Lambasting my mind was all the things I had heard and seen my brother do:
As he sat on his bed in the hospital he angrily said to my parents, "Why are you making those faces at me!"
"I hear Uncle Mike laughing at me."
He wrote all the time about noise in his head. But he spelled it Noiz, saying it was Zion spelled backwards. He heard our father yelling at at him in his head.
As he was strapped down to a gurney, he said, "C'mon Dad, give me the key."
He told me while at work one day, in the warehouse, he saw a face with sharp teeth and claws swatting at him.
People were worshiping him
He took pills, whatever was placed in his hand, just like Jim Morrison.
We are living in the Garden of Eden. I shouldn't stay a virgin. I should wear tampons to get used to "that feeling"
His temper compelled him to stab walls and smash things. His mind compelled him to resurrect Beethoven, Bach, Vaughn and Mozart from his electric keyboard. He strummed strings as he got inspiration from the symphony of his mind.
When he was a child I found him in his room tying his little Lego men to weights and dropping them in water. When I asked why, he said that he had been throwing them into his fan and he was afraid that during the night they would take their revenge on him.
His love for family brought him to tea at our aunt's and all holiday dinners. Sometimes, he would play music for us, after much begging from me, and laugh along at our conversations. He valued the wisdom of our elders- I could tell the way he listened and responded. When he was very little, about 4, he was in the tub as I stood hugging a towel around me, and told our mother that he wanted to be a cow when he grew up and became very upset when she told him he couldn't because he is a human. I remember waiting for the school bus, he was about 6. The collar of his coat, that our Dad had brought home from work (he worked a sewing plant), was standing up. Mom said he looked like Dracula. He said in his best Transylvania accent looking up at Mom, "Bend down, let me have your neck." We all laughed. For a moment I forgot my school jitters and anxiety.
My brother had been given a very sweet social worker who talked to my mom often over the phone about Sean. She said for the most part he was good, but often he would make sexual remarks to the nurses. He was moved to Lurch because of hugging a female patient (Sean later told me this) I'm not sure if this is the whole story or not. Somehow he was able to keep his Cross necklace. He had added a circle charm and once he motioned a sexual act by moving the Cross in and out of the circle at a female nurse.
Today was the most dreadful call. My mom sat at the dining room table talking to the social worker- her notebooks full of Sean's behaviour, medications, jumbo calendar marked all up with pen, pencil and marker with appointments and records of hospital admittances, releases. She had a red pen in her hand. I heard her say with fear, "Oh please no, Kelly..." I walked into the room and looked down at the page she was writing on; she was scribbling down "paranoid schizophrenic" she had written the word descending down the lined paper trying to figure how to spell it right. I turned and stared out our patio door- a sunny autumn day- you'd never know we had just gotten this kind of devastating news.
He's better off dead than a schizophrenic
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