Member-only story
My Mom’s Mental Illness and Alcoholism Is Consuming Us Both
She refuses the help I am trying to provide
“I need pictures of the things that happened to me. Now. Before it is too late.”
This is the final text in a barrage of middle-of-the-night messages from my mom. I read them the next morning. None of it made any sense.
In that set of messages she was telling me to come and bring my camera so “the police can work it out.” Telling me not to bring my 12-year-old son along but not explaining what I would actually be photographing. Or why this was necessary at 2 a.m.
When I called the next day she didn’t want to talk about it and said, “I need to sleep. I just cannot tell what is real and what is not.” Later, she admitted she had recently cut back from two bottles of wine a day to one.
I worried about what the change might be doing to a 70-year-old woman’s brain chemistry and gently told her as much. She meekly agreed.
About a month later, she told me that the night before those messages, she had gone outside to throw out her trash. She stopped to gaze up at the moon and that is the last thing she remembers. She awoke the next morning in her bed, pajama-clad, but her back was covered in bruises and she was in pain.
