His Bright Light

by Danielle Steel

  It was a time of terrifying frustration. I am a capable, reasonable, rational, intelligent, fairly strong-willed, competent person, with ample funds at my disposal, terrific resources, and an ability to get things on track quickly. If I couldn’t make things happen for Nick, and get help for him, I shudder to think at what happens to people who are too shy or too frightened to speak up, people who don’t know their way around, or have someone like Julie to help them. She validated everything I had thought for years about how sick Nick was, and gave me the courage to keep on fighting. But what happens to people who don’t have a Julie in their lives, who get no validation? All I can say is, given what I know now, if you believe that someone in your care is suffering from manic depression, or a similar illness, and you feel you’re not getting the help you need for them, don’t wait, don’t screw around, don’t be patient, try someone else. Try every route you can lay your hands on to help them. There are a lot of doctors out there, some good, some bad, some lazy, some brilliant, some stupid, some who care, others who don’t, and some who will help you and really make a difference. You have a right to what you need, someone who cares about your loved one and will help you. Do everything you can to find people who will help you. Keep trying, keep asking, keep begging. It makes all the difference in the world to find a good doctor and you have a right to do that. Always listen to your instincts. You know the patient better than they do.

  Don’t ask me how, but we somehow managed to tread water for a month, and went back to see the same psychologist again. He completed the evaluation, finally. He told us he would sum up the results, and then have his conclusions typed. I assumed that this would take a few days at most. I didn’t think Nick could wait much longer.

  Nick had gotten back on his feet somewhat by then, but he wasn’t in great shape. The only thing that had saved him was Julie, with her loving, firm, devoted, constant help. She just refused to give up, and tried everything she could to keep him going, and give him the hope that we would eventually be able to help him. Even Nick realized by then that he needed medication. And he was willing to try it, if we could get someone to give it to him.

  He was able to go back to school, and much to my surprise and our collective delight, he actually felt well enough to start a band. Encouraging him to do that was one of Julie’s tools to keep him going. He wasn’t in terrific shape at that point, but things were looking up. He called the band, rather unattractively, “Shanker,” but it provided the little fun he had in his life. And it revived his old passion for music. But when he wasn’t in school, or practicing with his band, he was either sitting on his couch watching TV in the dark, or in bed, sleeping. Classic signs of depression. And I was developing a strong sense that a kind of lethal hopelessness was setting in. Fearing that it might lead to a disaster, I called the doctor doing the evaluation several times. He still hadn’t finished up the report, but promised he would “soon.” At Julie’s urgent recommendation, I asked for medication for Nick again, and was denied. And when I tried to get Nick to go back to the psychiatrist he’d seen all during the previous school year, Nick refused to go back. But he liked the doctor who had done the evaluation, so I turned to him for help. And he agreed to see Nick several times a week. But he still wouldn’t give him medication until the evaluation was completed. I’m not sure what he was waiting for, but I felt as though I were waiting for three wise men on camels to appear beneath a star from the East, bearing Prozac.

  What I remember most about the fall of 1993, when Nick was fifteen, was that I was afraid to walk into his room. I had such a powerful sense of Nick’s despair (and who could blame him, no one seemed to be helping him, we were just putting Band-Aids on fatal wounds) that each time I walked to the door of his room, I was terrified of what I would find when I entered. I was afraid he’d kill himself before we could help him. And I finally bluntly told the doctor that one of these days, we would find Nick hanging from the belt of his bathrobe, and what would he say then? How sorry would he tell me he was? What was it going to take for someone to help him and give him the medication I felt he so blatantly needed?

  I’m not sure if it was that comment that spurred him, but within another week or two, he finally gave us his report. And when the doctor met with me and John, he looked somber. He talked about Nick having some learning disabilities and that “his behaviors were suggestive of a hypomanic quality that may point to a variant of a bipolar affective disorder.” For the first time, the possibility of Nick’s being bipolar, even atypically, had been touched on. And although he didn’t write it in the report, I believe that he said that he thought Nick had ADD, (Attention Deficit Disorder) and was possibly suicidal. He talked about a significant depressive component to Nick’s current experience, although he did not seem to believe that Nick was suffering from major depression. But he was willing to recommend medication. Hallelujah! The only miracle, as far as I was concerned, was that Nick was still alive to take it.

  They put him on a medication in the Prozac family, and it helped a little, but in my opinion, not enough. He was still depressed a lot of the time, though not quite as extremely. But there was still a lot of room for improvement.

  A song Nick wrote for his band, Shanker, tells how he felt at the time.

  I’m all alone.

  I’m all alone.

  Sky is white

  The pain is bright

  And I wanna get stoned.

  I’m all alone.

  Destiny, my destiny

  dance with me, dance with me, destiny

  Destiny, my destiny

  No escaping, that’s for me.

  My mother moans, get off the phone,

  she don’t like my fucking tone.

  Mama may have

  and Papa may have

  But God bless the child that’s got his own

  God bless the child that’s got his own

  I have been shown my heart of stone

  Feel it in my broken bones

  Love I can’t have

  The Dad I won’t have

  The child was left here all alone

  I was left here all alone

  Destiny, my destiny

  Dance with me, dance with me, destiny

  Destiny, my destiny

  No escaping that’s for me…

  It is a beautiful melody, with a mournful sound. It nearly broke my heart the first time I heard it.

  It was a tough winter for Nick, and the medication didn’t help him enough, but at least it was something.

  It was a tough time for all of us. We had learned earlier that summer that there were two unauthorized biographies planned about me which upset me greatly. We had also just recently been told that one of the biographers had somehow obtained knowledge of the record of Nick’s adoption. All children in the state of California have a right to have their adoptions sealed. In fact, it’s automatic. We had never asked for it, but as they do for all children, they had sealed Nick’s adoption records, when John adopted him when he was seven.

  But the biographer was threatening to mention it in the book, and Nick was frantic about it. Particularly in his very depressed state, he didn’t want anyone to know he was adopted, especially his younger siblings. At his request, we had continued to keep that information from them, so they wouldn’t feel he was “different” from them. He was emphatic about it. And John went to court to try and protect the seal on Nick’s adoption. That was all we wanted, to protect Nick, and the rights he had by virtue of being a minor, and having been adopted in the state of California. What mattered most to us was that it meant everything to Nicky, and he was already so fragile, we didn’t want the biographies to upset him further.

  The papers reported that we were trying to stop the book, and suing the biographer, but we weren’t. John went to court, and lost. The judge ruled that because of my celebrity, Nick’s right to privacy, and to keep the seal on his adoption, had been preempted. Our lawyer was outraged, and Nick was crushed. We had a right to appea
l, but Nick was in no shape to deal with it, or to appear in court, as he probably would have had to. We dropped the case, and Nick was bitterly disappointed. But the biographies, at that point, were the least of our worries.

  Nick was behaving strangely in school all through September, October, and November. He was quiet, and seemed mellow, but he was not doing his work, and his lack of impulse control was getting seriously out of hand, and getting harder and harder to explain to his teachers. One day, when he said he was bored, he walked quietly up to the teacher in front of the class, and without malice, or explanation, but just a lazy hand, quietly poured a soda out onto the teacher’s foot, and then walked back to his seat with the empty can when he had finished. The teacher was horrified, and I began getting frantic calls from the school. It pained me to say it, but it was obvious that Nick had to be treated as a “special needs” child. He could not function in a normal school on an ordinary basis any longer. They were going to have to accept him as emotionally handicapped, if they were going to keep him. And they were not prepared or equipped to do that.

  The week before Thanksgiving, they called and told me I had to withdraw him. He had lasted there exactly a year. But it was time for a new school now. Nick and I had visited a school months before, and it was somewhat unusual, but now it was perfect for him.

  I went to speak to the headmaster of the new school, told him the situation, and didn’t hide anything from him. He was willing to take Nick on, and deal with his problems. I broke the news to Nick and he was thrilled. He had loved the school when we saw it. It was tiny, informal, and the headmaster was bright and creative, and surprisingly undaunted by Nicky’s problems.

  Nick started there in December, and things went as smoothly for him as possible, at least for a month or two. But there was no denying anymore that Nick was getting sicker and sicker. And Julie decided that she had better go on an exploring expedition for us. She was still coming to the house every day, to work with Nick, and he was seeing the psychiatrist who had done the evaluation, although Nick seemed to be progressing slowly.

  What Julie wanted to explore for us were mental hospitals where we could put Nick if we had to, for a brief time, if he fell apart entirely, became suicidal again, or where they could at least do a thorough evaluation for us and explore the bipolar issue further. I was disappointed by the evaluation Nick’s psychologist had done that summer, and felt that he seemed to have done surprisingly little about it.

  At the same time, John suggested a famous mental hospital in Kansas. We talked about long-term, or even permanent, hospitalization for him. John thought it might help him, and it was undeniably difficult keeping Nick at home. But I wouldn’t even consider sending him away long-term, unless I felt we had to. I had promised Nick I would never do that to him, and as long as he was able to function while he was living at home, I intended to keep my promise. Besides, I felt strongly that one of the best things Nick had going for him was his family. If we “put him away” somewhere like that, there was no way that we could visit him with any regularity. I had small children at home and it just wasn’t realistic for us to start commuting to Kansas to see him. It was a great place, and John thought they could help Nick. But I didn’t want him to leave us. We never mentioned it to Nick, or he would have panicked. He didn’t want to be away from me, John, Julie, or his siblings for a minute.

  Nick got a little respite then, he was taking the medication, settling in to his new school, and he got an unexpected break that I thought might do a lot to boost his self-esteem and his spirits. There were times when I was still hoping for external forces to make a difference for him. But as with all manic-depressives, the powers that drive them, or drown them, are internal. But at least this one experience provided a positive moment for him. A TV show was being developed at that point, which was a news program for kids, written, produced, and reported by kids with adult supervision. And after an initial interview, Nick was hired as one of their principal “reporters.” It was a terrific opportunity, and a fun thing to do, and for a while he loved it.

  He interviewed teens with AIDS, tattoo artists, and someone at a piercing parlor. He did a piece in the Haight on runaways, interviewing kids, and commenting on the interview afterwards. There were serious moments in the show, and zany, wild ones. And with Nick’s personality and good looks, he was perfect for it. And for a while, he handled it well and was in everyone’s good graces. We all particularly enjoyed the show he did on Halloween. He interviewed costume shops about the hottest costumes that year, and did the entire interview straight-faced, while wearing a huge pink tutu. He actually loved doing the show and we loved seeing him on it.

  But the problem that did him in eventually, and ended his brief TV career, was his usual nemesis: impulse control. He began getting argumentative and difficult about the assignments he was given, and quarreled with the producer and director more than once about the subject matter. He finally walked off the set one day, and told them the interview he was supposed to do was “just too stupid.” But I think, in retrospect, that what was happening to him was that he could no longer take the pressure. No matter how much fun it was for him at times, or how well he did at it, he couldn’t keep up the performance. He walked off the set that day, and afterwards declared that he just didn’t want to do it any longer. But like all the things he “wouldn’t do,” it was always more a matter of what he “couldn’t” than “wouldn’t.” But it was disappointing when he left the show, because it had seemed like such a good thing for him. Nick had had the same problem earlier with modeling, when he refused to wear the clothes they gave him and walked off on modeling assignments.

  And as Nick was ending his fledgling media career, Julie had been spending three months traveling around the country, off and on, looking at hospitals for him, to see if we could find some place extraordinary, where they could help him on an as-needed basis. And finally, she found one. It was in a place I could get to fairly easily, my mother and stepmother could also travel to see him, and if he was there for a brief stay, Julie could arrange to leave her own family, and stay with him.

  They were willing to do an evaluation in February, in a week, during Nick’s ski break, and they would give us whatever suggestions they could as to how to help Nicky after they did it. It was something to hang on to, and we managed to talk Nick into going. He wasn’t enthused, but we promised him it would only be for a week, and the one thing he knew was that he could trust us.

  He went, willingly, but he must have been nervous about it, because we later discovered that he took an inordinate amount of Valium, without telling anyone of course, the hour before he got there. But in spite of that, they managed to do the evaluation. It reached our hands more quickly than the first one had and listed an incredible amount of mental and psychological problems, but confusing the situation even further, it found no evidence of either manic depression or ADD.

  He came home in exactly a week, just as we had promised him. And it hadn’t been as bad as he had feared. But it hadn’t really advanced us much either. All we had after his week there were more questions about the nature of his disturbances, but no answers.

  11

  Up and down, and up and down

  Better and worse, and better.

  Just like a seesaw.

  And finally, a diagnosis.

  When Nick got back from his week at the hospital, he settled back into the new school he’d been in for the past two months, and Julie came up with another miracle. She came up with a new psychiatrist for Nick. I would have been lost without her. Life with Nick, without Julie to deal with him, interpret for us, comfort us, comfort him, and come up with a constant cascade of new ideas, and help us implement them, would have been nothing short of a nightmare. She reminded me at times of Anne Sullivan, who brought light and life and language and joy into the life of Helen Keller. Julie truly was a miracle worker, and for that, and her vast heart, I will be eternally grateful, more than I can ever say here. I don’t know wha
t fates crossed her path with mine that breezy October day when Nick was fourteen, but for once they knew what they were doing.

  Before Julie found the psychiatrist she recommended to us, I called everyone I could think of to find one. People were getting used to me calling them, asking about doctors and psychiatrists and schools and hospitals. I was a one-man band, and played a single tune for more years than I care to think of. But I managed to come up with half a dozen names this time, all over the Bay area, and listened to a variety of excuses as to why they couldn’t see us. Most of them were kind, but they weren’t taking on new patients. But I knew I had to find someone soon. I felt that the doctor Nick had been seeing for the past six months wasn’t making much headway, and Nick was disenchanted with him, as was I. I had recently gotten discouraged when relating something inappropriate Nick had done, and he asked if I ever said “no” to Nicky. Of course I did, but the question made me feel that he had a less than perfect grasp of an extremely difficult situation. No, no, Nicky, don’t get depressed and sit in your room in the dark for three days at a stretch … no, no, don’t wander around the house all night and fall asleep on the floor somewhere, wrapped in your bedspread … no, no, Nick, don’t come down to dinner half naked. And for Heaven’s sake, no, no, don’t look like you’re contemplating suicide, or be so depressed and racked with misery that every time I see you, my heart bleeds.

  The point that was hard to get across at times was that Nick wasn’t just a disciplinary problem. There were clearly times, many of them, when he was barely able to function. The simplest tasks were too much for him. He could not do chores, or have responsibilities. He could not feed a pet, remember to empty his waste basket, close the refrigerator door at four A.M. so everything in it didn’t turn to mush, and making his bed was totally beyond him. He just couldn’t do it. He wasn’t just lazy, he was dysfunctional. And his lack of impulse control made him increasingly difficult to manage. And the older he got, the more we saw it.