When Madness has Rights

One thing both sides of the gun-ownership versus gun-control argument can agree on is that we don’t want people who are mad as hatters running around Wyatt Earp-ing it up with loaded weapons. If you crack like Humpty Dumpty, you no longer have gun ownership rights. Right? At least that’s the way these things are supposed to work here in Texas.

In theory.

This is a very real and personal issue for me and my sisters because my mother’s husband has threatened to shoot us. SHOOT US! Oh, he's clever about the way he words his threat so the District Attorney cannot call it a threat of bodily harm but when a man clenching his fists and snarling through his teeth says he will make you pay and then lines up his rifles by the door and readies his pistol drawer, he is not asking for cab money.

Let me bring you the last two years in twelve sentences:

Mom was mentally ill to begin with.
Then, Mom developed dementia.
Daughters tried to get Mom help.
Her husband launched a war.
Verbal assaults. Physical assaults.
We all went to court.
War over. Sanity won.
Mom in assisted living.
Kids have guardianship
Hired dragons to protect mother.
Husband still out there.
And, he’s mad.

The recent Casey Kasem stories have brought me to tears. No joke. He is old, infirm, and living with Alzheimer’s disease. Like my mother, he is at the mercy of his care-givers and like my mother, it appears that his kids are doing everything in their power to get Kasem the mental and physical help he needs, only to be thwarted by his spouse who publicly questions their motives and sabotages his care.

So... let’s jump right on this mental illness issue.

Actually, lets talk about guns.

Okay, let’s do both.

That disturbed young man who murdered six people and wounded 13 others in Santa Barbara legally owned three handguns. Three. Only three.

My mother’s disturbed husband owns 65. No, that is not a typo. He legally owns an arsenal including modern semi-automatic guns and black powder antiques, pistols and revolvers, rifles and shotguns. He has it all. Guns are his passion. His life. He also does this cowboy-gun thing where he shoots black-powder weapons on the weekends so the garage is a workroom full of gun powder, pellets, muzzle loading equipment and stuff to make his own bullets.

The angry and confused man that took his revenge on his fellow students had been spoken to by authorities on three occasions in the past year.

The angry and confused man married to my mother who has threatened revenge on her daughters has been spoken to by the police about a dozen times in the past year, most of those events since January and for family violence.

The agitated student in Santa Barbara made rambling manifesto-type videos.

My mother’s agitated husband sends us daughters rambling manifesto-type emails at wee hours of the morning.

The student in Santa Barbara was once charged with assault this past year and that was when he tried to file charges on his roommate but police discovered he was the aggressor.

My mother’s husband has been charged three separate times for assault, had three separate emergency protective orders issued against him and one is in place right now. RIGHT NOW. You see, after we took Mom to the mental hospital, he went to my sister’s house, threatening us daughters and then when my brother-in-law ordered him out of the house, that old guy punched him in the face, grabbed him by the throat, and then the punched him again.

The Santa Barbara shooter had been treated by multiple therapists and managed to conceal his mental instability for quite some time.

My mother’s husband has been treated by multiple therapists and managed to conceal his mental instability from the police, Adult Protective Services, and even his own attorney for quite some time. It’s out in the open now. One psychiatrist fired him as a patient and another doctor told him (with my sister in the room) to get his guns out of the house because his nature is just too unpredictable.

So why does my mother's husband, this man with a history of violence and a documented mental illness, who has written rambling unstable letters, who has a history of assault, and threatened me and my sisters have a right to own 65 guns?

Primarily, because nobody has made it a priority to try to take them away from him yet.

According to the Texas Government Code, 411.172, a person cannot keep, own, possess all those guns if he’s mentally ill BUT there needs to be evidence from a licensed physician. Okay, well, plenty of doctors know he’s unstable but what is the process for getting a declaration of mental illness for the purpose of removing the guns from his home and how long does it take and who is going to do it and who is going to protect us from his rage when he learns we got that ball rolling?

If he keeps all those weapons, we are in perpetual danger. If we seek to get the weapons removed from the home, we are basically provoking him and putting ourselves in even more danger.

This is a man who has threatened suicide, who flies into a rage when any minor thing doesn't match his recollection, and who will not hesitate to lunge for your throat or throw his fists to display his superiority.

Can you even imagine what a person with that kind of rage and that many weapons would do if provoked?

Sure, you can. Just turn on the news.

Preparing for Future Madness

WARNING: THIS WAS WRITTEN AFTER ONLY A FEW HOURS SLEEP SO IT MAY NOT MAKE A HILL OF BEANS OF SENSE TO ANYONE BUT ME.

Now that we four kids have the legal right to look after our mother and are no longer at the mercy of her husband, we find ourselves exhaling for what feels like the first time in two years. And, we laugh. We laugh because the absurdity of these most recent months is comic now that the shock and fear and urgency to act are no longer crushing the breath out of us. We laugh because stress and anxiety and tension and uncertainty all demand a release and laughter is better than hysteria. And, to be honest, we cannot always tell the difference. But, mostly we laugh because we are scared, scared of what comes next for Mom and for us.

Our mother was sixteen when she started having children and while we are sure dementia was setting in two years ago, it could have been as early as three. So, if you do the math, the oldest of her kids could be facing dementia in as few as thirteen years. THIRTEEN YEARS! Do not be buffaloed by that “it skips a generation” baloney either because Mom’s mother also suffered from dementia and developed Alzheimer's.

What will my three sons do if I get dementia at 64 or 65?

Scary stuff. Not as scary as my nightmare about waking up in a coffin but still scary stuff.

We have no idea which of Mom's kids, if any, might develop vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s. Maybe all of us. Maybe none of us. Maybe only the girls. Maybe my brother since he is the oldest.

Blueberries. We need to eat more blueberries.

But . . . what if I do start hiding my rolls of toilet paper all over the house? What if I begin to think my grown kids are coming to the house and stealing my shoes? And, what if the voices in my head and the shadows in my vision become my reality?

We all need to talk about things as we get older but with the threat of memory loss hanging over heads, it is imperative to:

1. Talk to our families and tell them what we want. Nursing homes, assisted living centers, retirement centers, independent living, castle in the back yard with a bat-pole, etc
2. Look into life insurance and burial plans. I want to be buried with a live cell phone that has a portable hot spot. You know, just in case that coffin nightmare is a premonition.
3. Make sure our family has photocopies of our drivers' license, social security, and insurance cards in cases of emergency. Thank goodness I copied my mother's ID and insurance cards two years ago because her husband has still not turned them over to us. 
4. Once we tell everyone where we want to live, how are we going to pay for it? Do we have IRA's and retirement funds that will pay for it? My kids need to thank their grandmother because up until we daughters had to find a way for her to live on $1800 per month, I thought I would just blow through all our money and if there was no money to pay for my care when I was finger painting with my own poop, who cares? It's not like I would know the difference. 
5. Consider long-term care insurance to cover the cost of private care (memory care is expensive) and our own income/savings/social security/medicaid may not cover it and I do NOT want to live in my son's converted garage especially since he may forget it's a converted garage and park his Honda in front of my giant flat screen and I do not have a lot of faith that any of them will build me that castle in the back yard. Or the bat-pole.
6. Execute a Last Will and Testament and make sure our kids and spouses know where the executed document is and what it contains. I'm not doing one of those surprise readings like in television where the attorney announces who gets the Rolls Royce and who gets the Bentley. My three sons will all know ahead of time that what's left of my estate will be split 80/10/10 depending on which kid sucked up to me the most during my lucid years. Or a sack race. I have not decided yet.
7. Do we want to include a declaration of guardianship in the Will should it become necessary later? I may need to keep this part a secret from my sons. None of them may want to take on this daunting responsibility.
8. Do we want a Living Will that discusses choices we want made on our behalf should we be unable to make them or will those decisions be left up to our families? Yes, because I want to be an organ donor but only if after THREE DAYS there is no answer on that cell phone.
9. Execute medical and durable powers of attorney so our kids can make us go to the doctor when we start going to the mailbox in our birthday suits.
10. Find a safe accessible place (safe deposit box, fireproof file cabinet) for all critical documents like insurance policies, our Will , powers of attorney, and records our family will need in the event of our incapacitation or death because, otherwise, we will hide these documents in hat boxes and refrigerator drawers and hey, that's not a half bad idea because if the attorney is reading a Last Will and Testament that's been in a drawer full of onions, everyone in the room will be crying and I'll look very popular.
11. Talk to an attorney about our specific financial situation to see if there are other business issues we need to resolve because we, ourselves, are not attorneys. Well, unless we talk to my nephew who actually is an attorney.
12. Get regular check-ups and be receptive to preventive care and treatments. (Missy, this means you really should consider getting one of those V-Steams with me. . .)

And that's about all we can do.

And eat blueberries.

One day, my mother wanted to know why I stole the gold flatware that her friend had given her to hide until she needed to use it to fund her escape from Afghanistan. As a writer, I make up stories. But I sure hope, hope, hope that if I lose my wits and live in my imagination, it's a world of dragons and fairies and pirate ships and mermaids, NOT wars in Afghanistan.

The Madness Equation

Congratulations, it’s a bouncing senior citizen. The judge did not even bang his gavel as he solemnly awarded guardianship of my mother to “Team Sybil”, her squad of four adult kids who had sought champions for two years in this battle against mental illness until we realized we had to don the capes and tights ourselves.

Today, the children of madness became the parents of madness. Now, we can legally work as the super-hero team we had to become to make sure our mother’s physical and psychological and psychiatric needs were met. We’re her guardians, her watchmen, her protectors. She will now see the doctors she needs to see, get the medication she needs to get, live in a safe place, and be supervised by people trained to care for her.

This is HUGE!

In our case, we not only had to find a way to get psychiatric help for our aging mother but we had her abusive spouse to contend with, a man who legally had the ability to make choices on our mother’s behalf but who we believe is dealing with his own mental illness and suffering dementia on top of his underlying personality disorder.

So... we had Mom,  mentally ill with we don’t know what - narcissism, borderline personality disorder, histrionic behavior and maybe some schizophrenia -  and then suffering from dementia on top of her underlying illness, who married a man who is so Jekyll and Hyde that he seems to have a dissociative identity disorder and sociopathic tendencies but is also now dealing with some age-related dementia of his own.

When madness marries madness, it is NOT madness times two. The ripple effects on friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, doctors, law enforcement, government agencies, the court system and every person this pair interacts with is madness squared. SQUARED!

In another post, I’ll talk about the abuse we endured at the hands of both of these people, the altered reality they lived in, the threats, the accusations, the intimidation and how Mom's husband has been so obsessed with her back taxes (which is a non-issue because we've had IRS auto-drafted from her checking account monthly for over years now) that every doctor, police officer, banker, and mailman that crosses this guy's path hears about his tax woes.

But all of that is for another day.

With this court ruling, we’ve changed the madness squared equation. Now, when our mother wanders out the door naked, it will be into a hallway, not onto a sidewalk. She is not in danger of being hit by a car or even hit in the face by the husband who cannot understand why she is an often childlike, confused and unreasonable little-old-woman version of the strong, argumentative woman he married six years ago.

Guardianship awarded. Physical abuse proven. Visitation by the husband denied.

As the attorneys all side-bar’d at the judge’s bench, our mother’s husband shot us a glance of combined bewilderment and rage. How had he, a scientist and the smartest man in every room, lost to three such ignorant women and their idiot brother? Even the court reporter shivered when the attorneys turned toward him and his “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too” face astonishingly morphed into a victimized old man, tragic and court-weary, longing only to visit his beloved wife whom he never once bothered to ask about in the six weeks since she’d been in supervised care. Never a “how’s she doing?” or “is her room nice?” or “are the new medications helping?” or “does she need anything?” Nope. Nothing but a bombardment of the same Jekyll and Hyde emails we had gotten for months, complaining about Mom's back taxes and threatening to sue us for assault one moment (apparently, if you come to the house to give your mother her medicine or drive her to the doctor, that is assault) and Mr. Nice Guy the next (begging us to stop these unnecessary assaults and still complaining about taxes).

But. we’re tuckered out little super-heros with tattered capes and runs in our tights and our heads ache from our crash course in justice from the real-life Justice League of attorneys, judges, and agencies in this state. We now know that  we can, indeed, leap tall buildings, but not in a single bound and never faster than a speeding bullet.

When it comes to mental illness, the solutions are complex and when we fail as a society, we fail big. People get hurt. People suffer. People die. Why, oh why, oh why? Because protecting a person from himself and protecting the public from a potentially dangerous person sounds elementary on paper and even less complicated in comic books and movies but the reality of our obligation to NOT rob a person of his rights, be unjustly invasive, or cross moral and legal and ethical lines with regard to a person’s liberties is an olympian sized conundrum when it comes to our ability to address mental illness at all.

It’s not as simple as identify it, cope with, treat it, and regulate it.

You see, madness is not against the law and people have a right to NOT get treatment.

That’s right. People have a right to be crazy. Period. If they aren’t a PROVEN danger to themselves or others, their odd behavior and subtle threats are “harmless”.  And that burden of proof is great.

For example, if your mother’s 73-year-old husband says he is going to “make you pay” and mentions he has 65 guns and could “resolve this another way”, it doesn’t matter if he is a red-faced volcano squalling in your face and clenching his fists, those words were not, by law, a direct bodily threat because he did not say “I will shoot you” or “I will kill you”.  You have to wait for that volcano to erupt.

- - - Like when he goes to your sister's house uninvited and punches her husband in the face. - - -

Yeah. THEN people believe you.

Talk about madness!

Today, I found great comfort in the Bible verse where Jesus says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a person to force somebody with a mental defect to get psychiatric help.

Except for the part about THAT’s NOT WHAT IT SAYS! And, my own cheese must have slid off own my cracker if I’m re-writing the Bible (and plagiarizing Stephen King) to justify the maze of agencies, cries for help, phone calls, doctor visits, and complexities of the legal system that we have maneuvered, hurdled, and trudged through.

And, I was only kidding. We had no capes.

But it’s true. You cannot force somebody to go get help. You cannot make them. You can’t. They have rights. So the conundrum is, if someone is really functioning in a diminished capacity and refusing to get treatment -

they are not capable of making decisions about their own safety and welfare but they have every right to make decisions about their own safety and welfare. 

Our guardianship hearing is only part ONE of the battle our team of super-heroes faces. Because, you see, our mother’s husband is still out there, bombarding us with emails where he has translated things we've said in the real world into the language of his fractured world and then spit those words back out at us in a venomous rant of victimization.

Heaven help us.

Guardianship means nothing to my mother's husband. Her business is his business and he cannot let go. He's making phone calls he is not allowed to make, writing letters he is not allowed to write, and is even showing up places he is not allowed to show up due to protective orders against him. And, even though he has proven himself mentally and emotionally unstable and even though he has proven himself violent to my mother and to her four kids, it's not legally a threat when he says to us if we get in his business, "I WILL STOP YOU".

The madness continues.

Mother's Day Madness

Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today.

Holidays, when we were growing up, always ended the same way; with my mother sulking, yelling, or crying about how much we did not love her. It was like watching Groundhog Day only each of us four kids was Bill Murray witnessing the same manic depressive day over and over. Easter and Christmas were tense enough but Mother’s Day? That was the single most dreaded day of the year because nothing we did could prevent our mother’s tormented scene about what wretched kids we were.

And, we believed her.

Mother’s Day is the holy of holies for Moms; the day kids stop and make sure their mothers know they are loved and appreciated. For us, it was the day we always committed the ultimate affront to motherhood with our crude homemade gifts, sub-standard breakfasts in bed, lame handpicked flowers, and puny shows of affection. It did not  “come from your heart” was her angry complaint when she rejected our gifts. Year after year, we tried to come up with a new way to prove our love for our mother on this sacred day and year after year we got slammed doors, artwork in the trash, and home baked treats that went uneaten.

I know, right. That's cold.

In our teen years, my siblings and I started buying gifts with what little money we managed to earn babysitting or mowing lawns or selling lemonade. We graduated to stealing money and shoplifting  necklaces for her but they still “did not come from your heart”.

Eventually, all gifts sat unopened.

It was a Mother’s Day that made me decide to move away from home my senior year in high school. Mom had already kicked one brother and one sister out of the house. There was nobody left but me and my second grade little sister. I managed to save some money and borrow the rest from my ex-stepfather who took me shopping to buy my mother a pair of jeans and blouse for Mother’s Day but it resulted in her beating me on the head with the box and screaming that it didn’t come from my heart. The next morning, she had another tantrum, slapped me, pulled my hair, and accused me of plotting against her. Unable to cope with the madness any more, I left to live with a friend. After graduation, I went to San Antonio to visit family including the sister my mother had kicked out earlier in the year and surprise! She was wearing the jeans and shirt I had bought my Mom for Mother’s Day. My mother had mailed them to her as a birthday gift.

Uh. Huh. I know. Colder than the trash, even! But that became a pattern with Mom. Re-gifting our gifts to our siblings. Over the years, we started asking each other what to buy Mom since we knew she would give it to one us anyway.

Fast forward to today: Mother’s Day, 2014

We, the grown-up kids, are now petitioning the court for guardianship of our mother. Such is the severity of her mental illness and dementia. There have been years when we thought our mother had outgrown some of the paranoia, narcissism, and  erratic behavior of her early age. We have had some good times. We have had some not so good. We have had some awful. Now that she is 69 years old, time has eroded her filtering system and vascular dementia has set in. We’re seeing a lot of the same behavior we saw when we were teenagers and it’s Groundhog Day again.

But, not always.

My sisters and I went to see Mom today at the assisted living center and took one of her granddaughters. We brought her flowers and cupcakes for Mother’s Day. She was thrilled! She actually loved her Mother’s Day cupcakes and even ate three of them! Can you believe it? She had to get dementia to appreciate the thought behind a simple gesture. And who could blame her? The flowers were gorgeous and when we shared her cupcakes with the other senior adults, they remarked on how fortunate Mom was to have kids that come see her so often. This made Mom feel a little bit important. All in all, not such a bad Mother’s Day.

Until, it was time for us to leave and she said she hates the place and the food and the people and wants her cat and wants her own stuff and wants her own house and how she loves her cat more than her daughters . . .

Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today.

Divine Madness

In 1980,  Mount St. Helens killed 57 people, the Kwangju uprising for democracy in South Korea took over 2200 lives,  the Soviet rocket, Vostek, exploded on the launch pad killing 50 people, and hurricane Allen killed 272 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless in the Caribbean and on the Texas coast. And, I'm barely scratching the surface here of the human tragedies that happened that year.

1980 was a mad, mad year.

In other 1980 news, the U.S. boycotted the Moscow Olympics, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, Norman Mailer won a Pulitzer, the Letterman Show debuted, and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein declared war on Iran. That was also the year Radio Caroline's Mi Amigo ship sank and the New York City Transit Workers Union went on strike.

Oh, the records and broken records, the entertainment and sports news, the politics, space exploration, the scandals, the disasters. It was a year of the weird, the sad, the miraculous and I'm forgetting something. . .

No. I am not.

That year, 1980, that mad, awful year, is the year John Lennon was murdered by a deranged fan.

Life is life. Each matters. Each person's value is precious beyond a price tag. But when John Lennon died, something changed within me. Sure, the sorrow was unspeakable but his death woke me up to something I had been asleep against. I suddenly saw something with adult eyes that my child eyes had missed.

I mentioned that John Lennon was killed by a deranged fan. Deranged. A deranged person caused irreparable harm to the person he supposedly loved most. How is that possible? To cause harm or even destroy somebody that means that much to you? But the person of John Lennon was destroyed and that wound was felt around the world, evidenced by the pain of people who never met the music icon, but grieved his loss like the dagger in the heart of humanity that it was.

Anyone who takes a life must be a monster, right? Or, is it possible that sick people -- mad people, insane people, people not right in the head, lunatics, call them what you want -- are capable of destroying people they care about?

Wow. This was profound. This was frightening and comforting at the same time because if it is true that mentally sick people are capable of intentionally hurting the ones they love the most, then maybe the verbal abuse and neglect my siblings and I were experiencing was not at the hands of a parent who hated us but was at the hands of a parent who was not well. Maybe, the mother who was supposed to provide for and protect us but, instead, harmed us and left us to our own devices . . . was sick?

Somehow the death of John Lennon, devastating as it was to us kids who had grown up Beatles fans, helped me come to terms with an environment that I might otherwise have succumbed to. For the first time, at age seventeen, I began to think my mother was not just rude to my friends, lacking in empathy, mean to us, angry at the world, and antisocial.

Something was wrong with her.

Monsters and Madness

For weeks, I've wondered how to begin this blog. Just how does one tell the stories of sane people who have lived on the outskirts of madness? How do you write with kindness and humor and demonstrate genuine affection for the lunacy that made you who you are? And how do you  not offend people's delicate sensitivities by using the words "madness", "crazy", and "mental illness"?

If you know the torment of living with schizophrenic, manic depressive, or suicidal family members or have been coping with somebody else's assortment of personality disorders, dementia, Alzheimer's or some similar mental illness or disorder, then you know me. We have a common bond. But if not, then we cannot meet in that dark corner of acknowledgment, in that secret place of silent head nods where only people who have felt mad for being sane have hidden, where only those of us who have had our inner peace beaten with somebody else's crazy stick have curled up in a fetal ball and surrendered to the utter hopelessness of it all.

That is not to say that the rest of you won't find my stories interesting in a human oddity kind of way. If life is a circus, then certainly there are sideshows, freaks and human marvels that people pay good money to gawk at, pity, and feel ashamed for being fascinated by. No shame here. Gawk away. I hope it helps you or somebody you know. Mental illness is real and if it hasn't touched you yet, it will. Such is our world of chemicals, stress, biological enigmas, environmental deterioration, and hereditary conditions.

There's no cure for crazy. No matter what category it falls under - personality disorders, dementia, disease, brain injury. There are medications to help control it, maybe mask the effects, maybe slow the progression. But there is no cure for that result, that behavior, those consequences of madness that affect our society and inflict themselves on everyone else's comfort zones.

Growing up, I had a difficult time identifying the monsters in my life. I had a Mommy Dearest childhood mixed with the stuff that nightmares are made of - things children should not know of or remember. This made it difficult for me to separate "bad people" from "good people who once did something bad" or "people who aren't right in the head". No doubt, monsters are real. We see them on the news every day. But to a kid and to many adults, mental illness or deficiency makes people automatically monsters or sub-human in some way. This is just wrong. There's a huge difference in being a danger because of mental defect and being a danger that needs to be locked in prison. Both exist. Both consistently prove the system doesn't work. Until it does. And then it doesn't again.

What I hope and pray is that we, as a people, do not forget that the madness --or mental illness or whatever word fits your particular situation -- is the wake of what the brain is doing and that the brain is functioning inside a living breathing human being with rights and feeling. Today, my siblings and I are fighting like hell for the safety, security and welfare of the very person who, when we were kids, never fought for ours. Talk about an unfair circle of life.

But it is life.