“Yes?”
She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “I don’t think Nancy belongs in school. At least not this school. I don’t think she ought to come back. I’m sorry.”
I hung up, staggered. The public school system was no longer able to handle Nancy. It was as if a door had been slammed in our faces.
I called Dr. Blake and told her. Then I poured out my frustration.
“We don’t know what to do,” I said, trying to choke back the emotion in my voice. “We do what you tell us to do and it doesn’t work. We don’t know what to do.”
“I have spoken to the director,” she said coolly. “He agrees with me that a reevaluation is called for. He would like to see Nancy tomorrow, then meet with you the following day. Can you bring Nancy tomorrow at ten a.m.?”
I said I could, and I delivered Nancy to the director of the clinic the following morning at the appointed time. He held a lengthy individual session with her. The details of his reevaluation, dated September 29, 1969:
My session with Nancy today was at the request of Dr. Blake who had expressed serious concern regarding Nancy’s recent exaggerated behavior.
From my interview with her, it was quite clear that she is a seriously disturbed child who has regressed considerably in recent weeks. Her affect [level of emotion] is bland and her thinking inappropriate and marked by poor judgment.
With respect to her avoidance of school, she says that she plans never to return again and can see nothing irregular about her attitude. She will not attend school because “all the kids are against me, even my best friend.”
She showed little concern about her extreme behavior at home and was casual about the recent episode of attempting to stab her baby sitter. The extent of projection that she uses appears to have reached the point of almost adult-like paranoid schizophrenic ideation with evidence of underlying mild depression often seen associated with such projection.
My diagnostic impression of Nancy is that she is a schizophrenic girl who is currently in a state of decompensation and regression with suggestions of probable continuation of her regression. The latter I base on her inability to see the degree of her poor judgment, the blandness of her affect, and the frequent bizarreness of her ideation.
The extreme rapidity of her regressions suggests that careful neurological studies be carried out to rule out the possibility of any organic determinants.
The director’s evaluation was thorough and concrete and signified a major change from a year before, when he had seen Nancy as a bright girl with a personality problem that stemmed from her troubled environment. He now believed what we had long believed. He now put a label on it. He now thought Nancy was schizophrenic. In recommending neurological studies for “organic determinants,” the director was referring to brain tumor as a possible explanation for what he perceived to be Nancy’s marked deterioration.
He did not, however, share any of this information with us when he ushered us into his office the following day. I only obtained it years later, when Nancy was already dead, at which point I felt bitter vindication—I had been certain for a long time that Nancy was seriously ill—but no satisfaction.
What he told us that day was that Nancy was being terminated from the clinic because she needed more care than they were capable of giving her.
He did not share with us his diagnosis of schizophrenia. Rather, the diagnosis he chose to offer was basically a continuation of his original one. He acknowledged that she was worse, but he still put the blame on us.
The clinic’s own report of this meeting, which I also obtained after Nancy’s death, jibes with what Frank and I recall of that day.
He [the director] strongly recommended and concurred with the therapy team, that Nancy should get all the help that she needs at this time. He also impressed on the Spungens that if they were to follow through with this it would be highly important that they make a point of getting involved themselves, because what is going on at the present time is not only due to factors in the present, but also due to multiple factors and interactions which have been on-going over many, many years.
What is seen now is purely a product of what has been fed into the situation in the interactions between the parents and the child over the past few years. The Spungens were essentially satisfied, and our contacts with them were terminated at the time.
The clinic report makes no mention of the director saying anything to us about schizophrenia or about recommending a neurological study for Nancy. That’s because he didn’t.
I asked him that day, point-blank, for a diagnosis. He told me, point-blank, that he had none. I asked him what our next step should be. He made a steeple of his fingers, looked me in the eye, and replied, “Damned if I know.” Not a word about a neurological work-up.
If the director had been more candid with us that day, we would have had a better understanding of what was wrong with Nancy and of where to search for treatment. We wouldn’t have had to stumble along blindly like we did. Maybe it wouldn’t have altered the course Nancy’s life took. Maybe it would have. If nothing else, we wouldn’t have felt so helpless and confused, so lost.
Why wasn’t he more candid? Doctors now tell us that up until about five years ago it was not uncommon to “spare” the parents of a seriously impaired child—just as they did the parents of a terminally ill one. The director probably felt that Nancy needed a hospital-like psychiatric setting, and was fully aware that not one such place existed for an eleven-year-old then in the Philadelphia area. So for him to have spelled it out to us straight would have been for him to say, “You’re going to have to live with this for as long as you live—there’s no hope.” That would have been just like telling us our daughter had incurable cancer.
Doctors also tell me that psychologists find it much more difficult to diagnose schizophrenia in a child than in an adult—so many of the dream-world symptoms are natural behavior in a child. But even if a psychologist does suspect schizophrenia, he or she will still be reluctant to use that label for behavior the child may outgrow. This is especially applicable to Nancy’s case, since she was such a bright child and since the director may have wanted to see the results of a neurological work-up before disclosing his suspicions to us.
Why didn’t the director himself undertake the neurological testing before electing to terminate Nancy? Why didn’t he advise us to have the tests done? I don’t know. I have no explanation.
All the director did was stand up, wish us good luck, and shake our hands.
Frank and I reeled out to the parking lot, just like we had a year before—only now we knew even less. All we knew was that we had a disturbed eleven-year-old daughter who neither the school system nor the clinic could deal with.
We drove back slowly through the quiet afternoon streets of our suburban development, not saying a word. We had no idea what to do with Nancy. If the professionals didn’t know, how were we supposed to know?
I wanted to cry, but I stopped myself. There was no time to cry. No time for the luxury of tears. Tears meant giving up, and I wouldn’t. I had made a commitment to Nancy that day eleven years before in the nursery, when I saw her fighting for her life. I had promised her a life of quality. Now that promise had real meaning, real direction. I had to find a way out of this maze. I had to do everything in my power to keep my promise to my child. I took several deep breaths. I did not cry. I would not cry.
Chapter 7
I sought out Nancy’s pediatrician for help. He saw her a few days later and was concerned about her physical condition. He said her pulse rate was unusually high and her pupils dilated. He gave her a blood test on the spot. When I asked why, he said he wanted to see if she was taking drugs. This surprised me—drugs were not yet a problem with the kids in our neighborhood. Besides, Nancy was only eleven.
She was clean. There were no drugs in her system. She was speeding on her own.
Through the pediatrician, I found a psychiatrist who was willing to see Nancy. I sch
eduled an appointment, and though Nancy didn’t want to go, she did. I sat outside in his small waiting room.
Within five minutes I heard a crash, then a thump, then a scream. Then another crash.
He opened the door. His forehead was bleeding. His glasses were smashed and hanging from one ear. His wristwatch was shattered.
“Please come in,” he said.
Nancy had swept everything off his desk. The floor was covered with papers and the broken remains of his family photo album. She sat on the couch smirking.
“We’ve had some problems here,” he said quietly. “Please take Nancy home and call me.” He turned to Nancy. “I’ll be seeing you later.”
“I’ll do it again,” she warned.
“Call me,” he said to me.
I did when I got home.
“I’m very concerned,” he confided. “I think she’s a very disturbed girl. All I did to provoke her was ask why she walked out of school.”
He agreed to take her on—provided I sat in on her sessions. He pointed out, though, that he regarded his involvement as an interim step. He said my top priority should be to place Nancy in some sort of full-time residential treatment center/school facility. He gave me some names and addresses.
He made no mention of having Nancy neurologically tested. I guess he didn’t feel there was any need for it.
I spent every day and night with Nancy over the next five months. Much of the time I was on the telephone trying to locate her school records, trying to find a school to place her in.
I wasn’t having an easy time. I called private schools all over the country. They were prohibitively expensive—some as high as $20,000 per year, which was Frank’s entire income. The state of Pennsylvania did operate schools for disturbed children, with sliding-scale fees based on income, but it seemed that Nancy’s circumstances were unique. She didn’t fit the model of the emotionally disturbed child: usually, children who exhibited behavior like hers were also learning-disabled. The state schools weren’t equipped to offer any education beyond the level she’d already reached. There just didn’t seem to be any school that fit Nancy’s problem. So I kept looking.
She found some of the brochures one day and got so upset that Frank and I were “sending her away” that I had to begin hiding the brochures and applications under the underwear in my dresser, and making whatever phone calls I needed to make before nine thirty in the morning, when she got up.
She rarely went outside. Mostly, she read and listened to raw, hard rock albums in her room. Once, when I was cleaning up her room, I found a piece of paper on the floor that she’d scrawled a note on. Evidently, it held significance for her:
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.—e.e. cummings.
She was still fighting, just like the day I saw her in her isolette in the hospital nursery, screaming and kicking at some unseen enemy. I wished I could help her, but I didn’t know how.
The shark nightmares were becoming a regular occurrence now. I sat with her practically every night when she woke up screaming. Then they began to spill over into the daylight. She began to see sharks all over the house, even when she was wide-awake.
Once I found her in the den, trying to crawl under the couch.
“They wanna eat me!” she screamed. “They wanna eat me!”
I sat her down on the couch and tried to calm her. She began to bang her head against the wall and pull her hair out. She was wild-eyed. I pinned her arms down and spoke to her. After a few minutes she came out of her hallucination. She looked at me gravely.
“Mommy,” she said, “I want to die. Let me die. Please.”
“I love you, Nancy,” I said. “I don’t want you to die.”
“If you loved me you’d let me.”
I hugged her helplessly. She pushed me away.
“I wish I’d never been born,” she said.
A few minutes later I found her going through my medicine chest, collecting what was left of some old prescriptions for muscle relaxants, cold pills, painkillers.
“Nancy, what are you doing?” I cried. “Give me those.”
She gave them up without a struggle. She’d collected about eight or nine pills.
“You don’t love me,” she said woodenly. She walked away. I threw out all of the pills in the house.
She spoke to her psychiatrist that week about the sharks. “They want to kill me,” she explained to him, simply.
He asked her why. She had no explanation.
But verbalizing the hallucination to her psychiatrist did seem to have an effect. The shark attacks seemed to diminish over the next few days—only to be replaced by something far worse.
It was a Sunday afternoon. Suzy and David were playing in the living room. Nancy and I were watching TV in the den. Frank had gone out on an errand.
“This is a dumb movie,” Nancy said abruptly. “Let’s go to the Franklin Institute.”
“It’s too late,” I pointed out. “The science museum closes in half an hour.”
“I want to go,” she repeated.
“No,” I repeated.
At that moment I looked down at the coffee table. David had been trying to fix something and had left a hammer there. Nancy saw me looking at it, grabbed it before I could stop her. She hefted it in her hand and smirked. “Take me or I’ll kill you.”
“Give me the hammer, Nancy,” I said sternly, trying hard not to let her know that I was afraid, for the first time, that she might actually hurt me.
“Take me or I’ll kill you,” she said.
“You won’t.”
“I will!”
“You won’t.”
She struck me hard on the shoulder with the hammer. It gave me a jolt down to my fingertips. Then she did it again.
“Stop that! Give me that hammer!”
She struck me on the arm. I fought the pain and went for her. I tried to wrench the hammer away from her, but I couldn’t get it out of her grasp. She may have been five inches shorter than I was, but she outweighed me by ten pounds and was filled with animal fury. We began to wrestle. She struck me repeatedly on the shoulders and arms. I couldn’t overpower her. It took both my hands to grab hold of the arm that was striking me with the hammer, and when I did grab it she began to punch me in the chest with the other fist. I wouldn’t let go. I didn’t know if she was capable of killing me or not, but I didn’t want to find out. She was in a blind rage. She didn’t see me.
Far away, I could hear the sound of Suzy and David playing and giggling innocently. I thought about calling them for help, but they were smaller than I was—they could be seriously hurt. I didn’t call.
I held her off for an hour or longer. She just wouldn’t quit. I was reaching the point of exhaustion. My battered arms were losing their strength. But I had to hold out just a little longer, until Frank got home. I just had to hold on, hold on.
At last I heard Frank’s car pull up. His car door closed. The front door opened.
“I’m home!” he yelled cheerfully.
“Frank!” I screamed.
He rushed in, wrestled the hammer away from her, and threw it into the hall. She began to punch and claw and kick at him, totally out of control. He overpowered her, put her down on the floor in a wrestling hold, face down. He put his knee in her back to contain her. She continued to whip around and curse and snarl.
Suzy and David watched from the doorway, cowering in fear. I just lay there on the floor, panting.
“Are you okay?” Frank asked me, straining to hold her down.
“Uh-huh,” I gasped. “Just in … just in time.”
“Can you phone?”
I nodded, crawled over to the telephone, and dialed the psychiatrist at home. I hoarsely related what happened. He could barely hear me over Nancy’s screams.
“Lock her in a room,” he advised. “Lock her somewhere
where she can’t hurt herself and let her get all of that anger out.”
“None of the bedrooms lock from the outside,” I said.
“Oh … how about a punching bag? You got a punching bag?”
“A what?”
“Something she can punch.”
“Just me.”
“How about the basement? Can she hurt herself down there?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Put her down there. Call me when she quiets down.”
Frank pulled Nancy kicking and screaming to her feet and into the kitchen. He took her halfway down the basement steps, released her, ran up the steps, and locked the door. We stood in the kitchen, watching the door and waiting. She ran up the steps and began to pound on it with her fists.
“Let me out, you motherfuckers!” she screamed through the locked door. “Don’t do this to me! Don’t do this to me, you bastards! You motherfucking bastards!”
She kept pounding and kicking at the door. She began to slam at it with her shoulder. The frame strained against her weight and I was afraid it might give way.
She gave up on the door. She ran screaming down the steps and began to throw open the storage cupboards down there. She pulled out cartons and suitcases and the lawn furniture and hurled all of it to the floor. She destroyed the furniture, broke lamps, broke the luggage, ripped our winter coats into shreds, ripped the boxes up. She destroyed the entire basement. The rampage went on for two hours, interrupted only by an occasional run up the steps to throw herself against the door.
Then it was quiet.
We unlocked the door and tiptoed warily down the steps. Nancy was sprawled across the rubble of our belongings, spent. She was gasping for breath, her body quivering. Frank carried her to her room and put her to bed.
I called the psychiatrist. “We have to do something.” I cried. “We can’t live like this.”
“Calm down,” he said. “I know that. I’ve been on the phone trying to find a hospital for her. But she’s too young—none of the psychiatric hospitals take children, not even the one I’m on staff at.”
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 13
