Today I received in the mail my late husband's letters and scientific treatises on ethno-botany and the shamanic implications of the plants' hallucinations, by a professor he had grown up with and wrote to.My late husband was a genius.He was also schizophrenic.He was quiet about it. He had no social skills even before the schizophrenia exhibited itself.But he was fascinating to listen to.It came upon him as a late teen and it frightened him. He knew so much and shared what he knew and amazed people.Then people came to notice something was wrong. Finally his father. His father was not a sensitive man, or a kind man, but he was also a scientist.
When my not-yet-husband graduated high school and went out on his own, he actually was able to get a job at the post office,which was a very good thing, because when the illness became full blown, his income put him at a high rank on the SSI,or disability, list for a big check each month. Even then, I read in these letters, there was often not enough $ for food the whole month and he ate at church dinners for the homeless. I have been reading a time capsule:it is so painful.The photograph at the top of the entry is one I have treasured:I have just given birth to our son.My husband's face was so full of love and awe. I treasure the photo, wanted to share it, because so many people have misconceptions about schizophrenia and think that the ill person is always "out of it". My husband was often very clear and brilliant.When word salad popped out of his mouth, it made us giggle.It also frightened him. I did what I could to assure him. It frightened me as well, but not as much as the violence.
I spent all that rainy day in bed with these letters, essays, listening to the storm, listening to the ghostly sobs of a boy who very few people understood. I was reading a foreign language. I had a dictionary of madness compiled by myself through time, but it was incomplete, the grammar only went so far and emotional dangling participles often confused a concept. My poor boy couldn't even speak sometimes and it frightened him into deeper terror and a broken spirit for a time.
In reading these letters, essays, I piled on more woolen clothes, I shivered with compassion and fierceness: why didn't they notice sooner. Why'd they expect thank you notes every time his family sent him $100, a $20 bill. Madness does not understand thank you notes. Madness writes operas of gratitude, but it is rare they get through the mouth to the givers' ear. Schizophrenics don't have stamps very often. The govt. doesn't send money enough to pay the rent. When I had to leave with the baby, (listen, I had no choice.)he had to eat at the local catholic church which served meals Monday through Saturday. What do the mad do on Sunday? He moved into town after burning his/our cabin down around himself, scarring himself terribly. That what they do. They are not good cooks I think. He was in the burn unit for months.
Madness is rude, violent, it cries in yr arms when you are soo tired from going out in the forest to collect firewood, cleaning out the wood stove, hauling water to the garden...madness doesn't know any better. He didn't know he should be doing it instead of me; he was lost in a barrage of shouting, whispering voices of command. I tried to let that not make a difference.But I was young. In reading these papers I felt so bad for all the places I failed. I'm sorry I can't hold him now, right now, and tell him, I discovered the alchemical process by which to"kiss and make it better". But I haven't discovered it yet. I've only grown old enough to discover compassion and patience.
I've read Lisie's Story by Stephen King. I know the violence first hand of madness. But I had to leave. He would steal my clothes, my shoes, every time he caught me trying.
At first there were nights I found myself suddenly awake in my own studio flat 150 miles away in Berkeley again, (where we'd met years before when i was still a teen), just out of dream-time, a baby in arms, or strapped across my chest or along side my shoulders, my side of ribs, barefoot, wearing a holey T shirt, nothing below, just young downy legs splattered with tattoos and mud, a cold butt because it's the beginning of February, but there's no moon and therefore no shadows..I am walking, walking, down a dirt road with crooked fences on each side and that startling bird sound that mimics a wild cat...I am getting away, away, as far as I can, I am fast-walking. I am crying. I am missing him already. I am crazed in my own way, but not enough to stay.This child is the sanity which allows me to disappear.
I raised two sons to who I also had to say, I don't know how to make it better, but let's cuddle and when they were older and told me they were too big to cuddle, I'd say, " let's make cookies, let's go out in the valley and I'll let you drive that long stretch where no cars come"..anything to make them feel better, as if I were making up for the inability to cure mental illness, give my oldest boy, the genius son, back his genius father. I am hoping that's what happens when I give him these papers after I've copied them for the professor: I hope he hears the Good Father who always stopped before the violence came out to the baby. Except once. And that once is why I had to leave. You don't shake babies, even if they are crying for hours.It's a dangerous practice to push that little brain pan around inside that still soft cranium. I guess what his own violent and cruel father taught him was that violence works as a fear tactic on women and babies: they were for taking out yr own frustration out on. What he didn't know was I grew up on that. I knew all about that first hand from one parent and her husband. I am no stranger to violence. I tried to teach my sons that violence is no answer, and they being sane, know this is true. My sons are beautiful, intelligent, gentle and fierce in their own sane ways. There is so much to be grateful for, as I grieve the loss of one less genius in a world full of idiots, angry monsters with guns and wars to fight. He played dulcimer when it got too hard to hear me over the head-voices. My late husband knew in his heart that violence was wrong, but the voices in his head were louder than the beating of his own heart.Those voices took over like robotic monsters inside his skull so he couldn't hear his heart sing.He longed to hear the Gloria of his own heart, his paen to God and the Universe inside each tiny wild flower, fingers splashing across dulcimer strings singing latin botanica as if poetry. I wished I wasn't the only one who could hear the joy as he played and grinned at me over the instrument. I wished the whole world could hear the beauty of his heart and head, all healthy and happy, a married man, a father, a learned scholar, living in a shiny clean cabin where the only shadows were made by candles as the evening deepened into night.
Good night John, sweet dreams and G-d Bless.
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