All the Things We Never Knew (2 page)

My hope is that our story—told from the other side of this sixth stage—will be a catalyst for positive change in the ways we approach, regard, and respond to the social fallout of mental illness.

Chapter One

The doorman scanned two pages of names before he found ours—Colin MacLean “plus one.” That was me: the plus one. It was strange to be known that way and even stranger to be wearing a dress. For the last three months, I'd worn nothing in the evening but sweatpants, the uniform of crisis. I tugged at the hem of my black silk dress to pull it down farther.

The young doorman nodded and opened the door, “Enjoy your evening.”

The knot in my stomach tightened along with my smile. The tension was highest just below my rib cage.

The restaurant was one of Portland's trendiest, with a long marble bar and two stories of dining. The art was modern, and the place thumped with electronic dance music. Dozens of young men and women were moving on the dance floor. The bass bounced off the acoustic ceilings and the glass windows, amplifying the beat. The party took up both floors of the restaurant. Upstairs, dining tables had been pushed aside so guests could hang over the banister to watch the dance floor.

One of them, a young man with sticky, gelled hair, yelled down at my date, “Hey, MacLean, you're late!”

Colin waved and then gently folded his long fingers around mine.
A true gentleman,
I smiled to myself. He opened car doors for me. He was the first to stand whenever a woman left or rejoined a group at the dinner table. He thanked waiters and waitresses for their service and did it all sincerely. It was a type of chivalry I hadn't seen in a long, long time, certainly not from my soon-to-be ex. The marriage was over, except for the formalities, except for David's signature on the papers. I caught myself nervously biting the inside of my lip and forced myself to stop and be in the moment.

The focus of this party, the birthday boy, was a local real estate agent, a hugely successful, balding, middle-aged guy who liked his newly single life and women under thirty. He was jammed between several women in the middle of the dance floor, oblivious to his newly arriving guests.

I'd been dating Colin for only about a month, but he already seemed like the guy I'd been searching for back in my twenties, when my list of must-haves seemed important. He called when he said he was going to call. He was, as a mutual friend described him, “one of the last remaining good guys.” But I was like a detective trying to uncover Colin's dark side. I'd even paid a background check company to make sure he didn't have a record, a history of violence, or a history of pretending he was someone he wasn't. Men aren't always as they appear, but they are what they hide.

I watched his profile as he summed up the party: a wonderful nose, perfect in its lines except for a slight bump at the top. It would have been too perfect in its geometry without the break. I liked a man with a few scars, stories to tell about his various broken bones. He was the most stylish man there, taller than the rest, in a black jacket, white tuxedo shirt, and jeans. He smiled easily and shook hands with nearly everyone he passed. The owner of the restaurant made it a point to wind his way through the crowd. “Well, now the party begins,” he said, shaking Colin's hand and then kissing me expertly on the side of the cheek. I wanted to relax into Colin's breeze. Instead, I felt like a hurricane was looming.

An oversized mirrored ball hung from the ceiling, spinning slowly, throwing bursts of light onto people's faces. Like so much in my life, it seemed precarious. Would it drop and smash into pieces? The exits were guarded to keep the party private. I felt my underarms begin to sweat. Part of me felt trapped. Before, I loved parties, the thrill of too much everything: music, people, alcohol. Now in my early forties, my world had been reduced to worrying about my estranged husband, a man I no longer loved. He was in trouble, I knew, suffering from a sudden and acute mental breakdown; tonight he was safe, though. Tonight he was at our home with his mother to watch him. I reminded myself of this and tried to ease the knot below my breastbone, but it had become a part of my physical landscape, like worry lines. A young woman with blonde hair extensions teetered toward us. Colin squeezed my hand and started weaving us through the couples.

I wriggled loose of his grip. “That's okay; I'll get a drink first,” I said, smiling, finally breaking free. It was all too much, too fast. I shouldn't have come. I had convinced myself I was ready to rejoin the social scene. But I was wrong.

The bar was pure chaos. The bartender held two bottles in his hands, pouring, shaking, then pushing drinks toward a line of loud customers. I waved in the bartender's direction. Nothing.

“I'll have a vodka martini, double,” I said. Still nothing.

“
Vodka martini!
” I yelled, and he finally looked my way, nodding.

The light from my phone distracted me from the bartender. “Unknown number,” the phone read.

I took in a breath. Sophie. It must be my nine-year-old calling from her sleepover. I pressed the talk button and held the phone against my ear.

“Ms. Hamilton? Sheila Hamilton?” I could barely make out the man's voice. The music thumped louder than ever.

“Hold on, hold on. I can't hear you.” I walked through the middle of the crowd with the phone to my head. Colin saw me striding toward the bathroom and mouthed,
Everything okay?
I nodded,
trying to keep the panic from my face. I pushed past sweaty bodies to the small unisex bathroom.

Inside, I yelled loudly into the tiny speaker of my cell phone. “Sorry. I'm at a birthday party. Who is this?”

“It's Officer Todd Rodale from the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office.”

My body suddenly felt heavy, too heavy to stand.
Bang, bang, bang!
The door shook like someone was kicking it from the outside.

“Hey!” a drunk yelled. “I've got to piss.”

Unisex bathrooms,
I thought.
What a stupid invention.
The guy would have to wait. “Sorry, Officer, go on,” I said into the telephone. I plugged my other ear to drown out the drunk, and the music, and the absurdity of the place.

“Ms. Hamilton, we got a report that your husband broke into a woman's home in the Columbia Gorge and stole her gun.”

I pushed the phone closer to my head. “What? I'm sorry, did I hear you correctly—he has a what?” My soon-to-be ex was supposed to be at the home we'd shared. His mother was supposed to be watching him. This must be a mistake. The dim light of the bathroom made the scene feel like a bad dream.

The cop repeated the words
gun
and
husband
and
woman
. He said they were looking for David, that my husband knew the “victim,” and that they considered this man I was not yet divorced from “armed and dangerous.”

My husband was on Larch Mountain, the officer said. I repeated the information, scrambling to make sense of the bizarre story. I stopped cold at “shots fired.”

“We didn't know how to reach you,” said the cop, “so I called the radio station. I'm a big fan of yours.”

I drew in a breath. I'd tried so hard to keep the drama of my personal life from most of my coworkers at KINK-FM—and I'd never mentioned on air how serious the problems were.

“I hope you don't mind that they gave me your cell phone number,” said this cop, this fan.

Shame, humiliation, nausea—the storm moved through my body. I stood up to interrupt the bile rising in my stomach and caught a reflection of my face in the mirror. Red blotches covered my neck and ears. My foundation had disappeared from the sweat. My eyes, which Colin described as a deep emerald color, were bloodshot and pinched. I was pressing the cell phone so hard against my head that my blonde hair was mushed against one ear. The face in the mirror was a mug shot.

The jerk banged on the door again. Now there were several people yelling. One voice came through loudest. “Get the FUCK out!”

I unlocked the door and poked my head out. The crowd outside was larger, the comments louder. “Please,” I said. “It's an emergency.” I closed the door, locked it, and put the phone to my chest for a brief moment while attempting to slow my breathing. “Where should I meet you?” My voice sounded like that of a person in shock. The sheriff's office was forty miles east of the city. “Do you have a pen?” he asked.

I heard myself try to answer, watched myself from above, like a moviegoer, conscious of what was happening but no longer mouthing words or reacting to pain. It was someone else down there, some mixed-up woman in a black dress and “no-run” mascara running down her face. She looked pathetic, trapped in an overly expensive bathroom. Gleaming Kohler faucets and no way out. “No, I don't have anything with me but my phone.”

“Meet us at the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office in Troutdale.” He said it twice to remind me. I was numb, trying to calculate how I would navigate a forty-mile drive. He must have known I was in shock. He added, “Sorry I had to call you under these circumstances.”

I opened the door slowly. A young man in a tuxedo looked at my face and fell silent. Another guy booed as I walked past. His date elbowed him in the stomach.

Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry
. My body felt hollow. I nearly tripped on the step down to the dance floor. A blonde in a tight tube dress stopped dancing to stare at me.

Colin saw me from a distance and pushed through the crowd until he could grab my hand. “Let's get out of here,” he said, squeezing my fingers.

The young doorman was surprised. “Leaving so early?” he chirped, and then he stopped when he saw my face. “Well, okay, you two have a good night.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and watched us walk away.

Inside the car, my words spilled out. I felt as if I'd been injected with a super shot of amphetamines. I was unraveling, almost babbling. “He's stolen a gun, Colin. He could do something really dangerous.”

“Whoa, slow down,” Colin said, taking a deep breath. “Start from the beginning.”

 

STIGMA

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration,
nearly one in five American adults (18.5 percent), or 43.8 million adults, had a mental illness in 2013. Yet, despite the prevalence of mental illness, the stigma surrounding it persists. Some people still believe that mental illness is a weakness of self, or a choice that can be managed by “pulling oneself together.”

Dr. Graham Thornicroft, senior study author at the Institute of Psychiatry of King's College, London, says,
“The profound reluctance to be a mental health patient means people will put off seeing a doctor for months, years, or even at all, which in turn delays their recovery.” Thornicroft's team collected information from 144 studies involving 90,000 people around the world. Stigma ranked as the fourth highest of ten barriers to care.

Self-stigmatization can be even more potent and destructive. David's worsening mental health resulted in a sense of shame so great that his doctors say it complicated the most extreme of his symptoms. He was “unreachable,” as one caseworker told me. Secrecy acted as an obstacle to early intervention in his illness.

If David had been diagnosed with diabetes at a young age, members of his family, school, and church would have undoubtedly mobilized support. His caregivers would have communicated his need for dietary changes, exercise, and/or insulin. This was not the case when David exhibited the earliest signs of depression.

The myth persists that mental illness is a character flaw. It is my hope that one day disorders of the brain will be treated with as much care, compassion, and tenacity as diseases of any other organs in our bodies.

Chapter Two

He drinks too much coffee. That's what I thought when I first laid eyes on David eleven years earlier. He was juggling construction plans and a pager while he ordered a double-shot cappuccino. He checked his watch, ran his fingers through his hair, and then fumbled through his wallet for a few crumpled bills.

I would later interpret this first impression of David in a much different light. Disorganization and anxiety are two of the early warning signs of bipolar disorder, but on this day, I was immediately drawn to his erratic, discombobulated energy. I thought his lack of bravado was refreshingly different.