back to Niagara Falls Reporter archive
When she wasn't in the hospital or on a psychotic rampage, sometimes Mom would lie in bed for months. They tried electroshock treatments. One time, she came home and her brain was totally scrambled. It was like she had Alzheimer's Syndrome.
She would call out from the back door into the night, names I had never heard. She talked like she was living out events of her past--her childhood, I assumed. Responding and then listening, hearing something and then responding, changing subjects, places, people. It was like she was really back there ... back in time.
One of the most valuable lessons I learned as a child was to stay the heck out of Mom's head when she was nuts. I was 12 or 15, and there was nowhere to run.
Where do you go? Home? To your mother? So you learn to stay out of the way until you're certain you have an "in" at one of the hospitals. Getting a mental patient checked into a hospital isn't always easy, especially if the person doesn't want to go. It seemed as if I was always pressuring my father to get the ball rolling. I could usually sense when Mom was about to go over the edge. It seemed like my father never believed me, or when he did, he had kind of a passive reaction. "Oh, really?" he would say. "How do you know?" It seemed like she would always start to really flip out on a Friday, about a minute after all the shrinks locked the doors and went home for the weekend. My father, for some reason, always had to get some shrink to tell him he should take her in.
So we'd keep watch.
It seemed like I kept watch a lot. One of us would go out for a few hours and then we'd switch up. My dad said he went for drives. I don't know where I went--all kinds of places, probably.
What happened on those weekends is the story of my life. I still dread weekends.
Nothing's open. If there's one thing I remember, it's how scared I was and how I dealt with that fear. I didn't really attach the fear to the situations because there was no time to be scared. There was no room to be scared. I had to watch my mother. I had to know who she was talking with on the phone. She was always doing wacky things. (One time she called the fire department to have my father rescued. He wasn't even home.)
I had to keep her in the house. There were two reasons for this. First, there was the obvious threat that if she wasn't watched, she would do something crazy like kick in someone's door and get picked up by the police, or check into a motel and overdose on sleeping pills. Second, there was the incredible need to hide her, to make sure she didn't call my friends' parents and start rambling nonsense, or go down the street and accuse the neighbors of being Mafia czars. This was a horrible thing, the shame and embarrassment I felt, but I couldn't help it. I didn't want anyone to know. I hid it. I didn't talk about it.
When she wasn't in the hospital, I simply didn't have friends over. I thought I did a really great job of covering it up. It was, for the most part, a big waste of time.
I know now that a lot of people knew, a lot more than I imagined.
Even before she got sick, mom didn't require much evidence to believe things.
After she got sick, no evidence was required at all. When she was in one of her normal psychotic modes, virtually anything could happen. She would mostly pace and pace and talk and talk on the phone. It didn't matter who was on the other end. It didn't matter if it was a wrong number. The themes were fairly consistent. Basically, it was either "The Government" or "The Mafia." They were after us. They were going to get us. They were going to burn the house down. It was usually because of something she wrote. The problem was that she wrote mostly poetry.
The stuff was totally harmless but there was no reasoning with her. When I republished her first poetry book, "Descended From Whales," shortly after her death, I realized that it was just really good poetry. I marketed it locally in Buffalo and nationally at Amazon.com.
But back then, logic and reason were pointless. She was certain the things she had published were somehow going to get us all killed. I really tried to reason with her. I remember once I tried to counsel her or whatever. I just sat down at the kitchen table and talked with her. She was really tripping out. My father and brother were away somewhere as usual, and I thought I had her all calmed down. I went up to the attic, which was my brother's room, and I was listening to Neil Young when I saw her coming up the stairs with a butcher knife. It was the biggest knife in the house, and she was, like, kind of emaciated from being so messed up. She was in her robe and looked really frail, but there was no doubt she meant business. I saw the knife first, and then her body, kind of coming around the corner. The knife was in front of her, point up. She was holding it real tight at a 45-degree angle. It was like a movie. Slow motion. Light actually flashed off the blade.
"Mom?"
That kind of freaked her, knocked her back a step. Some glimmer of sanity must have jolted her. She came out of the dream.
"Ohhh. I have to call my doctor," she said. The knife went down and she whirled around, running down the steps. I kind of breathed a sigh of relief and closed the door. I stayed up that night.
So there was no time to be scared, so I waited, or rather, I unconsciously waited, until things were smooth before I let myself crack up. I had anxiety attacks of such intensity that I like to think nobody could handle them.
If you've ever had a really bad panic attack, you probably know fear. I was about 12 when I first started having them really bad. I remember one of my first.
I'd been drinking whiskey with a bunch of friends and when I got home, I just knew I was going to die. I was positive. My heart was exploding, jumping out of my chest. It's almost impossible to describe: just white-hot panic searing through my whole body, my mind on fire. I wanted to run, but I knew it wouldn't do any good, so I ran and it didn't do any good.
That first night, or one of the first, I thought the booze we'd been drinking had been laced with something, some kind of speed or something. My mom, who was sane at the time, finally called up my friend's mom and asked if maybe my friend, S.C., also was dying. He wasn't. Anyway, I lived in a state of anxiety, not always panic, but pretty serious anxiety, from the age of 12 until I was about 19.
I used to joke with my friend, D.H., about pain.
"Did you ever feel like you were in so much pain, that if the pain were suddenly transferred to someone else, the person would just keel over and die?" he would ask.
I told him yes, I've felt that way.
That's how I felt with anxiety.