by Jessie Close
Tom visited Calen daily, and I called Tom for nightly updates. He told me Calen had made a friend in the locked ward, another young man his age who was equally psychotic. The two of them were spending hours sitting in front of an erasable whiteboard explaining paranoid theories to each other, egging each other on with their delusions as doctors tried to determine what medications might help free them from their own thoughts.
After three days, Calen decided that the doctors and nurses were plotting to kill him. They were not going to allow him to enter the Real World. Calen began planning an escape, and when two sheriff’s deputies came onto the ward with a patient, Calen darted for the open doors.
Both deputies snatched Calen as he attempted to run by them. Joined by the psych ward orderlies, the officers slammed Calen onto the floor. He fought back, swinging wildly and kicking as they pinned him down. When one of them finally got Calen in a choke hold, a nurse hurriedly injected him with Haldol, a major antipsychotic that literally knocked him out.
When Tom told me what had happened, I called the Helena hospital and told them that I was coming to see my son. I drove up as soon as I could get away. Calen was standing at the nurse’s station, and I could see that one side of his face was red and scabby from the nasty carpet burn he’d received while fighting the deputies and orderlies.
A big grin swept across Calen’s face when he saw me.
“Hey, Ma,” he called out as I came through the door, as if nothing bad had happened to him. He gave me a big hug.
We settled into two chairs, and I listened patiently as Calen explained why he had fought the officers.
“I was trying to get my contacts out, and they were holding me down,” he said. “They were holding my arms, but I knew that if I could get my contacts out, I could be in the Real World.”
I held his hand and peered into his eyes. He was being given Haldol and because of that he was cognizant. But he couldn’t stay on Haldol all the time—it is a good drug but a dangerous drug for side effects. There were other anti-psychotics out there but what would work?
I didn’t know what came next. All I knew was that my heart was breaking, my son was hurting, and I needed to pull myself together and do something to help save him.
But what?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
We’re talking about Calen,” Mom said. “Anything he needs, you just let me know.”
I felt grateful and relieved. I knew Calen was going to require long-term care to recover. Thinking back, I realized it had taken him about three years to reach the point where he was now. Three years of watching him get progressively worse—even though I had taken him to a psychiatrist, a naturopath, and a counselor. If it had taken him three years to get here, it was going to take a while for him to get better.
Although he was getting good care at St. Peter’s Hospital, our insurance company wasn’t going to pay for him to stay there longer than two weeks, even though the hospital’s doctors warned us that it might take five or six weeks for the medications that they’d prescribed to fully kick in. That just didn’t make sense, but it is how our system operates.
I didn’t want him getting a Band-Aid at St. Peter’s only to be discharged and return a few weeks later.
Asking my mom for financial help made me feel guilty, but not guilty enough to keep me from doing it. A private hospital would be expensive. Many of them didn’t accept insurance, and neither Tom nor I was in a position to pay for the high level of care that Calen required.
With Mom on board, I began searching for psychiatric hospitals. I searched the Internet, called friends, and learned that several other parents I knew had children with mental illnesses but had kept quiet about it. They had been afraid their sons and daughters would be stigmatized. I’m sure that part of my determination to get Calen the best care possible sprang from guilt. I had wasted so much time taking Calen to men who didn’t know what they were doing.
I began attending NAMI meetings, just as Tom did, and soon learned that other parents felt guilty, too, because they had been unable to help their own children. It was as if I were suddenly a member of a secret club. I felt immediate relief after my first meeting. I had no idea that mental illness, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder were as prevalent as they are.
Every waking moment was consumed with something to do with mental illness. I ended up selecting McLean Hospital, outside Boston, for Calen. For starters, it was affiliated with Harvard Medical School and was identified by U.S. News & World Report magazine as the nation’s number one psychiatric hospital. Located in Belmont, a Boston suburb, the hospital dated back to 1811. Seven years after that, it had switched from being a general hospital to one specifically designated an “asylum for the insane,” only the fourth such institution in America at the time. Seventy-seven years later, it had dumped its “asylum” tag and was reborn as McLean Hospital, named after a Boston merchant who died in 1823 and left the hospital the equivalent of $3.5 million in today’s dollars. A list of its former patients reads like a who’s who. Musicians James Taylor, Rick James, Steven Tyler, Marianne Faithfull, and Ray Charles; actor Billy West; poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell; mathematician John Nash—even Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald—had all sought help at McLean.
As soon as my dad realized McLean was affiliated with Harvard, he made a few calls to medical colleagues back east, then gave his approval.
When I spoke to the hospital, I was told that Calen would be evaluated for two weeks in a facility called the Pavilion. He would undergo a slew of tests, all known by their abbreviations—MRI, EKG, CAT—as well as blood work and psychological evaluations. He would be assigned to a psychopharmacologist to help him with medication. Calen would not be under lock and key. He would be permitted to walk outdoors and roam the hospital’s grounds. He was free to leave the hospital at any time. Just the same, security guards could respond in less than a minute if a problem arose.
Tom didn’t want to send Calen to McLean, but I insisted, and he finally gave in. Calen was still visibly confused when he was discharged from St. Peter’s Hospital, and I was nervous about flying with him to Denver and then Boston. United Airlines discounted Calen’s ticket because his trip was deemed a medical necessity, but it wouldn’t cut the cost of mine. The ticket agent looked at us suspiciously when we appeared at the airport. I could almost read her thoughts: What could possibly be wrong with this seemingly healthy, good-looking young man—so wrong that he deserves a discounted medical-necessity fare? If Calen had been in a wheelchair, the agent wouldn’t have given us a second glance, I thought, but because his was a mental illness, I was certain that she suspected we were trying to cheat the airline.
Getting through the airport’s security, especially its metal detector, was the next step. Calen slowed his pace as we neared it, but I took his arm and assured him it was okay. He made it through but began to feel anxious again when we started to board and he was surrounded by a throng of other passengers. Inching forward in a line of strangers was difficult for us both. I tried to distract Calen by asking him to locate our seats, hoping he would concentrate on finding each row’s number rather than on our turtle-like boarding pace. I held my breath, hoping he would not explode when a man in front of us took forever to put his bag in the overhead compartment then slowly remove his jacket and fold it. When we finally slipped into our assigned seats, Calen whispered to me. He said the other passengers were listening to his thoughts, but if he remained perfectly still, didn’t make eye contact, and stared out the window he’d be able to minimize the thoughts he was broadcasting. I touched his arm reassuringly and tried to get him to eat or drink something, but he refused. He didn’t want to interrupt his vigilance. Finally, he fell asleep, and I began to relax. A vodka helped.
McLean had a car waiting at Boston’s Logan International Airport, and we soon arrived at the Pavilion, a brick building with a modest white portico at the entrance and a long veranda. I later learne
d that Wyman House, where the Pavilion is located, was named after the hospital’s first superintendent, who’d believed in “moral treatment” for patients, which included making them feel as if they were living in a home rather than in an impersonal, antiseptic ward. All the buildings were designed to look like houses, not institutions.
Calen and I were taken to his room, which contained a double bed, a sofa bed, a wooden writing table, an armoire, and a television. The walls were painted a soothing blue and had white chair rails and ornate ceiling moldings. It was quite a contrast to the off-white walls and institutional furniture at St. Peter’s Hospital.
While Calen was unpacking, I whispered to the male nurse: “You know, TV scares him a lot. I wonder why there’s a TV in his room. We’ve been pretty careful to keep him away from it since he left St. Peter’s.”
“Some patients are okay with it, others aren’t,” the nurse, who was big enough to physically dominate Calen, replied. “The ones who aren’t can learn not to turn it on. Your son will learn about choices here. It’s not easy but it’s necessary.”
I didn’t particularly like his answer, so I said, “The TV makes me nervous because he’s just beginning here, and he’s probably not even on the right medications.”
“Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ll keep an eye on him,” he replied.
I needed to check in at a nearby hotel but was worried about leaving Calen.
The nurse told me to go. “Take your time and come back whenever you’re ready. He’s not going anywhere.”
I hailed a cab, checked into a hotel about five minutes away, tossed my bags onto the hotel bed, and raced back to McLean, surprising the nurse because I’d only been gone about twenty minutes.
“Sorry,” I said, out of breath. “I forgot to give you Calen’s medicine earlier.”
“It’s okay,” the nurse replied. “Our doctors already have spoken to his doctor in Helena, and we’ve given him his pills. You can relax.”
After hearing that, I wished I had stopped at a bar after checking in at the hotel. I could have used a couple of shots of vodka. I found Calen lying on his bed in a fetal position with the TV on.
“I saw a vampire,” he whispered. “First on TV and then outside, at the window.”
Damn it!
I unplugged the TV, put an extra blanket from the armoire over it to block the screen, drew the curtains, and sat next to him on the bed. So far, I was not impressed with McLean!
Calen said, “Don’t tell them, okay?”
I stroked his arm. He was almost a fully grown man, but his illness made him as vulnerable as a child.
“I’m going to sleep on the pull-out bed here tonight in your room,” I said. “Not at the hotel.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
It was getting late, so we both went to bed. Calen was still sleeping when I woke up and tried to smooth out the linen blouse I was wearing. By the time I came out of the bathroom, he was sitting up in bed and began laughing at how disheveled I looked. At least he was smiling.
We both spent that morning meeting separately with psychiatrists. While I talked about Calen, he was being interviewed. Getting a correct diagnosis and determining what medications could help alleviate his symptoms could take months, I was warned. Months? At least they were going to be thorough.
Midafternoon, I ducked into the Pavilion’s kitchen and was eating a piece of coffee cake when Calen came in. He said he wanted to show me something important. Calen led me out the back door onto a lush lawn of grass.
“I saw squirrels and chipmunks earlier,” he said excitedly.
“Let’s bring cake out here and throw it to them,” I suggested.
Within minutes we were feeding the squirrels. Calen had another appointment, so I waited for him on the lawn, and when he returned we went for a walk. We’d gone about a hundred yards when Calen spotted a short stone wall and suddenly took off running toward it. Leaping up on the stones, he let out a loud Whoop! I chased after him, noticing that there were no thistles in the grass, as there were in the West. The lawn was cushiony, as the lawn in Greenwich had been when I was a girl. By the time I reached the wall, he had spotted an abandoned building from the old asylum days near a cluster of trees.
“Let’s look at it,” Calen said excitedly.
We hurried down a gentle hill to the house, which had tall white double front doors covered in chipped paint. “This is where the horse-drawn carriages used to stop,” Calen declared at the entryway. Scrambling up the worn front steps, he peered inside through a dirty window. I joined him, pressing my face to the glass. Leaves covered the floor, tables lay on their sides, and file cabinets were empty, their drawers hanging open like hungry mouths.
Without warning, Calen jumped backwards, as if he had accidentally stuck his finger into an electric socket. He caught himself before he could topple down the front steps.
“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked.
“I heard them,” he replied. “A woman. A man. Don’t you?”
“No,” I said.
“There’s pain here.…”
We walked back, our jubilant mood replaced by an emerging sadness. We were not here for a vacation. We were here because he was sick, just like the hundreds of others who had passed through this hospital. I told Calen that I was going to sleep at the hotel that night.
I called Tom from my room. “The first day went okay, but this is hard on Calen. I wish we could just come home.”
The next four days came and went quickly as I accompanied Calen to his MRI and other medical tests. The high energy that he had felt when we first arrived was gone. There were no more gleeful runs down the grassy slopes or whoops from atop stone walls.
I, too, was emotionally drained by the end of the first week. It was time for me to go. I’d done all that I could as his mother, and now it was up to him and the doctors. I packed my suitcase, checked out of the hotel, and had a taxi drive me to the Pavilion so I could say good-bye.
Calen was between therapy sessions, sitting outside feeding the squirrels and chipmunks coffee cake. As I approached him, I thought: I should be leaving him at college. I fought back tears and told myself: No crying now. Buck up, Jessie. This is what’s best for him and for you.
Calen smiled when I sat down next to him and then turned back to feeding the squirrels and chipmunks. They would watch a piece of cake hit the grass and then eyeball him and each other before scampering forward to claim it. I noticed Calen’s lips moving, but no words were coming out. Where are you, my son?
I wanted to wrap my arms around Calen and hold on and cry, but I couldn’t do that. Doubt washed over me. Can I really trust these people to take care of my child?
I said, “Sweetie, I have to leave. I have a ten thirty a.m. flight home.”
“I wish I was coming with you,” he replied.
We sat for a few more minutes until the cake was gone and then walked together to the front of the Pavilion, where my taxi was waiting. I’d promised myself that I was not going to make a scene. Calen didn’t need that. Yet I grabbed his arm tightly when we reached the cab and said, “My God, I don’t want to leave you.” Panic and sorrow grabbed my chest.
“It’ll be okay, Ma,” he replied, gently touching my hand with his. I felt its warmth. He was reassuring me!
“I’ll be home soon,” he added. “Say hi to everyone for me. Good-bye, Ma.”
“I can’t say good-bye,” I said. “I’ll just say, ‘See you later,’ like Uncle Sandy and I would say when we were separated. Okay? I love you more than anything in the whole universe, more than tongue can tell.”
Calen turned and walked into the Pavilion, and for a moment I felt disappointed, hurt. He didn’t seem that upset that I was going. The taxi started down the driveway. As we turned a corner, I spotted Calen. He came bursting out the building’s back door and was running across the grass toward my cab. My first instinct was to tell the cabbie to stop, to fling open the door, and to grab Calen and escape together. Instead, I
dug my fingernails into my purse and began to cry.
When Calen reached the road, he stopped and waved enthusiastically at the back of our departing cab. That was my parting image of him.
I cried, intermittently, all the way to the Denver airport, where I hurried into a bar to wait for my flight to Bozeman. I cried so much that I wondered if a person could become dehydrated simply by weeping. Several vodkas made me even sloppier.
When I got home, I collapsed in bed, but I was awakened early the next morning by the phone.
It was Calen calling.
“I want to come home,” he said.
“You can’t, honey,” I replied.
“I hate you,” he said.
Before I could reply, he hung up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
As always, when I was under extreme stress, my shifting moods sent me into the arms of a new man and another bottle of booze.
Mark Sovulewski provided me with both.
At age thirty-eight, Mark was nine years younger than I when we met in 2000. He was ruggedly handsome, with ink-black hair, a handlebar mustache, and mischievous amber eyes. He’d recently arrived in Montana from California, but acted very much like a local cowboy, right down to his big silver belt buckle and scuffed boots. His mother’s people, the Bakers, were Montanans, so Mark felt he had every right to wear this cowboy costume.
We were introduced through my friend Pam, whose husband, Dave Sovulewski, was Mark’s older brother. Pam thought we might make a nice couple and invited us to join them for dinner at her house. From the moment we shook hands, I was smitten, and Mark was just as taken by me.
After dessert that night, Mark and I excused ourselves and spent the next several hours getting to know one another better while sitting on the front porch steps. Mark asked me about Glenn, and as usual I was proud but annoyed. It was celebrity-mongering, but I quickly got over it. How could I reject him because of some innocent questions about my movie-star sister?