by Mark Lukach
“I have been working on this so you can finally understand what I have been trying to say to you,” she said. “I haven’t explained to you how many angels I have seen. You three, you are angels. You’re on the list. But not me. This explains everything.”
She handed us the book, and we looked down and collectively gasped in awe. The page was an explosion of bright colors, almost too bright to look at. The first page was a list, just as Giulia said, of all the people she considered angels. The three of us were on the list, at the top. The rest of the family members were there, too, along with other friends and colleagues who had touched our lives. Several of the names were circled and reinforced with accompanying colors, some traced and retraced so many times that Giulia had almost torn through the paper.
The next page was a poem, a rambling confession of guilt for how throughout her whole life, Giulia had been too selfish to return the love she was given.
None of us knew what to say. It was alarming to see so much self-loathing, but there was so much gratitude in her journal as well.
I broke the silence.
“Giulia, this is so beautiful and so lovely of you to write, but none of that poem is true,” I said. “I have known you for nine years, and I have felt loved by you. You have certainly given back the love I have given you.”
Suoc chimed in, “Amore, questo non è vero, come ha detto Mark.” This is not true, as Mark said. “Sei una persona bella, come il sole.” You are a radiant person.
But Giulia was not hearing any of it.
“I know you don’t understand,” she said. “But that’s because you haven’t seen what I’ve seen. That’s why I wrote it down, so you would finally understand.”
She turned her attention to me. She took my face in her hands and looked directly into my eyes.
“Mark, you’re a wonderful husband. I’m so lucky that we met, and that you chose to love me. And now it’s time for that to end.”
She was saying good-bye.
“I know it will be sad, but you are too strong and beautiful to dwell on me. You need to move on. You deserve all the best in the world. I love you, Mark, and I want you to be happy.”
She was calm and resolved as she talked me through this. I tried to listen without hearing, half there, and half hiding behind an insistence that this was not real. It was real that we were sitting in the visiting room of a psychiatric hospital, and Giulia was very sick, and she anticipated that she was going to die soon, but she was in a safe place. She wasn’t going to die. This was not the good-bye that she believed it to be.
She kissed me on the forehead and then moved on to Cat. “I never had a sister before you. I love you, Cat. I only wish we could have grown up together, like real sisters.” Cat hadn’t said much of anything yet, she was so overwhelmed by the visit, and her face was so filled with tears that she had no response.
Giulia then addressed her mom. “Mamma, mi hai sempre detto: fai tutto con amore, e hai ragione.” Mom, you always told me: do everything with love, and you’re right. “Stò facendo questo con amore.” I’m doing this with love.
She came back to me for one final declaration.
“Mark, promise me that you will be happy.”
“Giulia, I already am happy. You are my happiness.”
“Mark.”
“Giulia.”
She kissed me on the lips, then moved to get up.
“I love you all. And now you can understand. You can understand why.”
She walked out of the room, and we trailed after her. We hugged her at the nurses’ station, and she hugged us back. She left us standing there, and just before entering her bedroom, she looked over her shoulder and kissed her hand to wave. It was her final salute.
We went home and went to sleep, drained by the overwhelming visit. Giulia’s evening was not as straightforward. I later learned from her that after we left, she brought the book to the nurses’ station and tore the pages to shreds. She left them scattered on the floor for someone else to clean up. She then crawled into bed and tried to hold her breath long enough to suffocate herself. I don’t think the human body is capable of choking itself, but Giulia tried many times that night. She lay back in her bed and held her breath as long as she could. Her body inevitably revolted and gasped out for a deep breath of oxygen. Discouraged, Giulia panted until her breathing once again became normal and steady. Then she regathered her will to die. She tried it again, and again, and again, and again, until morning.
One night at dinner, after our regular visit, Suoc said to me, “This is worse than if Giulia had died.”
I didn’t say anything.
“The person we visit every night is not my daughter, and we don’t know if she is coming back.”
I was silent, but halfheartedly agreed. Every evening I ripped open a wound that I’d spent the whole preceding day trying to patch up.
I did all of this grieving with my mother-in-law as a roommate. She planted herself in our house and had no intention of leaving. I was coming unglued, and I started to wonder just how long she would stay in San Francisco.
Suoc and I had always gotten along in the past. She was fun to talk to and a great cook. Whenever she visited, she left our house cleaner and more polished.
Now, with her daughter in the psych ward, Suoc immersed herself in the doting and fussing. She didn’t know anyone else in the entire state of California besides me and Giulia. She reorganized our pantry, then our pots and pans. She swept daily, sometimes several times a day.
The creature comforts felt stifling. When she swept, I saw it not as a help, but as a judgment that our house wasn’t clean enough for her. She did the laundry and ironed everything, down to my boxer shorts and socks, and I burned defensively at what I assumed was disdain at the way that Giulia and I lived.
Most challenging, we took different approaches to Giulia’s uncertain state. I asked some questions of the medical approach to fixing Giulia’s psychosis but was generally trusting. Suoc was outright hostile, and I felt uneasy with how literally she took Giulia’s delusions. She wanted to analyze and interpret them ad nauseam. I was inclined to take the doctors’ advice: acknowledge the delusions but not focus on them. My conversations with Suoc on the way to and from our evening visits to the hospital became more intense.
Finally, one drive home, I’d had enough.
“Sorry, Suoc, but this isn’t working for me anymore,” I said coldly, my eyes on the road. “I need my space to handle this my way. I appreciate all the help you are doing, but I need to be left alone. I can manage the household like I’ve been handling it for the past three years of marriage to Giulia. If I feel like eating an entire pizza in front of the TV and want to leave the box on the coffee table for a few days, then that’s fine! It’s my home, where I should be able to live by my rules, but I’m feeling like an outsider in my own home.”
Suoc pouted in silence. The rest of the drive home neither of us said a word. We got home and she went straight to her room and closed the door. The next morning, I found her sitting quietly at the kitchen table. With no emotion in her voice, she told me, “I bought a ticket to New York. I’ll stay with a friend from when we lived there. My plane leaves in a few hours.”
I insisted that I drive her to the airport, which she allowed me to do. We hugged stiffly at the curb, and then she was off. I felt guilty, but I needed my space. I needed my home back. If Giulia and I were going to rebuild our lives, I needed Suoc to quit ironing my boxer shorts.
The doctor extended Giulia’s 5250 after the first fourteen days expired. However, we all agreed that she was looking a little better. Her outbursts were becoming less frequent, and after her third week in the psych ward, they were almost gone. She was more predictable, less explosive. Our visits were more typically conversational—the weather, updates about friends and family, little to no talk of religious delusions. We still mostly went to our little room, “our place,” but some days we strolled the halls of the psych ward in our restlessness
, past barred windows and faded framed prints of impressionistic paintings that no one looked at.
“That guy kissed me,” she whispered to me on a walking visit as we passed a patient.
“What?” I asked, wheeling around to get a look at the guy.
“He kissed me today. He came in my room and kissed me on my face.”
“Really.” I stopped walking and turned to see the figure disappear into his room. He slammed his door shut.
“Yup.”
“Well, that’s weird,” I said. I took a deep breath and focused on keeping my cool, then changed the subject. “Goose has been really enjoying the beach lately. We’ve been staying for hours, and he couldn’t be happier, although of course he misses you.”
Giulia smiled. She always loved to hear about Goose. She asked me repeatedly if I could bring him to the hospital. I brought her a stuffed animal bulldog instead.
This was Giulia’s twenty-second day in the hospital. I knew the routine. When I’d signed in that night, I’d chatted with the nurses as I always did, to get a rundown on the day. No one had said anything about another patient coming into Giulia’s room, a clear violation of hospital policy, and kissing her on the face.
Of course, there was the possibility that Giulia was making this up. While she was doing better, she still had her moments of delusions.
I kept the rest our visit light, but I was tired, and Giulia was tired. After three weeks in the hospital, we were at a loss over what to say. I understood why some families just watched TV together when they visited.
At the end of visiting hours, I gave Giulia a kiss of my own on her forehead and then marched over to the nurses’ station. “What happened to Giulia today?” I asked, banging my hands down on the counter loudly.
“Uh, what do you mean?” asked one of the nurses behind the counter.
“I mean, what happened to Giulia today?” I repeated. “Because she told me something. And I want to hear it from you.”
All three nurses were now looking up at me nervously. They looked at one another and back at me, and finally the charge nurse, the woman who had so rudely shooed us away on Giulia’s first night in the hospital, the woman I had desperately tried to win over to my side over the past three weeks, stumbled her way through a response.
“Well, there was an incident today. It involved Giulia and another patient. None of us were here when it happened.”
“Yeah, I know there was an incident. Who the fuck kissed my wife? What the fuck happened? And why didn’t anyone tell me about it?” I demanded.
“Uh, well, yes, from my understanding, yes, another patient went into Giulia’s room and kissed her.”
“Yeah, I know! But not because any of you said anything to me. You left it up to my delusional wife to tell me about that. I have tried so hard to be nice to you all, and to work with you, and you don’t tell me about this? This is fucking ridiculous. What do you know that I don’t know already? What does it say in her file?”
I’d grown savvy enough to know that the file was sacrosanct. Everything and anything was in that file—how well Giulia slept, how much she ate, if she took her pills, how often she shit, everything was in that file.
The charge nurse trudged over to the file cabinet, flipped through the file, and came back empty-handed. “It doesn’t say anything in Giulia’s file.”
“What the fuck do you mean it doesn’t say anything in Giulia’s file?” I was losing control. I had mourned plenty over the past three weeks, but I hadn’t yet raged. The adrenaline felt good, compared with the dull emptiness of grieving for someone who was still alive.
“It doesn’t say anything in her file,” she repeated.
“You guys didn’t make a record of a patient kissing another patient?”
“Well, we did,” she said sheepishly. “But not in Giulia’s file. It’s written about in the other patient’s file.”
“What does it say?”
“I can’t tell you that,” she said. “You don’t have permission to know the contents of anyone else’s file.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
You have got to be fucking kidding me was one of Giulia’s favorite phrases, ripe with condescension. I was delivering it in a way that I knew would make her proud.
“I am not kidding you,” the charge nurse replied, gaining a bit of moxie as she sensed I was losing control of the situation.
“This is fucking ridiculous.”
It felt good to explode at someone and to have a target for my anger. I had cried so much in the past month, but I hadn’t yelled at anyone, because who was there to yell at? I finally had a situation that granted me full permission to air out my anger, to give it free rein to wreak all the havoc I had been feeling inside. This nurse had failed to protect Giulia, just like the nurse who had rolled me over even though I was at a pain level ten. Now it was my turn to protect Giulia.
“Let me get this straight. You’re telling me I’m not entitled to know what happened to my wife? All I know is that some guy kissed her, and that’s the best I’m going to get out of you fucking people?”
“Visiting hours are almost over,” she said, desperate for something to say.
“There’s thirty fucking minutes left in visiting hours,” I spit back at her. “Don’t try to kick me out. Take some fucking responsibility for this situation.”
“You’re clearly upset. Maybe you should head home so we can talk about this tomorrow after you’ve calmed down.” She was starting to go on the offensive, sensing that I was on the edge. I didn’t want to give her any reason to find fault in my behavior.
“This is a fucking disgrace.” I stormed out of the hospital. As soon as I got home, I called the hospital and demanded to speak with Giulia’s doctor, that night.
With nothing else to do, I Skyped my parents. It was four in the morning in Japan, where they lived, but they woke up on the first ring.
“What happened, Mark?” my mom asked.
I had grown up in a household of no swearing, but I explained the situation through tears and profanity. It felt so profane, I couldn’t think of other words.
“Mark, you need to talk to the doctor,” my mom said. “We need to make sure that this other patient isn’t going to be bothering her anymore.” My mom was calm with a mission in mind, which was exactly what I needed.
“I did call, I’m waiting for his return call.”
“Okay, good,” she said. “You should also—”
My phone rang, with a blocked number. Anytime someone from the hospital called, it was a blocked number. “Mom, Dad, I gotta go,” I said. “I think that’s him.”
“Okay, good luck, you’re doing a great job,” my parents said, eternally encouraging and supportive. I hung up Skype on my laptop and picked up my phone.
“What the fuck is going on?” I demanded of the doctor. I still had some fuck left in me.
“Well, Mark, to be honest, this is the first I’ve heard about this as well.”
His not knowing calmed me down, because the nurses would have called him if it had been an emergency. I gave them at least that much credit.
“Here’s what I understand happened,” he said. “There is another patient who believes he is God, and he offered some type of forgiveness to Giulia. She has been so set on being the Devil, and here was God, saying he would forgive her. She let him into her room, and he kissed her on the face.”
“Did he try to touch her?” I screamed. “Did he? Did he fucking try and touch her?” I was raging again.
“No,” he said, and I began to weep in relief. “We asked Giulia and the other patient, and both said it was just a kiss. An orderly walked by and saw the patient kneeling at Giulia’s feet, and rushed in to break it up. We think he was only in her room for a few minutes at most. And he didn’t touch her.
“We moved the patient to another room, and he is now under constant supervision.”
I couldn’t be mad at the God delusions, just like I cou
ldn’t be mad at Giulia for her Devil delusions. But I wanted Giulia out of the hospital.
“I am not certain Giulia is safe in the hospital anymore,” I said. “I think we should talk about relocating her.”
“Well, let me interrupt you there,” the doctor chimed in. “Giulia has been in here a long time, one of the longest stays we have right now. We check in on patients every fifteen minutes, but we can’t watch everyone all the time. To be honest, I can’t believe nothing has happened up to this point. The group tends to take care of themselves, and protect each other, but it’s still strangers in a confined space together.” None of this was reassuring.
“What I’m getting at is this might signal that the hospital is not the best place for her anymore. We had been talking about Giulia plateauing in the hospital anyway, and she seems to be doing better on the medicine. She’s not completely out of the woods, but she’s much more stable. She’s been here so long, and the psychosis seems so much more under control . . .” He was searching for words, uncertain of how to put this in a way that would make sense. “And so I think this is a sign that she’s ready to come home, to a more comfortable and familiar environment.”
And like that, as I still reeled with the shock of a patient kissing my wife, the doctor told me that Giulia was coming home the next day.
I listened to “Viva la Vida” on loop on the way to the hospital. I opened the glass doors to the psychiatric ward for the last time. I was grinning from ear to ear, eager to forget all the rites and rituals of taking the special elevator, signing in, having my possessions checked. I avoided the nurses. I rounded the corner to see if I could help Giulia with packing her stuff. She was out in the hallway, waiting for me.
“Honey! You’re coming home!” I beamed as I saw her.
“Mark,” she whispered as she leaned in close, looking wildly over her shoulder to see if anyone might be listening. “This is a big mistake. Lock me up forever. I am the Devil and need to be locked away.”
My buoyant optimism skipped a beat. The doctor had been so convincing last night on the phone that Giulia was looking more stable, yet here she was, still psychotic and talking about the Devil, and she was coming home, where there was only me to take care of her. What was I getting into?