CHAPTER THREE: BEFORE

THE GATES

The gates of madness open wide

Beckoning, please come inside.

Leave your troubles at the door.

Pray, they’ll trouble you no more.

Leave your worries,

Leave your strife.

All it will cost you

Is your life.

            CHAPTER THREE.

 BEFORE…

1992

            Things have beginnings. According to Ron, it happened very suddenly. He was coming out of a K-Mart and he remembered watching Father of the Bride on television the night before. He started crying, right there in the middle of the parking lot. By the time he made it home, he was a blubbering mess.

            But I was standing on the other side of Alice’s looking glass. From my perspective, the downward slide began way before that, innocently and slowly. Ron had sleepless nights. I would awaken to find him sitting on the side of the bed, rocking back and forth. If I asked him what was wrong, he would say, “Nothing. Go back to sleep.” And often I did. He would toss and turn,  sometimes driving me to the couch when the turbulence became too much. I would come home from school to find him sitting on the same couch, his head in his hands. He began to pace, like a lion in a cage. Once in a while, when the demons that now dwelled inside his brain became too much for him, he would pound his fist against whatever was handy. Our furniture began to suffer.

            My own life was clouded with issues. After putting it off for years, I had returned to college in the winter to get my teaching degree. But my vision was giving me problems and the degenerative disease I had been coping with for years, kerataconus, made itself apparent. The condition affects about 1 in 2,000 people in the general population. Usually, a diagnosis is made in the late teens. I was 19 when Dr. Scheie of the Scheie Eye Institute at the University of Pennsylvania confirmed mine.

            

My optometrist, Dr. Neil Schwartz, told me that it was time to consider a transplant. Generally, it takes six months to a year for the eye to recover from this type of surgery. Everyone I spoke with—my family, my friends, my co-workers at the library—thought I was nuts to risk my vision and take on a college program. I know, because I took a poll. Each one suggested I put off school for another semester and have the transplant.

            I remember calling my pastor one night. The pressure I was getting to return to the halls of academia was great. And the pain in my right eye caused by the degeneration of the cornea greater still. “Well,” said Dr. Hopson when he answered my call, “anytime anyone asks my advice I always pray that my words will be godly. And I think, Linda, that you need to consider your physical needs first. Your body is, after all, the temple of God.” I chalked up another dissenting vote. That made it twenty-five to one.

            They were not good odds. Even my eye doctor, who had shepherded me through the progression of my disease since I was nineteen, advised me to sit out school a little longer. “You don’t really see, “ Neil told me, “but you’re so good at pretending you can that you fool everyone, even yourself.”

            I decided to fool myself just a little longer. The changes in Ron scared me, but I did not know what I could do about them. Here, though, was a tangible problem I could solve. Three weeks into my first semester, I had a cornea transplant to replace the one in my right eye and began my first semester back at college with an eye patch and a tape recorder. My friend Chris typed and proofed my papers. I tried to act as if everything was fine. I became good at it.

            But, again, I was fooling myself. Ron’s problems became difficult to ignore, more than just little quirks. He had an accident at work involving a forklift and was demoted. The financial setback caused us to take on some piecework as a family, delivering circulars on the weekend. We tried to make a game of it with the kids, tossing flyers onto lawns from Ron’s moving van, aiming for mailboxes and flowerbeds.

            In April of 1992, my beloved grandmother became seriously ill. I added hospital visits to my already over-crowded schedule. Nanny died on July 4 of 1992. The summer dragged along, hot and muggy and laden with textbooks I needed to read with a magnifying glass. I took Ron to his first therapist that summer, looking for answers. They were as elusive as my ability to read with my right eye. I began to think of our lives as a carefully constructed house of cards. If the kids and I didn’t breathe too loudly or move too quickly, we could make it through the day without an outburst or a crying jag.

            The house began to topple over in August. Ron’s uncle was killed in a motorcycle accident. A few days later, a casual stroll past a tennis court and an ill-place lobe sent a ball speeding towards my right eye, destroying the nearly healed cornea. My surgeon told me that was nothing he could do immediately; it would take the eye months to heal from the trauma. My father had driven me to the appointment, and I gave Ron the bad news over dinner.

            “Just my luck,” he said, pounding on the kitchen table for emphasis, “to have a blind wife.” Although I knew his mental state had provoked those words, they hurt nonetheless. In a very short space of time, our lives had suffered major upheavals: financial, employment, death, illnesses. Something had to give. Ron simply stopped trying to hold it all together.

            But I was still gluing the pieces back, doing my best to make it right again. The same events that had sent him over the edge had also affected me. Why, I wondered, was I still standing on my feet while he dissolved into a quivering mass? I was simply too busy to let go of the hope that I could, somehow, reclaim our lives. I had two teenagers and an adolescent at home. I had classes and a job. I had household chores and bills to pay. I had one eye that still functioned. And I had a husband who was consumed by invisible and uncontrollable enemies.

            Someone had to be in charge. I elected myself.

            I finished my teaching degree in two and a half years, propelled by the notion that someday Ron would be unable to work. My dear friend Dr. Schwartz wanted me to have a second cornea transplant to replace the one destroyed by the tennis ball, but I wanted to student teach. I won. I wore dark glasses to my graduation, hiding my eyes from the sun. My father-in-law took me aside that day and whispered into my ear: “Don’t go rubbing it into Ron now that you have a damn degree.” Thanks, Dad.

            Ron’s problems at work continued and he was laid off for the summer. Although exhausted and in need of a break as well as a second cornea transplant, I took a job at a daycare for the summer, gambling my vision for a few more months. In September, my new degree in hand, I got myself onto every substitute list in the county and went to work almost every day. I took two weeks off in February for my second cornea transplant. The summer of 1996 saw me working at another daycare center, but I managed to find a full time teaching position for the fall. Ron was seeing a psychiatrist weekly now, a rather dour man who insisted I come to the appointments but seldom wanted to speak to me. He diagnosed Ron with bipolar disorder. We were trying medication now, and Ron was sleeping a bit better and no longer abused the furniture.

            I wondered if I could breathe yet.

            Bipolar disorder became the ruler of our lives. Some days Ron could function fairly well. Some days found him depressed and withdrawn. And there were a few days—always wildly scattered throughout the weeks—that plunged Ron into a frantic, manic state. He would be consumed with activity and plans, taking Allen to the basketball courts back at the B’s Field to play HORSE, tacking new projects—which would never be finished—around the house, full of exuberance and hope. I began to think of the cycle we lived in as a roller coaster ride.

            The ascent is thrilling as the cars speed upward and the rules of gravity are suspended. The wind whips your hair back and the world below you blurs as the car picks up speed and you come closer and closer to the top of the world. From the summit, you can see the earth below, small and insignificant. Why should anything down there really bother you? You feel, for an instant, as if you could fly!

            But the laws of our world cannot long be defied. Once the hill of the roller-coaster is crested, there is no way to go but down. Suddenly, your stomach lurches and flips over, the gorge threatening to rise in your throat. Your hands clench tightly onto the restraining bar and your back stiffens. You have lost control over your body and there is no way to stop the break-neck speed at which the car descends. You hear screaming in your ears and are surprised to hear that it is coming from you. It takes only a few second and then you are back on level ground again, daring towards the next mountain. There is no way to get off.

            Often, we hoped that something—anything—would break the cycle for Ron. We left no stone unturned to seek a cure, or at least a compromise. I became acutely in tune with the ups and down, the twists and turns of living with bipolar disorder. The only thing that I could ever really be sure of was that the frenzied race up the mountain would always be followed by the downward plunge, as heart-stopping and mind-numbing as a roller-coaster ride in its velocity, intensity, and depth. The higher the climb, the further the fall. I came to hate roller-coasters.

            I exchanged words with the nurse at Ron’s plant on an almost daily basis. It was clear that in the spring of 1999 he was in a downward slide, but there seemed to be nothing we could do about it. At the close of the school year, Ron and I chaperoned a group of high school seniors on their class trip to Niagara Falls. He was withdrawn and uncommunicative, not even showing interest in the massive forces of nature displayed. I kept up a running stream of conversation to make up for his silence. It became a habit; I would always find a way to fill in the gaps left by Ron’s emotional or physical absence. Two days before the seniors graduated, Ron’s fragile hold on reality snapped. He, as the kids put it, “freaked out” at work. His father went to pick him up and take him to the crisis center at Crozer Chester Medical Center where I would meet them.

            The man I had married was broken. The only thing that I knew for sure was that I had not been the one to break him. Perhaps he came that way? The last seven years had been, on my part, one long attempt to fix him, heal him, bring him back. We tried counseling, medication, religion, and meditation. Now, as Reese and I sat with Ron waiting for the ambulance that would transport him to Friends’ Hospital in Philadelphia, we talked about electric shock treatments. It was a last resort and it seemed a drastic solution. Somehow, despite our best efforts, he remained a man whose inside mechanisms were unable to function.

            I had once told a counselor that Ron was like a hollow man. The counselor jumped to the conclusion that I was talking about the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. What I really referred to was T.S. Eliot’s poem about the straw men who live without hope, somewhere between heaven and hell, unable to make a decision in either direction. It is, Eliot says, the way the world ends, “not with a bang, but a whimper.” It was the way Ron seemed to be ending it. By choice or design, he would sit alone in a mental hospital, powerless to heal himself, powerless to end it all. It was a permanent kind of limbo, far removed from the world the children and I inhabited.

            Some part of me believed that, on some level, Ron made the choice to leave us in favor of his illness. I was left holding the bag. I fought resentment. He was locked away behind metal doors, and I needed to continue on with my life. We talked on the phone every evening. He would tell me that he loved me. I could not respond. It would have been a lie. What was there left to love? He had become an object of pity. I felt for his pain, but I could not heal it. The kind and gentle man I loved was now buried under an avalanche of self-contempt and remorse. He was so sorry for what he had done; he was trying so hard, he said. But I had heard it all before. He made promises he would not or could not keep.

            I was amazed at my own calmness, the resolute way in which I made the trip up to visit him in a mental ward, then returned home to pick up the burdens he had thrown off. I learned to start lawnmowers, change fuses, install air-conditioning units. I learned to balance work and home and school and family, paying the bills on time and cooking meals in the crock-pot, helping Allen with his homework while I studied Education Theory 589. I locked the doors at night and checked the mileage on the car. I slept in the middle of our bed, the pillows heaped around me.

            I scarcely missed him.

            I had already spent seven years saying good-bye. I had cried oceans of tears. But, in the end, the tears had done nothing to save Ron. He alone could save himself. He might be too weak to do it. I, on the other hand, had become a woman of daunting courage. Each piece Ron lost was a strength I was forced to gain.

            I did not need Ron, in that summer of 1999. I could take care of myself.

            The question then, was not of need, but of want. I had no answer. My needs had only intermittently been a part of our marriage since bipolar disorder became the ruler of our lives. Most things the last seven years had been about Ron. Ron could not remain forever in the rubber room at Friends’ Hospital. Where would Ron go when he was released? I am sure my in-laws assumed that he would come home. But I did not. The children did not. Ron had become a stranger to us, someone we must be wary of. Could I trust him again? Did I want to? Without him in the house, life was peaceful. We could not go back. Ever.

            So, I was forced to ask myself, it this how it ends? Not with a bang, but a whimper?