“Well, your brother’s gone off the deep end…” my mother sighed, with an undercurrent of anxious resignation. She had called me from a random hotel in New Jersey, not the kind of place she would ordinarily hang out, but extraordinary circumstances called for extraordinary measures. “I drove down here around five in the morning…he at least had the sense to call me. He’s in the room next to mine here at the hotel. He’s already tried to walk off a couple times, but I think he’s settled in for the night now. I’m going to go check on him again before I go to bed for a few hours. I’ll have to try and get up before he does and make sure he doesn’t wander off again.”
“I don’t mean to drag you into it,” her voice softened, “but I had to talk to somebody, and you know how your father is with these kinds of things; I didn’t even bother to wake him up when I left this morning. I just called him this afternoon to let him know where I was and give him the gist of what happened. Your other brother’s at work, and I figured you’ve had at least some experience with this kind of thing.” By “this kind of thing” I assumed she meant mental illness and the people who suffer it in its various guises.
My turn to sigh, “Yeah, hah…I suppose that’s true enough.”
She continued, “I guess I hoped you might at least have some ideas on how to deal with him like this.”
As best I was able to piece together from the rest of our conversation, the story went something like this: my youngest brother had gone down to spend a week or two at the small house on the Cape that had been my grandmother’s until her death a year and a half prior. That wasn’t in itself unusual. He had stayed there over the previous winter with no hitches, even had a seasonal part time job, or so he said. By now, it was early summer, and nothing had really seemed all that different with him… until this.
We’ve never really been able to figure out just what happened–if anything at all–to trigger the whole episode, but he evidently had such a sudden impulse and bolted out the door in such a hurry that he left his phone on the kitchen counter and the front door unlocked and part-way open. He then drove nonstop until he ran out of gas somewhere in New Jersey, and, assuming that the car had broken down rather than the obvious, he walked some miles until he came to a train station. Eventually, he had enough passing clarity to dial my mother collect from there. When she arrived at the station herself, some hours later, she found him standing on the platform staring into the distance–a post he’d seemingly been occupying for some time. He told her he was “waiting to take the train to England,” and had pretty clearly not slept, bathed, or likely eaten for several days. She described him as looking and smelling like he was homeless.
This was not, by any measure, his natural state of affairs. For years, he had been inclined to take showers protracted enough in length to warrant comment, especially from our father, the penny-pincher of the household. My brother had previously armed himself with such a battalion of scented body washes, lotions, shampoos, conditioners, deodorant sprays, colognes, and miscellaneous hair products that he could almost be described as a bit dainty were it not for the fact that he was anything but in stature. Standing a bit over six feet and built a little like a linebacker, you’d expect, perhaps, a more commanding presence; he had even had a little bit of a Fabio look going on at one point when he was in particularly good shape and had long hair. So it was quite surprising when he would open his mouth and speak so softly you sometimes had to strain to make out what he was saying, which was almost always in a sort of half-stumbled mumble, dropped directly onto the ground.
That is unless he were singing. Now, this was a rare bird indeed, witnessed only scarcely, but if you were lucky enough to hear it, it would be clear that he has some serious pipes in him. It’s a big, soaring sound with huge projection, almost operatic, and puts my own passable rock baritone to shame. For a time, he was a lover of show tunes and musical theater, if from a comparatively safe distance. It’s clear enough to me that he could have gone somewhere with a little more training and control, but he quit his voice lessons when it became an inescapable fact that he’d eventually have to perform in front of people he didn’t know. He just couldn’t get past his stage fright, which was so bad it made him physically ill. I myself have only heard his powerful singing voice a few times when he was able to overcome his near-crippling shyness and let it fly, usually while singing Christmas carols with my mom, aunts, and cousin toward the conclusion of those particular festivities. Not that he’s come to any family holiday gatherings for several years now.
Six years my junior, he was a happy-go-lucky little kid. When he was really small, he often made up his own words with which he populated jaunty ditties about Christmas lights and Santa Claus or products he’d seen on television. As a child, he was boisterous and good-natured; he wanted to be everyone’s pal. He was always kind of the baby of the family–my father had the biggest soft spot for him, calling him “Twosie” even when he was well past that age. Though, he lived in something of a separate world from my other brother and I, who were a lot closer in both age and habit while growing up.
With the inevitable traumas of being kind of an oddball suffering through puberty in a public school in a gossipy town, everything really began to change. He somehow became one of those poor, unfortunate souls who by some cosmic practical joke found himself with a nasty nickname and was ruthlessly picked on by his classmates to the point where my mother eventually had to pull him out of school and home-school him. And this only when he finally admitted it to her after silently enduring years of unearned abuse.
So he went from a fairly normal, creative, well-adjusted kid to painfully shy and extremely introverted within a few short years. He’d either lost touch with, or more likely, been abandoned by, any friends he’d previously had. Kids seem to have an almost sixth sense when it comes to perceived popularity and instinctively evacuate when they see a sinking ship. Most of his teenage years were subsequently spent immersed in video games and old reruns on the Nick at Night lineup. Instead of genuine human companionship, he found chums in Richie Cunningham and the Fonz.
For a time, he did have some Internet friends made through online video games, but they all eventually moved on, got married, had kids, and focused on their careers instead. My brother, meanwhile, continued living with my parents and playing his games, watching his reruns, and seemed to view getting a job about as favorably as the prospect of going back to school–which is to say about on par with old-fashioned inquisitional torture. I did, at one point, get him a short-lived part-time job where I had been working, but before long. he was laid off and didn’t really seem too perturbed by the fact. That was one failed attempt among many where I tried mostly in vain to reach in and pull him out of himself a little; over the years, I tried to get him to go places with me, too, which he almost uniformly declined, only joining me and a friend of mine once or twice for a hike or random day trip. He seemed to find more comfort in continuing to live on the couch in front of either the television or the computer or both, alone in his own world while the years passed relentlessly.
Eventually, in the dozen and a half or so months immediately preceding the first episode, he seemed to grow increasingly secretive as well as incrementally more irritable and agitated, with a completely new and uncharacteristic angry streak. We chalked it up to some kind of delayed adolescence, and aside from a couple wild ideas about moving across the country–with no money, income, job prospects or even a car, which we at the time wrote off as optimistic naivete–this was the only real warning we had that his mental state could possibly be deteriorating. Even then, he hit a new quasi-normal with it until that day in June. Even with something of a family history of mental illness, it’s a shock when this kind of thing just comes out of the blue.
So, after having the car he was driving towed just over the New York state line to a local mechanic for a once-over just in case–my mother managing the whole time not only to keep my brother from wandering off but eventually corralling him back into her car–they set off homeward once again. I got another call from her when they had stopped en route near the western border of the state. She was having a hard time dealing with him in this condition; he kept grabbing at the wheel, yelling that she was going to get them killed in traffic. It seemed his perceptions were off, and he saw each oncoming vehicle as heading straight for them. Fortunately, she’s worked as a nurse for many years and was able to talk him down each time and remain in control of the car; though I could only imagine that it must have been a harrowing ride indeed. He was also not making any sense whatsoever, conversationally speaking. “We need to get him hospitalized somehow, but I don’t know how we’re going to get him to go along with it. Can we stop at your house when we come through?” my mom asked me. “I really don’t know what to do with him, and don’t know how much longer I can keep handling him like this by myself.”
They arrived in the late afternoon. I hadn’t really known what to expect or what to think about the whole thing up to that point; but after observing him for a while, I was convinced that something had gone seriously wrong upstairs. He seemed very animated, intensely so, unusually for him. With a couple of strategic questions, my mom gently prodded him into revisiting the conversation they had in the car, perhaps in part to reassure herself that she wasn’t losing it. He rolled his eyes, let out a frustrated groan–like she had just asked him if the sky was blue or if water was wet–and started spinning some very convoluted yarn about how The Ramones and the Mafia had been working together to kidnap some random girl he went to high school with, and it was all being covered up by the government, but he was about to blow the whole thing wide open and go rescue her. He was talking a mile a minute, starting off on a fresh tangent every few sentences, each tortuous path now seeming to open up before him like a glowing revelation. Like how our Uncle Glen and Bill O’Reilly were in fact brothers, or maybe…yes, they were actually the same person, it was all just a disguise! And so forth. My mother was initially thinking of trying to drive him the additional hour home, but when they went back toward the car, he jumped in the driver’s seat and refused to budge, intent on taking over, adamant that she was going to get them killed. Fortunately, my mother had the keys.
Eventually, she had to resort to having the police come. I was initially against the idea, having heard so many horror stories about interactions between the police and people suffering acute episodes of mental illness coming to very sudden, violent, and completely unnecessary conclusions. Thankfully, they dispatched a patient and understanding officer who worked the situation expertly. She offered to “give him a ride” up to the hospital where he could “get some rest.” He followed her to the cruiser, handing his license over for her to “scan” (he was insistent that the police needed to scan his license to let him through the toll booths on his jaunt); she reassured him that she “didn’t have (her) scanner with her today,” and off they went.
My mother and I followed, and in the end, he was admitted overnight then transferred to another facility for a few weeks. He was ultimately released without a firm diagnosis and almost as out of touch with reality–if calmer–when he eventually returned to my parents’ house. I wish I could say things improved from that point, but it’s been pretty touch and go ever since. The one thing clear to all was that he had suffered some sort of major psychotic break; schizophrenia, extreme bipolar disorder, and even some form of autism were all mentioned as possibilities for underlying conditions but were never followed up on. He had no health insurance at the time and from then on has steadfastly refused to recognize that anything might be wrong, never mind go along with any suggestions for counseling, psychiatric visits, or subsequent hospital stays–and can’t be forced to unless the situation meets some very specific legal criteria.
In the interim, he’s taken to pacing and ranting bitterly to himself, sometimes. He’s taken to having heated debates with someone only he can see, sometimes. At other times, he’ll say hello and tell you about a great book or article he was reading, and you wouldn’t really know a thing was amiss. Occasionally, he’ll catch sight of you coming in the door, walking up the front walk, or sitting on the couch in the other room, and march right back up the stairs in a huff and slam his bedroom door with no words exchanged.
Every once in awhile, he’ll just take off and disappear for months on end with little or no warning. The first time this happened, my mother worried herself sick for weeks and had to resort to taking sedatives just to get a few hours of sleep each night. After he returned from that first outing, having evidently taken a cross-country trip via Amtrak, of all things (he’d by then let his driver’s license expire, ostensibly to prevent the government from tracking him)–again calmer and a little more together than when he left–she’s tried to let his wandering adventures worry her less. He at least seems to have enough wherewithal and is apparently in touch enough with reality to survive and get around on his own, though his not letting anyone know where he is or what he’s doing until after the fact and his refusal to carry identification are still causes for concern. Most recently, he returned from a 10-month stint renting a cheap furnished room in Virginia with a credit card he somehow acquired (my mother’s only way of knowing he was even still alive throughout that whole enterprise was when he would use her checking account to pay his bill). She tells me he again seems somewhat more coherent since he’s come back from that, though mostly he just hides in his room.
Throughout it all, I’ve found the situation leads to a peculiar kind of grief, which my mother, especially, has struggled with in the aftermath. While no one technically died, in a way, we’ve still lost the person we knew and can’t help but ask ourselves the same kind of futile, tortured questions that follow a premature death: is there something we could have done differently? Should I have said this, not said that? Did we somehow fail him? And so on. There’s always this dim hope in the back of our minds that the person we knew will return. But until such a time–long hoped-for but never forthcoming– we’re just left wondering, perplexed, and always a little on edge. Sometimes he’s like his old self for a minute. Then he’s off fighting another battle somewhere else outside the realm of our understanding.
I still get that same kind of urge to reach in and try to pull him out of the deep. I contort my mind to try and grasp it and see what he sees or to try to see things from his point of view; but even at its closest, it just skirts my periphery, forever eluding me. With each new twist and turn, each up and down, each step forward and corresponding two back, we have eventually been forced to learn to roll with the punches, to ride the waves, and just let him be, in the hope that he’s doing whatever it is he needs to be doing to make this life a little more bearable for himself.
