Housebreaking

28 May 2015

This was the year Uncle Russell no longer had the wherewithal to make his annual Memorial Day pilgrimage to place flowers on the family graves, and this was the week Cheryl moved him to a rest home from his assisted-living apartment. The logistics were not particularly daunting; indeed, a lot of people worked to make the move happen, and the pieces of the puzzle pretty much put themselves together.

The problem was going to be Russell.

Russell is a dear, sweet, kind man, prone to impulsive gestures of generosity. He loved horseback riding and his 1938 Packard straight eight, and juggled and did sleight of hand to entertain the kids. When Cheryl was young and her mother was having a hard time of it, Russell, the only driver in the family, helped out.

In recent years Cheryl and I have become privy to a more complete picture of Russell. When a new peccadillo surfaced his sister, Cheryl’s grandmother, would always say “Russell’s odd, but we love him.” He has, as we now euphemize, issues. They are mental, though his body is a willing accomplice. They are real, they are lifelong, and they torment him. From time to time they overwhelm him. He is the most credulous, fear-driven, anxious man I have ever known. Even in photographs of him at his calmest, he always looks to me like a vulnerable little boy, as if he’s about to scrunch up his eyes and cry.

In the push to mainstream mental illness it’s easy to forget that just because you’re mentally ill doesn’t mean you don’t have character flaws. Certainly Russell’s anxieties color what he perceives and wants us to believe, but we’ve long known that he withholds information, misrepresents, and outright fabricates. His prevarication and his mental illness exploit each other; they’re intimately entwined. Once your interlocutor breaks your trust in his truthfulness, it doesn’t matter whether he has a character flaw or mental illness. Once you accept that you’re in an unsolvable one of those liar/truth-teller logic puzzles, it’s not so hard to deal with someone who may or may not be speaking truth. I marvel that I can sometimes even let that ambiguity feel liberating. The words are ephemeral. They carry no weight, impose no obligation to believe.

I’m inclined to dismiss how Russell copes with his pain as maladaptive, but his continued existence at a surprisingly robust 93 belies that assessment. I’m on much firmer ground when I say that it’s suboptimal, and no one could contradict me if I say he’s high-maintenance and often maddening. The disorder in his life has increased over the last several months with the realization that his memory is declining feeding his voracious anxiety. The wheels to move him to a place safer than a hands-off assisted living facility began to turn, slowly, then with gratifying urgency.

With Russell no decision is ever final. He changes his mind and mood from day to day, hour to hour, and even from one minute to the next. It’s as if the only way he can perceive grey is to flip back and forth between black and white really, really fast. Cheryl and I embark on the campaign to get him on board with moving to a more supportive home, a prospect stressful even for those less excitable than he. Basically, our plan is to wing it and be flexible, a strategy that is way out of my comfort zone. I like to know where I’m going and how I’m going to get there, but Russell’s state of mind is so unpredictable there isn’t any useful road map. There’s nothing for it but to just do it. We take him on visits to his potential new quarters in a family-run rest home, help him weigh the pros and cons, coordinate with the powers involved, allay his anxieties. He resists out of habit, but it’s pro forma; his heart’s not in it. His acceptance buoys us. We can exhale.

It’s a week of all Russell, all the time. To decompress, Cheryl and I indulge in consecutive stolen evenings at our corner pizza joint, where we recap and analyze the latest events, and make rudimentary plans for the next day. Finally, the siege ends. Russell has spent the night in his new place.

Cheryl and I bring our grandson, the hired muscle, to start dismantling Russell’s old room at assisted living. It’s just as he left it. The curtains are drawn against sunlight and the outside world. Both the heat and air conditioner are cranking. The air is viscous with old-people aroma: sketchy hygiene, perfumed insecticide laid down during the institution’s periodic cockroach pogroms, and mummified sardines. The scent will be sticking to our clothes and hair when we leave, following us home.

Russell swims against the tide as best he can, now and again showing a hard-won scintilla of awareness of the nature of his problems. Hope endures. We trust Russell won’t leave his current incarnation until he gains some insight into where true happiness lies. Meanwhile he teaches us patience, how to help without being enablers, and not to invest too much emotional capital in a specific outcome. These are non-trivial jobs, and we’re all slow learners.