Front row seat to crazy

Six months after he’s died and I am beginning to think my father was just schizophrenic.

(I mean before he was also epileptic and had liver disease and then got cancer.) As if someone is just schizophrenic. Like a word contains anything. What I really wonder is what would it have been like to have had a diagnosis for him for all those years when I was a child. (And it’s not that my grandmother and my mother did not try to get help for him.) No one ever disputed he was crazy. Crazy. With a capital C. And finally when more modern medical help came he was diagnosed with manic depression, with perhaps schizoaffective tendencies.

I just thought of myself as the mad man’s daughter.
And when the band the Who sang “ No one knows what it’s like to be the sad man, behind blue eyes’, I thought they knew my father.

He was severe bipolar and had medicated with alcohol, or tried to, off and on since his teens. He had suffered. He had caused suffering in others. He had not responded well to lithium or antipsychotics. Finally in his late 50’s (when I became his guardian) another brain trauma seemed to knock some of the crazy out of him. He had started having grand mal seizures and either the force of the electrical storms or the benefit of the anti epileptic medications, helped manage his condition. When he did go crazy, it was usually in the deliriums following these seizures and he was helped by newer drugs, neuroleptics that only became available in the 1990’s.

But what if, over the course of our lives, we had been able to say, “Our father suffers from schizophrenia.” Would that have helped any of us? Was that in any way less dehumanizing than just knowing someone was “crazy?”

Would it have helped to just have always known he had schizophrenia, an organic disease of the mind? To think, there is science, there is medicine, take cover but have pity.

But it’s not like you stop to read the guidebook on genetic illnesses of dinosaurs when the T-Rex is chasing you down the hill.

It was just that his crazy looked so much crazier than a lot of people’s crazy.

But maybe that is always how crazy looks when you have front row seats.

His sane times were so lucid and bright, his mind clear and quick and witty and kind even. He was handsome and his eyes twinkled with life. It was during one of these windows my mother met him.

But the beauty of his sanity made his crazy seem crazier.

Jekyll and Hyde, only brighter and faster and more out of control.

I believe he went to Mexico to save us all. I think the sunshine helped. And a certain kindness and tolerance in the Latino people. Being able to live cheaply helped. Being far away from home with its expectations and responsibilities must have helped.

Now I am understanding my attraction to these books. Maybe their stories will better help me tell mine.

But I just spent ten years taking care of my father, trying to protect my family and the world from him. I am tired. It might be too soon.

And Ack, what if that crackling in my head is a radio station trying to tune in? The first sign of impending madness? I don’t really think it is, and yet it gives me some idea of the powerlessness a “crazy” person must feel.