All the Things We Never Knew (14 page)

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Chapter Nine

August 2006. Ninety degrees, suffocating by Portland standards. Star, our yellow Lab, panted heavily, leaving drool marks on the hardwood floors. Max, a West Highland, napped nearby. The sun shone brightly through floor-to-ceiling windows. The pool looked cool and blue, but there were dishes to load, a house to clean, and dogs to feed, and Sophie needed a ride to summer camp before I headed off to work. I was pissed at David for refusing to get air conditioning. The linen suit I wore had sweat stains under the arms. I'd begun looking for apartments and was saving up the down payment for a house. I had an appointment with a divorce lawyer. But I hadn't said a word about these plans to David. As much as I wanted to leave him, I also didn't want to be responsible for destroying his life. He seemed so fragile, as if one line might suck the last of his life out of him. In a weird turn of events, David's frailty now held the marriage together.

David stood near me while I loaded the dishwasher. He stared out at the weeds in the garden, where he and Sophie had excitedly planned to “grow huge, monstrous tomatoes and corn.” Dried clods of dirt covered the spots where she'd carefully planted her seeds.

David's big hands seemed to be the only thing holding him up. He leaned against the granite kitchen countertop, putting what was
left of his weight on his hands. In the few weeks since his hospitalization, he seemed to be vanishing. I guessed he'd lost fifteen pounds. Green boxer shorts hung limp and low around his hips. He slumped from the weight of being alive. His beard was an unkempt inch of scraggly hair.

He stank of alcohol and something that reminded me of dental fillings. Ever since he'd started taking antidepressants, the stench of metal seeped through his pores. After being hospitalized, David had talked a friend of his who was a primary care doctor into giving him the meds. When I asked the doctor's name, or where his office was, David refused to give me the information. The whole thing seemed dangerous and unprofessional. But I also hoped the meds might help stabilize David.

At night, he said he lay awake, sweating. I changed his sheets daily, trying to keep the stink from sinking into the walls. Ribs showed through his skin, and he seemed not to care when his boxers slipped further down his waist. Sophie had actually been the one to pick those shorts out, guessing that he would love the color, green, and the red pheasants flying up toward the waistband. David used to love watching wild birds in flight.

She'd used her allowance to buy the boxers, then stuffed them in a red stocking along with a plastic bag of gummy bears. “I love them!” David said on Christmas morning, pulling the boxers on over his jeans and doing a dance that made Sophie laugh.

David spoke slowly, quietly. “I heard voices last night.”

“What do you mean?” I didn't look up. I tried to focus on getting the dishes done before work, anything to calm the chaos. There were fifteen minutes left to get the house clean, drop our daughter at summer camp, and get to work. I put another dish in the dishwasher. Rinse, load, repeat.

“Last night I heard voices telling me to jump off the bridge,” he said in a monotone. He was no more dramatic than if he were talking about how much it costs to fill up his truck with gas. “I heard it as plain as day. Jump from the Vista.”

The china breakfast plate I was drying dropped to the floor, breaking into four large pieces. Bizarre—I never believed the movie scenes when people dropped things in response to being shocked by dizzying events. Now, I recognized myself inside a cliché.

David stared down at the pieces, studying the shattered pattern on the floor. “Did you mean to do that?” he asked.

After that day, David's behavior spiraled down. It was at its worst at night. I dreaded the darkness and the sounds he would make as he battled his demons. He paced in tight circles and muttered to himself. “You can't leave. I'll leave first. You can't take her.”

I tried to comfort him. “David,” I said, “I won't take Sophie from you. You can see her every day if you want.”

He crumpled to his knees and cried. “I have fucked this up. It's entirely my fault.”

I lifted my hand to his back, rubbing large circles.

“Please don't,” he said, pulling away abruptly. He never could stand to be touched. He rose to his feet unsteadily and then fell to his knees crying loudly, a moaning sound that reminded me of the wolves in Yellowstone. I reached out my hand again, but he rolled his eyes. “Don't bother.”

Later that night, I heard him turning on lights, banging cupboard doors in the kitchen. The television turned on and then off. In time I would learn that hating to be touched was part of his illness. So is not sleeping and sensitivity to light and sound.

As his nights grew increasingly restless, David didn't complain. At all hours, lights turned on, then off; the toilet flushed. I heard him making himself a drink. I listened to these sounds in total despair, wishing I could wrap Sophie in her pink blanket and whisk her off into the night. Instead, night after night, I lay awake, piecing together the puzzle of who David was, just as he was falling apart. The monstrous, dark mystery living in our home was finally in plain view.

He'd always been moody, like a storm brewing, harmless at first, but then menacing. There used to be enough warning to get out of the way. I'd sweep Sophie out the door to the park or the movies or shopping. Then the storm would lift, and he'd wake up and announce he was taking Sophie mushroom hunting or skiing or gliding.

“Let's get out of this house!” he'd say. “It's
gorgeous
outside.” He was sorry, so sorry, for being such a difficult person to live with. It was going to be different now. He was changed. He would tell me funny stories about his day, sing while he did the laundry, and even make his famous dish of rice and beans for dinner. It might last a couple of days, or long enough for a short excursion. Sometimes, his mood changed between the time he'd made the plans and when he got his coat on.

David must have sensed his mind slipping as he became more ineffective and confused. His anger, in hindsight, was undoubtedly the panic of a man about to go under and take his family with him. But he never let on, and if I inquired whether there was something I might do to lessen his obvious stress, David shoved me away rather than tell the truth. From a distance, I tried to piece together what had gone wrong. He'd become busier than he could manage alone. He'd refused to hire an assistant or a full-time accountant. Sometimes I'd overhear him juggling six or seven different remodels and two commercial jobs at once.

He was fueled by endless energy, but it was odd energy, erratic and irritable. One day, I saw his work truck flying down Burnside, David holding two phones to his ears. He was driving with his knees. He didn't notice my car, stopped at a traffic light. He was hurtling down the street at sixty miles per hour. I barely recognized that man, that stranger who flashed past me, caught by a red light camera in my mind.

 

CAREGIVER DENIAL

When I think back on the ways in which I denied the onset of David's mental illness, I am overcome with heartache. Imagine what it was like for him to experience the fear of losing control of his thoughts and emotions and the additional guilt of involving his family in a downward spiral.

People may hide or deny obvious changes in their patterns and behavior because they are in enormous pain due to the social stigma associated with mental illness. We were both unwilling to look squarely at the problems unfolding in our home, both attempting to preserve our own sense of self-esteem and both failing the reality test.

People with bipolar disorder commonly shock and surprise their loved ones with grandiose ideas, excessive spending, sexual indiscretion, and irritability. Those periods can alternate with normal behavior and severe depressive episodes. I have heard many people with bipolar disorder say that a much better description of mania is “mixed depression.”

People who have severe depression feel miserable. They have no energy, and life seems meaningless to them. They feel “frozen” or incapable of doing anything to make themselves feel better. Some people believe that they must have done something to deserve such punishment. The irritability and the unwillingness to share the interior of one's mind can be especially alienating for caregivers.

David's preoccupation with noise, light, and sound was not at all unusual for a person suffering from a mental illness. Instead of confronting his increasingly unusual behavior, I attempted to “fix” the situation: moving from a perfectly fine home, choosing to ignore sexual indiscretion, and moving away from him physically during times of greatest stress.

In his book,
Scattershot: My Bipolar Family,
David Lovelace writes,
“Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball
of coke cut with speed. It's fun and it's frightening as hell. Some patients—bipolar type I—experience both extremes; others—bipolar type II—suffer depression almost exclusively. But the ‘mixed state,' the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression's paranoid self-loathing.”

Chapter Ten

In September 2006, I finally called for help. I couldn't care for David alone anymore. His anger was explosive, his behavior so erratic that I feared for my life. He was suspicious and paranoid in a way I'd never seen before. He smashed a hole through the basement wall one night as I left for a fund-raiser. He hadn't slept through the night in weeks. He was provoked by the slightest change in noise, smell, and light. He refused help, and I knew the law well enough to know you can't commit someone in Oregon without his or her consent. I believed he would never harm Sophie—but me? I could not be sure.

And now David was missing. He had taken off from the house, alone on a walk. He couldn't contain the manic energy he had in his body, so he'd walk and walk and miss appointments or forget to pick up Sophie at school. This time he hadn't come back, and I was worried.
He should be in a hospital,
I thought.

His sister, Jill, lived two and a half hours away, in the beach town of Astoria. “Jill, I need your help,” I said over the phone. My voice cracked, but I held back the tears. She had enough worries of her own, as a single mom with three kids and no job, her nursing degree months away. I didn't know where else to turn. “David is getting worse. He left this morning at eight for a walk, and he's still not home.”

“Oh, you poor pet,” Jill said. “I'm finishing finals this week. I'll get there as soon as I can.” I imagined her hanging up the phone and wondering how in the hell she would manage to help when she could barely hold her life together.

I pulled on a jacket to go find David. I'd be late for work again. I hadn't told anyone about my problems at home. News spreads like a virus at work, and I couldn't risk losing my job when I needed it most.

My mind raced with images of David passed out on the Wildwood—a nearby woodsy trail and one of my favorite city hikes. My head flipped through gruesome possibilities. I tried to think back to the last time I'd taken a long walk. March?
This must be how it feels to be at war,
I thought,
when you lose track of the hours and days and months to the fear and chaos around you.
My friends had stopped calling for our walks. I never knew whether David would be there to take care of Sophie, and at nine years old, she was still too young to leave home alone.

And now David was missing, again. As I searched, I wondered if he'd just decided to take off. Maybe he'd bought a plane ticket to Canada, or Mexico, or Brazil. He hadn't gone to work in weeks. His wallet and phone, which had begun to seem like unnecessary accessories, were still on the kitchen counter. The faster the images filed through my head, the quicker I walked. I checked my watch. Four hours. He'd been gone four hours.

It startled me to see a tall frame come round the bend near the Japanese gardens, approximately a quarter mile from our home. For a moment, I didn't recognize him, the boyishness of his face, the changed expression caused by what I later realized was a full-blown manic attack. His wrinkles and dour expression seemed erased, replaced by bright, wide eyes and a smile that was uncharacteristic. “David?” I asked, relief washing over me. “Are you okay?”