18. Care Unit

“I’VE FOUND THE PERFECT place for your son,” Elsa said, two weeks after accepting my first frantic call on day two of the siege. As if applying for a college scholarship, I filled out admission forms for Care Unit in Orange, forty-five minutes from home. Since Terry stashed empty vodka bottles and pot under his bed, overdosed on speed, and downed two six-packs of beer before threatening to kill himself, he qualified.

We had no savings. Stuart earned $10 an hour as a newspaper printer. I made less cleaning houses. When his health insurance agreed to cover eighty percent of the sixty-day substance abuse program, I rejoiced as if he’d been accepted into Yale.

The morning we planned to drive him to Care Unit, Terry shaved his arms and an hour later, we spotted him on the curb a half-block away slashing his Jordasche jeans with a pocketknife. Stuart said he looked like he was going to bolt and called the police. Within minutes two officers arrived and, in a calm, professional manner convinced Terry to get in our car. Turning the corner, Stuart driving, Melissa and I sat in the rear seat praying her brother wouldn’t open the door and jump out.

Waves of relief washed over my nerve-wracked, thirty-seven-year-old body as we entered the hospital. In summer camp ambiance, healthy-looking teen drug addicts lounged on couches wrapped in blankets, watching Saturday morning cartoons. Terry, safe in the detox unit, we attended a lecture by Dr. Perch on addiction, alcoholism, and codependency, a family disease. We stayed all day soaking up the calm of the place. Hungry for human touch, I felt a bolt of healing energy rush from her soul to mine when our young, red-headed therapist barely touched my shoulder in a reassuring manner.

Remembering Elsa’s encouragement to wait upon God in expectation, like a child on Christmas Eve, I bought an EXPECT A MIRACLE bumper sticker in the gift shop. Two weeks before Terry rose from the bed when I thought him dead. Maybe another miracle could restore him to health? Back home, I stuck the sticker on my Dodge Dart bumper and slept well for the first time in months.

Twenty-four hours later, an Emergency Medical Team was summoned to the hospital detox unit, restrained our son in a straitjacket, and whisked him away in an ambulance to Brea Psychiatric Hospital. I phoned Elsa. Weeping, I told her about the bumper sticker. “How could I have been so foolish as to expect a miracle?

“Don’t despair, my dear,” she said. “Some miracles take a little longer.”

The following morning, behind the guarded prison-like door of the mental hospital’s lockup ward, glassy-eyed, legally drugged teenagers huddled on the hallway floor. Care Unit had already diagnosed Terry as an alcoholic and drug addict. His new psychiatrist offered an additional diagnosis. “Bipolar disorder,” he said. “It’s a new name for manic depression. We’re trying out lithium on him.”

Terry didn’t recognize us. He sat on a hard table-like bed without sheets or a patchwork quilt in a sterilized cubicle, his closet stripped of coat hangers. Apparently, coat hangers could be used for self-inflicted wounds, “Your son is in lockup for his own protection,” the nurse said. “He’s on suicide watch.” I gasped for air. The room spun. The color drained from Stuart’s face. Seeking help for my troubled child, I never expected such unspeakable despair.

 Terry rose from his bed, swaying back and forth, his feet edged forward as if stuck to the floor. “What’s wrong? Why’s he walking funny like that?”

“It’s the Thorazine shuffle,” the nurse said. “It’s just a little side effect of the drug.” I wanted to shake her and scream, this is not a safe place for children! She’d stripped his cubicle to protect him from stabbing himself with a coat hanger or hanging himself with sheets, but I couldn’t protect my own child from the side effects of the medication they were trying out on him. The prescribed cocktail of lithium, Thorazine, and other legal drugs had turned my sixteen-year-old, once exuberant youngster into a shuffling zombie.

As a painter, I reveled in comparison and contrast, the juxtaposition of light against dark. But driving home from the psychiatric hospital, I couldn’t fathom how the world remained so full of light, when moments before we’d stood in that God-forsaken place—staring hell in the face.

Stuart spotted a golf course, parked, and hunted for balls lost in the roadside bushes. In the past, beneath such azure skies, father and son often golfed together. “A natural athlete,” he said when Terry showed promise at an early age. “He’s got a great swing, a real future in the sport.” While my husband scavenged for lost golf balls, I dealt with grief in my own way. All my life, I’d sought solutions in books. Sitting in the car reading One Day at a Time, I discovered Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote, With the help of my God, I shall leap over the wall. I pictured myself in a lush English garden leaping over a stone wall, a challenge but not insurmountable. I prayed for guidance and for the restoration of my son’s sanity and my own.  

That night, awakened from a restless sleep, I wandered through the house. Silken strands of hair caressed Melissa’s eyelids closed in sleep. Moonlight beamed in the window slashing shadow shapes across the Saint George Slaying the Dragon hanging over the living room fireplace. I collapsed on the couch. Replaying the movie in my mind, the children huddled on the floor behind the iron door moaning senseless sounds. Terry in his sterile cubicle on his sheetless bed. His Thorazine shuffle. His vacant eyes.

Had my son inherited his illness from a defective gene pool or caused it himself by ingesting pot, vodka, black beauties, and God knows what? What if he’d suffered toxic side effects in my womb? What about the menthol-flavored Kools I’d smoked or the occasional amphetamine I’d taken when pregnant or the codeine cough syrup I swallowed on dare, the night of his conception?

Still believing in sin, I condemned myself and came to understand how a vulnerable soul might contemplate suicide in the middle of the night.

 

 

 

19. Gratitude

“YOU DIDN’T CAUSE IT dear and blaming yourself won’t cure him,” Elsa said when I told her I stayed up all night replaying past scenes in my mind trying to figure out how I caused Terry’s illness. Thinking about the past, I felt guilty, and thinking about the future, I feared what might happen next.  She said it was time to make a gratitude list. I’d never considered being thankful except at Thanksgiving. Besides what did I have to be grateful for? Terry could kill himself any minute and it would be my fault.

“Make a list,” she said. “It will anchor your thoughts in the present moment.”

I remember reading Emerson’s Essay on Self-Reliance as a young art student and what he said about living in the present moment. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. I’d always wanted to live that way but didn’t know how.

I got a pen and listed some things I might be grateful for a house to live in, food to eat, and my 1973 Dodge Dart, even with its frayed headliner and torn seats. Thank you, God, for keeping my son alive another day and for all the angels you’ve sent to help us.

I admitted to Elsa when writing the gratitude list my self-condemnation and anxiety subsided. “Remember, it’s impossible to be fearful and grateful at the same time,” she said.

“There’s one more thing. Melissa asked me to take her to the beach, but how I can go when Terry’s in lock up?”

“The ocean’s healing. Go spend the day with your daughter. She needs you.”

 

 Melissa chose Huntington Beach, where the year before on a Foundation School field trip, she’d dug for clams in the surf and made chowder over an open fire pit with her brother and their friends. We arrived at the seashore under a royal blue sky, toting suntan oil, pamphlets about the family disease of alcoholism, books, buckets, blankets, beach towels, and hot dogs and marshmallows to roast on our dangerous wire coat hangers after sunset.

Grateful for the sun on my face, a steady breeze, and the smell of seaweed in the salty air, I sank my weary body into the warm sand. Melissa headed for the water.

I pulled out, The Merry-go-Round of Denial by Joseph Kellermann describing the family dynamic of addiction: The wife must seek help for herself or permit the illness of alcoholism to destroy her, other members of her family, and perhaps her marriage. Thank God, Terry shot the gun off in the house three weeks before because it forced us to seek the help we desperately needed.

Fishing in my beach bag, I found two containers of suntan oil, a cheap Thrifty’s brand, almost full, and a brown bottle of expensive Hawaiian Tropic Oil–almost empty. Debating using the last of the good stuff, I recalled my In-N-Out epiphany, “Take care of yourself. You’re worth it,” and decided to treat myself to the expensive Hawaiian brand. Unscrewing the lid, I noticed a man sitting on the blanket next to me pointing at my bottle. “May I borrow your suntan oil?”

“Sure!” Not thinking, I handed the stranger my precious golden-brown bottle. I immediately felt like the poor woman who’d tossed her last coin into the church coffer. I forgot my recently acquired spirit of generosity as he splashed my precious Hawaiian oil all over himself, his wife, and his child. Good grief! He’s using it up. I should’ve given him the cheap stuff.

“Thank you very much,” the father said, handing me the empty bottle.

Suddenly, I remembered the kindness of strangers in recent days and how often I’d thanked them for their time and guidance: Tim Hoover at the Pasadena Alcoholism Council, Mr. Edwards at the Jackie Robinson Center, the young, red-headed therapist at Care Unit, Elsa, my guardian angel and the many kind women who’d shared their experience, strength, and hope and my Mammaw saying, give freely of what you have, and it will come back to you—tenfold.

 

“It’s sunset, time to cook our hot dogs,” I said, shaking out our sandy towels. “Let’s go find the fire pits.” Walking, our bodies casting elongated bluish shadows on the colorless sand, it dawned on me I hadn’t worried about Terry for hours. Elsa was right. You can’t be fearful and grateful at the same time.

We passed a few joggers but most of the sun worshippers had gone home. Finally, a mile up the coastline, we spotted the fire pits.

“I’m thirsty,” Melissa said, dashing ahead. She climbed the steps to the water fountain. Its wide smooth slab was reminiscent of an ancient well where weary travelers came to draw living water. My eyes watered as my daughter descended the sun-drenched steps, bathed in wonder and yellow-orange.

“Mom, mom! Look what I found on the water fountain!” she yelled, running toward me, clutching a golden-brown plastic bottle.

“What is it?”

“Look!” She handed me a new, sealed, full bottle of Hawaiian Tropic Suntan Oil identical to the one I’d given the father many hours before–a mile away. “Oh my God! Melissa, do you know what this means?”

But she didn’t know. She’d been swimming in the surf and knew nothing about the father’s request, or how he’d splashed the last drop of suntan oil on his wife and child, the sincerity in his voice when he said, “Thank you very much,” or my ten-fold epiphany.

“Can we keep it?” she said, wide-eyed, expectant like a child on Christmas Eve.

“Oh, yes!” I said, caressing the precious bottle. “Unless someone comes back to get it.”

The sun slipped below the water line in a neon-green flash. Pale skies turned pink and riotous red streaked in blue-violet. Radiant in afterglow, we stood side by side focused on the path that led us to the fountain, expecting to see someone coming at any moment.

Waves crashed against the seashore as if timed to music. A pelican dived, emerging with a fish. Buoyed by the wind, a flock of seagulls glided overhead. Melissa and I looked up and down the lonely stretch of beach but there was not a soul in sight.

 

 

20. The Rose

MEDICATION STILL CLOUDING HIS eyes, Terry asked us to bring him cigarettes. I hated his smoking but took his request as a good sign considering only two weeks before when we’d found him in lockup, he didn’t recognize us.

“He’s stabilized,” the doctor said. Care Unit had agreed to take our son back, the insurance upgraded him from a thirty to a ninety-day treatment program. Suppressing memories of the children on the hall floor behind the iron door, we celebrated our reunion with their caring staff.

Three days later, Terry and another boy escaped from the hospital. Since the day he’d ditched school in the fourth grade, I wondered why he seemed to always want to be someplace else.

I called Elsa, my wise mentor. “Terry ran away,” I said, in tears. “What if they can’t find him?”

“Don’t worry dear; he can’t run far wearing those paper hospital shoes. Don’t you think he will be easy to spot?” Picturing his flimsy footwear, I stopped crying and laughed. It felt good to laugh.

Hours later, as Elsa predicted, a pharmacist spotted the boys roaming the aisles in a drug store and the police returned them to the hospital.

After this escapade, Terry settled down and became a model patient. That fall, Stuart and I drove the thirty miles to Care Unit almost every day and Melissa joined us for family counseling on weekends. I rejoiced to see the light return to Terry’s eyes, his sense of humor resurrected, him making friends with other kids in the program and enjoying a brief romance with Carol Burnett’s lovely daughter. As his graduation from the ninety-day program drew near, our family sessions intensified. Taking turns on the “hot seat,” we vented our feelings. Terry expressed his anger toward me and Melissa for not trusting him. He confronted his father about his drinking and how it had hurt him and our family. Days later, Dr. Persh, the hospital’s head psychiatrist delivered a fact-filled lecture that convinced Stuart he also suffered from the disease of alcoholism and could die unless he stopped drinking. Miraculously, days later, Stuart attended an AA meeting and came home sober for the first time in our sixteen-year marriage.

Hope for Terry’s future and my expectations for a normal family filled our final days at Care Unit. The program required teenage patients to write a thorough moral inventory listing everyone they’d harmed. Terry wrote the ways he’d hurt himself, his friends, and his family and made amends to me and Stuart as we sat facing each other, knee-to-knee in a group session. “‘I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you,” he said. He even apologized to Melissa for stealing her piggy bank.

 

Days before Terry’s discharge, his Care Unit counselor called us into his cramped office. “We highly recommend Terry not go home,” he said. “But transfer directly to a half-way-house where he can continue his recovery.”

I can’t remember why we didn’t take the counselor’s advice. Perhaps because Terry had made so much progress, we assumed he’d been miraculously cured. or maybe we were too tired to argue with Terry who didn’t want to go to another place right away. Or was it the way he said, “I just want to come home?”

After ninety days of treatment for drug addiction, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism, again, believing the problem had gone away in sober period, we took Terry home. He reenrolled in high school, transferred academic credits from Care Unit, and moved back into his bedroom. Because Stuart had quit drinking, we enjoyed the honeymoon we’d missed on our wedding night in the Starlight Motel in Azusa, when I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant and Stuart, too drunk to appreciate the vibrating bed. Stuart attended recovery meetings, and Terry often joined him. Melissa embraced a group of teenage children of alcoholics. Elsa encouraged me to let go of my efforts to control everyone and everything. My stomach pains disappeared, and we became a poster family for recovery.

Terry never played tennis again, but he played the guitar, strumming his favorite, Stairway to Heaven, and a new song, The Rose. The lyrics…It’s the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live…resonated. My fear of his dying kept me from living my own life. Elsa encouraged me to, “Live, and let live,” by reclaiming my creative spirit.

When Terry was in lockup, I’d sat on the couch praying for deliverance. Now, sitting with my son, who I believed, or wanted to believe, had been restored to sanity, I imitated Bette Midler, singing…in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun’s love, in the spring, becomes the Rose.

 

In mid-December, Terry had been free of alcohol and illegal drugs for almost six months. Once, bewildered by his dual diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which required medication, and alcoholism, which required total abstinence, we marveled that his mental illness seemed to have disappeared with sobriety.

On Christmas Day, we celebrated Terry’s recovery at my sister’s house and he and Melissa spent the night with their cousins. At 6 a.m. the next morning, my sister called.

Twenty minutes later, Stuart and I entered her living room. Nicotine-saturated drapes, drawn against the light of the rising sun blocked out the pink-streaked sky. We found Terry sprawled on a pile of gold foil wrapping paper beneath the dying evergreen. Among the opened gifts beneath the lighted tree, Terry had discovered a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream and drank the entire contents before sunrise. He was drunk, screaming, cursing, stomping around, waving his fists drunk. The children awaked by the ruckus stood in the doorway trembling. Me and my sister burst into tears. Stuart took charge, forcing him to drink coffee, but it didn’t sober him up. We managed to corral him into the car and took him home. He slept.

Hours later, Terry staggered into the living room pointing at things only he could see. He said he heard voices, “Don’t you hear them, Mom?” I only heard the jagged edges of my panicked breathing. Terry stood before us but beyond our reach. I begged Stuart to do something. He called 911. Soon, the police and a psychiatric emergency team entered our living room and whisked Terry away to Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, a government facility for the mentally ill. The following day we began searching for another place, another solution, another miracle to expect.

Clutching my knotted stomach, drowning in a whirlpool of fear and disappointment, I reached out to the women in the support group. They reminded me to take care of myself, to get enough sleep, and to remember to eat.

Grieving. I called Elsa. She consoled me but gracefully changed the conversation. “What do you love to do?” Did I remember a moment when I was so engaged, I lost all track of time.

 I’d often experienced such a sense of timelessness when painting but I hadn’t painted in seven years. “I used to be an artist,” I said, feeling nostalgic.

“You used to be an artist?” she said. “For an artist, painting is a form of self-love.”

 

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