Vancouver, February 2009
It culminates with a night of lying in bed, sipping Grey Goose out of the bottle, taking a couple of Ativan to relax a bit, and then taking what I think is a half a bottle of Vicodin. But I’m so blindingly drunk that in the darkness of my room and the red glow from my table lamp, I accidentally grab an old bottle of amoxicillin instead. While it doesn’t kill me, it makes me feel like absolute shit for three days. Occasionally I puke into my waste paper basket, I shake and feel excruciatingly cold, and my stomach feels like there’s an elevator going up and down inside, up and down.
There is something shameful about not drinking water just so you don’t have to leave your bedroom to piss. At some point you might remember that award you won in fifth grade—“the self-manager award”—and realize that in your current state, you’d be stripped of it.
I was supposed to be so much more than this.
Sometime during the late afternoon of day three, my phone vibrates. I flip it open to see that it’s my grandfather, again. This time he leaves a message:
He’s never been good on the phone, but lately his words are quieter than usual, with long drawn out pauses in between. “Tried calling… a couple of times… guess you aren’t there. Maybe… your phone’s not working. I hope you’re… okay. Anyway… I’ll call again later. Love you.”
This has to end now.
It does when I sell all the IKEA furniture my family bought me as college graduation gifts, illegally sublet my room on Knight Street, and buy a train ticket back home. Portland, Oregon, here I come.
A few days later I call my grandpa in Iowa and share the new plan. He is a man who thrives on order, facts and figures. I explain to him that though I will initially be poor in Portland, I will be less poor than staying in Vancouver. It’s a wise, economical and practical decision.
“Well, as long as you’re happy,” he says.
And for the first time in a year, I think I am.
Portland, May 2009
Portland isn’t just depressed, it’s devastated. As I walk up my parent’s country road half a mile from the bus stop, for sale and foreclosure signs are in front of most of the houses. When I make it up to the businesses on Barbur Boulevard, they are advertising 70% off sales, and men stand on corners, spinning signs that say “going out of business, everything must go!” I buy a $200 printer for $80 at an Office Depot closing its doors in the trendy Pearl District.
Over two months I send out seventy-five job applications and cover letters. No one responds. When I inquire if they are hiring at my favorite bookstore they tell me the job market is so bad, they are only hiring people with Master’s degrees.
My parents live in the southwestern part of Portland, far from busses (I don’t drive), far from the night life, and most importantly, far from all my friends. They’ve also recently taken to going to bed at 10:30 at night, and so I’m forced into the basement to entertain myself. I can’t have friends over without prior arrangement as our dog, Milo, will rip out the throat of anyone who comes through the door. The road outside their house has no sidewalks and no streetlights. The buses in their part of town stop running at 10:00 p.m. Most of the buses in Portland stop at midnight.
Even with its recent shiny, trendy, artsy veneer, Portland is no Vancouver. Turns out Portland isn’t home. I’m trapped and I’m suffocating.
June 2009
There’s a plane trip in my future, and I am not the greatest flier. When living in Vancouver, I would roll over to Student Health Services, lie about the number of flights I would be taking, and they would give me many more pills of Ativan than I needed. I would take at least two at a time, drink a cocktail, or two, or three, at an airport bar and float across the continent in every sense of the word. On this day, I sit in the doctor’s office unable to stop moving my leg and moving around in my seat, trying to keep a lid on my nervous energy. It doesn’t work.
The young resident gives me multiple questionnaires to fill out and when he returns and scores them, he sighs.
“Has anyone ever suggested you might have bipolar disorder?”
From the psychiatrist who interviews me for an hour a month later, I find out that people who seem a bit ‘enamored’ with Ativan end up having a high incidence of bipolar. They diagnose me as being right on the cusp of bipolar II. After consulting Google and Wikipedia I learn that I am more likely to be like Stephen Fry, less like Margot Kidder. More likely to look like a high-functioning overachiever, less likely to think I’m a superhero. Less likely to be institutionalized for staying up for days on end and thinking I’m the messiah. More likely to spend days in bed or completely drop out of life altogether.
The diagnosis does explain some things. I remember being a senior in high school and telling a friend, “It’s an even year this year—they’re never good ones for me.” He responded, adamantly, “People don’t consistently have years that are bad, that you can set your watch by—not unless they have something wrong with them.”
July 2009
They say the first year after diagnosis is the most critical; one bad week, one wrong pill, and it can throw everything seriously out of whack. I switch medications and dosages of my antidepressant so much over one year that my doctor labels my depression ‘extremely drug resistant’. During this process you start to feel less like a person, and much more like a high school chemistry project. Pill A works, but makes you constantly nauseous. Pill B doesn’t work, and also makes you lose weight. Pill C makes you tired, but Pill D keeps you awake, so if we give you just a bit more of Pill C with Pill D will it actually help you sleep at night, or will you sleep through the day and the night? They settle on Pill E and Pill F together, which makes me not want to scream fuck at everyone who crosses my path, and helps me to be able to leave my house and act more like a human. However, this wonderful combination includes the following side effects: weight gain, ridiculously low sex drive that rivals that of a panda, constant involuntary teeth grinding that suddenly disappears one day after three months, and my personal favorite—bizarre dreams every single night. We’re talking the kind of bizarre dreams in which you are making out with your fourth grade teacher, Mr. Savage, who was forty-five when you were in his class. Oh Mr. Savage, I’ve been naughty. Put me in the corner on the reading rug, like the bad girl I am.
Yeah. Every night is an adventure.
One bright light in my recovery is that I do finally get a job. My friend calls in a favor where she works, and gets me a job working at a new plus-size clothing store. They only give me twenty hours a week at $9 an hour, but it’s something, and when faced with a future of staring at the wall in the basement, I take it.
Because my insurance company decides bipolar disorder is not a coverable condition, I end up paying about $3,000 in doctor visits alone over a year and half, just to stabilize my health. Everything goes according to plan: to keep my diagnosis from my grandfather so as to not worry him. Lately he seems a bit out of it when my mom and I talk to him on the phone, and so she makes me promise to keep quiet about it. He doesn’t need to be bothered. Then my hours are cut at the clothing store. Then I get yet another medical bill.
My bank account is in double digits.
Work doesn’t start for another forty-five minutes, so I sit outside the Panera Bread, in a hot wrought-iron chair, tapping my phone against the metal table. I am in a suburb of Portland; Clackamas (Clackamas: an old Native American word meaning “shitty suburban sprawl”), in the blistering hot sun, wishing there was an open table with air conditioning inside. Three and a half years later, this mall will be the site of a spree-shooting that leaves two dead on the floor inside near the food court, the same place where I so desperately wished I’d had an open chair while I made this call.
The phone rings three times on the other end, and at first I have hope that he won’t pick up, but then I hear Grandpa’s voice rumble low. We exchange typical pleasantries and I try to delay this conversation as long as I can. Eventually, I start to feel sick so I just spit it out.
“Look, I need to talk to you about something, but I need you to keep it quiet from your family, okay?”
He goes quiet. He eventually grunts an affirmative.
“I’ve had to go to the doctor since I came back from Canada, a lot. I haven’t told you about it because I guess I didn’t think it was anything to worry about. I’m fine, okay?”
“Okay,” his voice pitches up.
“But my insurance is refusing to cover my care because they say I don’t have a condition they recognize, so I might need a little money for doctor’s bills.”
“Why won’t they cover you?” My grandfather has government retiree insurance. If he gets a hangnail, they treat it for free and give him a lollipop on the way out the door.
“Because I have bipolar disorder.”
Silence.
“But, I’m okay Grandpa. I’m not going to the loony bin or anything, or to a room with padded walls, okay?”
More silence.
“Grandpa?”
“I’ll send you a check. How’s work going?”
I’ve made a huge mistake. I’ve made him uncomfortable and he has just completely shut down. I shouldn’t have told him. He’s just drawn a line in the sand—we will not talk about such things.
October 2009
It starts with my cell phone vibrating on the nightstand until it tumbles off onto the carpet at 5:30 in the morning. The number is not one that I recognize so I roll over. Then it buzzes again—a voicemail received.
“Emily, it’s Calvin.”
I can’t breathe. Calvin is my grandpa’s nephew. He lives two hours away from my grandpa.
“Your grandpa had some surgery.”
My hands curl tight.
“He’s okay, but he’s giving his sister a lot of trouble at home. She called me and she’s very upset. Could you or your mother call there and talk with him? He’s very angry and not really listening right now, from what I gathered, and she sounded kind of scared.”
Taking the stairs two at a time, I meet my mother at the top. We’ve both just gotten the same voicemail. We convene in the dining room and she calls the shots. She tells me to leave the room and go shower or something. She will play bad cop and I will play good cop if necessary, later.
I take the world’s shortest shower—water on, throw soap on skin, turn around three times, water off. I stand in front of the mirror and shake. What the hell is going on almost 2,000 miles away?
When I return upstairs, things have returned to a state of relative normalcy and a plan is in place. My grandpa went from a sixty to zero, just by the sound of my mother’s voice. She always appeals to him with his favorite things—logic and facts—and he calms. Calvin is driving to see my grandpa and his sister over the weekend to assess the battle wounds. Christmas is a month and a half away, and his sister has a trip planned out of town, but now she is scared to leave him home alone. My mother strikes a deal by which I will spend most of the month of December with him, while his sister sails on a cruise.
“He told me his sister was stealing and hiding his clothes so he couldn’t leave,” my mother says.
When she relays this statement to Calvin he tells us something my grandpa has been keeping from us. He’s just recently been diagnosed with dementia. Finally.
Starting when I was thirteen and my mother, grandfather and I were all living together in his house just outside Portland, twice a year he complained to the doctor that something was wrong. They gave him the requisite test for Alzheimer’s, asked him the date, who the president was, and took blood tests. He always passed with flying colors, so they sent him home after a B-12 shot, and told him you’re just getting old.
The problem is they’d been testing for Alzheimer’s, not other forms of dementia, and so they essentially missed it until now.
Iowa, December 2009
After my first day in Iowa I walk to Smokey Row, the only coffee shop in town that offers free wi-fi, and write to my mother. I tell her that Grandpa and I ate dinner last night and talked about British politics, and he asked me to explain the Parliamentary system to him since “I know Canada has it too.”
“It’s really weird. He was totally engaged and actually seemed to understand what I was talking about. He explained back to me what a minority government is. He really doesn’t seem all that bad,” I write.
I walk the four blocks back through the snow, to the duplex, and from outside in the alley I notice my grandpa standing staring out the dining room window.
“Can you come here a second?” he asks as I walk through the door.
He’s standing in front of a cabinet with a dozen or so Precious Moments Christmas dolls his sister left out to generate some Yuletide spirit before she went on her cruise. He points down at the dolls.
“They aren’t moving are they?”
I’m confused. “Are they moving?”
“Yeah.” He reaches out and pokes one of the dolls, but it continues to stand motionless on its metal stand.
Heartbreak. He’s hallucinating.
“No, they aren’t moving, Grandpa. Do they look like they’re moving?”
“Well, not after I touched it.” He turns around and heads back to the living room to watch the news.
• • •
The psychiatrist I met with six months before told me I could up my dosage of Pill E whenever I am having trouble sleeping, or if life is just getting overwhelming. I never feel the need to do this until later that same night when I hear my grandpa stumbling through the house at about 2:00 a.m. He bumps into cabinets and tables, and his bedroom door repeatedly opens and closes. Then he starts yelling.
“Where is my bathroom?! Where is my bathroom?!”
Before I can make it to the door, I hear him finally find it. When I hear the toilet flush, I swallow two extra pills and pull his sister’s quilt over my head. My body may sleep ten hours, but my mind doesn’t wake up again until I’m back in Portland, safe in my own bed and alone with only my own illness. The words that psychiatrist uttered six months before echo strong: “Some days will be better than others.”
• • •
There’s this lie someone started, that knowledge is power. So once I am laid off from the clothing store, I spend a good portion of my days researching dementia and bipolar disorder. The thing that troubles me most is how similar the symptoms can be, since many people with dementia also suffer from depression. My grandfather will die from it if something else doesn’t take him out first. All the articles indicate I will struggle with it my whole life and odds are pretty good I will die from my illness too. Despite our vastly different ages, personalities, life experiences and interests, we have more in common now than we originally thought.
Unlike myself, my grandpa has never been a social man. He is quiet, stoic, and classically dependable—a John Wayne kind of guy. But when he was younger he was known for playing cards with the boys, occasionally drinking at the pub after work, and for arguing anything—whether he believed in it or not—way, way into the ground.
But this last time I’m in Iowa to take care of him something changes. Almost every day at a certain point he turns off the television and stares at the blank screen. Watching TV has been his pastime since it was invented, and so I ask him why he is turning it off. He lowers his voice and says, “Because I just can’t keep track of it anymore.” I feel a small twinge in my chest. I too have put down many books over the years for the same reason.
Iowa, December 2010
Christmas again, and I’m in Iowa to see the old man while his sister goes on another cruise. I am in grad school now, back in Vancouver. I have crawled my way back over the border with a semblance of recovery in hand. I have done everything you are supposed to do. I go to therapy for a year, I do yoga twice a week, I drink tea, I take baths, I take walks along the river, and later the beach. The break and the time with Grandpa has gone relatively well this time, until I reach into my suitcase and realize the pharmacy back in Vancouver shorted me two weeks’ worth of one of my pills. I spend my morning calling long-distance to Shoppers, calling Walgreens in Portland and Sacramento (where I will spend the next ten days), and eventually calling my doctor in Vancouver to find out what the withdrawal symptoms will be.
“Look, I am going to be hanging out with my mother’s boyfriend’s family soon. It’s usually really stressful—I do not want to be detoxing off this stuff during their Christmas dinner.” I’m sitting in the kitchen, on a barstool pulled up to the island. My grandpa sits quietly next to me on another barstool, sipping his morning coffee out of his old faithful “No More Mr. Nice Guy” mug my mom bought him for Father’s Day 1973.
“Well this just sucks,” I say to my grandpa as I hang up the phone.
“You know,” he doesn’t look away from his coffee cup. “I think I had that there… depression once.” He struggles with the word. It’s a word he can say in another context—the Great Depression. As in, “FDR was a great man. He pulled us out of the Great Depression.” But in this context, he falters.
And I can’t believe he’s admitting this. I thought he’d set the rules when I broke him the news of my diagnosis a year and a half before. We would not speak of such things.
“When Grandma Pat died,” I reply.
It was often talked about around the neighborhood. My grandmother died from lung cancer when I was three. My grandpa stopped leaving the house for pleasure. When neighbors saw him rush to his car for grocery trips or to go to work, he looked robotic and pale. Nancy and Ron next door started inviting him over for dinner once every other week when they noticed he had lost a lot of weight, and his cheeks were sinking further into his face. “He finally looks happy again now that you and your mom moved in with him,” Nancy told me one day when I was eleven.
“No,” he says, “When you were eighteen.”
• • •
When I was eighteen my grandpa spent most of his days in the house in Gresham, in his brown corduroy La-Z-Boy recliner. But there was something different about that time. Every night after dinner he’d reach into a cabinet near the sink in the kitchen and pull out a bottle with a drawing of a bird on it—Wild Turkey. He’d drop a couple ice cubes in the glass with the bourbon, sit back in his chair, stay quiet and drink. He might get up and refill once, maybe twice. At some point he’d break the silence by admonishing a newscaster reading the latest headlines from the Iraq War that day—“That Bush is sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong”—and then usually fall asleep, until the motion of his head falling forward would jerk him back up and awaken him.
By eight years old I knew exactly what a raging alcoholic looked like. My dad was one—he’d spend every night polishing off a bottle of wine, yelling at my mom, blasting songs by James Brown on his stereo, and dancing wildly around the living room while I tried to sleep upstairs. An alcoholic slept in until noon the next day; an alcoholic cheated on his wife; an alcoholic cornered his small child and screamed with rage in her face that she had ruined his life when she was born; an alcoholic lied, or didn’t show up for things they promised to show up to. Eventually an alcoholic would one day abandon you.
My grandpa was not an alcoholic.
But what I didn’t know, until I discovered it myself, is that some people use alcohol quietly to change their moods, to quiet a voice within, to stop some sort of pain, some sort of uneasiness. He may not have looked like he was falling apart, but for a man whose reputation was one of reason and responsibility, he was crashing hard.
During the year when my grandpa drank Wild Turkey every day, he took me to a reunion to meet his old co-workers from his days working on the cleanup of Mt. St. Helens. Some man, older than him, sat quietly next to us and when the host of the party offered him a beer, he turned it down.
“Can’t I’m ’fraid. I had a bit of a drinking problem for awhile.”
“Oh yeah?” my grandpa asked.
“Yeah. Whisky mainly.”
“Yeah, it’s awful stuff,” my grandpa replied.
I didn’t notice it then, but for some reason my grandpa was quietly in pain.
• • •
“Why when I was eighteen?” I ask him as we drink our coffees at the island.
“Because I couldn’t get that damn house in order.”
Several times he had tried to renovate our old ranch style house built in 1976, just outside of Portland. The plan was that I would go to college in Canada, he would renovate and sell the house to help me pay for school, and then he would move to Iowa to live with his sister. That all panned out, but the part where he would fix up the house himself didn’t. He painted a wall, then stopped. He tried to fix the garbage disposal, couldn’t, and my friend (eighteen at the time) did it. He tried to fix the sliding glass door, and resigned himself to placing a yard stick in it to keep it shut. Eventually he sold the house to one of those companies that flipped houses in the U.S., and in turn flipped the economy.
For a man born in a time when you were judged by what you could do with your hands, and how you kept your house in order, that must have been crushing. My grandfather hadn’t been depressed because he’d lost the love of his life like I thought, but because he’d begun to lose a part of himself and he felt it coming.
• • •
Still, there are extreme downward plunging moments when I climb into bed and don’t feel myself move for hours. In the past, those hours had turned to days, as I wallowed in self-loathing and crippling guilt over my lack of perfection. Now when I find myself there, I try to remember the year of the Wild Turkey. It reminds me that you can still feel awful inside but be a great person despite that. It tends to lessen the shame and helps me roll out of bed sooner rather than later.
• • •
My grandfather and I sit in his living room, watching It’s a Wonderful Life one night. It’s snowed a foot outside, and the whirring sound of the snow plows are starting to lull me into a state of relaxation. He returns to his recliner from taking his pills in the kitchen.
“Those dementia pills are fifty bucks a bottle, even with my insurance,” he says.
“Yeah well, the costs are better for me now that I’m back in Canada. When I wasn’t, I was insured but they refused to cover my medication anyway. I did get a thirty percent discount from Walgreens though, because they gave me a frequent buyer card like I was buying mochas from a cafe.”
He chuckles. “That’s pretty bad.”
“How much do you actually pay out of pocket for medication each month?” I ask.
“Oh… let’s see here… those blood pressure pills are about fifty cents a bottle.”
“Do not even talk to me right now.”
He smiles. “How much do you pay a month?”
“Well, it’s way cheaper now, but when I was back in Portland the one cost thirty-five, and the other was thirty three with my discount card. On a monthly average about sixty-eight.”
“Wow,” he says.
“Yeah, I win.”
Epilogue
Emily Walker's grandfather, Kenneth Schakel, passed away on January 29, 2012 from his fight with dementia.
He was 80 years old.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Walker was born in England, and lived on the island of Crete, Greece, before settling in Portland, Oregon. She spent almost eight years in Vancouver, BC pretending to be Canadian, before recently returning to Portland. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in print or on the web at Gawker.com, The Los Angeles Review, The Tyee, This Magazine, Little Fiction, and The Vancouver Observer. In 2012 her nonfiction was shortlisted for the Event Magazine nonfiction contest.
BT #007 © 2014 Emily Walker. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, May 2014.
