All the Things We Never Knew

by Sheila Hamilton

  In one way, I was worried that Sophie had bonded with Colin so quickly. I wanted her to protect her heart, to hold her most emotional self at bay. This was my old pattern repeating itself, looking for safety in defense. Sophie did just the opposite, relying on Colin’s consistency and his goodness to help her heal. She read with him, called him on the telephone, and jumped into his arms when he arrived home. Over time, she learned how to navigate the jealousy she felt when Colin’s girls arrived for their biweekly visits.

  Blending families is an unnatural act, but we were determined to make it work. I’d never met a man who doled out so much affection to his children or was fairer or more capable of juggling the demands of domesticity than Colin. Sophie learned valuable lessons in sharing, patience, and kindness because of her stepsisters’ refusal to treat her differently than they treated one another. We never romanticized the difficulty of bringing two families together, and the challenges, though many, always led to personal breakthroughs. I’d been through much tougher, and far less valuable, experiences.

  In the same way that mental illness forces us to make decisions about how we will react, blending families presents an opportunity—do we choose to withhold or to expand our love? Can we be more generous, more present, and more available? I challenged myself to say yes.

  Things were changing at the radio station as well. My cohost and I were promoted to the morning show, and I settled into an early morning routine others consider grueling—I saw it as a necessary part of working the most coveted time slots on the radio. The alarm sounded at 3:30 a.m. I showered and tiptoed out the door at 4:15.

  From 4:15 until 5:30 a.m., I researched the morning’s news—local, national, and international; I downloaded sound clips from CNN and MSNBC; and wrote eight newscasts and found as many “kickers,” or the types of stories that add a little levity to the show. I edited two interviews, one that would air in a newscast and another that would air on our website. I prepped for the interviews with the artists who would be calling in later, posted pictures and stories to the website, tweeted and blogged, and checked up on the constant chatter of email from our listeners.

  After the live show, I settled back into my editing, a chance to breathe, slow down, and enjoy the conversations with authors, artists, and musicians. On this day, the interview was with Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay and the husband of actress Gwyneth Paltrow. The digital recording of his interview was displayed on my computer screen in what is called wave form—sound waves that look a little like the up and down lines of a seismograph. Seeing the wave form made it easy to edit the interview. It also gave distinct clues to people’s personalities: those who are animated have waves that show up as wild and erratic as a heart attack reading. Depressed or dour interviewees often show up as a long, flat line, with very little emotion on the high or low end of their voices. Children’s waves are thinner and weaker. Trained speakers often have thick sound waves that look like the jagged ups and downs of the Dow.

  David never would allow me to record his voice. I often wondered if he suspected the sound waves might reveal something he didn’t want to see.

  Chris Martin’s voice was in my headphones. I was totally engaged in what he was saying about the making of his most recent album. The white light in the studio flashed, a sign that the phone was ringing.

  I took off the headphones and picked up the receiver. “Hello, Sheila, dear, I do hope I haven’t disturbed you.” It was Alice, calling from a new number. “I’ve moved closer to Nini. I just thought it would be better to be closer to family after Lew’s and David’s deaths. I thought you might want the number.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” I said, turning away from the computer. “How are you?”

  “I’m better. I’m getting stronger. The asthma attacks have subsided for now.” That’s right—I reminded myself of his family’s propensity to suffer from asthma. Even David had started to have breathing problems later in his life. I made a mental note to myself to watch Sophie for any early signs of the disorder.

  She paused. “I thought you might need some support during this week.”

  I nodded. “Yes, David’s birthday. It’s a tough day, but they all are, really. I thought, somehow, that time would make it easier, but in fact, it’s just the opposite. When the shock wore off, I had a new round of grief to deal with.”

  “Quite right,” she said. “How is our lovely Sophie?”

  I hesitated before I spoke. Sophie was great, incredible really, for what she’d been through. She’d started going to a new school; she was happy at home and healthy. “She’s fine, Alice, thanks for asking. She’s reading a ton of books, playing tennis again. It’s been a good summer for her.”

  Alice drew in a breath. “Does she speak of David?”

  I considered my words carefully. “She is in a different place right now, Alice. When David first died, Sophie grieved long and hard. I would lie with her at night while she cried so hard I thought she might break. But after a few months, she stopped talking about him. She stopped wanting to hear my funny stories about him. We’re in a different phase now. I’m sure it will change.” I waited to breathe. The truth was so hard, but I was through with secrets—it was the secrets in my marriage that had destroyed us. I hoped Alice would accept my candidness in kind.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Well, I suppose we all grieve differently, don’t we. Especially children. They just need more time.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sophie still refuses to see a psychologist.”

  “Well, I certainly understand that,” she interrupted. “I still think those people did David more harm than good.”

  “I was just going to say that I hope one day she will be willing to talk to someone other than me about what she’s gone through. I expect she’ll need to process it all at some point.”

  “Or, perhaps not,” Alice said. “As I said, we all grieve differently.”

  For a split second, I was back in Diedra’s cabin with Alice, her face drawn by the realization that David was gone for good, knowing the experts we’d hoped could help him couldn’t save him any more than we could. The memory sent a strange sensation through my body, the same way a flu bug feels when it first announces itself in your stomach. His family had denied the gravity of his illness, denied me the truth when I first met them. I considered asking her why, and then I stopped myself. I knew the reasons: they were the same reasons that had prevented me from telling my family the truth about my crumbling marriage. We were both ashamed.

  For a moment I fell silent, forgiving myself, David, his family. We were wounded, all of us. David had escaped his pain in the way he thought best.

  “I do hope to see Sophie again,” she said. “Perhaps next summer?”

  “I’m sure she’d like that,” I said.

  I weighed the obligation of keeping David’s memory alive for Sophie—the stories, the pictures, the reminders I put on her calendar to write her relatives and thank them for the cards they sent on her birthday. She would one day want to know more exactly what went wrong, why her father decided to leave her so abruptly. Even if she avoided the pain of David’s memory now, Sophie would want to know the whole story; she always did. I would write it down, knowing my memory would be clouded, my objectivity hampered, the sharp, instinctive tools of a reporter deadened by overwhelming emotion and personal involvement in my own story.

  The fact that David hadn’t left a note, denying us any written record of his final moments, or any insight into his decision, troubled me. Because of his illness, so much of his purpose in the world went unclaimed. He wouldn’t live to see his greatest achievement, Sophie, learn French, or win a tennis match, or ski a black diamond run. David’s story was so unfinished.

  I once heard a pastor speak about suicide, about how those who take their own lives force us all to examine our untapped promise, our purpose, the reasons we put our dreams on hold. I’d been thinking about it so much, examining how I had loved, how deeply, what my part was
in David’s life and his death. My own purpose had come under searing self-scrutiny. Even if I could never forget him or move on from him in the way other people described, I was claiming the promise David left behind.

  I put my headphones back on. Chris Martin was talking about living a life he, too, never imagined, one with infinite possibility. “If your wife had slept with Brad Pitt, you’d be shaking your head too.” I threw back my head and laughed out loud.

  Grief is like an unwelcome stranger, an abductor who comes just at the moment you least expect and puts a black sack over your head, whisking you away to a dark, unknown place. Just when I thought I could cope with the idea of David’s absence, I would wake up confused and traumatized all over again. His birthday, Easter, Christmas, and the anniversary of his disappearance all seemed to tear at the scab that had formed over the emotional wound.

  Two years had passed since David’s death, and I could not shake the feeling that there was something more I needed to do to fully understand David’s decision.

  I had overwhelming feelings of despair at the most unexpected times: Watching Sophie kick the soccer ball reminded me of the dozens of nights she and David spent kicking the ball across the hardwood floor in our kitchen. When Sophie sang the lead in the school play, I was reminded of how David would prod Sophie to sing louder at our campfire gatherings. Sophie skied the way he did, cracked jokes with the same rhythm, shared his nose and his cheekbones and thick, thick hair—how could he have left her? Were there reasons that made sense at least to him? Was there a logic, however twisted? Or was it just the disease, the darkness, something no one, not even David, could understand?

  I petitioned the doctors for his medical records, desperate for any answer. When the documents were ready, I drove to the hospital and parked in the same parking space I had used to visit David. It was the first time I’d been back to the hospital since his lockdown.

  The skateboarders I’d seen on so many nights during David’s hospitalization were there again, along with the familiar clacketyclack of their skateboards against the cement. It immediately took me back to the lonely nights I’d entered and exited the hospital, awash in emotion and anxiety.

  One of the young guys dressed in baggy pants and a T-shirt looked up at me and grinned. I smiled back. Had I seen this particular teenager before? I could not recall seeing any of the skateboarders’ faces before today. Except for the vivid sound of the sport, I’d remembered the skaters only as dark sketches at the recesses of my memory. I wondered how much else I’d missed during David’s illness.

  In the lobby, clerks stared at their computer screens while families waited in the reception area for word of their loved ones. A young woman paced back and forth while talking on her cell phone. She wore a business suit, her face haggard from the day. People come to hospitals on their bad days, not their good ones. The panic, the anxiety, the smell of pharmacology and mental illness flooded my senses again. Dizzy, I leaned up against the reception desk. “I’m here to pick up my husband’s medical records.”

  A clerk arrived with a massive file, three hundred or so pages. On the top of the stack: a discharge summary dated October 24.

  Final Diagnoses: Bipolar disorder, mixed state.

  Suicidal ideation, resolved.

  Partner relational problems.

  Complicated bereavement.

  Severe Secondary to financial problems, separation from spouse and daughter, death of father.

  A note from his psychiatrist read, “David was discharged this morning. I wrote a thirty-day supply of medications for him. He was very pleased with how well he was doing and he acknowledged that while his brain wasn’t all the way back it was most of the way back and he felt comfortable with leaving. His friend has written a letter regarding her concern that the firearm, which he had shot twice in the woods, was still lost. David has assured everyone that he does not know where it is.

  “David does not feel that we need to call her and feels that the issue is resolved. He is not planning to go look for it and he thinks that it is just simply lost in the woods.”

  The discharge note continued, “David’s mother had set plans that either she, or his sister, Adele, would be with David constantly and felt comfortable that he would be okay. He was no longer expressing a plan to kill himself.”

  My chest lifted with a breath of air that I couldn’t let out. It was caught at the back of my throat, trapped with the anger and frustration I’d felt two years prior, when I tried so desperately to make sure the staff behind the glass windows realized the man they were treating needed their attention.

  That David would lie about his planned suicide did not shock me. He’d lied to me plenty about everything from life insurance to his intimate relationships. But how could trained psychiatrists, the last line of defense, the people most expert at detecting the deceit and vagaries of bipolar, also be defrauded? And if it’s as easy as David made it sound in those exit interviews, what hope is there of ever preventing suicide? What separates those who can be saved from those who, like David, simply can’t believe in a future beyond their illness?

  I sat in the hospital lobby reading through the documents for two hours. I called Ted Oster, the social worker who had been so helpful to me during David’s hospitalization. “Sheila,” he said warmly, “how are you?”

  “I know it must be odd to talk to me after all this time,” I said, “but I just can’t shake this question, this question of why. I think I was shielded by shock and grief for the first year, Ted. But I really need to know. How could David have done this to Sophie?”

  Ted grew quiet. “He could have used more time, undoubtedly. Unfortunately, there is no funding for transitioning patients. We do as much as we can.”

  The weight of the hospital documents felt heavy on my lap. Ted drew in a breath and continued, “But David, David was unreachable, Sheila. The staff talked about it at length—his affect, his holding the staff at arm’s length, his refusal to tell the truth about his gun. We were all very concerned. We, too, take this loss very personally.”

  I thanked Ted for all he’d tried to do and hung up the phone. An unfamiliar noise escaped my mouth, the kind of guttural sound that comes from unresolved loss. Whether he knew it or not, Ted had given me an essential piece to the puzzle I’d tried to put together for two years, one I would never completely solve.

  David had been unreachable: to me, to his family, and in the end, to his doctors. A series of memories flashed vividly through my mind: him pulling away at the coffee shop when I’d first moved in to appreciate his smell, his distant and clouded affect the day of our wedding, his excuses as to why we shouldn’t make love during my pregnancy. He was not mine from the beginning, and certainly not at the end, when he grew weary of the added isolation of mental illness. Everything I’d done to try to reach David was useless against his mistaken belief that we are alone in this world.

  If mental illness caused David’s isolation, I was powerless against it. But if it was the opposite, if isolation actually helps create mental illness, we might all avoid that fate—by allowing true intimacy in our lives, by telling the truth, by embracing our own authentic selves.

  I would later read about a research project that highlighted the importance of intimacy and relationships in helping the mentally ill recover. Jay Neugeboren’s brother, Robert, had been in the New York mental health system for nearly forty years and had been given nearly every antipsychotic medication known to humankind. Jay began interviewing hundreds of former mental patients who had been institutionalized, often for periods of ten or more years, and who had recovered into full lives: doctors, lawyers, teachers, custodians, social workers. He was fascinated with the question—what had made the difference?

  Some pointed to new medications, some to old. Some said they had found God. No matter what else they named, they all said that a key element was a relationship with a human being. Most of the time, this human being was a professional, a social worker or nurse, who said, i
n effect, “I believe in your ability to recover, and I am going to stay with you until you do.” The author points out that his brother had recently recovered from his mental illness, without a recurrence for more than six years, the longest stretch in his adult life.

  Of all the research I’ve read about breakthroughs in mental illness, this message resonates most loudly. We need one another to lead healthy lives, and when faced with the prospect of illness, be it mental or physical, we need to believe others can help us through to the other side. We need to believe that it is no different to ask for help with a mental illness than it would be for a cancer patient to ask for chemotherapy. We need to have faith in our own ability to endure, and when hope wanes, as it will with the illogical ups and downs of brain diseases, we should find our way back to our hearts.

  I filed the papers back into the manila folder and walked to my car. My phone buzzed with a text message: “Hi Luv, Can’t wait to see U and the girls tonight. Your man, C.”

  Two weeks later, Colin and Sophie charged headstrong into another huge set of Kauai waves with their boogie boards. Sophie’s back was crisscrossed with tan lines; her legs were long and strong from all the outdoor exercise. When had she grown so tall?

  Another big wave came, and Colin heaved Sophie forward on the board so that she could get the longest ride possible. She rode the slipstream, shouting, “Whoo-hoo! Mom, watch! This is so cool!”

  A jagged outcropping of black rock framed one side of the beach. It was beautiful—more beautiful than any postcard. Colin caught the next wave, riding up alongside her as if they’d planned the whole show. I smiled and waved, wondering whether to trust the bubble of joy I’d suppressed all week. It was, he was, this was, all too good to be true.

  The warm sand underneath my thighs was real. The air, its moist, reassuring humidity, reminded me to drink it all in, the beauty, the water, the incredible fruits and vegetables.