A year ago, I finished my masters degree at my dream school, packed up my bags - and headed the opposite direction from everyone's expectations. HOME. I moved back in with Mom & Dad - to save money, yes. To take a job and pay off loans, yes. Mostly though, to be near the man I loved as he went through what we would eventually recognize as his first major "break" with his schizophrenia.
We are sweethearts who met through mutual friends while working toward our graduate degrees. His, cut short by his illness, we struggled to function until it became to much. Without family to turn to of his own - he moved in with my parents a 20-hour drive away as I wrapped up the last semester of my program.
We weren't really sure what was ahead or even what we were facing at that moment. Every doctor had a different theory and a new set of medications. His gentle, tender demeanor swung out of control from paranoid to angry, fearful and outright catatonic. Some of it was the illness - some of it the medication.
By the time I finished up school and moved down to be with him and my parents he had been in the hospital for a month. Not just a hospital - an acute psych ward in the Veteran's hospital. A space that feels more like a prison than a place of healing and recovery. He had been stripped of his shoelaces, the drawstrings of his shorts - and anything else he might use to cause harm to himself. His hair was matted and scalp caked with dried skin chunks. He smelled of saliva and that sterile perfume of hospital air.
I would come see him every day. Most days with a snack: snow cones, a sandwich, Oreos, something to make it all feel less miserable. We would sit in the visiting room watched by an attending nurse. There, under observation, we tried to know one another again. The man that had further developed through the darkness of his own mental collapse. The man contending against his own mind and the side effects of countless pills whose names were too hard to pronounce or half-remember. Somedays we would laugh. Somedays we would sit and try to figure out passwords to his emails, bank accounts and wide array of things left unattended in the sudden turn of his illness. Somedays we would cry - the pain from the little fragments that remained from things he did when we were both too afraid to think he might be getting sick. From the weeks before the hospital when he knew, he could sense what was coming and began to push away to keep me safe. Somedays, we would just sit in the hospital. Holding hands in silence for the hour we were allowed each day, we made the visiting room our sanctuary. We played make-believe - that none of this had happened; that in the world it was just him and me, nothing to worry about.
We went for four more months like this. Somedays better than others. Mom & Dad would come with me to visit and sometimes others too, but people don't volunteer in droves to visit the psych ward - and he wouldn't have wanted them there anyway. It was during this point, however, that I got angry - angry that no one asked me where he was, angry listening to prayer requests for cancer and other illness in church while my heart wanted to scream out for him. To let people know where he was and what was happening. To understand how hard he was working every single day to get his own mind back on his side.
I was angry at the doctors for not having better answers. Angry at the hospital for only giving me an hour at best, on good days. I was angry at the medicine for putting him behind a fog. Angry at my friends for not understanding what I was going through. Angry at myself for not being able to reach in and fix anything.
I was angry at schizophrenia,too. Angry at the social stigma and the silence around its existence.
I was confused and frustrated. We went from a couple with a promising future - to sitting silently holding hands in a hospital for 30 minutes a day. I had too many questions and no answers.
