Madness Cries Wolf?

Remember my last blog post about how the ownership and possession of firearms by a mentally ill person is a bad idea? Uh huh, well, yesterday, my mother’s husband wrote on his Facebook wall.

One word.

No caps. No punctuation. Just a terrifying word floating on his otherwise ignored Facebook.

This man never speaks in shorthand. He writes rambling interminable e-mails, corners you for an hour while he complains about his taxes and compares the rotation of a bullet to that of a football and then follows up that conversation with a thirty minute phone call just to make sure you did not miss anything he had said earlier.

One word. That's all he wrote.

sorry

As soon as I saw it, I knew.

This one word was a suicide note.

Not wanting to panic or over-react and scare everyone, I thought the most rational course of action was to run around the house screaming “Oh my God, he’s gonna kill himself!”  But, apparently, that does not accomplish anything so I also called his daughter and went to the police.

Long story short. He’s fine. Maybe he was not planning suicide and that one word was a cry for attention or a warning that he was about to go shoot up a shopping mall but whatever it was, three squad cars full of men in blue let him know IT WAS NOT COOL.

You see, for two days, his bail bondsman had been calling me looking for him. He had not checked in. And, he had not answered phone calls from his daughter and a multitude of other people either.

First of all, I’m like wait - whu - huh?  He gave MY NAME to his bail bondsman as a reference?

I tried to play it cool when they called but for real, my mother’s husband hates me! This is not just any ol’ hate either. This is a deep-rooted “she’s some kind of voodoo witch” mixture of fear and hate. AND, I am part of the reason he even HAS a bond in the first place since he assaulted my brother-in-law after he was ordered out of the house for griping at my sister for twenty minutes about what? Taxes and ME. I’m evil. I’m the worst person he’s ever met. He’s going to make me pay one way or another and he has a gazillion guns so if this was 150 years ago, he could solve this another way.

But yeah, dude, go ahead and use me as a reference on that bond even though a protective order prevents you from coming near my house.

Weird. But that is how illogical this guy is.

Anyway, even though the panic is over, I’m still shaking. I was certain this man had done something foolish or was about to and even though he physically abused my mother and assaulted my brother-in-law and causes the rest of us more grief than I care to share, he’s still a human being. No doubt, he is dangerous. But what hell must go on inside his head that he would remind us so often that suicide is a way to escape it?

There has to be something more we can do besides fear this guy, blog about him, and pray that he does not hurt himself or somebody else. His daughter is trying to get some help from his psychiatrist, my sister had a chat with his neurologist, and I called our attorney today. I asked if there is anything we can do. What if he was trying to kill himself yesterday? Isn't that enough to force him to get help? A judge cannot rule on "what if"s, she said. And, I have said before, it is not against the law to be mad. Crazy is not a crime. Mental illness is not illegal and nobody can force you to get treatment.

BOTTOM LINE: If you are mentally ill you have the right to refuse to get un-mentally ill even though you are not un-mentally ill enough to make that decision.

Until my mother’s husband hurts himself or somebody else OR somebody in a position of authority gets legal documents declaring that he is a danger to himself or others, he has every right in the world to be mad as hatter.

When our mother was refusing mental health treatment and her husband was blocking us on top of that, we kept hearing over and over that we needed to get a mental heath order. Her condition was deteriorating at an alarming rate and a mental heath order was quickly becoming our last and best hope. But, we did not want our mother taken away in handcuffs. We could not put her through that. Then someone said something that changed the way we think. She said, “if it was my mother, I’d much rather see her leave in handcuffs than in a body bag.”

We found the courage to make tough decisions after that.

And, I stopped watching Forensic Files.

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.

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.

A Puff a Day Keeps Alzheimer's Away?

Have you seen the articles that discuss the pioneering research of Professor Gary Wenk out of Ohio State University that says smoking marijuana before the onset of degenerative brain conditions can prevent and slow down dementia and Alzheimer's? He even suggests that people who smoked marijuana regularly in their 20's and 30's and less likely to get dementia or Alzheimer's in their 60s and 70's

Sigh.

I do wish I believed him but his research appears to be based on a single premise: that chronic brain inflammation is the underlying cause of age-related dementia and that cannaboids in marijuana have the ability to halt the brain's inflammatory response.

Problem: dementia and Alzheimer's disease are not one-size-fits all.

The current prevailing medical opinion is that Alzheimer's is caused by a protein called amyloid-beta which forms a plaque in the brain that kills neurons and causes memory loss and cognitive problems Dr. Wenk's research also does not appear to take into account other types of dementia not related solely to inflammation like vascular dementia which can coexist with changes in the brain like Alzheimers. Vascular dementia is caused by mini-strokes that block the blood vessels. Then there's dementia with Lewy bodies where a protein called alpha-synuclein develops in the cortex of the brain. This is the same protein that also is present in Parkinson's. Okay, so we've got Alzheimers, vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia and then there's the trifecta of dementia where all three conditions co-exist and that's known as mixed dementia.

And, according to Dr. Wenk's research, the mutant proteins that cause Alzheimer's appear shortly after birth to which he says, "My research suggests that it is never too early, or too late, in life to begin using very low daily doses, i.e., one puff per day.”

Based on what we know about the vast differences in dementia and its causes, until we know more this statement is, in my non-medical opinion, false hope. The puff only affects the mutant proteins. How will it prevent mini-strokes? How will it prevent the formation of alpha-synuclein?

Maybe some day, science will isolate the offending factors in Alzheimer's, AIDS, Parkinsons, Multiple Sclerosis, and ALS and be able to use medical marijuana to prevent or retard the effects of these crippling conditions. If so, I'll stock up and even grow my own if I have to because with the extreme dementia my mother has and the Alzheimer's her mother had, I've got a humongous scarlet A on my forehead already and it is not the Nathaniel Hawthorne kind.

• Medical Marijuana May Prevent Alzheimer's Disease - February 19, 2014
• Alzheimer's Association - Vascular Dementia
• Berries for Brain Health 

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.