Nuclear Family Blast
About a year ago, I drove to visit my brother, Ben, at the group home he’d recently moved into. It was about an hour to the Finger Lakes town, a significant improvement on the two-and-a-half hours I’d needed to drive to see him at the State Hospital in Binghamton. It was a beautiful day. I was mostly excited, just slightly anxious. As is my wont, I blasted music the whole way. I love driving alone with loud tunes.
My device navigated me to the house without any trouble, and I pulled into the small lot at the back of the driveway. The house looked inviting, and the setting was gorgeous, with hills all round, and a drop off just behind the property down to a creek. Before I’d even gotten out of the car, I saw Ben come out the back door, by himself, to greet me. And I cried for the third time in forty years about my brother.
The week after Father’s Day in 1975, I heard the term “nervous breakdown” for the first time. My father was trying to explain to me that Ben had had one, and that he was in the hospital. Something was wrong with his mind, which was different than his brain. I would be able to visit him soon, but not yet. He would be okay.
This had very little meaning to my nearly 10-year-old self. Dad acted very serious, so I assumed it was serious, but the term seemed so abstract and unreal. I hadn’t seen a whole lot of Ben since he’d gone away to school in Atlanta the year before, then returned to any apartment in Endicott. He was still, largely, just absent.
I recall thinking that people in school were whispering and tip-toeing around me. But that might not have happened. One kid did say she was sorry about my brother. Why, I wondered? In my mind, he was injured and would be fine by and by. But he was not fine ever again, and the lives of my immediate family were never the same.
It must have been 1977. Ben had been in the State Psychiatric Hospital, but now was in what we then called a “half-way house.” We had arranged for Ben and I to go out to see “Star Wars” at the Oakdale Mall Cinemas. I walked over to the half-way house, which was in our neighborhood, met Ben, and we took a bus to the mall. Maybe it was two buses.
He was quiet in those days, but I remember his being able to have something of a conversation. I was excited to see the movie for the fourth or fifth time. I was a chatty kid, and probably didn’t give Ben much of an opportunity to talk. We saw the movie, took the bus back, and I went home. It all seemed normal enough to me at the time. But it would be the last time Ben and I saw each other outside of a hospital or my parents’ home for a very long time.
I cried when Ben walked out the door of the group home because he had been essentially incarcerated for forty years. After his abortive stay at that half-way house, he lived exclusively in mental hospitals, and mostly in the one in Binghamton. There, a security airlock with guards greets visitors, and every ward is behind another locked door. I visited a few times a year, being placed in a room with Ben and perhaps my father, brother, wife, or, later, my children.
In later years, I asked for and was given permission to take Ben out for meals or to a park. By this time, he’d become more difficult to have a conversation with; his psychosis is profound, and what he imagines intrudes constantly.
I believe I had less trouble interacting with Ben than my brother and my parents did. My theory is that because I hardly knew Ben before his breakdown, there was less grief in the loss of who he was. To me, Ben had always been “crazy Ben.” It’s just the way it was. I think there was torment for all of us in the first decade or so around the hope of Ben’s getting “well.” Hope, cruelly, sprang eternal.
But after all those years of signing in or signing him out, when I saw my brother walk to the car to meet me, freely leaving his home, I was overwhelmed.
I didn’t cry when I first found out about Ben. Again, I didn’t really understand what was happening at all. As far as I remember, I didn’t cry for years until one night at summer camp when I was about 16. I was up late at a spot we called The Bus Stop, bonding with my new friend, Claude, who had recently lost his mother to cancer. And I realized, maybe for the first time, that I was dealing with a nearly commensurate loss; that while Ben was alive, what we were dealing with in our family was grief for the loss of the child/brother we had known. And in relating to Claude’s terrible pain, I finally felt my own. And it was profound.
After that, my sense of what had happened in my family changed dramatically. I saw the extreme freedom my parents had given me as exhaustion on their part. My other brother putting 3,000 miles between himself and the family when he went to college made more sense. As I would later say, Ben’s illness was a nuclear bomb in my nuclear family. It changed everything.
Over the years, I’ve made dozens of trips to Binghamton to visit Ben for a few hours. The visits were mostly upbeat. I chose long ago to see Ben’s delusions and hallucinations as funny, and he has always seemed fine with that. I could have fun with the idea of Freddie Mercury and Linda Ronstadt as characters in our lives. Some visits were harder when he was particularly out of it, but visiting Ben was never an ordeal for me.
The first time I visited Ben after my first child was born was different. Well, the visit itself was largely the same, but as I went through the security airlock and walked around to the back of the building where I’d parked, something welled up in me and I was crying by the time I got to the car. I sat in the car for 15 minutes or more, sobbing. I’d been dealing with Ben’s illness for 20 years at that point, but now I had empathy for my parents.
There is nothing worse than the loss of a child — I have a brother-in-law who went through this, and it’s unthinkably awful — but this illness, for my parents, has also been loss. Ben will never be the person they imagined he could be. And the push-pull of hope and setbacks over the years has been particularly cruel. I knew that before that day, but I felt it for the first time in the hospital parking lot, and I’ve felt it ever since.
Benjamin Spock wrote something about family resemblances passing like clouds, and I often see a hint of my brother in a facial tick or a gesture of one of my own children. Those clouds never pass without causing a shudder. My children are fine, but I can’t help but wonder if It is in them, and my chest tightens when I do, the feeling coming faster than the realization of what it means.
In a way, Ben’s illness was always reasonably easy for me. I have a close friend who has a bipolar brother who is not institutionalized. I’m here to tell you, that is way harder to deal with. Constant worry. I worry about Ben, but not worry worry. The hospital took care of him and his needs and kept him reasonably safe and healthy (I am not going to criticize the woefully underfunded state psychiatric institutions, nuh-uh).
I got a glimpse recently, though, that our future may be more worrisome. The group home gives Ben much more freedom, and in some ways, he’s not entirely up to it. I got a call from the woman who runs the home about some behavior Ben exhibited at a day program that got him into trouble. She was a little freaked out and wanted advice. I honestly had none; these things happened from time to time at the hospital, and were, well, handled. Would she send him back? That thought saddened me deeply. Would I need to be more involved on an ongoing basis? I don’t know the answer to that one.
There is a wonderful Hallmark Hall of Fame TV film from the ’80s called “Promise.” James Garner plays a man who had promised his mother that he’d take care of his schizophrenic brother — played magnificently by James Woods — when she died. The film deals with his situation and his brother’s illness with remarkable realism.
I never dramatically promised my parents anything like this. But of course, the reality is that my other brother and I will look after Ben as best we can. That recent glimpse of what the responsibility actually means was sobering.
When I’m first getting to know people, I’m fairly quick to tell them about Ben. I know how important he and his illness are to who I am, and I like to put it out there. I brought it up the first time I met my current business partner (on the phone), and because he also has a sibling with mental illness, it was an immediate point of bonding. It’s often that way. Very few families aren’t touched in some way by some kind of craziness.
I also bring it up because it’s, well, heavy, man. I like heavy. When you bring out the heavy, it tends to heighten The Real, and people get to connection — deep connection — faster. I crave that with others. And I bring it up because if you want to know who I am, where I came from, and why I am who I am, you need to know about my schizophrenic brother, Ben.
When people first learn about him, the reaction is either, “Ah, you, too?” or, “Oh my god, what a terrible burden.” Yes, it’s heavy, but it’s not a terrible burden. I love Ben and his strangely humorous psychosis just the way they are (and I like the plural here). And now that he’s in such a beautiful setting, I feel more positive about his prospects.
I am bound to his illness until one of us leaves this world. With our only other family members across the continent in two directions, I am the primary point of contact in his life. And this is much more convenient now that he is, according to Google, 59 minutes away. He just turned sixty a couple of weeks ago, my big brother to whom I play big brother. I’m overdue for a visit.
