Suspended Sentence

by Janice Morgan

  So now in Drug Court, was Dylan was ready to give up his own version of “high flights?” He didn’t have a test-pilot dad, but from stories he told me about his life and loves in the Cincinnati days, I was pretty sure he spent a fair share of time flying through the rings of Saturn, too. No wonder he still held out hope he would return there someday! I knew he’d had his first intense romantic involvement in that place, with a girl he’d met on day one of his freshman year. With her or with friends, he’d driven his car everywhere and discovered a whole, huge hilltop metropolis. He’d learned how to find scores of businesses, repair shops, workplaces, clinics, restaurants, concert halls, cafés, gyms, hangouts. He had met and gotten to know all kinds of people from all walks of life—not just students. After what he called his two “exile” years at the special school, he wanted to know and be friends with everyone.

  The second year, he withdrew from classes to support himself by working at odd jobs provided by a temp agency. For him, college courses at the University of Cincinnati were too slow; he was looking for a lucky break. We didn’t like it, but for him, this was a learning experience. He’d met an even wider variety of city residents—guys who’d worked in car factories for years, worked graveyard shifts, weekend shifts, any and all shifts, just to put some cash in their wallets. And while in the metropolis, he’d also met a few of those special breeds of slick, cool guys, the kind who went to clubs, dressed in the most amazing clothes and dropped the best lines. They were never short on cash, or so it seemed. The stories some of those guys could tell!

  To Dylan, it was all intoxicating—worlds within worlds to discover. And all this was something we presumably dull family members plodding away in our conforming lives wouldn’t have a clue about. No, we didn’t. I’d only read or seen this stuff in movies. I didn’t know anyone who actually lived like that. But Dylan did. I remembered Saturday visits when we’d be down on the Ohio River waterfront, strolling in a park, and he would tell me about some of his adventures—only the milder ones he thought I could handle, of course. Even then, I was aware of trying to steer him back to some kind of a regular life.

  “Look, all that is amazing,” I would say, “but you need to think about earning a living, having a real life, not about becoming a millionaire or some kind of blackjack champion in Vegas. Be realistic. You need to go back to college.”

  Back then, he would nod his head, but that was probably only to comfort me a bit. Trouble was, he wasn’t convinced of the necessity to have a regular life at all. It took things like living on his own terms, doing well for a while, making big bucks, then being totally down on his luck because it had all somehow disappeared. When he finally called us months later, he was facing disaster. It’s strange to say, but right before this, he was convinced that his life was turning around, that after a whole series of temp jobs he was “on the way up” in a new one with promise—if only he could get the car fixed and pay off his fines so he could get his license back. When the family went to the city to meet him, we saw the state of the car. When I drove it out of the city lot to a repair shop, it sounded like a B52 bomber that had flown too many missions and spent the last twenty years of its life rusting in a field. How could he not realize that his car—along with his life back then—had fallen into shambles? We told him we would help, but only on the condition that he return to his studies and sell the car. He took our offer.

  Now, three years later, he was in Drug Court and living in a small college town in what has to be one of the most conservative areas of the country. This was where he was born and grew up; in fact, he’s a native son. Yet in a lot of ways, he was also a wild seed from planet Saturn who had to find a way to grow here—at least for the duration. It wouldn’t be easy for him to adjust to a toneddown, “simple” life. It wasn’t just about adjusting to the rules of DC, not just about adapting to life in a small town after being in a big city. No, as Jamison tells it, the hardest part of all is the internal resistance: giving up a version of yourself that you secretly really like and admire. That adventurous, charismatic self doesn’t want rules, doesn’t want blandness, doesn’t want routine. But Dylan, you have to adjust; you have to learn to be responsible, even if means working with less. Focus on what you need.

  Somehow Kay Jamison learned how to declare a truce with normal, civilian life. She learned how to accept the person she was when ill and the person she could become when well. She says this didn’t happen easily. She credits her psychiatrist’s patience in her long battle with lithium; she acknowledges the healing art of psychotherapy to deal with the deceptive thought traps she fell into. But she also makes it clear that another powerful source of her healing was the network of loving relationships that sustained her. “This medicine, love,” she calls it. The love came from family, yes, but also from persons who surprisingly, when they got close enough, did not turn away when she told them about her illness. Instead, they made the courageous decision—even while knowing what they were up against—to accompany her on the uncharted trail of a difficult life.

  From Dr. Jamison I found out that accepting your truth, knowing you need help, then learning where to find it and from whom—that’s already a miracle.

  I could only hope Dylan would find the same in his own life someday. At least he was still alive. He’d made it past twenty-four years. My brother didn’t.

  CHAPTER 19

  YOUNG MEN ON THE ROADSIDE

  When it happened that I had a twenty-four-year-old son in Drug Court, I found myself increasingly aware of other young men out and about. In our small college town, there were many young people on the streets from all walks of life. So if I happened to see someone roughly the age of my son, I would notice his demeanor, his attitude. Near the campus, young folks would be out for fitness jogs on the sidewalks. Other times, though, I’d spot someone walking in a perilous place alongside a major road. Then I’d find myself speculating: did he lose his license? Did he have substance abuse issues? If the guy looked slightly scruffy, I’d wonder if he just got out of jail or was headed that way. Did he have any kids already? Was he looking for a job or just his next meal at a fast-food place? Heading for his next class or his next fix?

  A glance would make me wonder: Was this just another day for him? Or did he sense that he’d somehow arrived at a turning point in his life? What lay ahead on his road?

  No doubt, these existential speculations are due to the impact of my son’s experiences. But on another level, they’re due as much to those of my brother, Mark, born eight years after me. I remember one summer day a few years ago, I was driving in Tennessee, approaching Nashville. Suddenly, I saw a hitchhiker on the right side of the road. This wasn’t too rare near Music City; it looked like he had a guitar case with him. What captured my attention, though, was his amazing resemblance to my brother, Mark—same body type, same longish, curly hair, same glasses. It was uncanny. I almost turned the car around, wanted to go back and look into his face to see if it was really him or not. But of course, I didn’t stop. For one thing, my brother had been dead for twenty years. He had died suddenly in an alcohol-related incident, had been found dead in his apartment. At the time, he was twenty-three years old, still in college and working a summer job. Long after I passed the hitchhiker, I couldn’t shake the memory of Mark. What if he had somehow managed to come back to the world in the form of this other young man out there? An irrational thought, but very real to me, as if I had somehow driven right through a space/time portal into another dimension of remembered reality.

  It was my mother who first told me about my brother’s drinking problem, how it had started when he was a teenager out with buddies on Saturday nights. I had missed all that while away at college. My dad found the beer cans in the trunk, but he thought that was just normal teen guy stuff—nothing to worry about. For some it isn’t, but you never know what kind of genetic predispositions you’ve inherited. By the time Mark was in college, his roommates decided one day they needed to take him to detox. Things were gett
ing out of control. He eventually had to take a medical withdrawal from school, but not before his grades had taken a nosedive, probably for missed classes.

  When Mark came back home to continue recovery and attend AA, for a while it was touch and go. Visiting one summer, I felt that an invisible circle of shame had been drawn around my brother. He didn’t talk about what had happened, not to me. My dad only alluded to events in one blunt sentence to explain why my brother was home again. Only Mom would talk about matters, but always privately, in hushed tones, as if no one was really supposed to hear about it. Dad had trouble accepting the situation. He couldn’t see why his son couldn’t handle alcohol, why he had “flunked out” of school like that. If Dad had only thought about his own father’s weekend binge drinking, it wouldn’t have seemed so strange. But I believe our dad’s refusal to look at family history had to do with protecting himself. Like many men of his era, he didn’t find it manly to show any vulnerability. Back then, he felt it was threatening, even dangerous, to probe painful feelings from the past. He didn’t realize how dangerous it would be not to. He didn’t cry.

  Meanwhile, my mother had been crying all along. When I visited home from grad school, she told me stories of my brother’s secret illness that shocked me: how Mark had snitched scotch whiskey from the cabinet, how sometimes he had fallen into delirium tremens on withdrawal, how he pleaded with her to give him wine or whiskey. She would not. Instead, she brought cold, wet cloths for his forehead, stayed with him, spoke to him, prayed by his bedside. I couldn’t believe how much she had been through. And I couldn’t imagine my sweet, shy brother being so sick, so unlike himself. How could this be? And my dad barely spoke about it, closing his heart.

  When Mark joined AA and made a recovery, it took him at least a year at the local community college to work his way back up to being eligible to enroll at NC State in Raleigh. By then, he was a student in their landscape design program and doing well. Then another year later, in the spring of 1984, came a relapse. It apparently started on a group field trip to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville. One night, the class was enjoying their camp setting outdoors, sitting on a mountaintop under the stars, drinking beer. Mark wasn’t far enough along in his recovery to say “No thanks, I don’t drink.” Not easy for a young man to say to his peers on such a tempting occasion. That night must have triggered the addiction. Three months later, he was found dead in the apartment he shared with a roommate. My father received a phone call from the Raleigh police one July morning. After the shock, all he and my mother could do was cry. Later that same morning, I picked up the phone: I remember my father’s usual bright, confident voice sounding strange and flat on the other end—the space, the silence, the effort to talk, to breathe. He told me simply that Mark was dead and asked me to come home. Hardly anything more. Dazed, Mike and I made reservations for Greenville, packed our bags. How could this be happening? A strong young man, my brother … dead at twenty-three.

  My parents were comforted to have us there. Along with funeral plans, there were other difficult ordeals to go through. The hardest was entering Mark’s apartment to retrieve his possessions. My mother and I were there, but we didn’t go in. A police detective stood by with keys. Though it was a hot day, he was dressed in a dark suit and as he opened the door, held a neatly folded white handkerchief to his nose. The apartment was now a crime scene since someone—my brother—had been found dead there. “The apartment will have to be professionally treated by a forensics unit,” he told us, “but please feel free to remove whatever you want that belongs to your son.” Then my father and Mike began the process of gathering Mark’s belongings and bringing them outside in armfuls while my mom and I loaded them into the car. The work was grim; our clothes were soon soaked with sweat. Mike later told me that he couldn’t believe how many empty bottles of cheap wine he saw. The floor was lined with them. And hovering over it all was the hot, sticky smell of death.

  The next day at the funeral, the dark casket at the front of the church was closed and covered completely with an immense bouquet of white flowers, my brother’s favorites. Amid the pale green of spring woodlands, he loved the brightness of white dogwood blossoms. I knew Mom chose them to honor her son’s spirit. Their whiteness, their purity, somehow cleansed the ghastly experience of the previous day.

  My mother told me afterward that her prayers for Mark had been answered—but not in the way she had hoped. She said what she wanted for him was to heal, to be free, to be at peace. And now, though he had lost his life, he was. When she told me this, the tears were flowing. I tried to comfort her but felt so awkward at it. As if my arms couldn’t encircle so much grief.

  For several years after Mark’s funeral, whenever I went back to North Carolina to visit my parents, I noticed my mom still kept some of his clothes in what had been his bedroom. A portrait photo of him held its place on top of the chest of drawers. The same curly hair, the same features, the light brown eyes, the unguarded gaze looking out, as if he’d just asked us an open question and was waiting for us to answer.

  Mark was the gentlest person I ever knew, and believe me, being eight years his senior, I was not the nicest sister you could imagine. I still feel guilty for all the times I was less than kind to him. For me, growing up, he was often just a pesky boy I could tease and lord it over, someone who wasn’t nearly as accomplished or sophisticated as I was. Later, when we were both older, I tried to make it up to him, and I think he forgave me. But I realize that I didn’t understand at all what was going on for him during the years he was becoming an adult. How could I know, how could any of us know that Mark would die so young with his whole life in front of him? Most painful of all was my awareness of the intense loneliness he must have felt that last weekend. Questions haunted me, haunted all of us: Why did he not reach out for help? Was he too ashamed? Did he secretly want to die or was it an accident? We didn’t have answers.

  A family tragedy reverberates far out in time. More than a decade later, when our own son became a teenager, Mike and I couldn’t believe how closely he resembled my brother in the photo. We told our son about Mark’s fate; we wanted to ward off disaster. Dylan’s personality was completely different, but the physical resemblance! It scared us. We learned from Mark that sturdy young men could disappear overnight for reasons that were hard to understand.

  It was after my son’s arrest that I would think back to stories my mother had told me about Mark: her anguish, her prayers, her feelings of helplessness at watching her son struggle with addiction. At the time, how could I have guessed that I, who had spent so much energy trying to be different from my mother, cultivating a completely separate life, would walk down a similar path? That my heart would crack open, much like hers did? Later, I wanted to go back in time and talk to her again. “Mom, now I understand more of what you went through. How in the world did you and Dad survive it all? How did you both heal?” I wanted to look into her eyes and hear her voice. I wanted us to cry together, to comfort each other. But by then, she was already gone. My dad, too.

  No, I didn’t know yet what would happen to my own son, but I always held a silent fear in my heart—a fear that history could repeat itself.

  CHAPTER 20: NAMI II

  Laura’s Story, Part I

  Our February meeting started with news of our group becoming an official NAMI affiliate within our state. Next, our leader Sandra reminded us about plans for our upcoming advocacy trip to Frankfort, the state capitol, while the legislature was in session. We wanted to support the passage of Tim’s Law, which would mandate court-ordered outpatient treatment for the severely mentally ill, helping people like Rita’s son, Brett. Then we discussed when to schedule a group trip to Louisville to visit a place called Bridgehaven, a special center offering counseling, activities, and fellowship for persons with severe mental illness. A date was set for the summer. By the time we went around the table to give our self-introductions and updates, I noticed there was a new person there, sitting next to Joan. It wa
s her daughter, Laura. Sandra greeted our visitor warmly.

  Joan attended regularly, but a visit from her daughter was a rare and special event. At this period, a visit from anyone actually living with a mental illness was exceptional. We were a small contingent, a new frontier outpost in the mental health network. So at first, even for us, it was still unusual for someone to show up at a meeting to say, “Yes, I have a mental illness and here’s how it is for me. I want to tell you about it.” Though I hadn’t met Laura before, I knew from Joan that she’d been living at a special treatment facility in nearby Chesterfield after life-changing events. Joan had told us several times that her daughter was getting along well at the residential center with the support of medication and counseling. But as it turned out, there was much more to know.

  It soon became clear that Laura was going through a tough time. She was forty-nine years old, had gone to college, lived in Texas, and now was back in the area, trying to get her life back in order. She had Bipolar I with a severe anxiety disorder that upped the voltage of her illness considerably. There had been no diagnosis until she had her first psychotic episode, and that was over twenty years ago, before she knew she needed to stay on certain medications to control the illness. The other parents, who had known her longer, felt a genuine affection for her. They also felt respect, because she could articulate for us what she had gone through, what she was still experiencing. It helped us understand.