I have a former step-nephew-in-law (gotta love these blended/extended families) who probably died this week, a victim of Hurricane Irma. His family was being evacuated, but he refused to go. He believed that the government had ordered him to defuse a bomb, so he fought evacuation assistance and ran. The family was given a choice: Evacuate now, or be left behind, because there are thousands of other people waiting. They left him behind. There was nothing else they could do.
As of this writing, I don’t know whether he survived somehow. I don’t know what the circumstances of his probable death were. I don’t know whether he was oblivious to what was going on around him, whether it became part of the hallucination he was living in, or if the fury of the storm brought him forcefully into reality at the last minute. In his lucid moments he could be crafty and resourceful.
My former sister-in-law is struggling with her feelings over this. The marriage that brought him into her life ended, and with some relief. The young man had terrorized her, stolen from her, put her at risk, made her life a frightening and increasingly stressful thing. And yet, we both can remember the beautiful boy with the infectious laugh. He was a charmer, and after a few years he learned to use that charm like a weapon.
Yes, of course he had been in and out of mental treatment facilities, and in and out of jail, too. He was no longer welcome in at least two states that I know of. His banishment from my sis-in-law’s life was both a sadness and a relief to her. When they were first becoming a family, it was a magical time. There was so much joy, and a feeling of home like she had never experienced. Sadly, the memories of the pain are stronger than the memories of the joy. The joy must feel like a lie in hindsight.
It wasn’t a lie. But things change, and sometimes dramatically so. These kinds of relationships are nearly always some kind of soul contract. We usually can’t see them for what they are until we’re past the awfulness and into the healing. His whole life may have been a soul contract, with “Game Over” as the painful conclusion.
I have to confess that the thought did cross my mind that he would be better off dead than stuck in the endless, painful spiral he was in. From hospital to jail to rehab to jail to hospital . . . Around and around, always being somebody’s problem, always being viewed as one of the dregs, one of the lost, a hopeless case.
The sad fact is, for all our knowledge and all our scientific understanding and all the vast years of experience that we have trying to treat, heal, medicate, deal with, contain, or restrain people like him, we have no fucking idea what they really need. We have no clue what help even means. We throw some chemicals at it and see what happens, and more often than not nothing good comes of it.
My heart doesn’t know what to do, so I simply send comfort to his family, and pray that he didn’t suffer. We will never know what his last moments were like. If he somehow survived, it may be months before we even know it. I’m sure that a couple of days being battered by a hurricane did his state of mind no good at all, and his body may be in need of some repair, too. I cannot imagine what his parents must be going through, sick with worry. All I can do is hold the memory of the sweet kid I knew close to my heart, and sing out the comfort.
Whether he survived or not, I hope that his experience can spark a conversation about mental illness among the Light and Sound Work community. I think pharmaceutical science has done enough. They cannot possibly understand mind or soul. That’s our gig. We need to start coming through for these folks. We need to embrace them, elevate them, let them know they’re loved. We need to stop letting mental illness be stigmatized and start working our asses off to find a way to integrate these folks with their unique gifts, abilities, sensitivities and understanding, into the rest of the world so they can be purposeful or peaceful or happy or simply live lives that aren’t terrible. How many people do you know who could be the protagonist of the above story? Maybe your own kid, or a sibling, cousin, parent, neighbor . . . maybe all of those and more. Maybe the person in the mirror. We have to do better.