonna get us, etc. Anyway, the flutter was an urge, and I'm not even sure I really even had it, but if I did, it was an urge to leave that house and come back in an hour.
This was a big one. I knew it. The struggle was getting her on the bed. She was never a big lady, but man, she was dead weight. I had her half on and half off the bed, and I just couldn't get her legs up onto the bed. Meanwhile, she's going on and on about more pills. Her eyes were open and I could tell she was fading. Her eyes weren't focusing. She couldn't look at me but she knew I was there. I'm really good with police dispatchers now, but back then I wasn't so good with that kind of stuff so I dialed O for operator. (She taught me that. Dial O. You're supposed to dial 911.)
Anyway, the operator obviously had no idea where I was, like, what town or whatever. I told her my mother took a bunch of pills, bleh, bleh, and she finally said, "So you want a rescue squad."
I said yes, that would be fine.
She must have patched me through to the fire dispatcher because the guy seemed to know what was what. I gave him the address and I remember saying "hurry," and he told me in a kind of what-do-you-think-we-do-here voice that he was dispatching a squad. So I hung up the phone and calmed down about 30 seconds later when I heard the siren go off at the hose company. The station is gone now, but back then it was headquartered about a mile away. The sirens started a few minutes later and I went downstairs. The first guy to show up was one of the volunteer firefighters, a kid I remember making fun of in high school. I couldn't remember his name then, and I can't remember it now and I don't feel like going through the yearbook.
Anyway, he's carrying a couple first-aid boxes, so while everyone else is pulling up, I show him up to the bedroom. The front door gets propped open and they start working on her. Between cops, firemen and the ambulance crew, there's maybe 10 or 15 people in the house. That's pretty normal. I think it was a girl from the crew who asked me the questions about what pills, how many, etc. There was a cop I vaguely recognized (I met him a few weeks earlier when a power line fell on my car). I started talking to him in the doorway of the bedroom.
"I remember you," I kept telling him, "yeah ... I know you."
I was kind of spaced out by the whole thing. He probably thought I was nuts. Anyway, they took her and there was blood on the bed from when they started the IV.
(The blood soaked through the sheets into the mattress, a mattress I've intentionally kept and the one I still sleep on. Over the years the stains look more and more like rust.) So I'm watching the ambulance through the windows in the drawing room--that's a room at the front of the big house--and my mother is in the back. The lights inside the ambulance are going dim, bright, dim, bright, so I figure something's going on although I never found out what it was. I know they charged us for oxygen. A plainclothes guy walks up to me, probably a detective, and the ambulance is gone and it's more or less just me and him. Everyone else is either gone or packing up their gear. Dad was at the hockey game with my brother, see, so I call up Buffalo's Memorial Auditorium (that was home ice for the Buffalo Sabres at the time) to have him paged. The problem was the girl who answered the phone. She was, like, really reluctant to page him. I asked her to page Dr. C., and she's like, "Well, doesn't he have a pager?"
She kept saying that. "Doesn't he have a pager? Doesn't he have a pager?" I kept saying "no," but she kept saying it anyway. She kept saying that while I was trying to explain that my father is not a medical doctor, but he's a Ph.D., so he goes by doctor, and that he doesn't have a pager, and that we don't even have a color television.
That's when the detective grabbed the phone and said "Police. Page Dr. C." And that was that.
The guy, the detective, was really nice. He put his arm on my shoulder and I could tell he was for real. I don't know his name and I've never seen him since.
All the relatives flew in for that one. Mom was in a coma for a while ... two days I think ... and they gave her a fifty-fifty chance of survival. I think it was a day or so before she came around. I walked into the ICU and they treated me like some big hero. " ... saved your mother's life," her sisters said. " ... saved my life, Ronnie," mom told me. But when I looked in her eyes, I didn't feel like a hero. Before the relatives flew back, and while she was still in the ICU, her sister Carol told her everything was alright and things were going to get better. "Do you really think so?" Mom asked Carol. I wasn't there, but Carol said there was optimism in her voice.
I saved the news clipping from the police blotter. It gave our address.