A Decade Examined - Part Two
Photo by Ch Photography on Unsplash
November 15, 2024
This is the second of a series in which I’m looking back over the past ten years as I approach my 70th birthday next year. For this purpose, the year begins and ends in spring, my birthday season. I’m curious to uncover significant experiences and what they’ve taught me, especially about who I am now and who I want to become. Today I’m examining my 61st year, starting in spring 2015, with these questions in mind:
What happened? What was a significant experience or milestone for me? For my family? How did this affect us?
What was the impact of world events on me, my family, and my community?
What did I gain? … lose? … learn?
Did I come upon any place where “two roads diverged” (with a bow to Robert Frost) and what do I think about the one I didn’t take?
The defining event was a chapter in the life of my older brother, David. I wrote about him last April after visiting him where he now lives, in the streets of Tucson. In spring 2015 he was living near me, in an apartment. Other than that, he is much the same now as he was then.
*I wrote in my journal then:
He wants to return to S. Korea [where he lived for about 35 years, until 2012]. He’s been communicating with a friend there [who] he believes he can live with. He thinks he can easily get a job in a language school; he says there are lots of them. About two months ago, when he first started talking about this, he said he believed he could secure a job before he left here. That hasn’t happened.
This is where his thinking begins to veer off from reality—or, at least, from any reasonable caution—and his thinking can be summed up as, “I’m going to Korea, and everything will work out.” And he seems to have no memory of all the times he’s thought that way in the past and it has gotten him into severe trouble.
Some background: David arrived at my home in Maryland in August 2012, evicted from South Korea after being caught with an expired work visa. About five years before this, he had summarily quit his university teaching position, which he had held for more than 30 years, leaving behind all pension and health benefits. It wasn’t his first impulsive act during a manic episode, but it was probably the most consequential for the rest of his life.
He was 62, broke, and addicted to alcohol and marijuana. When he arrived, I got help from two friends at my church—one a psychotherapist and professor of public health, the other a man who had lived on the streets for several years before getting sober. Without the help of those friends, I would have had no clue what to do with David
We got him into a 30-day residential detox program, after which he was placed in a homeless shelter with a guaranteed bed and a case manager, who worked to get Social Security Disability benefits for him. That process took a year, and then he was admitted to a county program that provides outpatient mental health services and supportive housing. From fall 2013 to spring 2015 he was fairly stable on antipsychotic medication. Then things changed.
From my journal, April 21, 2015:
At lunch yesterday David told me he is planning to return to Korea, probably in July. He said he’s been planning this for quite a while, and I’m the last to know. … I asked him about his medical plan. He said he’ll go off his meds when he returns to Korea. He said he knows the symptoms of mania and, if they occur, he’ll go back on the meds. I suggested he might be experiencing symptoms now. … He does not seem at all concerned about falling back into the pit he landed in the summer of 2012.
David did go to Korea in July, and soon became deeply depressed. The friend he was staying with sent him back to me, with an airline ticket that I purchased. On September 14th I picked him up and took him home with me, and the next morning took him to a hospital emergency room. We spent the whole day there, until finally David was admitted—though not for psychiatric causes.
One hospital, two very different diagnoses
After several hours a hospital psychiatrist came to the ER and, after examining David, said she did not find sufficient cause to admit him. While I was feeling panicky and wondering what to do next, David remained in the ER because his blood pressure had spiked. By evening the nurses hadn’t succeeded in stabilizing him with medication, so he was admitted to a medical unit.
The next morning, another psychiatrist examined him and put him on a 24-hour suicide watch until a psychiatric bed was available.
After several weeks of hospitalization with no success at treating David’s depression, the doctors got him a pro bono admission to another hospital for Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), which is used to treat severe major depression or bipolar disorder that has not responded to other treatments. It worked for David, as it does with approximately 80 percent of patients, according to the American Psychiatric Association.
Then he remained stable with medication for about three years, living in a sober house. I had lunch with him at least once a week, provided support as needed, and managed his Social Security benefit as his representative payee.
But ECT, while highly effective, “does not prevent a return of the illness in the future,” says the APA. Sure enough, the time of stability ended, and in subsequent years periods of depression and mania eventually led to the events I wrote about last April.
A psychologist once said to me, after hearing my origin story, “As a young child, you sized up your older brother and sister and decided, ‘These two are incompetent, and it’s my job to save this family.’”
I’m still growing out of that childhood belief, and my experiences with David have helped by teaching me a few things:
What I’m outgrowing are the skills I developed unconsciously, skills for assessment, risk management, and anticipating and meeting other people’s needs. This is also known as codependence.
In any situation, I can choose from a wide range of responses. Not saving someone doesn’t mean abandoning them. There are many options in between.
People will manage their own lives, using the agency and ability they have, regardless of what I might think of their wisdom or competence.
*It’s a long learning curve for me. The journal entry I quoted at the top of this post, from spring 2015, began with this:
How do I get free of depending on the well-being of those I love—or those I feel responsible for—for my own emotional equilibrium?
A sendoff and a seed planted.
Photo by Kirk Thornton on Unsplash
On January 14, 2016, I drove my two, twenty-something kids from Atlanta to Springer Mountain, Georgia, the southern end of the Appalachian Trail. We parked one mile from the summit and hiked together up to the AT plaque, where Rachel and I hugged Michael, took pictures, and watched his receding back as he hiked down the mountain heading north. For him it was the start of his first long-trail thru hike, which he would finish, four months and 2,190+ miles later, at the summit of Mount Katahdin in Maine. For me it was the start of four months of happy diversion as I tracked his progress; filled quart-size zip-lock bags with the dry ingredients of camp dinners; packed the bags into boxes along with packets of instant mashed potatoes, oatmeal and other hiker favorites, plus dozens of candy bars; and mailed the boxes every couple of weeks to resupply destinations along the trail.
Though I wasn’t aware at the time, those months of being a trail mom worked a subtle opening of my self-perception, which would lead me a few years later to my own hiking adventures, more modest than my son’s many-thousand career miles so far (mine are probably under 200), but far beyond the imagination of the little girl who struggled for control over chaos.
My 61st birthday present was the best ever. In the last week of March, Michael happened to be hiking through an area about a 90-minute drive from our home. My Dear Husband left the house and returned several hours later with—surprise!—the hiker himself, to spend the weekend with us.
