My Mother Finally Got Help for Her Mental Illness After a Lifetime of Pain

It was a 75-year-journey.

I’ve written a memoir piece for today’s newsletter. I had a pebble in my shoe for many years that I no longer carry. You see, my mother suffered from mental illness but refused treatment. This is the story of how she finally did.

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The elevator delivers us with a bounce to the lowest level of what used to be the old hospital, where I’d given birth to both of my daughters, now teens. Since then, the hospital has been transformed into a modern physical rehabilitation center.

My father and I follow the color-coded arrows toward my mother’s wing. The newness squeaks underneath our feet.

I am my dad’s plus-one today, tomorrow, and beyond.

I’m unsure how long my duty as my father’s chaperone will last. Since my father’s arrest, he has been prohibited by a protective order from visiting my mother alone. He’s not allowed to return to his home either, even though my mother’s not there.

What landed my father here would surprise no one.

My parent’s relationship had been volcanic since my childhood. I couldn’t wait to escape the chaos of one parent with undiagnosed untreated mental illness and the other too traumatized to admit the depth of the problem.

I’d had premonitions that one day, I’d drive up and see yellow police tape surrounding their house.

But that’s not exactly what happened.

One day, my father simply broke from the strain. After one of my mother’s harrowing manic marathons, his infinite reserve of patience evaporated. My belligerent mother had cornered him, and he shoved her away hard, landing her on their faded green carpet, unable to get up.

The police came.

After a night in jail, Dad stayed with me and my husband until his court date. My father would explain to a judge what precipitated his first act of domestic violence after 52 years of marriage. My dad was uneducated about the legal system and needed me to help navigate his way through the charges.

I was back in a web I’d tried so hard to escape.

And I wasn’t happy about it. I begrudged any visit to see my mother. Five years earlier, I had elected to save myself, hacksawing a life without my mom, my bid for self-preservation casting both parents bereft onto an island of dysfunction. There were no family members or friends to fill my spot, a consequence of my mother’s penchant for burning bridges.

And so here we are.

My father and I walk in tandem past the nurses’ station, our eyes focusing on the flurry outside my mom’s room. Figures in personal protective gear move robotically at her door. The gray-blue shapes are holding things I do not recognize. A voice beckons us, pulling us from the quicksand of confusion.

“Stand back,” the voice orders.

“You can’t come in here.”

The figure turns away, returning to the work at hand.

A sense of familiarity surfaces at the sound of her words. Is that my mother’s nurse wearing goggles? Wisps of her tell-tale blond curls peak through, dispelling her anonymity despite the head-to-toe paper ensemble, complete with gloves and booties.

Memories of my old job visiting Superfund sites ping me, but the vision in front of me still makes no sense. Everything seems wrong here. Just moments earlier, we’d walked in from the sun-dappled parking lot, a warm morning in June, its cheerfulness precluding anything terrible from happening inside.

I hear another voice, louder and more familiar. It’s my mother screaming.

“Get me out of here! I’m going home. You can’t keep me here. Let me go!”

A moment of panic threatens to undo me. They’re not going to release her, are they?

My mother had been irrational after the surgery to repair a broken femur, the consequence of my dad’s push. She woke up disoriented and determined to leave. The change in her disposition post-surgery was attributed, at first, to the after-effects of an earlier stroke and the anesthesia.

But after further tests, the neurologist adds on another distressing diagnosis: vascular dementia.

The dementia she’d been hiding before the accident has been set loose. Dementia combined with mental illness emulsifies it into something horrific, a loathsome creature we would never manage to tame.

The hospital assigned a full-time aide to sit by Mom’s side to ensure she stayed put post-op. She attempted to escape her bed several times but was no match for the super-human aid who refused to allow her to damage her newly repaired leg.

There was no aid here, though.

A man in a white coat approaches, startling us from our slack-jawed state. He is an imposter, too, not seeming to belong to the unfolding tableau. The doctor escorts us past the beehive of nurses working at their station back toward the elevators.

“Sir, you’re going to have to come back later. Your wife disconnected her Geri bag and sprayed the room with her urine. We must give her something to calm her down and disinfect her room.”

After surgery, catheterization left her with the urine collection bag attached to her right leg.

I say nothing, at once mortified and shocked.

My father’s face is blank, showing no surprise, shame, or even fury as if the man had been speaking a foreign language. I know my dad. He’s trying to convince himself it’s not that bad as he had a million times before. This was a misunderstanding at best and a mishap at worst. A bucket and a mop would fix this. I’m surprised he doesn’t offer to clean it up.

“Come back this afternoon,” the doctor offers. Nothing was to be done until they got my mom stable.

I turn to leave, my eyes urging Dad to follow. 

He pauses but then, with shoulders slumped, follows me to the elevators.

“We’ll come back later, after lunch,” I say, hoping to stop him falling deeper into despair.

We spend the next few hours trying to make sense of the situation. We waste time inside a sad, down-on-its-luck cafe until we think we’ve let enough time pass.

We find my mom lying with her feet on the pillow, her head at the base of the bed. This position is odd, but the worst has passed. Her eyes are closed, but she senses our silent approach. She props herself up to sitting at last, at terms that she isn’t strong enough to stand.

But the fury of the morning is still unfolding. Ripped-up pieces of a glossy brochure lay on her blanket. She’s uncoiled the papers from a tripod binding and fashioned a weapon from the spiral wire. She leans into me, revealing three fingers folded down into the shape of a gun, the sharp edge of the coil pointed alongside her index finger.

She gives me a look of a partner and co-conspirator, whispering she’s going to get that nurse when she comes back.

As a child, I was afraid of her, and I’m no less fearful now. I extricate myself from our huddle and step into the hallway. I tell the blonde-haired nurse what my mother has in mind. The nurse has had enough of my mother. She marches into the room, opens my mother’s palm, and yanks the coil from her hand.

My mother is in tears now, resigned that she has lost the battle. My father tells me to comfort her, but I only want to leave. The thought of touching her reviles me.

The doctor catches us as we leave my mom for the night. He wants to ask me something.

The simple words belie the complexity of the question.

“What’s with your mom?”

The question slices me to the core. That’s the very question I’ve been asking my entire life. 

I hedge, not trusting what he’s really asking.

“I don’t know. She’s got dementia?” I am hopeful this will satisfy him.

He shakes his head. No, not that.

Now, I know what he means. 

Can I finally say it? Can I admit she’s been walking on the edge of sanity her whole life, never acknowledging the weight of her mental anguish, never seeking help?

“My mother has been suffering from a mental illness for years but never got treatment.”

This is my first time admitting the unspeakable truth. Neither my mother nor father had ever said those words to each other, let alone to a medical professional who could have helped.

The doctor nods his head at me. He understands and says he will work on getting my mother additional treatment.

My dad says nothing.

I am weightless as I step onto the elevator. The doors open to the blinding afternoon sunshine.

“It’s still nice outside,” I tell my father as we walk out into the beautiful June afternoon.

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