Dyana Herron's Open Salon Blog

Explaining Bipolar Disorder To My Grandparents

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 12:01:56 -0500

“I took my sister down to the ocean,

but the ocean made me feel stupid…

I picked up a seashell to illustrate my homelessness,

but a crab crawled out of it, making it useless.” --Jens Lekman

There are some days you just know are going to be important in the grand scheme of your life, like college graduation, or giving birth, or having your braces taken off. Like you know you’ll think back on it with uncommon clarity when you’re on your deathbed. That’s how I felt the other day when I drove to the country to explain to my grandparents why my mom had been admitted again to a psychiatric facility (or, as the number is programmed into my cell phone, the Crazy House).

Now my mother is not actually crazy, but she has bipolar disorder, and my father is an alcoholic. These are merely facts of my life, like my student loan bill or the mark on the right side of my chest that I’m pretty sure is a third nipple. Here are a couple of other facts: I don’t feel like my parents are all that different than most, as emotional imbalance seems a prerequisite for motherhood, and all dads can be assholes sometimes. Next fact: I don’t feel superior to my parents. So what if my dad’s average blood alcohol level is higher than Nick Nolte’s in that infamous mug shot? I can easily see myself just a few years and a couple of personal tragedies away from soaking in a claw-foot bathtub full of pure gin and then drinking it, all, through a garden hose.

All this to say: most of the time, stuff is manageable. But anyone who knows a bipolar also knows that they take a lot of meds, and have to go in for regular checkups to make sure their meds are working and not screwing up their systems. Recently my mom’s medication needed to be adjusted, which meant a stay in the hospital. And since I have a 14-year-old sister, this means some creative juggling to make sure she has someplace to stay during this time.

So I went to visit my mother’s parents, thinking we could talk about any anxieties they have about when this happens, and let them know everything was okay and would be okay, even when I am living in Boston and my brother in Chattanooga, as will be the case as soon as a month from now. I’m not sure what to say about my grandparents, except that they are super-hard workers and practical out the wazoo. My grandpa’s name is Clyde and my grandma’s name is Wanda. Doesn’t that say it all?

I sat in the living room of their house, my grandma beside me on the couch and my grandpa across from us settled in his recliner, hearing aid on high. Their shitzu and toy poodle were competing for my attention, clawing at my lap. The poodle, Scamper, peed on my leg. I declined a diet coke and got down to business.

We talked about my mom and my dad. Mostly I was surprised to find that they were unclear about what bipolar disorder is, and why my mom needs medicine at all. I explained that it is a sickness, an irregularity in the body.

“The way I look at it,” I began slowly and simply, “both mom and dad have a disease. Being bipolar or being an alcoholic is like having diabetes, or arthritis.” To my surprise, my grandpa nodded in agreement.

“That’s right about the drinkin’,” he said. “It’s an addiction, just like you get addicted to anything else, like to cigarettes or coffee. Well me and Wanda, we drink that coffee every morning, we need it, ‘cause we are addicted to what’s in that coffee. And who knows? It may be that drinking coffee like we do may be just as bad for you as the alc-y-hol. It may end up destroying our livers or something else on the inside.”

I gauged my grandmother’s reaction to this. She look pissed. Her eyes narrowed and she turned her head to my grandpa. “Well, Clyde, coffee don’t make you pass out,” she spat.

I had to agree.

Carefully, I continued. “In any case, that’s why it’s important to make sure mom’s medicine is doing what it’s supposed to do. It evens her out.” I formed my hands into an imaginary scale fluctuating in the air.

“Can you tell me, what causes this bipolar disorder, anyway?” my grandpa asked. I didn’t hesitate.

“Well, it’s a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it’s genetic.”

My grandpa started laughing. “Wonder whose side she got that from, Wanda?”

“From you,” she said with some venom.

“Now that you mention it, I do have some crazy folks on my side of the family,” grandpa conceded to me. “Did I ever tell you that I had a double first cousin who killed his wife with a baseball bat and then tried to kill his five kids?”

“Those poor kids,” my grandma sighed. “They ended up with metal plates in their heads.”

“Aw, old Rusty turned out okay,” said my grandpa. Then he continued, “Do you know what a double first cousin is?”

“I think so,” I said. “Like when your aunt on one side and your uncle on the other get married?”

“That’s right,” he said. “So then you’re really related to your cousin, more than to a regular first cousin.”

“And,” interjected my grandma, “did you know that Clyde’s grandpa murdered his last wife by strangling her?”

“Well, now, Wanda, that’s not something we really wanted to get out,” chastised my grandpa.

“Oh, I won’t tell anyone,” I promised. “Except on my blog.”

“Your what?”

“Huh?” I said. “Did you say something? I’ll take that diet coke now, I think.”

******************************

Now that I’m moving, now that I’m moving to Boston, I’ve started having these nightmares. In them, my grandparents get sick and die while I’m gone. Then I feel guilty, because I knew they were old, and maybe wouldn’t be around that much longer, and I left anyhow. And even though they’re just dreams, some residual fear remains while I talk to them, like this could be the last time I see them, or one of the last times, and shouldn’t I make something important out of it?

Track #2 on Jens Lekman’s newest album is about taking his little sister down to the sea. He wants to tell her something important, something that will make her understand him better, something that will help him understand her better. But then they get there and “all the words” he had prepared “vanish into thin air.” Later he laments, “We rode home on the bikes we borrowed, but I’d still never told you about unstoppable sorrow.” And then, “I still don’t know anything about you. Is it in you too?”

And even though Jens is mildly crazy himself, and the next song on the album is about pretending to be a friend’s boyfriend so her parents don’t find out she’s a lesbian, isn’t this always how it happens? We plan these trips to the sea, where we’ll finally be able to explain to the people we love who we are, and that we have these sad seeds in our souls but that it’s okay, but then it doesn’t happen that way, and instead your grandpa tells you about all the murderers you have in your family.

I don’t mean for this to be a life lesson, or Ira Glass tying it up all neat at the end, but it’s better that way, right? It’s the right way for things to turn out. And it certainly makes for a better story to relay later.

This Must Be So

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:01:56 -0500

For a moment, I’m putting all of it aside. The worrying about money, my newly-increased rent, my distance away from friends, my concern about the new snow this weekend and how water keeps seeping in through my boots. The important errands I’ve been putting off. The terrible week at work where I got yelled at for not organizing the new shipment of cookie cutters the “right” way. All of it. Putting it aside.

And here’s why. My friends’ dads are dying. Or they’re dead.

It’s happening, it’s happened to three now that I can think of automatically, three. Three friends with three dads, and suddenly their dads have cancer. And then suddenly they’re gone, they disappear from the inside out, they are gone, and my friends are dadless. And I’m sorry.

There are a couple of reasons why this affects me like it does. One is this:
These people are my friends.
Another: I always figured my dad would die first. You know, out of my friends’ dads.
Another: I think that, in some mysterious and primal way, our entire lives gravitate around the death of our fathers.

My best friend Jenny gave me a book a few years ago, and I read it all in one sitting, and it became my favorite book. It is called The Pharmacist’s Mate, and it was written by a woman named Amy Fusselman. The Pharmacist’s Mate is about many things, but mostly about Amy Fusselman trying to get pregnant by insemination with her husband Frank. And about doing this right after her father has died. And what that’s like. You know.

It isn’t easy- getting pregnant, and being without her father. The book is short, it’s under 100 pages. I’m pretty sure Amy Fusselman is short, too. But that doesn’t keep her from writing passages like this one:

I want to get pregnant. Or maybe more accurately, I don’t want to die without having had children.

Or this one, and this one is an entire chapter, Chapter Eleven to be exact:

What is it about my dad being dead that I can’t say it enough? That I feel like My Dad Is Dead would be a good name for my son?

That I can picture myself saying, “I can’t talk right now, I have to pick My Dad is Dead up from hockey?”

Singing, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear My Dad is Dead”?

I look My Dad is Dead up on Yahoo! and discover that there is a band with that name. And they’re from Ohio, like my dad, like me. And I can listen to their song right now, a noisy, static-y MP3 called “Don’t Look Now.”

My dad isn’t even dead yet, but I know she’s right on about that, about what it feels like. Except she’s rather calm about it most of the time. And I imagine I won’t be.

I imagine it a lot. I try to prepare myself a lot, because I have to. You would too, if your dad drank like mine does. You would too, if you’d seen what I’ve seen. Maybe you have, and if you have, then I’m sorry some more.

Lots of times in my dreams there are dried brown leaves over his face. I try to rake them off with my hands, but there are so many I can’t. This is a true story, about these dreams I have.

If you’ve never read Hamlet, just stop reading this and go read Hamlet and then you can come back and finish this if you want to. It’s ridiculous that you’d be spending your time reading badhousekeeping.wordpress.com if you’ve never read Hamlet, but whatever. Go read it now, and then when you’re done you can come back here or a better idea is to read King Lear, which will help you understand even better. It’s important to understand this.

We can all agree: Claudius is a creep. He kills his brother and then gets with his dead brother’s wife, assuming the throne. Only Hamlet isn’t buying it. But even though we know Claudius is a grade-A creep, he is never quite so creepy as in the following soliloquy, in which he tries to convince Hamlet to stop being sad that his dad is dead. If you’re not lazy, read it carefully. If you are lazy, read it anyway.

‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness; ’tis unmanly grief;
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool’d:
For what we know must be and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! ’tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd: whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died to-day,
‘This must be so.’ We pray you, throw to earth
This unprevailing woe, and think of us
As of a father…

Don’t fall for that beginning part, that “sweet and commendable…nature” part. Hamlet didn’t. Skip ahead, to where he says Hamlet’s grief is “incorrect to heaven,” from “a heart unfortified, a mind impatient, an understanding simple and unschooled.” And why? Because it is common, because everyone’s dad dies. In fact, nature’s “common theme/ is death of fathers.”

Why so it is.

I used to study poetry. Sharon Olds, an accessible and I think great contemporary American poet, wrote a book called “The Father,” a series of poems that, chronologically, follows her as she watches her abusive and alcoholic father die. As she tries to help him die. Sometimes it gets weird- she imagines herself as sperm inside his body the day before she is conceived. Other times it’s just, well, sad. Angry. Sad. Angry. No, sad.

My dad’s dad died. I remember it very well, I was in middle school and it was the first time someone I knew had died, and it was my grampa, and he had lung cancer. And it was terrible.

I had started wearing this coat, this long black one that my uncle wore when he was in the army, and it was January and for some reason I thought that was a good idea, wearing this coat. I took a walk one night before my grandpa died and it got late and got dark. My dad came looking for me, and walked me home down our long gravel driveway.

He held my hand, which made me uncomfortable, because he’s quiet and doesn’t show affection too often. Then he stopped, beside the barbed wire fence, beside the cow pasture. He said he’d talked to my grandma, his mom, and he’d started crying, and she’d said, “Well, baby…”

And then he fell over, onto me basically, I had to strain to hold him up, and he was sobbing and he kept saying, “She called me ‘baby.’” over and over. And I think I was just looking at the field, you know? I probably had an algebra test the next day. Thinking, this is one of those times. I’m never going to forget this. I’m not sure this is even happening. I’m fourteen years old. Nothing makes sense except this grass, these rocks, and this coat. I’ve got to get my dad in the house somehow. Which will be hard, because I’m not very strong.

I’ve lived almost twice as long now, I’ll be twenty-seven in less than a month, and I’m still not very strong. I know it, I just know, when my dad dies, I will crumble like, well, some metaphor about how the most fragile thing you can imagine crumbles under the weight of the strongest thing you can imagine. Like a dandelion seed under the breath of God. Like something more fragile, under something more strong. Got it in your mind? Like that. I know it. I know it like I know my dad… in a way I can’t explain to other people very well, but is one of the greatest truths in my heart.

At the end of Sharon Olds’ book, her dad is dead, and she is struggling somewhere between hatred and love.
At the end of Hamlet his dad is dead, and he dies too.
At the end of Amy Fusselman’s book, her dad is dead, and she becomes pregnant.

My own dead dad story doesn’t have an ending yet, thank God. And even though I don’t usually pray, I will pray for mercy and hope for those who are just finding out what their own will be. Over and over again, amen.