Because I Come from a Crazy Family

by Edward M. Hallowell

  “Don’t look so happy,” I said.

  “Just had to say I told you so, that’s all.”

  I ended up paying out of my own pocket to have the cat’s hip repaired. The patients spent an entire community meeting discussing safety procedures for the cat once he returned from the hospital. Mister Fenwood lived to eat again.

  Anyone who visited the unit had to be impressed with what a masterful therapist Mister Fenwood became. He might as well have been Board Certified for all the good he did. Patients who would not talk to anyone else would sit with him on their lap, stroking him, talking to him, connecting with him as he purred. Mister Fenwood would make daily rounds, visiting various nooks and crannies, curling up on chairs and in the odd corner, nuzzling one person after another, and, of course, taking long naps.

  Jake was not a bad guy. I know I was a thorn in his side, a pain in the ass. His job was to minimize risk, and I was forever proposing ideas that only increased risk and were not at all necessary in delivering the accepted standard of care. If I were Jake, I would have stuck pins in a doll of me for sure. Because I didn’t stop with just the cat.

  Taking a page from the Cuckoo’s Nest, I organized a trip to Fenway Park for a group of patients. Jake couldn’t stop sputtering when I told him about it—was I “fuckin’ crazy?”—but after the game, when I described to him how Professor Stein had carefully explained the rules of baseball to a group of Asian fans sitting next to our group, he had to agree that the idea had worked. “But you got so lucky. It could have been a total disaster and you know it!”

  I countered, “So could group walk be, when they cross the street. Should we eliminate group walk?”

  “Of course not. But why stick our necks out further than we need to?”

  “Because we want our patients to realize they can do more than sit in the day room and smoke cigarettes,” I said. “We really ought to have them working a farm instead of being cooped up in this warehouse.”

  “It’s not a warehouse, dammit, it’s a Harvard teaching hospital.”

  “Exactly, which is why we’re trying to encourage innovation. That’s what Harvard is supposed to do. Lead the way. You got behind Miles’s program to innovate with the Fenwood Inn, why can’t you get behind the little things I do?”

  The Fenwood Inn was indeed an innovative program Miles Shore had developed with Jon Gudeman in which patients who were not critical but still needed to stay overnight could be housed but not require the staffing of a medical unit, nor did they have to abide by the myriad regulations on such units. Miles was justifiably proud of this contribution to public sector psychiatry.

  Jake wasn’t convinced by my argument. “Miles—that’s Dr. Shore to you, son—runs this place. He is the Bullard Professor of Psychiatry and you’re just a peon.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  Jake and I actually liked each other; we were just advocating different interests, and we enjoyed sparring.

  One day the Boston Globe came to visit. Dr. Shore was promoting the Fenwood Inn, and he hoped the Globe would give MMHC some much-needed, well-deserved publicity. The reporter and photographer visited the hospital for a half day, and, by all accounts the visit went well.

  Dr. Shore, however, was not altogether pleased. He stopped me in the hall and said, “Hallowell, the Globe was here today, and all they wanted to talk about was your fucking cat!”

  78.

  One late afternoon in the dead of winter, Professor Stein veered off from group walk. He had unlimited privileges, and sometimes, rather than staying with the pack, he’d go off on his own.

  The pack itself was a diverse group of six or eight chronic mental patients strolling down Brookline Avenue. They’d talk to one another, remind one another to look both ways while crossing the street, tell the leader what time it was to make sure they got back before the dining hall closed, and meander along the sidewalk, sometimes turning in circles while looking up at the sky, or stopping to pet a dog who was being walked past them, or leaning down to inspect something on the sidewalk that caught their attention, always just casually ambling, without the determined pace of the average pedestrian.

  These pedestrians were teetering on the slim boundary between being out of their minds and connected with reality. Going for a walk in the supposedly sane outside world was one way we tried to help them adapt to leaving the hospital completely one day. They might be lost in their thoughts, or quite in the moment: enjoying being outside, enjoying stopping at the 7-Eleven to buy smokes, candy, magazines, or coffee, and relishing those treats far more than the average person does.

  It was as a result of one of those group walks gone wrong that I was conceived, when my father was allowed to visit home while actively psychotic. Of all people, I had to appreciate the unpredictability of what can happen on a group walk.

  You simply cannot supervise the mind all that closely. Sanity is elusive and fleeting. You never know what a mind is going to have it in mind to do. Try as you might, with all the knowledge, medications, rating scales, checklists, background information, and past history that you could ever want, you just never know what’s gonna happen next.

  It’s why our diagnostic manual, such a brave attempt to classify the peculiarities of the mind, is in the end such a paltry thing. There is so very much more in heaven and earth and in the human psyche than was ever dreamed of in the diagnostic manual.

  And praise God that it’s so. Though many claim otherwise, the mind is, at its center, free. Free to go where it wants, dream what it likes, get lost in places unknown, entertain terrors and joys of all kinds, and puzzle us all, especially itself.

  It should not have surprised me as much as it did to learn that Professor Stein had taken a long detour that frigid evening. He stopped at a package store on Brookline Avenue, bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and found his way into some snowy woods where he sat at the base of a tree, leaned back against the trunk, drank his bottle of Jack, passed out, and died.

  Everyone wondered why he did it: Was it a suicide or an accident? I think he was tired of life. Professor Stein was an intelligent man. I think he wanted to die. He knew that passing out sitting in the snow in a deserted wood in subfreezing temperatures was likely to be lethal. As much as he enjoyed our games, how much could playing bridge do? With no friends or family, aside from the people at MMHC, as well as a mind that rarely gave him a moment’s peace, how much of his existence could make him want to keep on living?

  Still, the news hit me hard. I had come to love Professor Stein, with his nicotine-stained beard and his wise, stabilizing presence on the unit.

  I wanted it not to be. At that point, I turned to my old friend Samuel Johnson, taking one of his books down from the shelf in my office.

  I read the final stanza of “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” a poem hardly anyone reads anymore except in a college course, but one that speaks to me in a unique way, loaded with powerful personal associations as well as Johnson’s clear-eyed, worldly warmth.

  Decades later, on an Easter Sunday, I attended services at Christ Church with Sue. That church is where Lucy, Jack, and Tucker were all baptized and confirmed, where I eagerly go to get a much-needed serving of spiritual food. Bringing all my troubles, worries, and concerns, as well as joys and celebrations, here I feel a cozy and abiding community. Sue and I go every Sunday we’re in town. I go because I have to; I’d feel depleted if I didn’t.

  Christ Church is a collection of wildflowers: street people and Harvard profs; radical politicos and old-money WASPs; a college classmate of mine who is black, gay, and the former mayor of Cambridge; old people in wheelchairs next to babies nuzzling in their mothers’ arms. The congregants enjoy a wide diversity of religious beliefs, disbeliefs, and hunches. You don’t have to believe anything to be a member of Christ Church. All you need is to show up.

  Abutting Harvard Square, just across Mass Ave. from Harvard Yard, the church bursts at the seams on Easter. Easter is usually a crisp and sunny April
Sunday, and this was no exception, with everyone decked out in their brightest finery, including me wearing my collar pin.

  Built in 1760, Christ Church, painted light gray, is simple in design, with Doric pillars and multipaned windows lining both sides of the nave. On clear days, lavish sunlight and a gentle breeze fill every pew. Two glorious, sparkling chandeliers hang from the high ceiling. The choir sits behind the altar, with the organ console in a cozy pit dividing the two.

  Our church has three gifted priests, a phenomenal music director, Stuart Forster, as well as an exceptional organ, and an exceptional volunteer choir decked out in their red robes and white surplices. With the addition of a couple of trumpets, the Easter service fairly lifts off the roof, ringing jubilant music throughout Harvard Square.

  On that particular Easter Sunday, when Stuart started to play the lead-in to “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today,” a hymn I know as well as I know my own name, I filled with emotion as if a dam were breaking. The hymn itself is a heart-thumper, but that day it was amplified by our organ, by trumpets and choir, and by the overflowing congregation singing their loudest. Add the sunlight pouring into the room, and that we were all there to celebrate nothing less than the biggest deal of all—resurrection, eternal life, the paradise that we’re told awaits us—and you feel God right there with you, as if God were on the brink of bursting out of the invisible. For some, now and then, He actually does. Are you crazy if you see the face of God? Short of that vision, if you feel God’s presence, as I did then and so often do, as persuasively as the sun on the back of your neck, does that mean you lack the courage to accept the nothingness some say awaits us all?

  For reasons I can’t explain, I have come to cherish and trust the feeling of God’s presence. For me, it is as real and present and important as love. It’s always there, sometimes like a nagging question, sometimes like an abiding belief, always dynamic and in flux, but never irrelevant or absent.

  At that moment on Easter Sunday, oddly enough, I thought of Professor Stein, an avowed atheist, sitting against his tree in the snow drinking his Jack. I imagined the warm buzz he felt as the bourbon did its work, pictured him falling asleep as the bottle dropped from his hand onto the snow beside him. I wondered if he’d been able to finish the bottle. I hoped so. I wondered if he were with God now.

  Please be, I prayed. Let it be so.

  To watch us sing and celebrate in church that day, Sue and me and the hundreds of others, you would have thought we all knew it was so, that we harbored no doubt that Christ our Lord was indeed risen that day, as would all of us rise when our day came. At Exeter, Fred Buechner had found all manner of poetic ways of telling us that he, also, was sure it was true, and that doubt was just one part of the truth. Harvard prof Bill Alfred had told me he knew it was so, just as sure as he knew his Franklin stove sat in the corner of his study.

  How much better it would have been for Uncle Jimmy, who was so terrified of dying, and Samuel Johnson, who was even more terrified, and the countless others of us who can’t find any peace around the fact of death, to know that we do not die, that after death there is not blackness, that we do not lie in cold obstruction and rot, that there is life for all of us, forever.

  My spiritual journey began all those many years ago saying the Lord’s Prayer with my mother in bed at night. Now it had come to this: an Easter morning in church, when by rights—and by statistics—I should have been dead or at best down and out on the margins of life. Instead, I’d witnessed more than my share of comebacks in a myriad of times and places, including achieving my own most cherished goals. I had no way to explain any of it, no proofs, but the tools I trusted most, my intuition and my ability to apprehend in the dark, fallible as those tools can be, still led me to plant my flag, for better or worse, right here where we stood, on the miracle some call a fairy tale, the miracle we were all praying, singing, and swaying together like a field full of wildflowers in a breeze to celebrate on this Easter day.

  Fools perhaps we were, but fools for love.

  79.

  Sometime in the early 2000s, Lyn went for a routine physical and it was discovered that a marker of inflammation was elevated. One test led to another, then another, until the diagnosis finally came back: multiple myeloma.

  Lyn and Tom came up to Boston to see one of the world’s leading specialists in multiple myeloma, Ken Anderson, professor at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He laid out a plan of a series of interventions, which held great promise.

  Over the course of the year, Lyn endured procedure after procedure, all the while reassuring us that she’d be fine. I knew she didn’t want to discuss possibly bad outcomes. She simply said, “What will be, will be.”

  When a stem cell transplant didn’t pan out, we began to fear the worst, even as Lyn told me over the phone, “I’m not going to die.”

  “Of course you’re not,” I said.

  A few months later, it was in 2002, I was somewhere in Vermont, having given a talk in a school. Standing outside in the freezing cold, I spoke to Tim on my cell phone. He said, “Mom is not doing well.”

  “Oh, no, not again.”

  I could tell from Tim’s voice this was more serious than the many other setbacks. “She’s back in the hospital,” he said.

  “Is she … I don’t know … Could she actually die?”

  “Yes.” Tim’s tone suggested to me that he’d hoped I’d ask so he wouldn’t have to volunteer that information. “It looks that way.”

  What happened next remains a blur. I drove straight home, talking to Sue along the way. After I picked her up, we drove to the Rhode Island Hospital in Providence.

  When we arrived, Molly was there with Tom. Molly had spent the previous several weeks lying next to Lyn in bed, stroking her mom’s back, rubbing her feet, comforting her any way she could.

  As I stood at the foot of her bed, Lyn looked up at me. “I don’t want to die. Neddy, could you please do something about this?” She had almost no energy. It was clear the time left was short.

  I went to the hospital chapel and did the only thing I could do to try to fulfill Lyn’s request. I said a prayer.

  She died soon after.

  She was fifty-eight, Jamie was fifty-six, I was fifty-two. We’d been such a great team for so long. Her dying hit me hard. For Tom, Molly, Tim, Jake, Anna, little Ned, and everyone who knew her, her dying was beyond tragic, it was impossible to comprehend.

  Lyn was simply not the dying type. She was the living type, oh boy, was she ever. You could not be in her presence and not get ready—for a zinger, a kind remark, an amazing insight, or a call to action.

  She could not be ignored.

  Perhaps that’s why none of us could believe she had died. Tom would say she was just in the next room taking a nap. Most of us would get hit at some point on certain days with the reality of her not being alive any longer after finding ourselves not believing it or forgetting it. It must have been a mistake. Check the manifest. You picked up the wrong body.

  Even to this day, fifteen years later, I think it’s all a dream that I will wake up from. She will be alive and I will say, “You won’t believe the terrible dream I just had.” So far, I haven’t woken up from that dream.

  We found our ways of getting on with life.

  Tom Bliss continued to be the great orthopod he always was but gave up surgery after a few years, focusing on outpatient work. He misses the O.R. but found a new operating theater, the world of photography. He won’t sell his superb work—that’s not why he’s doing it—but someday I think a Bliss photo will be worth a lot of dough. He found himself a new woman, Mary, the niece of Eileen, the Irish lady who’d been just about everything to the Blisses for many years, from nanny to babysitter to adviser to honorary member of the family.

  Smart and kind, Mary is a professor of social policy and intervention at Oxford. She still lives in Oxford but comes to the United States regularly, as does Tom go to England. In Provincetown, the t
wo of them bought a house together, where they go in the summer, and sometimes in the winter.

  Five or six months after Lyn died, Sue and I were fooling around in bed, kissing and such, when out of nowhere Sue looked up at me and said, in a clear and unmistakable voice, something she’d never said before: “Pecker up!”

  Holy fuck! I said to myself as we both abruptly stopped what we were doing. “What did you just say?” I asked, while Sue, dumbfounded, simultaneously blurted out, “What did I just say?”

  “I think I said ‘Pecker up,’ ” Sue said. “What does that mean? Why did I say it?”

  “ ‘Pecker up’ is exactly what you said,” I replied. When I told her the story about the promise Lyn and I had made, even Sue, ever the skeptic, had to acknowledge it was at least spooky. She couldn’t go so far as to agree it was proof of an afterlife and that Lyn was firmly ensconced in paradise, but she had to agree it gave her reason to wonder. She didn’t know the phrase “pecker up,” she’d never used it, and she had no idea what it meant. The words simply fell out of her mouth. “Well, I must have heard it somewhere before” was her explanation. “But you are right, it is pretty strange.”

  I smiled down at Sue and up at Lyn. I’m sure she, like Sue, would have found reason to discredit the evidence she had just supplied me through Sue’s lips, but that was fine with me. She was safely tucked away in eternity. I had the proof I wanted. Now I just had to believe what I’d seen and heard and hold on to it through my inevitable, irascible periods of doubt. I just wished I’d had a more articulate response to this communication from beyond than “Holy fuck!”

  On the other hand, given the raft of improbabilities that had followed me from the moment of my conception, maybe those two words summed up my life. As Sue drifted off to sleep, I lay on my back staring at the ceiling, knowing that I, like the sailor who saw Icarus fall into the sea, had at least just been part of something amazing.