Chapter 2--Poetic Derivative
A relative's life resembles mine in the written word and in mental faults. Either it wasn't known or the family didn't talk about it at the time I first entered the hospital. From what I learned at a panel discussion of doctors, it would have helped in the diagnosis of my illness.
As it was explained to me, the initial psychosis of a manic depressive or a schizophrenic looks similar. A psychiatrist will have something to go on in differentiating the two in the patient if informed of such illness among his relatives.
I would learn years later that I was first called a schizophrenic, which could account for my not getting treatment for manic depression for a decade. Yes, it might have helped, though the drugs that did weren't around.
But even today my genetic interest focuses on Kenneth. Uncle Kenneth. On the paternal side. Leatherwood.
I participated in his eulogy and did not recognize his closeness. I quoted him:
"The sadness of farewell is good,
"It speaks of love divine."
He wrote poetry as a pastime, as did his father (my grandfather). I never bothered to take up the habit, but when the first piece of this memoir was compared to poetry, I became more attentive. Here was linkage that swallowed the duels with demons that we had both inherited, the two-edged sword of our genetic makeup.
As river guide Bones would say when talking about the little isolated mountain ranges below the Rocky Mountains, "They are like little chips off the great block." And so were we.
Maybe all along I did reserve a special place for my uncle. In the shared illness of manic depression. I once in a delusion thought of him as Walt Disney. I was playing a record from a 1958 visit to the Disneyland theme park and imagined Kenneth, not Disney, was moderating the tour from the puff of a steam locomotive out of the station to the adventures of a river jungle. This was a strange twist, because a favorite uncle on the maternal side had flown me to the then-new fantasyland.
Uncle Kenneth's medical history pains me. He did not have the benefit of most psychiatric drugs, not even lithium, for most of his nights, and the terror (I will call it that, for that is what delusions usually are, contrary to some learned thought that we patients are enjoying them)--the terror increased with age. I first became aware of his problem when my dad was called late Christmas Eve to retrieve his brother from a country jailhouse near the Trinity River. It wasn't that he was violent, more that he was "out of his head" and a danger driving. No rural hospital was nearby to treat him, so the small jail became a safe haven--as it would for me in one of my later episodes in Oklahoma.
When my family got Uncle Kenneth the next day, I took the wheel of his car, and he climbed in beside me. He splashed on a cheap cologne to mask the smell of days on the road without a bath. I made reference to the fact that he should be in a hospital. "Butch, that doesn't become you," he said, irritated. He had, until then called me Butch with fondness.
Uncle Kenneth would not have benefited from the rudimentary drugs available then, even if he would have taken them, which he would not. He damned all drugs and doctors, would not take medicine, and certainly would not have stood for the laboratory tests that go with lithium.
Why was he crisscrossing the state? He was looking for an old girl friend, he said. I could relate later, having stomped through Phoenix and swamping The New York Times on similar quests. In Kenneth's instance (which took place in the early eighties) the lost love dated back to the Depression. He didn't mention his wife of forty years, left alone and apprehensive that particular Christmas.
In finer moments Uncle Kenneth penned poems that, as I said at his graveside service, revealed his values, his religion, and his reverence toward others. Several were read.
"Enduring," he called this one:
...And I met so many people
Who like me were searching too,
And we climbed upon a steeple
Just to watch for folks like you.
Thus my patience was rewarded,
And the end reward I gained;
I no longer was retarded--
My happiness no longer feigned.
I had found a thing enduring;
It would never have an end;
It would have the power of curing:
I had found myself a friend.
He received inspiration from nature.
A trip to Aspen leaves you gasping.
And the ski life finds you grasping,
Not alone the chair you ride in,
But the God we all abide in;
Grasping that His work tremendous,
Huge, colossal and stupendous,
Dwarf the human mind's conception
of God's glorious reception
...We are micro-organisms;
It is He who made the chasms,
It is He who made it all;
From His grace let us not fall.
Dr. Robert Hirschfeld, the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas at Galveston, was asked, "Does this illness strike creative people such as writers, entertainers, and musicians?"
His answer, at my federal health discrimination trial against The Houston Post was, "There's an increased frequency of bipolar illness (the modern term for manic depression) in such people."
"Why is that?" Steve Petrou, my attorney, asked. "Why does it target some of those creative people?"
"People who are creative go beyond the bounds of the more normal conformity in terms of thinking and in terms of behavior, and there are some psychiatric illnesses where that happens and certainly bipolar illness is one of those.
"The problem is when it gets completely out of hand, these peple are not productive. ...Kay Jamison recently wrote about the lives of a number of people (who) had bipolar illness. ...Many of these artists or composers would have very productive periods until it got frankly manic in which case--or would be depressed in which case--they were not productive at all."
(Kay R. Jamison's book is Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic.)
Uncle Kenneth suffered severe brain damage when he drove in front of an eighteen-wheel truck while manic. He regained only limited recognition during long years in a nursing home and died in 1998. He had written effusively in a narrative poem of family history and of a rosebush planted by his pioneer grandmother in 1882:
Now in comfort I look westward
As my evening shadows lengthen,
And I venture forth one pleading;
I will walk my way in comfort,
Soothed, serene, and witbout anguish,
If you promise me but only
I'll be buried in Lampasas,
In the Oak Hill Cemetery,
Where grows the Rose of Life Eternal,
There lives the Rosebush Everlasting.
It was a promise kept.
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