David refused to apologize; Lew did the same. Alice and I talked on the phone shortly after the disastrous visit, attempting to find some way of reconnecting these two stubborn, like-minded men. They refused to speak to each other, and I finally accepted their decision. But it worried me.
If David replicated this bizarre family behavior, he might one day convince himself he didn’t need his daughter either.
MENTAL ILLNESS AND DRUG USE
The National Alliance on Mental Illness says that nearly one-third of people with mental illness and approximately one-half of people with severe mental illness (including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia) engage in substance abuse. Drugs and alcohol can be a form of self-medication. People may feel that their anxiety or depression is less severe when they use drugs or alcohol. Unfortunately, drugs and alcohol don’t treat the underlying disorder and worsen mental illness.
The onset of psychosis during college years is particularly common, given the lack of sleep, an increase in stress, and experimentation with drugs and alcohol. David reported being unable to concentrate in college and having extreme difficulty sleeping. He also used drugs and alcohol during his teen years. David inevitably dropped out of college and showed worrisome signs that indicated his mental health was declining. He lost interest in the care of his apartment and his personal hygiene, he reported increased sensitivity to sights and sounds, and he withdrew from family and friends.
NAMI reports: “Abuse of drugs and alcohol always results in a worse prognosis for a person with mental illness. People who are actively using are less likely to follow through with the treatment plans . . . and more likely to miss appointments, which leads to more psychiatric hospitalizations and other adverse outcomes.”
Chapter Seven
Months later, I was on deadline at work, puzzling over the perfect combination of words and video for my story. We’d been pulled from a longer-format story about cuts in school funding to cover another gang shooting in north Portland. It was the third time I had been called to a particular intersection of Sumner Street in a month. I wished I had time to extrapolate the bigger picture: what the violence meant in relation to recent gentrification in the area, the job numbers, the divisions set up by the so-called Bloods and Crips, offshoots of gangs that had relocated from California.
I’d interviewed a couple of the mothers on the street before; harried and overworked, these women barely had time to get a decent meal on the table, let alone worry about a nearby crack house. One of the women had said it best: “I’m a damn rat on a wheel, that’s all. No time to get off. I’ve got to keep running and running so I don’t trip and die.”
I was from a far more privileged socioeconomic background, yet I wanted to grab her hand and say, “I know, I know how it feels.” As I tried to put the story together, my thoughts drifted away to my own chaotic life: running, always running, a rat on a wheel, scrambling to keep up with ten- to twelve-hour workdays, raising Sophie, trying to find time for paying the bills, buying groceries, cleaning the house.
I’d weighed the option of leaving enough times to understand why I stayed. I believed Sophie would be better off with David in her life, and I was too distant from my family to handle single motherhood. We seemed to leapfrog from crisis to crisis: David’s hospitalization for poison oak, my weeklong flu that turned into pneumonia, Sophie’s recurring ear infections. As much as David seemed distant and erratic, at least he was helpful in a crisis.
And getting a divorce would be a full-time job. I didn’t even have the time to pick up my dry cleaning. We’d have to set up separate households, and David would not make it easy. I had gambled his moods wouldn’t get worse, his investment in his business would pay off, and we’d make it. The truth was, we were living further and further apart.
“Sheila,” my producer shouted from across the room, “get your story to editing!” I grumbled to myself about sensationalizing crime, feeling that I was part of the problem.
The whiteboard had a scribbled outline of the day’s stories and the reporters assigned to them. These days, there were more news shows and less time for research, more rating grabs and less substance. We had two helicopters, not one, because research showed people liked pictures from the air. The investigative unit I had been hired to spearhead had been shelved in favor of more live shots and stories that were less than ninety seconds in length. I loved hosting the longer public affairs program we ran on Sunday afternoons, but the day to day had become grueling, sensationalized. I tried to remember the stories I worked on yesterday—and couldn’t bring any of them to mind.
My phone rang, the newsroom bustled with other reporters and editors, and producers rushed around with copies of edited scripts in their hands. We called it the bunker, the place where we spent long hours with nothing more than vending machines to sustain us. There were no windows, so I couldn’t tell what the sunset was like.
I let the phone go to voicemail—one more distraction wasn’t what I needed. It rang again a few minutes later, and I picked up. “Hello, this is Sheila.”
A warm, deep voice spoke up. “Hey, Sheila, I know you’re probably on deadline, so I’ll keep it short. This is Bill Gehring.” He was one of the most respected radio talk show hosts in Portland. I’d heard through the grapevine that Bill was putting together a team of top talent for a new radio station in town, and I’d let other professionals know I was restless. “Let’s grab some lunch sometime this week. What do you say?”
Was anyone listening? I lowered my voice and tried to mask the thrill that was moving through my body.
“Hi, Bill, thanks,” I managed to reply. “Here’s my cell phone so we can talk later.”
Later that night, I sat at my desk. The picture I had of Sophie on my desk needed to be wiped down with Windex. She was three and a half now, outgrowing her toddler’s tummy in a pink ballerina outfit and tutu.
Three weeks later, the photo of Sophie in her tutu sat on my new desk overlooking Fifth Avenue in downtown Portland. I now sat behind my own microphone at my own radio show.
When the station general manager at KATU had asked me if I wouldn’t miss being on television, I answered honestly. “I’ll miss the work. I’ll miss the thrill of chasing down great stories. I just can’t miss any more of my daughter’s ballet recitals.”
The offices had been custom built for the launch of the new talk radio station. The staff had been pulled from prime stations all across the city. Two producers sat across from me, next to a computer screen, ready to take calls. Sunlight beamed through floor-to-ceiling glass windows. I’d negotiated better pay, and even better, hours that would allow me to tuck Sophie in and be there in the afternoon to pick her up. Plus I had my own talk radio show, discussing politics and issues that I considered important. It was a startup station, a place where I could redefine myself.
“Good morning,” I said into the microphone. “This is Sheila Hamilton.”
I was driving to work when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. The CBS news cut-in interrupted the song I’d been listening to on the radio, something from the Barenaked Ladies. “How odd that a plane could be that off course,” I thought at first. I’d worked in New York several weeks in my twenties, helping ABC with a documentary on a Utah outdoor wilderness camp that was under investigation for child abuse. I’d stood at the top of the World Trade Center. I knew the flight pattern. Planes were not supposed to get that close.
By the time the second plane hit the second tower, I was watching it live on television, disbelieving the surreal screams and the terror the news anchors themselves were attempting to mask.
Nothing in my journalism career had prepared me for this day. I’d been witness to what I thought was the worst disaster I would ever see, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, when the engineers at Utah’s Morton Thiokol had gathered to see the first teacher off to space. It was one of the first national assignments I’d been given; it was supposed to be a fluff story, engineers attending anot
her routine shuttle launch. It was, instead, the first story that would sear a memory into my brain so clearly that I can recall the temperature, the smells, the way the plumes parted as the rocket boosters headed off in different directions in the sky.
I opened the microphone, my hands shaking. The music bed faded. My earphones pressed tightly against my ears. My producer eyed me warily from the glass room where he would be taking people’s frantic phone calls.
I spoke very slowly. “I’m Sheila Hamilton. And it is not a good morning. It is a morning you will remember for the rest of your life.”
Thirteen hours later, I drove home to Sophie and David. As I drove, the images of people throwing themselves from the upper floors of the towers replayed in my mind, immediate, terrifying. I made it home and walked through the door to find Sophie, now four, sitting in David’s lap as he read a book out loud. I rushed to both of them for comfort.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Sophie sensed my grief. She had her pink pajamas on and carried Bear tucked into her chest as she balanced her book in her lap.
I couldn’t speak. I knelt by David’s chair and listened to his voice finishing the book they must have read together a dozen times that week, the one about the greedy monster who wanted so many cookies for himself he turned a beautiful tree into a cookie factory. Sophie giggled at all the familiar parts, filling in the lines David skipped.
I couldn’t tell her how guilty I felt. I couldn’t share with her, or David, that in the minutes before the first plane flew into the towers, killing thousands of innocent people, I’d been contemplating my own escape, from this—this doomed marriage. Somehow, the tragedy of 9/11 made that seem selfish. Myopic. And wrong.
In the weeks that followed the attacks, I followed closely the stories of couples reconnecting, of rushed marriages and canceled divorces. Strangers reached out to one another for comfort. Wayward sons and daughters called home. I understood—just having a family to come home to suddenly made me feel that I’d won the lottery.
I spent the Christmas after 9/11 in a rush of breaking world news and strong opinions on both sides of the political spectrum. Christmas was a blur without the traditional trip back home.
So when the next Christmas came around, a year later, I was determined to let Sophie spend the holiday with her grandparents and cousins, where Christmas was always a huge, happy celebration and David’s disdain for the holiday would be less noticeable. We had made it through the year okay; despite the beginning of the war in Afghanistan and the lingering fear of terror attacks, David’s business was actually busier than ever. More people were remodeling their dream homes rather than buying or building. He bought two cell phones so he could be on two conversations at the same time, but he and I were as distant as ever.
By early December, I was wrapping the last of Sophie’s Christmas presents to send ahead to Grandma’s house. I’d tried to select things she would love, chapter books and a toy cash register, a stuffed giraffe that defied gift wrap, and a new snowsuit for snowboarding. At five, she was tearing through books just like her dad and walking around the house spelling anything that seemed relevant. “C-h-r-i-s-t-m-a-s,” she’d say happily. “R-u-d-o-l-f.” My brother and sister were planning on bringing their kids to Utah as well. Sophie would have playmates, the adoration of Grandma and Grandpa, and a guaranteed white Christmas.
David sat in his favorite chair, reading the paper. “You know how I feel about Christmas.”
“I’d really like you to be there with us,” I said. “You’ve missed the last two trips.”
He looked up from the paper. “You know how I feel about Christmas,” he repeated.
“Yes, but you’ve got a child, David. You can learn to fake it.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “My dad hated it, I hate it, it’s gross commercialization and . . .”
“And it’s Christmas, David. Find something about it you can celebrate.” I pushed the gifts into a huge Ikea shopping bag and headed out the door to the post office.
David walked toward me with his head down, avoiding eye contact. He stopped me before I reached my car. “I’m sorry.” He offered to help me load our things. “It just brings back such bad memories. I can’t recall a single happy Christmas. Dad hated it and spent most of the day in his room.”
I touched his arm. It was cold enough to see my breath, but there was no snow forecast this year in Portland. “David, you can make new memories. For her.”
“Okay,” he said, finally, “for Sophs.”
Two weeks later, David called from work, frantic. “My briefcase is gone. It was stolen.”
“Calm down, David. Tell me what happened.” I turned down the flame on the stir-fry I was making. “When? When did you last see it?”
His voice rattled. “I was working at the Henson’s house, and I left it inside the truck, with all my files, and all the billings, and the change orders, and the . . .” His voice trailed off and he moaned, a strange sound that worried me.
“David, it will be okay.” I washed my hands under the sink faucet. “You’ve got copies of all that stuff, right?”
The line went silent. I knew the answer. We had gone through this before.
Twice, our lives were disrupted by the theft of his briefcase. I spent weeks helping him make phone calls, reconstructing the bids, the work changes, the payments, the bills. After so much misery, he’d assured me he was backing up all his data, making hard copies of everything.
“I’m so sorry, but you need help, David.” I leaned up against the wall, trying to breathe. “You have to see someone about why you can’t get your work organized. Let me hire an organizational expert for you, a secretary, something. You can’t keep doing this.”
“I knew it,” he said, his voice rising. “I knew that you’d blame me. I get my fucking briefcase stolen, and you’re going to blame me. As if I did it!”
I refused to take the heat, to allow him to shift the focus on to me. “At some point, David, you’ll have to take responsibility for your continued crises.” I had reached a point of fatigue with him, a deep irritation over cleaning up his messes. I no longer made excuses for him when he was late or picked up the pieces of his unfinished projects. I was done propping him up.
“Forget Christmas,” he said. “Forget it. I’ll have to work.”
On Christmas morning, I sat in my father’s easy chair, videotaping Sophie as she opened her Christmas presents. She hugged the giraffe tight around the neck, her blonde hair tangled from sleep. Her Christmas PJs said “Ho, ho, ho” in big white letters.
She ran into my mother’s lap and curled the giraffe under her arm. “Look, Grandma, he remembered! I told him at Meier & Frank, and Santa even remembered to bring it to Utah!”
My brother’s two boys were there, too, tearing into loads of presents under the tree with shrieks of joy and surprise. The smell of bacon and eggs came from the kitchen. We’d tracked Santa’s path the night before on NORAD, the website that brings even the most skeptical child around. I honored this precious, fleeting time, when Sophie believed it possible that one man, driven by reindeer, could span the globe delivering every child’s wishes.
Sophie opened and closed her new toy cash register, talking to her tow-headed cousin about the “exact amount of change.” I kept the camera running, but my heart hurt at the thought of David, wherever he was on Christmas morning, wholly incapable of seeing or feeling the magic.
Sophie jumped on my lap, bumping the camera, her face bright with excitement. “Let’s call Daddy!” she said. “Let’s tell him he came. He needs to know Santa came.” Her skin was warm from the fire. She was already lanky and had lost some of her baby fat. How could he possibly miss this, miss her? The reason I’d stayed in the marriage was to witness her being loved by her father. And now that was slipping away.
I bounced Sophie on my knee. “Absolutely. Let’s call Daddy and tell him Santa did not forget you.”
ANOSOGNOSIA
Anosognosia is a phenomeno
n that commonly occurs in people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. They simply cannot believe that they have a serious psychiatric illness. Anosognosia is more commonly known as “nonadherence.”
I was in denial about the seriousness of David’s condition as well, but part of my confusion arose from David’s insistence that he was not sick and did not need treatment.
Why can’t a person see what is apparent to those around them? The National Alliance on Mental Illness says this is a core feature of the neurobiology of these conditions. “Frontal lobes organize information and help to interpret experiences. In conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, frontal lobe difficulty is central to the neurobiological processes that underlie the disorder. Psychological denial is not the reason for the lack of insight in these illnesses.”
More than forty states have passed laws defining assisted outpatient treatment (AOT), also known as outpatient commitment. AOT status requires a person to engage in treatment and gives the state authority to bring a person to a treatment center. All these laws specify a process for assessing whether an intervention is appropriate.
In Oregon, intervention is allowed only if it can be clearly shown that the person meets one or more of the following criteria:
1.is a danger to himself or herself or others,
2.is unable to provide basic personal needs,
3.suffers from chronic mental illness or has had two hospitalizations in the previous three years, and/or
4.will continue to physically or mentally deteriorate without treatment.
NAMI has active support groups across the nation providing opportunities for engagement with doctors who are interested in the issue.
All the Things We Never Knew Page 8