Hmmm. I don’t like this one bit. This sucks a lot. Goddamn, why’d I get myself in this? Was it even my fault? I don’t even know. I fucked up pretty bad. But that was a pretty direct result of depression. And that shit wasn’t my fault. I can’t help being sick. But it did make me fuck up pretty bad. Really bad.
As I read them now, Will’s anguished musings over the decision to stay and his desire to sort out his own life do not represent anything extraordinary. In his soul-searching, he asks all the right questions, questioning his motivation and looking for a way to explain the basis of a decision—one way or another—to himself. And I think he does a pretty good job of examining the issue truthfully.
What I do find extraordinary, however, is a startling lack of maturity, which I think he managed to mask all along with a keen intellect. I don’t think he presents a picture of a kid whose emotional maturity is inappropriate to his age; but I do think his reasoning underscores the argument that some, if not all, children of seventeen or eighteen years of age are ill-equipped to single-handedly make profound and fundamental decisions affecting the course of their lives.
In the end, why did he stay? I want to say it was because he deliberated his choices and determined that it was wiser to complete the program—a mature decision. In reality, it appears that in large measure he succumbed to peer pressure and that trumped all else. Typical adolescent behavior? Absolutely. But his decision was not made in a vacuum. I am sure there was an overabundance of factors we are well past taking into account.
In a journal entry written in the fall, he perceives the world outside Montana Academy to be discombobulated, as his childhood friends fall victim to circumstance or their own reckless behavior.
I heard from Megan that Vic got kicked out of school for dealing weed. I think that ends my childhood. I’m in the real life now. Vic, Henry, Enrique and I, we were best friends since forever. We were all on the basketball team in 6th grade and we won the championship. We were a crew, we were awesome. That was great. And we all ended up in high school together. And then Enrique got kicked out for selling drugs. He got in pretty bad with his foster parents and now he’s living in some low-income apartments in Silver Spring with his mom. His dad died in El Salvador in the civil war. He went to a Maryland public school for a while but dropped out and is selling again.
Henry has cancer. He’s had cancer since 7th or 8th grade and was supposed to die two or three years ago. His family’s really poor and I don’t know how they afford all his medical treatments. They didn’t think he’d live very long so they went out and bought him a huge TV set with his college money (and some money from the Make a Wish thing). You would think that if a kid had cancer his parents would spoil him and be really caring and nice, but it’s just the opposite. My mom says it’s because they’re so overwhelmed with worry and fear that they just don’t know what to do. But I think they’re just not really all there. They’re even harder and stricter with Henry than the other kids. He’s constantly kicked out of the house, staying with Vic and me.
Henry is a bad student. He has like a 1.7 GPA. His parents said if he didn’t get a 3.5 by the end of the junior year they were going to stop paying for the school and send him to public school. Our local public school is a model of the unsafe, under-funded DC public school. I doubt Henry could survive a week there. He’s not one to put up with tough situations. I imagine the cancer has drained him of his fight.
I didn’t even last to see the end of junior year. I dropped out halfway through and tried to kill myself two months later. That left Vic. But that was enough. If Vic could graduate from a solid private high school, there’s no reason he couldn’t get into at least some college and we could simply follow him there. We always planned to go to Florida for college. Someplace warm and fun with lots of girls who don’t wear much clothing. Someplace that wasn’t D.C.
Vic was my best friend. He is from Trinidad and he’s the greatest person ever. One day we were riding our bikes and he said, “Will, how long have we been best friends?” We were just little guys then. He’s not white; he lives in the projects. He could be tough if he needed to, but he was never actually tough with me.
Now that Vic is gone from school, I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s almost as if all of us have lost it. I don’t think we’ll ever make it to Florida now. It’s kind of sad. It’s like it just gets harder all the time for all of us to get together.
When Will announced his decision to return to Montana after the Christmas break, we exulted in the news and congratulated him on his choice. The longer he was in the program, the better grounded he would be when he left. He would complete the program—both its therapeutic and academic aspects. Exactly when he would finish was yet to be determined, but we all agreed we were looking at one or possibly two more eight-week terms, which suggested that he would be home by early spring. Over Christmas, we would have an opportunity to gauge the soundness of his decision.
Will was due home for the first time in eight months for one week, from the twenty-first to the twenty-eighth of December. Everyone in the immediate family was coming to Washington for the holidays. After the initial shock of my mother’s diagnosis, we moved forward with preparations for the holiday with a mixture of excitement and sadness.
Letter from Will to me from Marion, Montana, December 1, 2001:
Dear Mom,
Well, so I’m finally writing you. Just in time for the holidays (or something like that.) So, I guess I’ll be home for Christmas. That’ll be cool.
Nothing is all that new over here. I talked to you like ten times over Thanksgiving and then again on Monday. Nothing’s happened since then (today’s Wednesday). I talked to Phil Jones yesterday and he said all I have to do for an independent study next block is write a proposal describing everything I want to do and what books and who’s going to look at my work. He said he has this big video series that I can watch [on the Vietnam war] so that’s cool. If you think of more books I should read I’ll bring them back from Christmas.
I read that book, The Sorrow of War, the Bao Minh one. It was really sad. But anyways he [Phil Jones] said that based on my past academics and all that, he said it sounded very promising. He liked the idea a lot. Cool.
Is there anything you want for Christmas? I’ll probably just throw something together, make something. According to Malinak, “parents love that shit.” O.K. I’ll probably talk to you next week. Say Hi to Jack. He’s a good guy.
Love,
Will
With mounting anxiety, I marked that Friday, December 21—the day the staff at Montana Academy put Will on a 6:20 AM flight from Kalispell to Washington. He would transfer on his own in Salt Lake City, and although Will was an experienced traveler, I fretted about his first venture on his own since he had been away. He had been gone for eight months. Even though I had seen him in Montana at eight-week intervals, I wondered and worried about the person he would be when he returned home.
Families are warned to expect some “backsliding” when a child returns from a residential treatment program. And in reality, this was a dry run—just a one-week trial, before the real reentry on the horizon.
I held a vivid image from Christmas the year before of Will as he lay on the couch in the living room, lethargic and brooding. He was visibly wasting; it was evident in his sallow visage and fragile-looking limbs that hung like busted twigs from his body. The rest of the kids, Jane, Max, and John, were hanging ornaments on the tree, wisecracking, stumbling over one another and occasionally poking at Will in a concerted attempt to rouse him. But he barely occupied his own frame. This December I hoped and prayed that when he got off the plane from Montana we would see signs of the “old” Will, the predepression Will.
Maybe it was a small Christmas miracle: he looked terrific when he arrived. It was hard to squelch the desire to hug him and nuzzle him constantly. Under the circumstances, it was also hard to stifle the urge to be overly cautious, overly watchful, not to analyze everything h
e said or did for an out-of-synch marker, or uneven response. I tried not to ask him repeatedly, “How are you doing?” or “So, how are you feeling these days?” or anything that pressed too hard on the scab of our recent hurt and worry. And lest we forget, Will lulled us into thinking he was well once before—with near-lethal consequences. He deceived us before; he could do it again.
Within a day or two, we placed our worries on the back burner. Thank God, he was much better. Genuinely, openly, markedly better. I believe the drug regimen was finally working. Or maybe, given the passage of time, his depression was receding on its own. Perhaps he was maturing and his hormones were settling down, or maybe he had found a comfort level in Montana that allowed him to open up to the doctors and therapists there, so that he was finally getting something out of the process. We will never know for sure. But I was sure he was better.
While at home, Will sought out old friends from Gonzaga and hung out with his siblings and cousins. These reunions were bittersweet and everyone expressed relief to see Will looking so well. His sense of humor had returned and something else: a confidence in his demeanor, in his carriage, a vitality that had been absent for the past two years.
Will phoned Megan soon after he returned to Washington. The two of them agreed to meet for coffee the day after Christmas. I was curious about their reunion and how it would unfold. By December, Will spoke openly about his close friendships with a number of girls at Montana Academy. But Megan…the intensity of their relationship the year before, with its trauma and pain and mutual self-harm; was there anything left between them or were they ready to jettison the past?
A year in the life of a teenager. Adolescents are natural “rapid cyclers” wild mood swings are a given. With lightning speed teenagers acquire and discard new styles, new friends, new language and behaviors. As a tribe, they remind me of the Mad Hatter at his tea party, constantly exhorting his guests, “Move down, move down, clean cups, clean cups,” in an endless effort to reinvent and renew.
The day came for their appointed reunion: Will wasn’t gone for more than a couple of hours. He and Megan met at a local Starbucks. When he came home, I inquired, “So, how’d it go? What’s she up to?” My antennae were alert to signs and signals.
“She’s fine. Yeah, it was okay.” Will was tight-lipped about the encounter, but I could tell from his body language their reunion held no drama, no promise, nothing disturbing or bitter. I was relieved. I hoped he was, too. I hoped they would find a way, sometime years from now, to talk about what had happened to them. But right now, I could tell, he had moved on. It was inevitable and for the best. I suspected she had moved on, too.
Megan’s reflections on her first meeting with Will after his eight-month absence:
Just after Christmas, I saw Will for the first time since he left for Montana in April. I was mid-way through my junior year of high school, and I had pieced together a new life, one in which depression and Will didn’t exist in the concrete anymore.
In the months since I had last seen him, he had become a concept, not a person, a connection to my illness. His phone call, asking to meet me, was jarring, despite the unchanged softness and lethargy of his speech. He casually told me that he was home from Montana for a little while and asked if I wanted to get together. I agreed on coffee, partially out of a sense of obligation to my past, partially to satiate a need for the affirmation of how much I had changed since our parting.
I took the Metro to meet him, after my mother extracted a series of promises regarding how long I would stay and where Will and I would and would not go. The familiar succession of stops brought a numbed sense of pain and a flood of memories that I fought out of my mind. I had erected rigid boundaries; this was not to be an emotional ordeal. He wasn’t getting in again.
I stepped onto the platform, joined the streams of commuters, and started up the escalator. As I reached daylight, I squinted and was able to make Will out, standing hunched over a newspaper dispenser. He was exactly as I remembered him. He smiled and stood up when he saw me, I was already shaken and bared my teeth in a feeble attempt at a smile. We embraced loosely and turned to walk toward Starbucks.
Conversation didn’t come easily; we awkwardly small-talked our way around discussing anything that had unfolded before our parting. I was desperately upbeat, countering his sarcastic indifference with my artificial enthusiasm. I was fiercely trying to establish distance between us, trying to show him that we were completely different people now and he could no longer affect me.
We sat at a table with our coffee, and my anxiety rose as I ingested the caffeine. He told me he was happy for me, and I pretended to swallow this at face value. I continued to babble nervously. My right arm was resting stiffly on the table, and because I was wearing a 3/4 sleeved top, the largest scar was visible. In the middle of one of my sentences, Will reached over and touched the scar with his index finger, a subtle reminder of the reality of our past. I felt the blood rush to my cheeks, and not knowing exactly how to respond I reached over and fingered the pitted scar from his self-inflicted bite mark. We held eye contact for a few seconds, and then conversation halted for what seemed like an eternity. Part of me was furious at him for interrupting my efforts to maintain a contrived distance. For the most part, though, I was grateful that he introduced a touch of reality, however gritty it was, into our meeting.
Soon my allotted time with Will was up, but before we parted, he made me promise we would remain on good terms. We were officially friends again—no matter how strained our relationship was or would be for years to come.
He walked me back to the Metro station and bent down wrapping his arms limply around my body before watching me descend the escalator. All the way home my heart pounded and my breath was short. I reminded myself of all the reasons I would never slip back into who I was the year before; I was doing well in school, had another boyfriend and was rid of my depression.
It was dark by the time I got home. I tried to call friends, my boyfriend, anyone I could connect with the here and now; but everyone had gone out for the evening. I couldn’t shake my anxiety over our meeting, and I had my first sleepless night in months.
10
TIME, SWEET TIME
Over the course of January and early February 2002, we prepared for Will’s graduation from Montana Academy. With Will, his doctor, and his therapists, we worked up a “contract” for his release, which crafted a structure for his return home.
A “home contract” is pretty standard fare for teens returning after significant stays in residential treatment programs. Ours entailed an agreement between Will and us covering all aspects of Will’s life back in Washington—curfews, responsibilities, goals for school or work, and a commitment to remain in therapy and on medication for a specific period of time.
The final document read like a lawyerly agreement between two opposing parties—hardly where you want to be with your child—but we were looking for guidelines, and the clinicians at Montana Academy, with their vast experience, maintained this was the best way to master reentry for kids returning home after a long spell in a rigorous therapeutic setting.
In fact, I think by outlining expectations in detail, a home contract gives families—and teens—something to fall back on when things don’t go as planned once your child returns. Since you can count on the fact that families of troubled teens have withstood some pretty brutal encounters in the run-up to a child’s institutionalization, the home contract allows parents to fashion a new way of communicating with the child and offers every member of the family a fresh start.
Bob and I made several passes at a draft home contract before settling on one that made sense to us, and to Dennis Malinak. Will was allowed to comment on the draft before we finalized it. I offer it here as a model:
Dear Will,
We hope to see you settle back into life at home as smoothly and as comfortably as possible. You will have graduated high school, a time in your life when you can reasonably expect eith
er to be heading off to college or into some sort of adult working life with quite a bit of new freedom and responsibility. We’re confident this will happen for you in the months ahead and we’ll do everything we can to support you in that direction. We would urge you to take things a little slowly, however, until we all have a better feel for how your moods hold up away from Montana Academy.
After our discussions, here is what we’ve agreed upon on how things will work:
1. You will make a short family visit in San Francisco before settling in Washington. You’ll be flying to S.F. on Friday, February 21, and staying until the following Tuesday, February 25.
2. You will have a meeting with Vaune Ainsworth within your first few days at home and get familiar with a psychiatrist in her practice, who will be the one to write the prescriptions for your meds. As we have discussed with Dennis, we’re all feeling confident that you have a good plan for the medications, at least for the immediate future. But Ainsworth and this other doctor will be the ones to whom you can turn for whatever additional help you may need. Ongoing support of this sort will not be optional.
3. You will take responsibility for keeping up with your own meds, but they will be provided to you one week’s supply at a time, during the first six months.
4. You will start to work as soon as you can, so that there aren’t a lot of empty days upon your arrival. If you are able to settle in with one of the construction jobs that Jack has been exploring, then work will start quite soon after you arrive. Failing that, we will expect to see an energetic job hunt aimed at getting you to work asap. You can always change jobs later on, but the plan is to start on something right away.
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