The 13th Schizophrenic Break
Gratitude for my beloved schizophrenic mother
The first was the worst. And most memorable. In psychology, you call this a flashbulb memory. Exactly as it sounds. All the details. Vivid. Hard to forget. Hard to remember.
I was eight. Sweating. High fever. Head pounding. Wrapped in my favorite paisley blanket that I got to play with when I was sent to my room for laughing too much at dinner. (It was an allergic reaction.)
Mommy opened the bedroom door. She started to snort. Scrunched up her nose. I wished it was a hallucination from the high fever. It was real. She no longer was.
She got better. I only did until the next time, and the next time, until it reached the unlucky 13th. The lucky 13th, because it was her last.
She cycled between unfathomable highs and excruciating lows.
The fifth crept up slowly, as they all did. When it was time to involuntarily admit her, she naturally resisted. Around the kitchen, around the living room, bumping her narrow legs on the fraying couch. Then into our two tiny bedrooms, out the back door, with two men — my dad and her brother — running after her. Her mania made her invincible. Until it didn’t. After an hour, they pinned her down. She shouted out words I hadn’t yet learned. Other words that weren’t words at all. Finally caught, she was driven away. My sister and I shivered. Now orphans. Dad threatened to put his head in the oven, instead of using it to cook for us, which neither my sister nor I knew how to do. Cook, that is.
After a month, she became loveable mommy again. Sometimes this lasted six months. Sometimes a few years. The onset was slow. Even deceptive. A gradual descent into hell. Each time I felt like a wooden doll, smashed and shattered, with no one willing or capable to pick up the pieces.
I think it was her eighth. Perhaps. Hard to keep count. She had just returned from a trip to Greece with her good friend. Her voice was strange. She talked about a coup. She was being threatened. We wanted to believe. Then she told us the FBI was after her. Mom had become a spy while on vacation. I lost her again.
The 13th was the last. The unluckiest number of all. But lucky too.
The doctors said she was borderline catatonic. On visits, she sat opposite my sister and me in the common area room, lifeless. Neither looking at us nor looking away. Like she had taken an oath of silence. No matter how upbeat and talkative we were. Her vacuous dark brown eyes were everywhere and nowhere. An unrecognizable version of herself. Emaciated. Dressed in a faded plaid shirt and dirty jeans she refused to change for weeks.
I had never been a hero. Never wanted to be. But I couldn’t let her life, her story end this way. It was time to pull magic from the air. To pull magic from my life. To pull magic from hers.
I flipped through the telephone directory given to me as an employee of Columbia University. It included Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. I closed my eyes, and like a force from a Ouija board, landed my fingers on a one-of-a-kind research unit of ten patients that treated my mother’s type of mental illness. All this is true.
After decades of agony for mommy and me and her family, she was rewarded with royal treatment — a personal nurse and a compassionate and brilliant doctor.
Mom died two years later from metastatic ovarian cancer. But what a glorious two years. Dad died at age 59. Complications from Parkinson’s disease and pre-dementia at 40. Mom moved into a lovely one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, which she decorated with sunny, warm colors, and photographs of family and friends. She relished visits with her grandchildren, my sister’s children, and dining on a casual breakfast at the local diner two blocks away.
Memories can be deserts. They can be oases. Memories can provide sustenance. Nutrition for the soul. Mom’s many breaks from reality helped me become more real. More accepting. More human. And for that I will be forever grateful.
