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Nobody Believed How Sick I Was, Except My Dad
My father knew best—and stood by me until I got the care I needed
Shortly after I was born, my mother was hospitalized and received daily doses of shock treatment. She had what would now be diagnosed as postpartum depression, but in the early ’60s, much of female psychological distress was still called hysteria.
My father is a kind and intelligent man, so the doctors must have presented a convincing case to get him to agree to have my mother’s brain lightning-bolted with electricity. And from this improper care, a family legend was born: My mother was crazy. I not only bought into this myth but also harbored a fear that I was destined to become crazy too. So part of me wasn’t surprised when, in January 2008, the prophecy began to bear fruit.
It was after midnight when I called my father. My heart had been racing for several days. I was tired, yet my nervous system was locked in go, go, go. My skin had turned yellow, the whites of my eyes appeared gray, and my normally pink nail beds were colorless. Though not usually one to shed tears, I couldn’t stop crying. The room was flipping over. My short-term memory had all but disappeared; when I took my daily walk, I was unable to find my way home, even from a block away.
Also, the pain was back. Since the late ’90s, when a tabletop in a furniture showroom fell on my head, I’d experienced bouts of debilitating physical agony. Now it felt like my head was locked in an ever-tightening vice.
Every day, every hour, I would ask my father, ‘Am I going crazy?’ By which I meant: ‘Am I fulfilling my role in our lineage?’ Each time, he would reply, ‘Absolutely not.’
My 80-year-old father was not unaccustomed to calls asking him to bail me out. In high school, I’d sneaked out many times to clubs and parties from which he often had to collect me. At 20, when I dropped out of college and moved to New York City without a job or a contact, he was my financial and emotional support system. So, though it had been a while, he knew to take a midnight phone call from me in stride. But on this night, something in my voice concerned him enough…
