Shades of Eva (35 page)

It was the
we
in Mitchell’s life—the
whos
whom I was interested in. Since grief is a sort of
story, grief involves a hero as well as villains. It’s those heroes
and villains who I care to get to know. That’s what drove me to do
the work that someone like me does over the course of a life.
Personality psychology is nothing more than the art and science of
understanding stories.  

Funny thing is, and sometimes you don’t
realize this until it’s too late, sometimes someone else’s
story—one you may have considered quite foreign to your world—is
not so foreign at all. Sometimes you realize you’ve been a
character in a stranger’s story for quite a long time. That’s
always a scary feeling, but not quite as scary as when you realize,
for the first time, that you aren’t just a character in someone
else’s story, but you’re one of their villains!

And then again, maybe that isn’t so funny
after all.

***

The race is not to the swift, or the battle
to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the
brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to
them all.  Moreover, no man knows when his hour will
come.  As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken
into a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall
unexpectedly upon them. ~Ecclesiastes 9:11-12

Ben Levantle

My office wasn’t much—it was probably too
clinical—but when I shut that door, I wanted Mitchell, and everyone
else I’d counseled, to know that this place, this one place on
earth, was a safe one. They could talk openly and things would
never leave that room. Whatever questions they had would be heard
and attended to. If I didn’t know the answer to those questions
(and I quite often didn’t), then we’d search for the answers
together, and if together we couldn’t find those answers, then
there were other men and women smarter than me who probably
could.

Such was the tone I tried to set.

I offered Mitchell something to drink. He
refused and sat down. Before I could take a seat, he told me that
he was both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, that he was afraid of
both closed and open spaces.

“That’s quite a combination,” I said. “You
must be afraid all the time.”

I waited for a laugh, but Mitchell wasn’t
humored. He stared at me in reproach, and I finally sat. “I need
help,” he said, shaking his head. “Not jokes!” 

I nodded, but I didn’t agree. Healing and
humor are two sides of the same coin.

So there sat in my office a young man at
odds with his existence. That much was true by mere observation.
Since our Rapture conversation, his face had become taught; his
eyes sunken a bit. His hands, I noticed, wrung with the anxiety of
a young man who seemed trapped in his own skin. I think he even
began sweating, which struck me as unusual.

Mitchell didn’t just want a reference to
another doctor. He wanted counseling, and not the fifty-minute
session once per week variety. Since I was retiring in two weeks,
Mitchell wanted something more frequent—three sessions per week for
two weeks—and he wanted to meet outdoors. “We only have a few
days,” he said. “Let’s make the most of it. Forget I’m a patient
for a little while.” He wiped some sweat from his forehead.
“Pretend I’m just a visitor from another planet. I’ll bring chicken
and we’ll call it a rendezvous.”

I had to laugh as I handed him a tissue.
Outdoor sessions and other unconventional requests (like two-hour
sessions three times a week and picnics) were always the first
signs of a person who wanted more from a counselor than what should
be expected. I couldn’t be a friend to Mitchell; I couldn’t be a
surrogate father or grandfather. I also wasn’t Carl Sagan, and I
didn’t picnic with visitors from other planets. A handful of
references to colleagues was all that I had at the time.

Of course I was leaving in two weeks for
that cruise, but Mitchell did strike me as an intelligent, if not
downright interesting person. Perhaps I could clear a couple more
hours on my calendar for a couple more days, but I needed a better
reason than mere claustrophobia (or agoraphobia, not that those are
mere conditions) and I needed assurance from Mitchell that he would
follow up with another counselor once our time was up.

As for a better reason, what he gave me was
the tale of the alcoholic hunting sobriety. Again, he dabbed at the
sweat on his brow. Mitchell was asking me to become a sort of
replacement for the booze—at least for two weeks—and then reassured
me that he’d gladly move on to the counselor of my choosing once
our time was finished.

It was hard to say no to a man who was
reaching out to you in that manner. The seriousness of his
addiction wasn’t so serious (at least it didn’t seem so) that he
needed a three-day ticket to an inpatient center, but it was
serious enough, I thought, to warrant the regimen he was asking
for. And so I agreed. Two sessions a week, two weeks, cash at the
door, and a reference to three counselors in the area whom I
thought would best serve him after that.

We shook on it and that’s how Mitchell
Rennix entered my life.

Mitchell told me he was from
River
Bluff. I was working the name Rennix over in my head. I didn’t know
any Rennixes from River Bluff, or elsewhere, for that matter,
though the name sounded familiar. I asked him what his father’s
first name was, and he said Jack. I asked what his mother’s maiden
name was, and he said he didn’t know, which I thought a strange
response.

“What was your maternal grandfather’s last
name?” I tried.

Mitchell just shook his head and asked,
“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“You don’t know her first name or her last?”
I asked, wondering for some reason if he was trying to hide
something from me. Who doesn’t know their mother’s maiden name?

“Mom’s name was Mom!” he said,
unsmilingly.

It’s common knowledge that in counseling,
you don’t fare well with polity and undue respect sometimes.
Sometimes patients need to be worked up, and only then will they
let a few cats out of the bag. Mom’s name was Mom!—was a blatant
disregard for my question, and disrespectful to me as a person. Not
that her name—either of them—was of particular importance, but I
did push a little harder.

“You remember her name!” I said, stating it
bluntly and as a matter of fact.

He didn’t bite. He said, “I want to talk
about what’s important to me!”

At that point, a clinician can continue to
push things, or he can back off. I chose the latter. I typically
didn’t dig for names like I was with Mitchell, but I was getting an
unmistakable hint of evasiveness from him to go along with the
slight disrespect, and I only had a few sessions to form any useful
opinions to pass on to the next clinician. Since we hailed from the
same town, if I knew his family, then it might shortcut us through
a lot of exploratory dynamics.

But I digressed. I had to reconsider whether
or not Mitchell was being evasive, or if his lack of clarity might
simply be a function of a lack of information, and thus, neither
disrespectful nor evasive. Some patients aren’t privy to a detailed
family history, or a scant one for that matter, particularly when
they are orphaned at the age Mitchell said that he was.

He said his mother was only
thirty-four-years-old when she died, and he only five. Her
passing—regardless of her name—had resulted in his relocation to
Indiana where he was housed with an uncle.
Housed
was the
word Mitchell used, as if he were a pig that had been corralled in
a pen.

I chose to use the term
resided
, a
term less custodial and one I thought more adequate to describe
Mitchell’s situation. He wasn’t
thriving
there. He didn’t
stay
with this uncle. Stay was too hotelish of a word. By
age sixteen, he was a runaway. You don’t run away from hotels—you
check out. He wasn’t exactly
living
with his uncle,
either—just the opposite, he said. He was dying there, and he felt
he had to get out.
Resided
seemed the best word and least
condemning to anyone.

I moved the conversation to something more
immediate, however: Why the homecoming? “Why come back?” I asked
him, trying to gauge his attitude toward his hometown, as well as
his goals for returning. “Why not Montana or Alaska?”

“Too many ghosts in my head,” he said. “I
feel like they need exorcizing!”

I presumed he meant family when he spoke of
ghosts. Most likely these ghosts were the whos behind his grief, at
least the better part of it—and I was right. Family is usually what
patients mean when they refer to their ghosts. I knew they’d reveal
themselves in time, and so, therapeutically, a homecoming was a
necessary step toward healing.

“So, an exorcism brings you to this office,”
I stated, trying to elaborate the point.

“I hear voices sometimes, and laughing, and
sometimes crying,” he explained.

“What kinds of voices are these?”

“People voices.”

Mitchell said that he’d heard these voices
and this audible laughing and crying for quite some time. He even
had a term to describe the group of them: a congregation. He made
it sound as if his mind was a sort of parish, and these voices,
parishioners. I was Catholic and certainly appreciated the
metaphor. In fact, Mitchell likened his congregation to a
back-talking choir, as if he were the conductor at whom they
laughed at and cried over. And I suppose he was.

It was sad. It was fascinating. It was
shades of multiple personality, and shades of schizophrenia. It was
shades of Sybil and the Three Faces of Eve; shades of a Kingdom
called Yr and a Collective that lived in the mind of Deborah Blau,
a character in a Joanne Greengberg novel called I Never Promised
You a Rose Garden. It was also shades of the overzealous, who often
magnify the innate voices of conscience and reason into the
ghostlike admonitions of ancestors past.

It was all of those sad and fascinating
things.

I thought it a good idea to back
up
and check into two other things: a history of trauma, and the
severity of his substance abuse. Either might account for the kinds
of auditory or visual hallucinations to which Mitchell was
referring. Either can be quite mind-bending.

Regarding trauma, Mitchell made reference to
what he called his molestation. He said this happened in a toolshed
when he was five-years-old. Only once, but it happened. He said the
assailant was a neighbor, an older man maybe forty-years-of age, a
man who was subsequently shot and killed during the act by
Mitchell’s mother. A sufficient trauma to say the least!

Tragically, he said his mother died soon
after this incident as a result of stress and at the hands of a
psychiatrist.

When I asked him to clarify how a
psychiatrist played a role in her death, he said his mother had
been lobotomized after the shooting because she couldn’t cope with
what happened, suffered a total memory loss, and returned to the
family a blank slate with no memory of her past, her family, or the
shooting.

“She was a totally different personality,”
he went on, and I had no cause to doubt him. Lobotomies at such an
age can destroy a person, let alone a personality.

I asked how long his mother survived after
this lobotomy, assuming her death was perhaps a near-immediate
side-effect of the procedure, as was the case of most adults
undergoing a lobotomy.

He said seven months.

When asked if an autopsy was performed on
his mother, he said there was one on record, but the M.E. could not
identify an anatomical cause of death.

There are three general aspects of grief:
anger, resentment, and fear. Some call this the triangle of grief.
My immediate concern, particularly with grieving young men who come
home to deal with such a triangle, is with the anger aspect of that
triangle. When you start talking about metaphorical killings—like
death via lobotomy—or death via stress—and begin using the language
of homicide, you have to begin asking about who the villains are in
the patient’s story.

Though he’d said his mother was killed at
the hands of a psychiatrist, I hardly believed this
psychiatrist—whoever he or she might have been—was the only villain
in Mitchell’s story that might have inflicted such stress. The
neighbor whom his mother shot was an obvious second choice for
villain, but I wondered who might have been third or fourth or
fifth on Mitchell’s list. After all, there was a congregation of
voices in his head. There were likely as many villains in his
story.

It’s important to address them all, all of
these aspects of grief, and particularly those villains to which it
might be connected, and equally important that these so-called
villains aren’t truly confronted. At least not until they’ve been
confronted, in vitro, or in therapy, that is.

This in vitro confrontation takes time, but
it’s a necessary process that takes some of the venom out of the
sting of grief. The last thing a counselor wants on his hands is a
revenge killing before anger can be addressed in a haven such as my
office, and I only had a few days to begin to address it.

As far as substance abuse issues were
concerned, Mitchell said he was trying to quit whiskey. I asked
when he took his last drink. He said it had been three days since
he’d quit, and it had been a cold turkey quit at that. He said he
had been given a prescription for Valium to ease the withdrawal,
and one for Dilaudid for a pair of broken ribs he had suffered in a
bar fight several days ago.

Setting my concern for the Valium aside, I
asked why he had fought. He told me it was a fight over egos and
that he was drunk.

It was an old theme. I offered my
complimentary warning about substitution addictions: Valium, for
instance, for alcohol, and suggested an AA program for follow up.
He took the suggestions in stride and promised to consider each of
them.