River of Time

by Naomi Judd

  Scientists in a 2007 study reported in the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology found a specific gene implicated in the development of narcissistic personality disorder and which has a very high rate of heritability. Neither of the boys ever fully recovered emotionally from this unimaginable shock, although it seemed to affect the younger boy, Norman, more.

  I grew up around him and observed that he was very withdrawn and rarely spoke after that. Throughout his life, his physical stance was as stiff as that of a vintage cigar store Indian. There were no psychological services available in those days, especially out in the country, but there certainly was a lot of gossip. Word spread fast and the boys had to face the daily whispers of their classmates and the townspeople.

  The older boy, redheaded and quiet Howard, was to become my mother’s dad, my grandfather. When my mother, Polly, was only eleven years old, Howard, who had survived his father’s suicide–double murder attempt, was found dead in his bathroom, shot in the head.

  No one explained to young Polly what had happened to her father. Apparently it didn’t matter to her mother, Edie Mae, that her husband had seemingly committed suicide, leaving her with three small children. The coroner labeled Howard’s death a suicide, but Edie Mae’s own mother, my great-grandmother Cora Lee, knew that her daughter had murdered her husband.

  Edie Mae left town soon after with her secret lover, Jerry, unceremoniously dumping her three children off at Cora Lee’s house. She only returned to live with her mother, once again, after Jerry died of an accidental electrocution. Edie Mae never took responsibility for her three children. She was a textbook example of an extreme narcissist, and a possible psychopath.

  My great-grandma Cora Lee ran a popular diner on Main Street in Ashland, called the Hamburger Inn, which took up most of her time. My orphaned teenage mother was left to raise her two siblings, even as she began to work at the restaurant as free child labor. It sure made sense to me that my mother never, ever referred to Edie Mae as “Mom” or “Mother.”

  Edie Mae, instead of behaving like a mother, was a silly, flirtatious, and flippant loudmouth. She had gaudy fire-orange hair and wore way too much makeup as she paraded through town, hoping to meet a man for drinks at the VFW. She spent money wildly on herself and her friends, leaving her children to scrape together the necessities as best they could. My mother was the one who made sure her two siblings, Norman and Martha Lee, were clean and fed and kept up with their schoolwork. Mother signed her siblings’ report cards and helped them get primped up for any school dances.

  I was frightened of Edie Mae as a small child. One afternoon, during an unwelcome visit, she told me to paint her fingernails, as she leaned toward my face with her brittle, processed hair nearly in my eyes and her stale alcohol breath wafting into my nose. My stomach did a flip-flop in fear of having to spend any time with her, so I came up with an excuse that I had left something important outside. I flew out the door and down the sidewalk and rounded the corner out of Edie Mae’s sight. I couldn’t believe this weird woman was my grandmother. But she really wasn’t. She never hugged me or acted as if she cared about my existence. Why would she care about her granddaughter when she was such a self-absorbed narcissist that she never cared about what happened to her own children?

  In a rare moment when Mother was open to talking about her childhood, I asked her if she ever loved Edie Mae. She dismissed the question with a flick of her wrist and a disgusted sigh, saying, “It’s hard to have love for someone who never pays any attention to you.”

  Edie Mae spent her last years in an abysmal county nursing home for the destitute. My mother went to see her a couple of times before she passed away. I always wanted to ask Mom if she had been aware her mother had murdered her father. Edie Mae never had any remorse for killing her husband, Howard, for abandoning her children, or for her extravagant waste of the family’s minimal resources. Her only request, fitting the true narcissistic template, was to demand that my mother take her to live in her home. Fat chance!

  The only personal belonging that Mother has from her mother is an ornate clasp, a buckle that was on the belt of a luxurious long black velvet coat that Edie Mae wore on special occasions. I’ve watched as my mother has held the clasp in her hands, turning it over and over as if she might find the secret code to forgiving her selfish mother, or as if it might have some magical attributes that could revise heartache and history. I find it oddly symbolic that the one memento she kept is a clasp, something meant to hold two separate things together.

  My mother is a survivor. In her early life, she endured more psychological damage than most people endure in a lifetime. She has been an example to me in that respect. She lived in a crowded, cigarette-smoke-filled house, where the curtains were always drawn. She shared a small bedroom with her siblings, because Cora Lee’s other five oddball adult children, my mom’s aunt and uncles, all had mental and addiction problems and had either never left home or had returned after a brief but unsuccessful foray out in the real world. None of them seemed capable of making decisions and all seemed lost without their mother, Cora Lee, running their lives and having them help her with the restaurant.

  When my father first met my mother, while eating lunch at the Hamburger Inn, and showed interest in her, Mother felt a flicker of hope that this hardworking young man could rescue her. My vulnerable fifteen-year-old mom jumped at her chance to escape her harsh childhood and married this eighteen-year-old man. When she was eighteen, she gave birth to me. She became a full-time housewife to whom the meager life my father carved out for her felt like a step up from the lifestyle she had endured for her first fifteen years of life.

  My daddy was a nice enough looking young man who put in twelve to fourteen hour days at his gas station six days a week. He was straightforward, honest as the day is long, and undemonstrative. Every day one of us would take him a brown-bag lunch Mother had made. When he came home he wanted his supper. She always had it ready for him. Mother was a fabulous cook from her years of experience in the restaurant. We never lacked for a meal of comfort food, like fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, and homemade fudge for dessert.

  The neighborhood kids would always want to visit, because they knew my mother would have a plate of snickerdoodle cookies or a pie or two set out on the counter.

  I think it was the enthusiasm we all showed for her food that made Mother feel appreciated. It’s one time when I saw her happy and expressive, so I always tried to make sure I brought my friends into the house, even though I would have to run around gathering up and throwing all of the clutter left around the living room into a clothes hamper or shove it under the couch to hide it. She may have been a great cook but she rarely stepped outside the kitchen to see if the rest of the house was in order.

  Even though our kitchen was often bustling with neighbor kids, I never once saw my parents ask any adults over. We never had any company, except for a few relatives, only once or twice a year. Daddy coached Little League games for my brothers, and Mother would bake for the PTA sale, but neither one had any hobbies. It appeared my parents didn’t need the connection, happiness, or comfort of having friends. They didn’t express the slightest amount of affection toward each other. They never hugged or kissed in front of me or even held hands. There was never any overt display of affection in our home at all. I don’t remember ever getting a congratulatory pat on the back for a job well done.

  My mom would cook, bake, and do laundry, watch after us, and keep my father in clean work clothes. He would work until seven, come home, scarf down his plate of food, and retire to his red recliner to watch boxing or some western or gangster movie, leaving Mother and me to clean up the dishes. I never once saw my dad bring her a gift or flowers, or even give her a card on her birthday, yet she never complained. Her only friends were Kitty, a woman whom she grew up with and who stood as the witness at her wedding to my father, and my aunt Roberta, who had an equally hard life married to my uncle Norman, an alcoholic who
eventually abandoned his family of three and began to live as a gay man.

  I don’t know if my parents ever said the words “I love you” to each other. I certainly never heard it. But I do know that Mother was a dedicated martyr to Daddy. When, after twenty-five years of marriage, Daddy decided to walk out on us and move in with Cynthia, his twenty-three-year-old mistress, the humiliation, gossip, and the betrayal left Mother devastated. I observed her gradually becoming judgmental, bitter, and negative to the bone and I found out that she was throwing and smashing dishes.

  I was living in Hollywood, with Michael and Wynonna, and Ashley was still an infant, when the phone rang in the middle of the afternoon. It was Daddy. I knew something was wrong, because he never called me. I always had to check in on him, and after he had plans to marry Cynthia, I rarely had the urge to call him. It was as if Daddy had become a different person, one who had left his past behind, as if Mother and we children had never existed.

  “Your mother was found unconscious in her car,” Daddy sputtered, plunging ahead with the awful news, giving me no time to prepare. “She overdosed on pills. She’s in the ICU.”

  I couldn’t picture Mother doing this. She had come to Hollywood when Ashley was born, to meet her new granddaughter and help out with Wynonna, who was still a rambunctious toddler. It was obvious then that Mother was still very angry with Daddy, but I didn’t see it as hopelessness, only bitterness. Apparently the cold, hard reality of her situation had now settled in for good. She had to face the fact that Daddy was not coming back to her. She was trapped in a mire of embarrassing rejection and humiliation as a divorced woman in a town where divorce wasn’t common and most women didn’t work outside the home.

  A police officer had come upon her car, parked on an isolated dead-end country road that backed up to a field behind Cynthia’s apartment building. This was a “lover’s lane” where teenagers would play hooky from school and smoke pot or make out. The officer expected to see a couple of delinquent teenage boys hiding out in the car instead of a pretty auburn-haired housewife, slumped sideways on the seat, whose lips and forearms were now a pale shade of grayish-blue from lack of oxygen, an empty bottle of prescription Valium on the seat next to her. The officer alerted an ambulance and Mother was taken to King’s Daughters’ Hospital emergency room, where they managed to save her life by pumping her stomach repeatedly. She was most likely minutes from death when the officer found her.

  Even though I had been relieved to move across the country and escape the dreariness of Ashland and the demands of Michael’s parents, to sunny, hip, fast-paced Hollywood, I was now panicked at the thought of Mother dying with me so far away.

  Would our relationship end this way, without any expression of love between us? We were not only emotionally distant from each other, but also 2,300 miles apart.

  “What will happen to her, Daddy?” I asked, my voice shaking.

  “I bought you an airplane ticket,” Daddy explained. “Bring the girls with you. The Ciminellas will have to keep them at their house, because I don’t know how long you will have to stay.”

  About twenty-four hours later, I was at her bedside in the intensive care unit. Although her eyes were open and I was sure she recognized me, she was fairly unresponsive. For the first day, I sat by her bed, just trying to think of anything to offer to keep her alert and responsive.

  The second day, she began to speak. After the third day it was obvious that her brain had survived the drug overdose and oxygen deprivation. Her one request was for me to bring in food so she didn’t have to eat a hospital kitchen dinner. The doctors released Mother from the hospital without a single suggestion that she seek mental health help. They sent her home without any psychological follow-up or therapy. I felt stunned and dismayed. After all she had been through, beginning in childhood, she never went through counseling. When I tried to talk to her about the overdose, she acted as if it was all a big misunderstanding and wasn’t really a suicide attempt at all.

  I stayed on with her for another week, while she drank endless cups of coffee at our kitchen table and spoke derisively about Daddy living with his mistress and the way she was now forever shamed in front of the whole community. I could tell my mother was terrified at the prospect of being alone and losing all she had, which, at this point, was our family home.

  “This is what I get for working like a dog,” she lamented. “And being a stay-at-home mom.” She slapped her palms down on the table like an exclamation point.

  She ignored my attempts at sympathy and only wanted to deplore her chances of getting by on her own, with no income, since she had never worked other than as a homemaker after she married Daddy. The one thing my mother always did extremely well was cook, so I told her that it wouldn’t be difficult to find a job. Living on the Ohio River, there were cargo riverboats always looking for a cook to feed the many men who worked on board for weeks at a time. On my suggestion, she went to meet with a river pilot, who hired her on the spot. The weathered, lonely riverboat captain fell for my unaffectionate and bitter mother and they married a few years later despite the fact that he couldn’t hold an intelligent discussion about anything except riverboats. Still, the job gave Mother a feeling of accomplishment and she continued to work on the river until her retirement.

  Now I contemplated how my leap from the bridge would leave absolutely no chance that Ashley or Wy would sit by my bedside in a hospital ICU. I could desperately use the emotional support and advice of a loving mother, but I didn’t even think about calling her. I had never known her to reciprocate any of my attempts to be supportive and loving toward her. Why would that start now?

  In any case, I was certain that the inheritance of mental illness and suicide in my family had been passed to me. The bridge seemed to be my final stop, my preordained destiny.

  The next evening, my grandson Elijah came to the house with his girlfriend, Haley, to have our usual Thursday night dinner with Larry, Ashley, and me. He is a handsome, tough-looking, yet tenderhearted young man who has always been very close to me and whom I adore.

  As we sat at the dinner table, Elijah relayed the details of how he had heard about a police officer who had to respond to a suicide from the Natchez Trace Bridge the previous night. Even though the person who had jumped was a stranger, Elijah disclosed how upset it made him feel to think of finding someone’s body after they leapt from that bridge. I had to excuse myself and leave the table. I went into the bathroom to weep. The thought of my beloved grandson being the person who could possibly have to identify my mangled body was more than I could bear.

  I felt such a deep shame about not being able to shake off this increasingly dark and immobilizing depression. The only thing sparing me from suicide was the effect it would have on those I loved, and all of the people who thought of me as a hope seller, but the odds were beginning to weigh against them. The disease in my brain was as persistent as the hepatitis C virus had been in my liver. I began to convince myself that I was a waste of breath and life. After our company left that night, I called Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz, even though it was already past midnight in Maine, where she lives.

  “Hello,” she answered, obviously woken from a deep sleep.

  I sat silently, for what seemed like a full minute. In my head, I was making a decision: Would I reach out and ask my friend to save me, or should I hang up right now and find a way to end my life quickly?

  “Hello. Who is this? Naomi?” She sounded groggy and I could hear her bedside lamp click on.

  Then I heard a flat, unemotional, and unfamiliar voice say, “Can you help me? I’m very, very sick.”

  Chapter 8

  Paging Doctor Schulz

  Without asking many questions, my dear friend of two decades, Dr. Mona Lisa, as I call her, caught a plane from Maine to be by my side. I’m sure Larry was now less worried, knowing she was on her way. He had witnessed me slipping downhill for more than a year now and was hoping Dr. Mona Lisa could help me because not only is she a PhD
neuroscientist and an MD; she’s also a psychiatrist.

  At any other time, I would have been overjoyed that my longtime friend was coming to our farm, but I had sunk so low and my emotions were so flat I couldn’t feel anything at all: no happiness, no optimism, no anticipation of better days.

  I did my best to explain my ineffectual experience with my Nashville psychiatrist and I listed for her the many antidepressants he had put me on during the past year, one after another. Being a person who is a medical intuitive, using her intuition to describe all of the factors, both emotional and physical, that are contributing to an individual’s health problems, as well as a physician who has been formally educated in the consequences of mistreated depression, Dr. Mona Lisa was very concerned.

  Using her vast resources of psychiatry reference books written by top specialists, Dr. Mona Lisa had researched the medications I told her I had been prescribed. She sat with me and explained the uses and side effects of every single antidepressant and antianxiety medication I had been on. By the end of 2012 and into the first few months of 2013, I had gone through serial courses of Prozac, Celexa, Zoloft, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Paxil, Abilify, and Luvox. For my panic disorder, I had taken all four of the benzodiazepines: Xanax, Ativan, Valium, and Klonopin, one right after another. Nothing was working.

  Dr. Mona Lisa explained that with an SSRI, you have to gradually cease taking one over three to seven days and then wait three to fourteen days before trying another. I was currently on three simultaneously. It is also well known among competent psychiatrists that an antidepressant won’t work until the patient’s anxiety disorder is under control, because one of the side effects of some antidepressants is anxiety. As she looked up each of the drugs I had been prescribed, she shook her head in disbelief.