Today, August 25, 2014, we are only one day from 90 days clean and sober!  Today Zachary Simons starts college!  Today Zachary has his life in front of him, full of possibilities as he plunges into his hopes and dreams.  I have to admit that I find it odd that it is so much easier for me to talk about the heartbreak of this journey than the redemption. 

I live in a state of holding my breath.  It’s so beautiful, so miraculous, so glorious that to speak of it might jinx it.  This of course is ridiculous, but truthfully spoken.  Going through a season of grief unimaginable makes you suspicious of hope.  I’m guarded…and that means I miss out on some of the glory.  I have to trust in the process.

I am convinced that to not share this glory is to rob you who have followed this story for so long.  To rob you of faith that comes from watching your prayers for him be answered.  Please forgive me.  Rejoice with me, my friends, my son who I had given up for dead…who was wrapped in grave clothes has burst forth from the tomb…Spring has come, praise God.

You CAN'T heal, from what you won't FEEL.

Grieving...a topic that for many of us has been in the forefront of our minds, as we watched a broken hearted family in our local church bury their six year old daughter. 

The title of this post, "You can't heal from what you won't feel," is a phrase some of my "*Mops" moms and I repeat as we walk along side our sons on a path fraught with pain. The refusal to grieve is always a temptation.  Often, it is a survival technique; during the height of our son's crisis, when heartbreak came in unrelenting blows like a nightmarish carnival ride that refused us exit... it was simply too much.  Denial is a valuable, self-protective mechanism that provides a temporary stop-gap solution for pain that threatens to topple us headlong into oblivion.  It is, however, a tool, among many, that when abused can leave us emotionally arrested.  If we're not careful, we may find months and years that go by while we sit in an emotional stupor.  Other tools include, avoidance, self-anesthetizing, detachment, and distraction, and on and on. 

My personal favorite is detachment, I became amazingly skilled at this as a child.  I was particularly sensitive as a preschooler; I cried a lot. Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of good reasons to cry, but around six, I figured out that this wasn't working for me.  In fact, in my six year old mind it was beginning to threatened my very existence.  "I'll give you something to cry about," "crybaby," and a general sense of rejection were the byproduct of my emotionally labile personality. My memories from six on have a dry, heartless quality to them; my feelings had fled for safer haunts.

What is my point in all this?  I have come to realize just in the past couple of weeks that even though I have survived the past 18 month crisis mentally intact, and physically whole, I have become detached from my heart, not completely, but like a poorly abridged version of a classic novel I have gaps.  I grieved a great deal as I crawled through this dark, cold valley, but at times it overwhelmed me and I checked out.  I'm contemplating what it means to go back and process.  Why?

My Barometer for whether I have grieved thoroughly is my God sense.  When I shut down parts of my heart to cope, I shut down my ability to sense God.  It is the only faculty we have built to receive things of the spirit.  If I don't take care of my heart, my spirit suffers.  Without the spirit, there is no capacity for joy.  We become the dreaded, and strangely popular zombies that have taken over the entertainment industry, haunting the emotionally living, hoping to suck some kind of life from what they seem to have...endlessly frustrated.

I don't want to be a zombie.  Now to the business of grieving.  But how?  any suggestions?

*MOPS is a nationally recognized program for "Mother's of Pre-Schoolers." My friends and I hijacked the name to mean "Mother's of Pot Smokers." (It's the little things.)

Are you cold-hearted?

Empathy…the ability to feel compassion for what someone is experiencing without judgment.  How good at that are you?  I have to be honest…my natural response, the unchecked knee, has a “Get a grip, suck it up, try harder, you’ve got to be kidding me!” jerk reaction.   I’m sure there are many factors that play into this, but I’m confident of this, I need to change. 

Why is it that for many of us, our first thoughts are not of sorrow for the person suffering, but what they did to deserve their lot?  As is the case with so many of our human foibles, I believe there is a self-protective motive behind it.  We are always trying to reassure ourselves of our invulnerability to suffering…if the person did something to put themselves in the situation, well then, we will just be smarter, morally superior, or more disciplined and avoid it.  Also, I think if we can find a way to blame the victim then we  won’t have to feel so much sorrow, or ask the hard questions of God’s fairness.

I believe this tendency is exponentially worse when observing someone suffer from a mental health diagnosis or substance abuse.  

What words come to mind when you see a homeless man;  lazy, junkie, nut-job?  Next time give yourself  a moment to engage your heart, could it be he is; tortured, afraid, trapped?                                                             

A brave mom's journey.

There are many harrowing details that I could relate…and will probably get around to sharing the highs and lows of the last 18 mos., but I want to re-address the purpose of this blog. 

When I asked Zack’s permission to write about this journey, we both agreed that bringing understanding to the general public about the realities of mental illness and how it relates to substance abuse was our greatest desire.  We also have a passion for helping people in the Christian community grasp the truth about this topic and grow in their compassion for those that suffer from it. We as Christ followers have been woefully ill-equipped to minister to these individuals, and are often the most guilty of heaping condemnation and stigma on those that suffer.  Mental illness is on the rise, and with the legalization of marijuana and the drug tolerant attitudes that come along with that, we should expect it to skyrocket in the near future.

I recently met a mom who’s courage and fortitude in the face of unfathomable pain has left me in awe.  She agreed to allow me to post this newspaper article on my blog, because she too has a great passion for bring understanding for the mentally ill.  Following is a story that was published in the Seattle times that very well could become commonplace in our community if we continue the path we are on.  This tragedy occurred in Washington State…known for two things, a highly tolerant drug culture, and the second worst mental health care in the nation.

SEATTLE TIMES

On a Sunday morning in June 2011, Jordan Anderson’s mother knocked on his bedroom door to gather him for church.

Lorena Taylor-McPhail found her son dressed for worship, but also spread-eagle on his bed, seized by psychosis.

“Mom, it has started again — the war between good and evil,” he told her. “I’m burning up.”

Among the cruelties of severe mental illness is the fact that it often descends in the bloom of young adulthood. In Jordan’s case, he was 21, thinking about starting an automotive-parts business, a skilled BMX racer, handsome enough to model.

And then he was suddenly sick.

There is finally urgency in Olympia to reform mental-health care. One lawmaker after another has heard harrowing first-person accounts of scant treatment, denied at critical moments. Those who haven’t can hear it from Taylor-McPhail, who is telling her son’s story at legislative hearings Thursday.

Jordan’s story underlines the costs of our last-in-the-nation ranking for community psychiatric beds. In the last decade alone, the tally of beds certified for involuntarily committed patients dropped by a third.

Jordan’s first psychotic break came Jan. 14, 2011. His hallucinations were religious-themed — he was a prophet sent to save mankind from earthquakes and poisoned air. Suicidal, he jumped out of a moving car and was involuntarily committed.

But he stayed at a West Seattle psychiatric hospital just hours. He smashed a third-story window with a table and leaped out, according to Taylor-McPhail and other family members. Taylor-McPhail said Jordan was apparently left unsupervised when staff took a break.

Jordan crushed his heel during the escape and spent about a month at Harborview Medical Center, healing his body and mind. He left under a court-ordered treatment plan, but got permission to visit his dad in Arizona. “He did great. Fantastic, really,” said Ted Anderson, who lives near Peoria.

As Jordan’s 90-day treatment plan was expiring, Taylor-McPhail said she called his case manager because Jordan stopped taking the meds, but she was ignored. The delusions crept back.

She resisted joining a National Alliance on Mental Illness support group, and didn’t tell Jordan’s friends. “It was the stigma,” she said. “I was feeling the shame: What had I done as a mother?”

By the time Taylor-McPhail found Jordan sprawled in bed that Sunday morning, she was exhausted, isolated and desperate. She called 911 hoping he could go back to Harborview, but was told seven other patients were already stacked up in its ER.

Instead, he went to a Federal Way hospital. Records aren’t available, but Taylor-McPhail and her ex-husband, Anderson, have the same recollection: A King County psychiatric evaluator determined that Jordan wasn’t an immediate risk to himself or others, and suggested he spend a night in a homeless shelter. Because of mental-health confidentiality laws, the evaluator couldn’t take into account Taylor-McPhail’s concerns.

What frustrates me about this story is that the Legislature in 2010 passed a law to deal exactly with this scenario.

House Bill 3076 loosened criteria for the Involuntary Treatment Act, allowing evaluators to consider a patient’s history, including statements of family members, before deciding whether to civilly commit a patient.

But the start date was delayed twice — to 2012, then to 2015 — because it would require hundreds more hospital beds, at a cost of about $11 million a year.

The Legislature is now considering speeding up implementation with Senate Bill 5480. Gov. Chris Gregoire’s budget set aside $7.5 million for it, and Sen. Mike Carrell, R-Lakewood, gave it a hearing last week in the Senate Human Services and Corrections committee.

When Jordan wasn’t involuntarily committed, he left the Federal Way hospital with just a bus pass.

He found his way up to Seattle the next day, June 13, 2011. In the early afternoon, almost five months to the day after he was first committed, Jordan jumped off the 11th floor of the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. He died instantly.

Taylor-McPhail didn’t cry in our two-hour interview, but I suspect she did the moment I left. She said she felt powerless: She couldn’t even tell the evaluator what she knew. “The hardest part is, as a mother, you have all the responsibility and none of the power.”

The first domino falls.

Now that I have given a brief overview of the backstory  perhaps a detailed description of how we came to the current crisis is in order.

Jan. 20^th 2013, I approached the family PC as I had a thousand times before, and yes, my son’s Facebook page was open, as it had been numerous times before.  Normally, I would ignore it and close it down, but a word leapt off the page and caught my eye; suicide.  He had left an instant message with another teenage boy open.  Any thought of privacy went out the window as I saw myself as potentially responsible for reporting any possible danger. I was admiring my son as he was trying to talk this boy through some tough feelings, even quoting scripture and encouraging him to reach out to God.  The conversation, however, quickly changed; the boys began to talk about a previous interaction involving pot. 

My feelings quickly shifted from admiration to devastation as the undeniable evidence unfolded before my eyes.  Our son who had been taught from an early age that his mind was precious, beautiful, if not a bit fragile, and that he needed to take all precautions to protect it from substance abuse, had decided to ignore all warnings and engage in the very behavior that he had been told would wreak havoc on his mind.  Strangely, I just happened to be on the phone with the one friend who could talk me through these first shocking moments.  She dropped everything to be with me, and her presence was the first of many evidences of God’s faithfulness in this journey. 

The act of crying is such a strange, vulnerable experience.  Sometimes tears sneak out corners and slide down cheeks completely against our will.  We quickly wipe them away with embarrassed swipes of our hands, looking away to avoid the continued feeling of being laid bare.  Sometimes, however, there is a wailing that is so raw, so unprocessed that any thought of how naked and exposed you are has been overridden by immensity of the grief.  This is where I found myself. 

A prince in Austria is shot.  Storm clouds gather in the Atlantic.  A tendril of smoke rises in Waldo Canyon.

It’s rare for us to recognize the first domino to fall in a line of events that will spell out tragedy, and for those watching this unfold,  the grief I exhibited may have seemed disproportionate and superfluous, however the repercussions of all that this one decision represented was painfully obvious to this mom who had watched this boy struggle for so many years.  This was the beginning of a hell I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

Fluorescent Hum

This excursion has had many unforeseen turns, many trials I never thought I would have to face, but I always believed in some type of arrival point.  In the last two months the destination has become unclear…a fog hangs over the tracks, and the next stop  may leave me in some foreign land, where I don’t know the language.  It has taken me a while to come to terms with this uncertainty. 

I left off in the story of Zack at his seventh birthday party; a foreshadowing of the mental and spiritual battles we were yet to face.  The space this incident rented in my brain was minuscule, but its presence would resonate perpetually like the hum of a fluorescent bulb; a sound I usually can push back in my consciousness, but the tension of its effect is always with me.

 The nagging of this continuous hum drove me with a maddening fervor toward a one woman mission;  if the track that was laid out in front of us appeared to be headed in a direction that I didn’t want it to go then I was going to start ripping out railroad ties, and prying up steel rails with my bare hands.  I believed that if I could just help Zack to embrace his strengths, they would eventually outweigh his weaknesses. 

Music was the most obvious strength.  He had perfect pitch, and adored music.  He memorized all the composers, the era in which they composed, the pieces they composed, and could easily hum the main theme of these pieces. One of his favorite games was "guess the composer." In the car he would set the radio to the local classical station and attempt to guess the composer before the end of the song.  Often it might be a piece we had never heard before, but he could often guess correctly simply by recognizing the style.  I played clarinet in the Marine band so it was an easy choice when it came to choosing an instrument.  He excelled quickly. 

Geography was his next most obvious strength.   At five, from the place-mat he ate dinner on, he memorized all the states and capitals with an effortlessness and joy that was mind boggling.  Soon after, we bought him an atlas that he hauled around with him 24/7.  It didn’t take long for him to memorize the entire globe, the capitals of every country, their currency, and their anthem.  He entertained  and stunned adults with his knowledge.  He seemed to gain a great deal of pleasure from this skill.

There was a deep seeded flaw to this approach however.  First of all, weaknesses rarely disappear, even in the face of great strengths.  Only with hindsight am I able to see the kind of therapy that would have benefited Zack greatly.  I now preach to parents with struggling grade-schoolers, even pre-schoolers, to get help sooner than later.

The second flaw to this approach is that it put a lot of pressure on Zack to perform.  As much as I may have tried to shield him from my own anxiety about his condition he understood that being successful in his strengths was very important to his mom.  By the time he was in 8^th grade he was the 1^st chair clarinet in concert band, 1^st chair sax in jazz band, performing with the Colorado Spring Youth symphony, and participating in all-state concert band.  He had also won his school’s Geography Bee and was headed to D.U. for the state competition.

And that’s when it happened, he maxed out, red lined, the pressure was just too great,  and he broke.

The first time it happened we thought it might be the result of too much caffeine.  He said he felt excited, couldn’t calm down, couldn’t sleep.  We were at his grandparent’s house where Mountain Dew was a great treat, so we brushed it off and told him to stop drinking so much soda.  The second time it was more alarming, followed quickly by the third, fourth and fifth.  He was having panic attacks.  It progressed from alarming to terrifying in 72 hrs.  He was having 15 to 20 panic attacks a day.  When he was seized by one he would grab my hands with icy fingers, his face would go flush, and I could literally watch his pupils dilate as he gasped for breath.  It was enough to give me a panic attack.

Regrets? I didn’t get him help. My worst nightmare;  I would take him to a doctor, they would pronounce him mentally ill, cursing him to a life of pills and hospitals.  I foolishly thought if I could avoid hearing the doctor make such a declaration, pray through it, hold his hand, I could somehow stop this train from running us over.  I was in full blown denial.  No one could have told me the truth at that point. 

In the last two months I’ve had to face the reality that this will probably never end.  I didn’t realize that this is what I was pinning my hope on until this came to light.  I sense that mysterious unknown things are taking place in my heart, mind and spirit, that I have no more control over than my own heartbeat. It's as if my foundation has been morphed from solid bedrock to not quite set Jell-O.  Who I will be when all is said and done? This is yet to be seen.

apologies

For those of you waiting to hear the rest of the story I am sorry for not posting for so long .  We are deeply in the thick of things and I think that I might have something important to say but then we take another horrific turn in this journey and I don't know what I believe .  This is the essence of living through this however, I think I know something about God, about mental illness, about substance abuse, about parenting only to find out I was yet again mistaken.  Pray for me that I find some sure footing, and the voice to continue to speak.