“Oh, Gayley,” Elizabeth says. “I know you said it was bad, but I wasn’t ready for this.”
Elizabeth tells me that when our mom pulled up to the curb at the airport, she had a flannel nightgown wrapped around her nose and mouth to avoid breathing in fumes pumped through the air conditioning vents. A Jack in the Box cup full of urine sat in the cup holder of her car; she wanted to have it tested to see what sort of poison she was being subjected to. She had actually gone to a hospital in North Hollywood during the night because she thought she was having a heart attack; she told Elizabeth she wasn’t sure how she got to the ER—it was as if she had driven in a fugue state. Apparently they didn’t do a urine test—she was looking for someplace else to take her pee.
I put my hand over my mouth. “What do we do?” I ask. Why hadn’t the hospital realized she needed psychiatric help? Why hadn’t they kept her there?
“I don’t know.” My sister sinks onto the bed beside me. “I don’t know.”
We have a restless night. My mom sleeps on the hardwood floor in the living room—she has forgotten her cushion, tells us the floor is good for her back—and the motion sensor lights outside, triggered by cats and raccoons, keep startling her, make her think she’s about to be interrogated; she keeps waking up Elizabeth, who is sleeping on the couch, since Hannah is still at Matt’s. I, half asleep, think Asher’s ear is his mouth, that it’s frozen open in some sort of tortured rictus, and wake Michael up with my gasp. Asher keeps waking us up with his sweet kitten cries. All of us are exhausted and edgy in the morning. Michael wanders bleary eyed into the shower. Elizabeth takes Asher from my arms and walks around the house, singing softly to him.
My mom suddenly turns frantic. “What’s that?” Her head darts back and forth like a cartoon spy’s.
“What is what?” I ask her. That could be anything.
“It sounds like an Islamic chant!” She looks ready to bolt.
I listen for a moment. “Oh,” I laugh. “That’s Michael.” He’s singing in the shower. “If I Were a Rich Man.” I sing a bit of the “Ya da da da da da dum” part along with him, which I suppose sounds a bit like a muezzin’s call to prayer. Michael and I met doing a musical, but he’s not the best singer; he can be a bit nasal, a bit droney.
My mom laughs lightly, too, but she still looks haunted—whether by the Middle Eastern men she thinks are following her, or by “If I Were a Rich Man,” itself, by what a rich man she thinks my dad is, by what a rich woman she knows she’d be if only he weren’t hiding his fortune from her, I can’t say.
“I know this sounds fanciful,” she starts, and I wish it did, I wish her stories sounded fanciful. Fanciful stories would involve things like unicorns, not poison, although the unicorns she collected in the ’80s weren’t really fanciful, either. The schnauzer-sized one that still sits on her coffee table is wooden, muscular, with a lethal brass horn.
ELIZABETH sits alone on ARLENE’s patio. She wears a large green pendant that rests just below her throat. You can’t see how upset she is to be doing this interview, how much she doesn’t want to be here. She looks cool and collected, as always; her hair is short and chic. On the screen, it looks darker than usual.]
ELIZABETH: Well, I’ve always seen my mother as a very creative person and, um, somebody who’s always been very engaged with art and the arts, and so I think seeing this outpouring of creativity from her just feels like an extension of who she is, but a real manifestation of that creativity. So, um, I think when she was starting the process of assembling the supplies and finding space, I didn’t know what to expect or what might come of that process, but I think it’s become a part of her identity, and while she’s been an artistic person her whole life, kind of assuming this identity as an artist has awakened something or satisfied something in her that’s been a pleasure to watch.
Mom,
I know we planned an intervention, but I don’t remember anything about the plans, themselves. I think we had lined someone up, ready to ambush you with help, but none of us remember the details. Maybe Matt remembers, but that door is locked. I just have a vague memory of sitting with Matt in a psychologist’s office, one with large windows overlooking the 10 freeway. Why this particular psychologist, I don’t know. Someone must have recommended him. I remember a glass coffee table, Hannah’s car seat next to it on the floor. I remember the psychologist mostly asked questions; I remember thinking he wasn’t very helpful. I wanted answers, tools, not more questions. I remember thinking we had wasted our money, and living on student loans and food stamps, we didn’t have much money to waste. I don’t know if he was the person we enlisted to do the intervention, don’t remember if we had any faith in him at all.
However far along we were in the process, you caught wind of it. You ran away. Nothing scared you more than the thought of ending up in a psychiatric hospital. It was a relief and a worry to have you gone.
Dad flew out to California to help track you down; we found out later you had flown back to Chicago the same day, your planes likely passing mid-air. You tore through Dad’s closets and pockets and briefcase; you talked your way into his office downtown and tore through his desk. You looked frantically for evidence and thought you found it—evidence that made sense to no one but you, more “hand notes” you were ready to toss in my face like snow.
In my memory, we tried—somehow—to get you help again, and you ran off again. In my memory, you ended up in a small town in Canada, a small town by a lake. It wasn’t clear if it was near Guelph, where Elizabeth had moved with her Canadian boyfriend, Craig, where they had eloped to make it easier for her to stay there, where they were expecting their first baby. If I recall correctly, you likened the place you had landed to the town in Northern Exposure, Dad’s favorite TV show. I think you wanted to make him jealous. I don’t know what you did there—walked around the lake? ate eggs in a little diner? drank beer with lumberjacks?—I don’t know if you even really were there. But you surfaced eventually, and after Elizabeth gave birth on her own 22nd birthday—what would have been Dad’s mom Molly’s 110th birthday—you went to visit baby Mollie.
You had a knack for bringing postpartum chaos to your daughters. While you were at her house, Elizabeth found a piece of paper that had fallen out of your purse. It was a suicide note. It said that you should have killed our dad before you killed yourself. Elizabeth confronted you, and you laughed it off, calling it a joke. You were just letting off steam, you said. We were all freaked out, but we tried to not take it too seriously. It was too horrible to think about it being real.
NOVEMBER 24, 2009
I spend much of the day curled in bed with the baby, slipping in and out of sleep. The cloth napkins that drape the high window don’t let in much light, casting a murky aquarium glow through the room. The still-full birthing pool in the corner sends wavery reflections onto the wall, amplifying the underwater effect; it’s starting to smell a bit swampy in here, too. I’m starting to smell a bit swampy, myself.
I try to get up as little as possible—to avoid my mom and walking, both; the stitches make me feel like I have a bowling ball between my legs. Every once in a while, voices drift in from the other side of the closed door, primarily my sister and mom arguing. Elizabeth tries to stay calm, to be the voice of reason, saying things like, “That’s just a theory, Mom, not a fact,” but their voices often rise, and then they retreat to the cat-pissy laundry room, as far away from the bedroom they can get inside the house to keep from waking me and the baby. Now, though, they are right outside the room, bickering softly. A phone rings, and I hear my sister say, “Thank you for calling me back.” Her voice grows fainter as she walks away.
The door flies open and crashes against wall, startling Asher off my breast.
“Why would she do something like that?” my mom asks, wild eyed. “She knew I had a plan!” She thinks Elizabeth called, Sandra, our mom’s therapist. Our mom’s therapist, who it appears—like seemingly everyone our mom has talked to—believes o
ur mom’s story about her deceitful husband.
Adrenalin jitters through me; I hope it won’t spike my milk. “Could you please not involve me in this?” I ask. “I need to rest.” Somehow this sounds pitiful in my own ears, a weak excuse. My mom storms out of the room.
She runs outside to chase Elizabeth down. Michael follows her to see what is going on. He watches her run up Buena Vista Street, then run even faster back toward the house, terrified. She saw a white truck, she tells him. White trucks are supposedly following her again, almost sixteen years after Hannah’s birth. She races back inside.
Elizabeth returns shortly after, and I can hear our mom light into her about calling Sandra.
“It was Dad,” Elizabeth tells her. “Dad called me back.”
“Liar,” our mom hisses.
“Oh, so now I’m one, too?” Elizabeth asks. “If you can’t trust the people who love you, who can you trust?”
When I venture out of the bedroom, I learn my mom is trying to figure out her Thanksgiving plans. She has to get away, she says. She can’t spend Thanksgiving with my dad, who is planning to come here in two days to meet Asher.
My mom has a long-standing beef about Thanksgiving. When I was married to Matt, we would spend Thanksgiving at his mom’s house—she made the most delicious creamed pearl onions, the most delicious yams swimming in butter and brown sugar; she set the most beautiful table, with gold-rimmed goblets she inherited from her mother that look exactly like the ones my mom inherited from hers. My mom was invited every year after she moved to California, but only attended once. Matt and the kids and I usually went to Oceanside for another Thanksgiving meal a day before or after, but my mom always felt like a second-class citizen, a second choice. And she was; my mother-in-law’s Thanksgiving had become our bellwether.
One year, she spent Thanksgiving at the Golden Door, an expensive spa in Escondido. Elizabeth and I went to visit her there; all the guests in the dining room were dressed in white robes. Elizabeth said it felt like visiting her at a sanitarium; everyone was hushed, moving slowly, like terry-cloth-clad ghosts, everyone spaced out from a regimen of massage and yoga and very few calories. We were served a cup of vegetable consommé. In my memory that was it, the whole meal, but there must have been more, little plates of artfully arranged vegetables, perhaps a cube of tofu, a spear of pineapple or two.
She thumbs through her large brown leather datebook and lands on her friend Richard in La Jolla. She knows him from one of her cultural associations—the opera, maybe, or the art museum. “Funny little Richard.” She shakes her head. “He has such a crush on me.”
As she punches his number into her flip phone, her demeanor changes. She stands a little taller, takes a deep breath as if she’s about to sing. “Richard!” she cries, her voice loud, terrifyingly chipper. It’s as if she’s flipped some sort of switch, clicked herself into an Auntie Mame sort of frequency, a jovial socialite, someone who would call the guests “Darling” at dinner parties. “It’s me, Arlene. Can you believe it?”
Her whole face has transformed, lit up. She becomes this character fully, this outgoing grande dame, this bon vivant. Elizabeth and I look at each other in disbelief.
“Are you free for Thanksgiving?” she asks. “I’d love to make dinner for you, all the trimmings.” She gives a jocular laugh, a sort of feminine Santa’s ho ho ho. “I am known for my stuffing,” she says with a sly tone in her voice that makes me cringe even as I am flooded with an intense craving for her butter and vegetable broth-drenched stuffing made with celery and onion and a bag of cubed bread from Pepperidge Farm. One year, home from college, I had my wisdom teeth removed the day before Thanksgiving. Even though my mouth ached, even though I could only chew with my front teeth, I must have eaten a good third of her black Dansk casserole dish full of mushy bready goodness.
She hangs up the phone and her demeanor changes again, turns icy. “At least someone wants me for Thanksgiving.” She glares at us. “Too bad it’s not my daughters.”
MISDIAGNOSIS I: It Was Not Rheumatic Fever
ARLENE: Well, I was thought to have rheumatic fever as a child. I missed most of first and second grade because I always had joint pain; I had this funny heartbeat that turned out to be a floppy valve from Ehlers-Danlos. I guess that’s what all people have with mitral-valve prolapse, but they thought it was a murmur and I was on bed rest, and you know, I didn’t find out until forty years later. You know, this was the mid-’40s when I was thought to have rheumatic fever, and it wasn’t until the mid-’80s, when my younger daughter was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and this rheumatologist who came in and felt my skin said, Oh, you have it too. Well, then the search began. What is this? Well, what am I dealing with?
RE: SEARCH I
Postmortem Diagnosis
2015
I’ve always loved research. Pre-Internet, I’d be in the library at least once a week, looking up something that had sparked my interest or would help bring authentic detail to my fiction—’70s feminist performance art, say, or Zen parenting or Santeria or recipes for tagine. Post-Internet, like most of us, I’m always following my curiosity down one rabbit hole after another.
I didn’t have that impulse when my mom’s delusions started. I didn’t research delusion; I didn’t scour the Psychology stacks. Looking back, I see myself as strangely incurious about the roots of her behavior. Maybe I was in denial. Maybe her transformation seemed impossible to unpack, too big and wild to even try to begin to understand. Maybe the delusions seemed like something she could control—a willful act—not like something that was controlling her, something that could be looked up in a book. Maybe having a newborn and a toddler simply didn’t leave much head space for investigation.
We first hooked up to the Internet in 1995, about two years after Hannah was born, two years after my mom had started acting strange; even then, I didn’t search for information that could illuminate her situation. Two years in, we had learned to live with the ups and downs of her “episodes.” Some of the time she was fine—a loving nana, a generous mom; when she wasn’t, we waited it out as best we could. Nothing we had tried had worked as far as getting her help, not talking to psychologists, not talking to her, so we walked on eggshells, worked on our own patience, tried to set our own boundaries—something I was never good at; something she rarely respected.
Now, I can’t seem to stop researching delusion.
I learn the average age of onset of delusional disorder (which seems the most likely diagnosis) is forty (although one study puts it at fifty-five; my mom was fifty-four when hers began).
I learn the most common delusion subsets are:
• erotomanic type, in which the person irrationally believes someone, usually someone famous, is in love with them
• grandiose type, in which the person believes they deserve adulation for some special talent or insight
• jealous-type, in which the person insists their partner is being unfaithful because of delusional “evidence” (this type regularly leads to violence)
• somatic, in which the person has some sort of delusion related to the body: imagining bugs crawling on their skin, for example, or imagining one of their limbs isn’t truly their own and should be amputated
• persecutory type, where the person believes they are being victimized in some way. This is the most common form of delusional disorder, and is sometimes combined with grandiose type. Those two together seem to describe my mom to a T. They seem like even more of a fit after I learn that people with delusional disorder often appear to be fine and functional in most aspects of their daily life, and are often involved in formal litigation against imagined persecutors.
In his article, “Delusional Disorder,” James A. Bourgeois details some familiar-sounding characteristics of delusional litigants: “determination to succeed against all odds, tendency to identify the barriers as conspiracies, endless drive to right a wrong, quarrelsome behaviors, and saturating the field with multiple compla
ints and suspiciousness.”
I learn it can be hard to treat a delusional disorder, but Pimozide, an antipsychotic drug used since the 1970s, has a 68.5 percent recovery rate. My sister and I used to fantasize we could sprinkle some sort of med in Mom’s ubiquitous bottles of diet peach Snapple or cups of decaf. This one sounds like it could have helped.
I also learn from Bourgeois that people with delusional disorder share similar traits with hypochondriacs, in that “both selectively attend to available information. . . . They make conclusions based on insufficient information, attribute negative events to external personal causes, and have difficulty in envisaging others’ intentions and motivations.”
When I turned thirteen, my friends gave me a thick paperback copy of A Dictionary of Symptoms, with the inscription “Happy birthday, you hypochondriac.”
As my eyes filled with tears, I heard Laura whisper to Jessica, “She doesn’t think it’s funny.”
She was right; I didn’t think it was funny. I thought it was horrible and mean, and as soon as they went home, I couldn’t put the book down. I never would have admitted this, but they had given me the perfect gift. Before the end of the day, I was convinced I had colon cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and peritonitis. I was truly sick at the time and would soon be diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, but had definitely acquired some hypochondriac tendencies along the way.
Perhaps my mom and I were more similar than I had realized.
Mom,
Because I didn’t know what else to do right after your delusions surfaced, didn’t know how else to help you, I turned to my default—writing. I wrote you a letter. The scariest, hardest letter I had ever written in my life. I wrote it in green felt-tipped marker on stationery sized sheets of white paper, folded in half down the vertical center, like a book, so it would fit in a standard envelope. When I found the letter in your drawer all these years later, the seal broken, I could barely look at it; it made my heart race, my hands tremble the way they did when I first sat down to write it.
The Art of Misdiagnosis Page 6