photo credit: Lohb

Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.

— Elizabeth I

If we’re lucky, aging is a learning process.  We all age, but we don’t all learn.  Sometimes our ability to learn is determined by our willingness to see things in a new light.

All of us eventually face the decline and death of our parents.  My mother died of Alzheimer’s in 2005.  As you are probably aware if you are a frequent reader of this blog, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in December of last year.  In addition to Alzheimer’s, Dad has also been diagnosed with bipolar disease.  The health care professionals involved in his care reached this diagnosis partially based on his behavior, but largely based on the history of his behavior that we provided.  What makes the following story so sad is that if we hadn’t had such a strong culture of secrets, some of this could have been avoided and all of us would have had much different lives.

Awareness

Over time, we create a narrative that explains who we are and how we got to this point in our lives.  For us, this is truth.  It is how we explain the events that have shaped us.  It encompasses everything including how we see ourselves, our parents, our friends and the mentors who shaped our lives.  It is the foundation that explains and supports our identity.

When we are young, everything in our lives just “is.”  It is only as we get older, perhaps in our teens, that we question how our family interacts with the world.

It was when I was in high school that I remember becoming conscious of the chaos at home.  Up to that point, I’d been “protected” from seeing other people’s home life because my parents kept us all very close to home.  It was harder for them to continue to do that once I went to high school because my friends were no longer chosen from the neighborhood.  They were kids that were in my classes and many of them weren’t part of the neighborhood.  The result was that I went to their homes because we didn’t have people over to my house.

Over time, I became aware that my house was different.  It was tense.  It was unpredictable.  It was a place to be avoided if at all possible.

Mom worked hard to keep body and soul together.  She had a temper which could be set off unexpectedly, probably because she was under tremendous stress.  Dad had a temper which most often was focused on Mom.  The result was a constant sense of anxiety.  Regularly, Mom would confide in me that she was planning on leaving Dad or kicking him out or somehow separating from him.  It never happened, but I would stay coiled up tight as a spring for months waiting for the big blowup.  Without understanding why, I believed that Mom and Dad splitting up would be the worst thing on earth.

Fresh Eyes

At the time, my only view was of a family on their way to destruction.  Mom had no friends that she would confide in, so I became her confidant.  She told me stories about Dad that to this day I don’t know whether to believe or not.

When I “grew up” and left home, stories of my childhood became good for laughs with my friends.  The universal conclusion was that I was “amazingly normal” considering my childhood.  (This, of course, raises the question “What is normal?”  But that’s a topic for another day.)

As Mom and Dad aged, hidden issues were brought to the fore.  When Mom started to exhibit signs of dementia, Dad reacted in his normal way – hysteria (which we attributed to his emotional Italian background), denial and blame. (He blamed us for putting her in the Alzheimer’s facility.  We were uncaring awful children.)  In the “right” mood, he would tell anyone around how awful my brother (as the local representative) was.  In reality, Mac did all the really hard stuff.  He physically took Mom to the Alzheimer’s facility.  He identified her body when she died.  He arranged for the cremation and burial.  As a result, my father blamed him for it all.

Over the years, I had worked with different therapists.  I was terrified that I would become one of my parents.  So, again I consulted a therapist about the best ways for us to “manage” Dad.  She was very helpful.  Unfortunately, none of us had all the information, which made these attempts to have any type of relationship with Dad ineffective and extremely frustrating.  The end result was that he stomped off, cursing all of us.

The New Reality

With Dad’s recent and sudden slide into dementia and the resulting raging, he was committed for 14 days to a dementia unit in a mental health facility.  This is where the importance of a medical history becomes crucial.  The psychiatrists and social workers spent a lot of time with Mac listening to tales of Dad’s behavior.  It didn’t take them very long to come up with a preliminary diagnosis of bipolar disorder.  They placed Dad on drugs to treat bipolar disorder and Dad became a charming person we had never known – or at least couldn’t remember having known.  (Better living through chemistry – Monsanto’s old tag line.)

What is so obvious now, was totally obscure until six weeks ago.  The popular image of bipolar disease is high highs (Life is WONDERFUL!) and low lows (Life is AWFUL!).  Because one of my friends has a son with bipolar disorder, I knew that another form of bipolar disease was a raging high and a depressed low, I just didn’t recognize it in my father.

What makes this story so sad is that if we hadn’t had such a strong culture of secrets, some of this could have been avoided.  Because the Greatest Generation didn’t share their problems, Dad went undiagnosed until he was 83.  My mother struggled alone with protecting herself and her children from his unexpected and often paranoid rages.  She had always struggled with how to be an adult.  Her mother’s early illness and death had meant that she had no female role model of how to be a wife and mother.  She married a charming man who was going to rescue her while he conquered the real estate market and became rich.  Instead, he became an unpredictable and unmanageable force in her life.

Mom knew she was in trouble early in the marriage.  She and Dad went to the Catholic Church for marriage counseling.  Needless to say, the priest wasn’t qualified to identify mental illness and no doubt he wasn’t given the full picture.  They were there for counseling but there were just some things that were too shameful to tell anyone.  Dad was emotionally abusive towards Mom and on some level she probably felt responsible – most abuse victims do.  The counseling never really had a chance.

Scott Peck, psychiatrist, speaker and author, posited in his book A Bed by the Window that some people “choose” dementia when looking at their life becomes too painful.  When Mom developed Alzheimer’s, I chose to accept this viewpoint.  She had a hard life with very little joy and she finally just gave up and went away.

I know “coulda” isn’t helpful, but I so wish things “coulda” been different.  If Mom “coulda” told the full story, if she had had more self-confidence, if someone had recognized how much trouble she was in…  This is what I grieve – the damage to all of us that results from keeping secrets.

Mental illness is no one’s fault.  It is the result of chemical imbalances in the brain.  Yet, today, there is still a stigma attached to even the most common forms of mental illness.  It scares us, this idea that our brains can hijack us.  So we keep the secret.  We are ashamed.  It is time to let go of our secrets, not indiscriminately to anyone, but to the right professional.  It is time to get help.