Magic Words

Recently I was listening to This American Life, the episode entitled "Magic Words." Its three narratives (“acts”) depicted moments when people read, heard, or happened upon words that changed their lives.

Act two caught my attention. The story revolved around a daughter, Karen, and her family who had recently taken in her Alzheimer's-ridden mother, Virginia. Karen struggled to care for her and engage in meaningful conversation. She yearned for guidelines, an Alzheimer's rule book. Conventional wisdom guided her to "keep your loved one with you, remind them who they are, show them pictures of family, ask them what day it is."

I had an immediate visceral reaction, “No, that’s wrong!”  Why put her poor mother through it? The suddenness of my emotion scared me. Why was I reacting so strongly? A lump rose in my throat and my lips quivered.

The story continued and Karen happened upon the magic words, "step into their world." In that moment Karen was freed from the failed attempts to keep her mother present. She could listen to her mother's memories, her nonsensical notions, and she could laugh and live with her in a world gone by.

Now I understood my emotion. I too had arrived at these words, but it had taken decades of anguish and heartbreak, and I didn't have a playbook.

My mother was clinically diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder when I was seventeen. There had been years of abnormal behavior and Mom would call with some crazy stories, but what of it? My sisters and I had left home and were so busy with our lives. Then the day arrived when she fell off the cliff. She showed up several hours late to a family dinner and told a fantastical tale of voices in her radio commanding her to drive a hundred miles away and back again. We could not brush this one under the rug.

My sister and I arranged for friends to take her to lunch and through strong coercion whisk her to a mental ward for self-admission, an intervention of sorts. It was all so neat and clean - private health insurance, a top psychiatrist, fine hospital and good meds; she may as well have been in for bronchitis. I was so naive. Within months she relapsed, then relapsed again, and again.

It fell largely to me with help from my sister to manage Mom's care. I would spend hours on the phone pleading for her to take her meds then weekends and weekdays away from school with her when she didn't.

Late one night I rushed to her Alexandria apartment to find the walls bare, sheets covering the windows, cut wires hanging from ceiling fixtures, smoke detectors smashed. In the kitchen she stood trembling, pointing a long kitchen knife at me screaming, "Get away! Get away from me!" This is what paranoid schizophrenia looks like. Hours later I carried her limp, catatonic form through the night into an emergency room and simply said, "take her."

Months, then a few years passed and her journey, my journey, only grew darker - a farcical commitment hearing, multiple passages through the nightmare of state mental hospitals, her insurance long gone. Between commitments she would vanish - a week long disappearance ended with a phone call from London - she had been detained in customs. A months-long disappearance ended with police calling to say she had been arrested in California.

For me?... frustration, anger, exhaustion, disillusionment. I was nineteen. I had been thrust into the role of my mother's keeper decades too early. I could not know then my longer term emotional toll, a sort of PTSD.

I heard “my first magic words” when I visited a school psychologist. They did not fit into a pithy phrase, but they had a lasting effect on me...

 
Much of our anger is caused when someone does not conform to our mental image of them, to our expectations, and in the case of a loved one, to our wants and needs. He counseled that my mother, as I wanted to know her, departed when I was seventeen. If I could now envision her as a close friend, someone in need, I could give her care and compassion without all the trappings of a pedestal.
 

This was a contrivance of course, and to maintain that detachment was onerous though it served me nonetheless. There were many times my facade fell away and the anger returned, moments when beneath my veneer my heart broke because those around me saw only a petulant son scolding his mother. One can never know what others carry inside them.

My attention returned to the magic words on the radio. Immersed in Alzheimer’s, Virginia engaged Karen's husband in a conversation about monkeys outside her window. He picked up the discussion without blinking, and they debated the merits of housebreaking monkeys through laughs and giggles.

My own smile returned. Their banter transported me to a time near the end of my mother's life. She was succumbing to the final stages of lung cancer and brain lesions had shown up in her MRI's. During her last weeks my sisters and I would spend long hours helping her through delusions. Many frightened her, though in others she relived joyful moments I recognized from my childhood before the darkness of mental illness had overwhelmed her.

We conversed about summer camps, horse shows, and visits to Broadway, all as if they were happening in the moment. She was too weak to laugh but she smiled, and I smiled. I could see she was lucid and happy if only for fleeting moments. I had finally learned those magic words, “step into her world.” The mother of my childhood, that special person full of humor, love, and encouragement was briefly returned to me before she closed her eyes in eternal peace.