Dirty Big Secrets

I am not super close with my extended family. I wouldn’t count myself super close with my immediate family outside my children. Someone at work has a family member not doing well, and they’re on the downturn of a bad medical prognosis. It got me thinking about my family, and how we deal with things big like death, or medical maladies.

Legacy of mental illness

In my family, mental health issues are the dirty big secrets no one talks about. To the point that when someone is diagnosed with any mental health disorder, they are hidden away as quickly as possible and never spoken of again.

Case and point: One of my aunts on my mother’s side either has schizophrenia, or possibly dementia, but no one talks about her. One day she was just put in a home and never spoken of again. No one visits, no one acknowledges that she had an issue. I am not even 100% certain she is even alive.

How it all started

Her decline began in earnest about the time that I went away to college. In Connecticut there is this architectural little quirk where big houses in the cities have 3 apartments. They were either built on purpose or converted for this purpose. I would think the latter. In any case, it is not unusual to find entire families living in one house, with different parts of the families living on each floor.

The last place we lived in before I moved out on my own was such a situation. One of my mother’s younger sisters lived on the first floor, my mother’s other sister lived on the 2nd floor. And since me and my brother were practically moved out and my mother would eventually be an empty nester, she lived on the 3rd floor. So at this time, the aunt with the issues lived on the 2nd floor.

I remember coming home on holiday breaks and running into my aunt in the back staircase that led from the back door of my mother’s apartment to the back door leading outside to the backyard. All these houses had detached garages and long driveways, so if you had a car, chances are you were parking in the back. I didn’t have a car, but it was also easier for me sometimes to leave out the back door if I was heading out to be with my friends who were probably parked in the driveway waiting for me.

Mind bending reality

The interactions with my aunt were surreal and bizarre to say the least. I knew there was something wrong, and I first I chalked it off to her being quirky, or just really eccentric. But as I got older, as I educated myself more about mental health issues while I was in college, I began to realize that she was in the throes of something more grim. Worse was that when I tried to bring up the subject of these episodes with my mother, or her other sisters, they all brushed me off. Not one of them wanted to admit or acknowledge that their sister was in a rapid decline.

Death thru marriage

I will go back farther. This aunt had married a man, mostly for his status and money. But the man she married was an egotistical asshole who would flaunt his education (he was a Chiropractor) and financial situation over the entire family. His kids were being raised to be assholes just like him. I frequently would babysit for them because it was a lucrative gig since my aunt had money to burn and would want to go out with her other sisters.

Eventually my aunt and her husband moved from the city near where we lived into the suburbs. They bought their fancy house in one of the more affluent neighborhoods, he bought her a new SUV and she would drive into town to visit us and bring her kids along.

Her husband (I never did and never will acknowledge him as an uncle) was often not at home. He claimed he was working, honestly I think he was off carousing and having affairs. No chiropractor keeps the kind of hours he was keeping unless he was doing something shady on the side. Connecticut is not a big state, you can literally drive diagonally through on the interstate in roughly 3 hours give or take. So why so often away from home?

During these long absences, she would sometimes invite her sisters (and kids) over to visit at the house. So all of us would pile into my other aunt’s car and make the 20 min drive to her house. It was during these visits that I began to catalogue the otherness of her brain.

Everything spirals in isolation

She lived practically alone in this house, isolated in this neighborhood because she didn’t interact with her neighbors. She didn’t interact outside the home like volunteering at her kids school, or pursue any personal hobbies other than watching television, in particular soap operas.

It began as small things. One day we showed up and all the furniture in her fancy sunken living room was gone. Her kitchen faced this sunken living room with it’s nice skylights. It was bizarre sitting at her kitchen table looking into this room devoid of furniture except for the few plants that were along the windows. She wouldn’t give the explanation for the disappearance, only that it was her husband messing with her.

Another time we arrived and all the carpeting in her bedroom was gone. When I asked her about it, she said that it was torn out because there were ants under the carpet. I forget the details, but it was a long convoluted explanation that her husband was trying to make her think she was crazy because she told him she could hear them crawling under the carpet and he told her that he thought she was making things up, so she showed him!

She tore up the carpet so there wouldn’t be any floor for the ants to hide under. At some part of the story I think she accused him of hiring someone to put the ants in her house and then he lied about knowing the ants were there.

There was a bathroom downstairs that eventually no one used anymore. We had to use the one bathroom in the hallway. The bathroom in her bedroom was off limits to everyone, but even she didn’t use it to my recollection. The house was literally falling apart around her, but my mother and their other sister didn’t want to talk about it.

Suburban prison

In retrospect, I recognize her experience in this suburban prison as akin to my experience when we moved to New Jersey. The ex isolated me in the same way her husband had isolated her. Except, I had the wherewithal to escape, whereas she remained trapped.

I remember sitting at her kitchen table (because she no longer had a dining room table) with my mother, her sister, and my aunt, trying to get some answers about what was going on in her life. I could sense that she was not right in her mind, but her sisters (my mother especially) did not want to call it that. They would talk in circles about how her husband was mistreating her.

According to my aunt, her husband was withholding money (sounds super familiar). She would sometimes not have money to pay bills like electricity, the oil for heating in winter, or gasoline to drive the fancy SUV even to the grocery store.

She didn’t work and since her kids were spaced five years apart, she wasn’t in a rush to find work as the wife of a doctor since she perpetually had a kid in diapers over the span of 15 years. Her situation was the perfect storm of spousal abuse ripe for someone to succumb to something like schizophrenia or whatever it was that she had.

Glaring Red Flags

Thinking back on that situation, there were probably several layers of wrong happening:

Undiagnosed and untreated mental health issues
Spousal abuse in the form of control of movement, control of funds, and isolation
Gaslighting
Isolation
Lack of mental stimulus (she didn’t read or pursue any personal hobbies)

She was still living in this house after I was married. We visited her with our kids when they were toddlers. That was the last time I was in that house. Not much longer after that she lost the house. I don’t recall the circumstances, I don’t even know where her husband was. I know he had not divorced her. He would have had to pay her alimony.

Spotify

Good sister, bad sister

So here she is, living with her brother on the second floor, and I knew it was just a short while before she was gone entirely (and no one was talking about it still) because I was visiting my mother and I see my aunt in this back stairwell and I go to greet her and give her a hug.

She physically recoils from me, and when I ask her about it she tells me that she knows that my mother had me replaced with a robot. That she knows I am just a machine and not the real me, but it’s okay, she isn’t going to tell my mother that she knows she had me replaced to play a trick on her.

I told my mother about the incident, and tried to talk to my mother about her sister’s declining mental state. If denial were a river, my mother would be the pilot of the steamboat traveling on it. According to my mother, her sister didn’t have mental problems.

Unpleasant similarities

I gave up caring. I had my own messed up life to deal with. I was deep in the trenches of my own jacked up marriage, raising kids, dealing with my own gas lighting spousal abuse situation. Which as I have been reflecting on my possibly schizophrenic aunt, there are many similarities to my own marriage which is very worrisome. The only plus is that I got out.

I asked her one time back when I was in high school why she wouldn’t leave her husband? Why, if he was such a controlling bastard, such a liar, wouldn’t she consider getting a divorce? She told me that she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

Last I heard was that she was committed to a home. Only her youngest son visits her on occasion, and the husband (are they even still legally married? Who knows) got the last laugh. Despicable.

Warning Signs

I think of all of this because as the years have passed, my mother has exhibited some signs of either dementia, or schizophrenia. She has claimed for MANY years, pretty much since I was in high school, that she hears voices. (It may even be as early as middle school right after she had her car accident). They are real to her.

She doesn’t talk to me about them as often as she used to because I dared to suggest that she should consider getting checked out. She was quick to tell me that she doesn’t need to see a professional, or get medication because these “people” are real.

Borrowed troubles

I feel sorry for my brother because she lives with him, and I don’t know if he is humoring her, or if he has bought into her hysteria. Their relationship has always been way closer than my relationship is with my mother.

To hear them talk scares me sometimes because they are a few eggs shy of a rational dozen. It’s like her hysteria feeds into his paranoia and vice versa. Either he is really good at pretending that he believes her and he is just humoring her to keep the peace, or he legit believes the shit that comes out of their mouths.

The world according to my mother

But it’s not mental health related. My mother is also the woman who does not believe depression is a real condition. She is the person who told me when I was a teenager that I just needed to “stop being sad” and “be happy”. Because me having dark thoughts, or being unhappy was all in my control and I just had to stop thinking about it. I wasn’t depressed.

Well, mother, sorry to disappoint, but depression is real. I am certain that that you are mentally ill, and it is only going to get worse.

Mental illness is a dirty big secret that no one talks about. No one acknowledges it, they just sweep it under a rug. I wonder how many other family members attempted to self-medicate their issues with alcohol, and it’s not really alcoholism that runs in the family, but a lack of awareness, and unwillingness to shine a light on what is really rotting the family from the inside out.