It's the anniversary of Gregory's death. He was 42 when he died, and if he were still alive he would be 49. If he were alive, I cannot think that he would be any happier for it. His life took a dark turn, and it is a turn that could happen to anyone.
At the age of nineteen, he was diagnosed with a mental illness. Nobody seemed to know what this mental illness was, but there might be a medication for it and the pro's tried assiduously to find it. Nothing worked very well for any length of time.
There runs through my father's family a strain of depression like a dark vine that flowers now and then, here and there, in the chosen one. It could be that this illness that came forth was a blossom of this vine. Could be something else entirely. Greg had no money and I was a struggling schoolteacher with no money to help him pursue a leisurely or rational search for a root cause for his depression. It was certainly major, producing almost catatonia once at least, and black feelings and dreams and heavy misery some of the time.
The rest of the time he was a pleasant, funny, talented young man with lots of interests and a gift for researching and talking about these interests. Once he got on the medication, serious musical practice was out of the question for him. He was incapable of learning past a certain point where he'd gotten stuck long ago. Was it when he wanted to take organ lessons and I did not have the resourses to make connections and see that he got them? Maybe. He loved the Episcopal Church and the music thereof.
His writing, his poetry, were stuck too. He would try. He would write, but what he wrote was stuck in some part of his head and couldn't develop. He returned to some simple age in his mind and accepted that return in order to adapt to his reduced hopes and circumstances of life.
People who had kids in similar tragic conditions would tell me, "Oh, he's luckier than my (twenty year older) son. Any day now they're going to find (a cure, a miracle, an eraser, a panacea) that is going to fix him right up." It never happened.
He was in a "program" with the County, and the psychiatrist who oversaw that program wanted Greg on a certain drug. Let's call it Dexdex, though that 's not its name. "Well, Dr. So and So is known to be a Dexdex man," one of the young men in his group told me. So Gregory went on Dexdex. I feel now of course that Dr. So and So was running a clinical trial, and didn't want a loose nut (so to speak) in his little group. Dexdex did a lot for Gregory at first, (he got smarter) but shortly he became a different fellow, scornful, harder to talk with, more isolated even in the family. Physically Greg had lots of problems associated with those drugs; I won't go into that.
Many years had gone by and nothing had really done it for him, so I let it go though I asked him to leave the group and get off that medicine, but by then (this was 20 years after he'd first become ill) he was dependent on the group, less sure of himself, reluctant to make a precipitous change.
Mental illness patients regularly have to go into hospital to "decompensate" for the effects that their drugs have on them. They are removed from their medications, and watched carefully as a new medication program is started up again. Sometimes they have to be strapped down or restrained as their minds and bodies respond to the huge changes happening within their bodies. Greg one night asked to be restrained because his anxiety was so great that he could not bear it; the caregivers were flustering around trying to get him some help (Dr So and So not being "on" that night) and while they flustered, he ran down a corridor and banged his forehead on a steel door. He shattered C7 and injured C6 and C5, they discovered, after they walked him to the emergency room. We were informed of none of this. After an operation in the middle of the night to stabilize things, he emerged a quadriplegic who was never again able to sort coins, sort stamps, play the guitar nor the piano, even after he was able to be propped in a chair and get himself about. It was not a happy time. After "two and two-thirds years," as he noted shortly before his death, he was able to break through his bonds of earth, and he left us. He died naturally and without physical pain. I was fortunate enough to be there when he died, and for hours thereafter as we could not get the first responders nor the cops there for a very long time. Friday night is a very busy night for the Chula Vista cops. So I sat with him until time for his body to be taken away. It was a remarkable experience, and one that's rare in these days when people say goodbye in a hospital and then are hustled out and the body removed to the basement. Most of the family had paid their last respects. His father, Alexander and Benjamin were there. We were all at the maximum of fatigue, but I stayed there with him and the nurses. Then the nurses left for their homes and the business of death transpired. By dawn, the people from the funeral home came, and Gregory's body was taken from the house. I asked only that they not enclose him into a body bag in my presence. They assured me that they would not, and by seven a.m. I stood in my front door watching the men push his body down the driveway, suitably covered, to the waiting hearse. Then I went to bed and I think I cried. YAZZYBEL
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