Soujourn of Sanity

This post originally appeared on AOL

Suicide, my mother explained after she found me huddled at the bottom of my small, dark closet after a beating I had endured at the hand of my father, is selfish and an easy way out. But more importantly, and this I want you to think about - hard: what guarantees do you have that it's going to be any better on the other side?

And so, harnessing my mother's views, I persevered and went on to find the purpose of my life.

* * * * *

"Good morning," I sang as I pushed open the bedroom door only to reel backwards against the wall as if I had walked dead-on into a hot electric fence. The twin-sized mattress was propped up against the wall and the fresh linens I had pulled across its girth less than twenty-four hours earlier had been balled up and thrown across the room where it lay in a crumpled, wrinkled mass. The tall, lanky man standing at the sliding glass door turned and looked at me with a sheepish smile. His hair was disheveled with tufts sticking straight out, as if he had pulled clumps with two fists away from his skull. My heart pumped furiously as my eyes widened and my tongue grew three sizes larger, choking out the words that attempted to push from my throat. He frowned as he stepped closer. I backed up and pushed against the wall.

"I'm sorry, Miss Donna," he said apologetically. "The voices were really bad last night."

I nodded slowly, then cautiously moved forward to the threshold and peered in. His roommate had tucked in the final corner of the linens on his own bed and turned to look at me. I smiled for a moment before turning back.

"Did you take your medication?" I asked. He nodded. I didn't understand. "So how come you're hearing voices, then?"

They both laughed. My eyebrows pulled together as my tongue began to shrink back to its normal size.

"The medication doesn't help that much," he reached out and pushed the mattress back down onto the frame. The whoosh and thud made me jump just a hair. His roommate scooped up the linens and tossed them onto the bed before moving to the end nearest me where he began working on helping his friend make it up. I watched them move maybe a bit longer than I should have, but was mesmerized by their synchronized movements. It seemed they had done this many times before.

"So, would you please explain this to me?" I asked later at the breakfast table after serving the last plate of hot cakes. Tommy Newsom looked up from his plate, then sideways at Jerry Timber who was shoveling huge bites into his mouth. Twelve of the fourteen men I was charged with providing care for where huddled around the long table and all began exchanging looks with one another. Finally, Jerry spoke.

"They aren't dreams, Miss Donna," he said as he rested his fork on the edge of the plate and pulled the cup of coffee up towards his lips. "They persist continuously and the medication doesn't really help all the time. In the beginning it might, but as time moves on, it's more like candy."

"Which is why we often have problems with drinking or using drugs," another chimed in. I listened intently as I opened the medication log and began pulling out the bubble cards with various pills inside. Thorazine, Clozaril, prolixin, Prozac, lithium? "It mutes the voices and fuzzes the demons we sometimes see."

"But, Gabriel," I began as I poured a pitcher of water and brought out the Dixie paper cups. "You're diagnosed as bi-polar."

"True," he pushed his plate, flatware and coffee mug across the counter then waited for me to deposit his medication into his outstretched hand. "But I'm old and when they first diagnosed me, I was manic. When you're manic, you see and hear some weird things. So they thought I was schizophrenic and treated me accordingly."

"Which was??"

"Shock therapy. They now know that if you treat a non-schizoid with shock it can cause what they now refer to as schizoaffective: schizophrenic-like tendencies, such as perpetual auditory, and sometimes visual, hallucinations."

"Tell her the rest," Pete called out as he scraped the remainder of the pancake and syrup into the large trashcan. I looked back to Gabriel, our resident "doctor" who received a PhD in philosophy shortly after he turned 19.

"The consensus is, at least for us bi-polar types, after 40 our chances for recovery are pretty slim."

"Recovery?"

"Well, remission."

"And guess how old Gabriel is," Tom piped up. Gabriel's face flushed.

"I already know," I replied as I flipped the page in the medication binder. He had turned 40 the week before.

"I vaguely remember being sane," he said as he stuck his tongue out at me and I peered into his mouth. "It was but a brief sojourn in my life."

According to the charts, Gabriel had been diagnosed the year after he received his doctorate. I watched as he touched upon one of the hundreds of skin-colored Band Aids covering his freckled flesh and discovered it was loose. With a perplexed look spreading quickly across his face, he disappeared. I knew he had gone to replace the bandage. His philosophy was the demons that possessed him entered his body through any dark markings on his otherwise fair skin.

* * * * *

A week later, on my 28th birthday, I was called to the morgue to identify a body the police had found in a nearby wetlands area at the bottom of a small creek. It was Gabriel. He thrashed around in less than two inches of water until he drowned. It was ruled a suicide.

My beliefs, adopted from my mother's, had been challenged. For I knew, the world Gabriel went to was guaranteed to be much better then the world he had just left.