Skating

This photo showed up on my Facebook feed this morning.  It was last year, when Shayne and I were getting ready for our figure skating lesson.  It was the moment I realized that we had crossed some sort of bridge out of hell.  Before that, I equated Shayne’s illness as traveling through a terrifying forest.  There were patches of sunlight, but eventually the shadows would come creeping back, engulfing us in the unknown and dangerous once again.

Sometimes people ask me if there were signs along the way.  Sure.  Maybe.  But I didn’t know what I was looking at.  Mental illness was not on my radar.  My first real indication that something was really wrong was in 2013, when Shayne was out in LA at acting school.  I hadn’t heard from him in weeks and he called me out of the blue.  And I swear, he was calling to say goodbye.  I asked him if he wanted to come home and he said yes.  I felt like I had thrown him a lifeline.  So many things, I would do differently now, had I known, but I didn’t know how bad it was.  I thought he could be okay until I could finish my school year and go get him.  I didn’t know that he was living in the streets of Hollywood, walking around day after day, changing his routes so he wouldn’t be followed.

He called me again the next night.  I woke up from a dead sleep and reached for the phone.  He wanted to know our cousin’s address out in Orange County.  I heard the scream of a truck in the background and I realized that he was somewhere on a highway.  My cousin, Patricia, who is an amazing person and deserving of her own story, found him and brought him to her house and kept him till I got there.

He was better and worse than I imagined.  I had left him in a fully equipped apartment with a Fry-daddy, clothes, and toilet paper enough to last a decade.  He had a backpack with a book, a couple of photographs, an Allen wrench, his laptop, phone, id, and a sweet potato.  I was hung up for a long time on what happened to his stuff, but I suppose it’s easier to focus on material things than what led him to walking 60 miles out of LA with the most random assortment of belongings.

We were sitting in a Starbucks in Santa Barbara, having this intense hushed conversation with me mostly pissed about the money he’d wasted dropping out of school.  And he says, “I’ve been hearing these voices.”  And everything just fell away.  I became completely aware of the man typing away on his keyboard next to us.  I dropped my voice even more.  “You’re hearing voices?” He shrugged and his eyes met mine, searching, scared, looking for help. “Yeah.  No.  I don’t know.”

Even then, I didn’t really believe it.  I took him back to Colorado and just hoped that if had a place to live and a job and quit smoking pot, he’d be fine. And it was sorta fine, for a bit.  Or at least I pretended it was.  Because I’m good at that.  He got a job at a nursing home and always showed up for his shifts. He bought a car and mostly helped out around the house and sometimes said funny stuff and rekindled his high school romance. When he said he was ready to go back out to California, I really, really thought maybe he would be alright.

He was out there for about six weeks before he called me from Vegas to let me know he was on the road back home.  He showed up in the middle of the night and when I saw his car the next morning, I didn’t know how he got back.  The front window was shattered; the airbags were out, the hood was buckled; and the fender was tied on with neon green shoelaces.  Darian said to me, “Something is wrong with him.  He is crazy.”  And listening to him talk, I had to agree with her.

He said he was Jesus.  He said he was the end of time.  He didn’t need to get a job; he had a job, saving the world.  His voice was so fast and his eyes glittery and it all just really made me angry.  I told him he could go, because if wasn’t going to work, then he couldn’t stay.  He left with no money, no id, just his clothes and his wrecked car tied together with shoelaces.  It took me about two hours to get over my anger and realize something was wrong and I put a sick kid on the street.  It was the first time of many that I looked for him and brought him back.

Sometimes I think if Mom and Dad wouldn’t have been killed that night a few weeks after Shayne returned from California, maybe we could have found some help faster.  But that night, seeing Dad wrapped up in the blankets with his head all swollen and discolored and watching Mom take her last breaths pushed Shayne into another realm of madness.  For awhile, Shayne and I are were alone with Mom and I saw the craziness happening.  I saw his eyes change.  I heard his voice change.  I know why people think of the voices as demons.  There is no other way to describe watching the voices take over.

In the days to come he accused me of lying about God, mind-reading powers, and the collective consciousness.  Uh-huh.  I’m not even sure what the collective consciousness is, so I was pretty sure I hadn’t lied about it.  And let me say, if I had mind reading powers, I sure as hell wouldn’t be an elementary school art teacher.  But it wasn’t funny.  I was scared.  Not because I thought he would hurt me, but because he was so unpredictable that I had no idea what he would do.

Losing Mom and Dad was so much to deal with–the funeral, the people, the property, the insurance, the police, the damn lawyers, and I just couldn’t give Shayne the attention he needed.  The insanity unfolded.  I lost track of how many times, he ended up on the street.  There was always a feeling of relief when he’d leave.  It was like a recess that lasted about 24 hours, then the worry would take over.  Where was he sleeping?  Would he steal food and end up in jail?  Would he kill himself?  A week of that and I would be pretty close to crazy myself.  That was my reality when he was on the street.  When he was home, it wasn’t much better.  He was lighting fires in the oven to keep the soul snatchers away.  He slept in the hallway, away from the windows, near my bedroom to be safe.  He’d wake screaming from horrible nightmares.  He sometimes would be aggressive and accusing.  Sometimes he’d be asleep for hours.  I went to work, because I had to.  But I never knew what I’d come home to find.

Everyone asks about medicine and doctors.  It’s not that easy.  Colorado is at the bottom of the fifty states for mental health.  I didn’t get a doctor to take him seriously until he was covered in blisters the size of oranges from being in the sun for days.  And even after that we hit every obstacle.  The wrong meds.  Doctors quitting.  On and on.  The fight to get him the medical help he needed was all on me.  I never gave up.  I researched programs in other states, in other countries.  I read about all the meds.  I talked to support groups and uncovered any resource I could.  But Shayne didn’t completely buy into his illness and sabotaged so many attempts at help.

In August of 2016, after he ran away after a failed attempt to join Job Corps, I let him stay on the street for weeks.  I didn’t go look for him.  I went to work and tried to be as normal as I could for Darian, but I was awake every night wondering if he was warm, wondering what he was eating.  After the first promised freeze in November, I found him in the hills behind the house and told him he could come back.  Instead of bringing up the doctor and meds and all the things that hadn’t worked, I asked him if he wanted to go ice skating.

I had read a study about 20 people diagnosed with schizophrenia who went on to live fairly normal lives.  One of the key components to their success was intense physical activity.  Around that time, I went on a field trip to the ice skating rink and I laced my skates and remembered all the weekends I’d spent at the skating rink with my dad and my brother as a kid.   Dad wanted me to be a figure skater.  I met with the trainer at the Broadmoor once.  There was no way Mom was driving me to Springs every day and I liked horses and treehouses and riding my bike a lot more than stupid little skirts and twirling around like a music box Barbie.  But that afternoon, stepping out on to the ice as an adult, it was like having my father with me again.  I sort of remembered what it felt like to be happy again.  I wondered if ice skating would help Shayne fight the voices.

Shayne was a natural and the voices would slip away every time he stepped onto the ice.  He agreed to try the meds again and quit smoking pot and try to apply to get into a study at the National Health Institute.  He started working a little bit and when the voices tried to take over, we’d hit the ice.

We have traveled so far since that time.  I don’t know what the future holds and I can’t say with certainty that we won’t find ourself in that dark shadowy forest again, but today, we made breakfast and cleaned the kitchen together. and now we’re settling on the couch to watch the Olympics.  We both love the skating.  I’ll take it.