Death of a Schizophrenic Child
Where I’m sitting right now it is a beautiful, windless, cloudless November sunny day in northern Texas, USA. It’s peaceful and private in the countryside along one of our biggest rivers, the one that separates our state from the state of Oklahoma to the north — “Indian Territory” admitted to the the United States just over 110 years ago. The northward distance is, in generality, a rolling blue hued forested area as well as home to a transplanted native American nation, the Chickashaws, hemmed in but not obliterated. It occurs to me that we are all transplants.
Close range, my view out of the large windows of my home is water, rolling hills, hundreds of multicolored trees that will soon drop leaves — and green cedars that will weather winter in the same color. A yearling deer, vulnerable and separated from her twin and mother, just walked across the pasture between house and pond. I’ve seen her often with her twin and mom, I know she is circling and separated and searching because at some time yesterday she was on this very ranch inadvertently caught in a large open air room size trap intended to catch wild hogs. I found her just after dark and turned her loose. Her leg is not broke but she is limping, it’s no wonder Disney used “Bambi” as a heart string pulling lead in an animation feature.
Last year my handsome, athletic, highly intelligent, affectionate, creative and humorous son, Jack, died from severe Schizophrenia. Those are the words on the autopsy report, when someone in their 30’s dies and is unexpectedly found by their daughter the whole scene is treated as a potential crime scene and a fairly through investigation occurs. He had suffered for 8 years from episodic psychosis. For a death such as Jack’s, blood and organs are checked to see if any substance or identifiable contributing cause is present. I waited to see the report, I stared at it and kept it. Death due to severe Schizophrenia. We don’t know what that means, it is a broad place-holding explanation and it does not mean heart attack, autonomous system stoke or anything that would satisfy our human addiction to “know”. It means we don’t know.
If anyone reads this who has lost a child they will know the unique difference between loosing father, mother, brother, friend, extended family (all these have happened to me) — and the loss of a child. It’s inexplicable. As a parent we know the hopes and dreams invested in the unfolding and changing life of our offspring and it feels unnatural and the cliche is true (for me at least )— the loss is with us everyday.
Severe mental illness is also an experience that has it’s own inexplicable qualities with admission to understanding being limited to those unfortunate enough to have close up and pervasive participation. We don’t understand the medical or biological nature or treatment of Schizophrenia, the best clinicians hold skepticism of accurate labels or categorical symptomatic organization of identification of Schizophrenia or any of the wide ranges of illnesses of the mind. It is frustrating for friends, family and caretakers. It is frustrating for the professionals who do attempt service and most frustrating of all for the sufferer. In America our homeless are mostly our mentally ill, the recourse of the state is institution or jail. It’s just another item that goes on the American list of things that often get sweep under the rug because they are difficult, complex and require reflection.
Which leads me to the summation of this story. Jack, my son, had lived in a house for 8 years prior to his death. The house was a quickly fabricated, cheap materials tract house built in 1984 in the suburbans of a big Texas city. I always thought it peculiar when I sat with a son telling me of malevolent voices in the attic, gangs lurking on the back porch, secret passageways and messages coming from the house that is was, literally, straight out of 1984. The house had been mismanaged and poorly maintained from the outset. Following his death I decided to completely renovate and restore the house. I told myself it would be a type of closure and cathartic. With the help of an inordinately skilled undocumented Honduran asylum seeking refugee who has been my ranch foreman for the last 6 years we sat about the doing of the restoration.
We thought it would take 5–6 months. We slept in the house Sunday to Friday every week and worked from 7 AM to 7 PM. It took a year. We thought it would take $25,000 in materials, it took $50,000. In the end it was the restoration of an otherwise unremarkable house — something akin to restoring an ordinary family sedan. It was wearisome and draining, we have finished and I feel depleted and at a loss. I have been let out of a trap I walked into myself and am wandering seeking to reconnect with my life and find out if I exist “after the year of dead kid house rebuilding”. Maybe I’ll bump into myself, maybe I’ll find some kind of personal fiction or myth that lets me park this sense of disconnected and distracted futility. Maybe some growth or recovery will come out of the grief, pain and wildly directed energy of motion. I’ve read the witnesses such as Viktor Frankl and Elie Wiesel of true horror; people do find pieces of resolution.
