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1/22/23

Almost a Lifetime as a Prisoner of Schizophrenia, then a Divine Miracle of a Mind Coming Alive with Freedom for My Brother (part 1 of 3 parts )

Part 1 of 3: Hard confessions to Mom
By Robert R. Schwarz

                               However  often a man may sin, if he return to
                                    me with  true and heartfelt penitence, I  am
                                    ever  ready to receive him; and I do not  regard
                                    the number of his sins, but the intention  and
                                    will with which he returns. ( attributed to Saint
                                    Bridget from her vision of Mary, the mother of
                               Jesus )



A Memoir by Robert R. Schwarz

                                    
           
          My 54-year-old brother woke up with confusion more distressing than any past hallucination from his paranoid schizophrenia. This morning he felt something painfully shrouding him from which he could not free himself. It was the flashing anguish of self-condemnation for his years of perverse behavior. Other memories of his life before age 25 were vague:  teaching grade school after graduating from college, then marrying and fathering two children. Then, like a thief in the night , came the schizophrenia, and a divorce followed by  officer's training in the U.S. Air Force. A few  months later  he wore lieutenant bars but soon  was given a general discharge. After several hospitalizations, he moved himself into a   retirement home and   barely stayed off the streets. 
***
            On this particular morning in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights , Illinois,  Lester  was desperate to free himself of his bondage of self-condemnation, from that seemingly omnipotent dark force which had been cruelly jabbing at him for three decades.   Hallucinations and strange voices he could survive --though barely-- but not this.
            Lester got into his old Buick ( inherited  from our  deceased father  ) and drove to a nearby nursing home to see the  only human he knew who was not afraid to confront his  dark side with  more empathy than I or anyone among   the bevy of counselors and psychiatrists he had seen in the last 29 years. It was his mother,   Mrs. Dorothy Schwarz.
             I met the two of them an hour later when  I stepped into our mother's nursing home room , intruding on a whisper-quiet conversation the two were having. Lester had  a sheepish look.
           
           
Mom, Lester ( behind her )  and  me.
Mom
 was  in her early eighties then , with a full head of curled white hair and an unwrinkled face with a modest touch of rouge . She was wearing a flower-patterned  dress and a warm smile . (Neither she nor my father ever saw a  day of  dementia.) Lester was months overdue for a haircut; he  wore a red shirt with food stains; his eyes unfocused eyes and his skin darkened by years of strong medication..Family and boyhood  friends  had nicknamed him "The Lamb"—it was never meant to have any religious significance ,  but to fit  his gentle and  compliant behavior.
            " Bring in a chair for your brother,"  Mom said.          
            Lester got the chair and then  went for the door. " See you later, Robert ,  " he said.
            "Don't go ,  son, "  Mom said. "You know how I love to see you two together."
            Lester  left   to smoke . He was truly addicted to nicotine and would soon  pay heavily for it. 
            Mom's  room was small but  made homey with family photographs , two vases of artificial flowers,  and a few  oil paintings on the wall  done by my late artist  wife, Judith .  My mother had  television to watch her favorite  Ted Turner  movies, like  The Wizard of Oz.  On her night table was the Holy Bible, a book on theosophy,  and   autobiographies of  movie stars like  Betty Davis and Clark Gable. 
            I had brought  Mom  a bottle of  Chantilly Lace ,  her favorite cologne . .
            "Put it on  my dresser," she said. I also showed her the jar pf cinnamon she had requested to spice up the  usual bland nursing home meals. Mom had been an excellent, indefatigable  home cook and baker,  and now she sorely missed her gourmet-like food. ( It had been  a sad day for her  when she lost her dentures by leaving them on a food tray and now had to eat pureed food because her jaw could no longer support dentures. ) 
            When I asked her  what she and Lester  had been talking about , she  lowered her head and said,  " I shouldn't tell you."
              "Yes, Mom, you should.  I need to know. "
            " He does things he shouldn't," she said. 
            " Please tell me."
            She did: There had been his   late night drives  to a  porno shop , and , most alarming to me,   the recent skipping of his anti-psychotic meds whenever he could fake  swallowing them in front of the nurse who knocked daily on his retirement  home door. 
            Mom took off her glasses and  looked away. Her face  showed the regret  of a loyal  mother  now helpless to stop her son   from  damning himself .
            "How often does he do this ? " I asked, hating to sound   like a  prosecuting attorney .
             " He visits me sometimes twice a  week. "  
            Mom  held back tears and put on  her glasses.  We stayed silent for a long moment.  She broke the silence with,  " I wish my family had stayed at the ranch." 
            I welcomed the segue as my thoughts flew back many years ago  to a run-down  barn and a small house on  a remote 207 acres in far western Arkansas . Dad  purchased  all this at a bargain price upon his retirement as a truck salesman for the International Harvester Company in Chicago .  For years, we kids and Mom had been hearing Dad  say ( while reading his  Strout farm catalogue),   "I wish we had  a little piece of land ."
       ***
        Mom often wished for those few precious months her entire family had been together on those 

farm- land acres when Lester was quite healthy with his wife and toddler son and I having just 

completed my two years of U.S. Army draft.     Those months on the "ranch" were filled with  

Mom's Dinner roasts and baked pies ( inspired by her Swedish ancestry)  and   family  strolls with 

 laughter through fields of Lespedeza and Bermuda grass. We all enjoyed sharing memories  of  


our  head-strong  bull named Rollo and the by a dozen polled Herefords , each named by my mother

and fed by her every morning.

      Every  night Lester would drag out the telescope he had constructed at the Adler Planetarium  in

Chicago , and  we'd sit on the front law  making up silly  names for star constellations.  
  Teenage Lester in Canada with  a Northern Pike
he just caught.
            A few hundred feet down the rocky sandy road in front of our house  and concealed  by pine and oak trees was a  small abandoned church which a farm neighbor re-opened for Mom for  to teach Sunday school. ( I was  surprised to learn that my mother's teaching was an addition to her  Christian  orthodoxy---in spite of her library of pre-New Age books about Theosophy, astrology , Buddhism , karma and reincarnation . Dad, raised Catholic, had been unable to dissuade her from her study of the occult . Lester and I absorbed some of her occult beliefs, especially karma and reincarnation. Nevertheless, Mom and Dad strove to teach all of  us to genuinely care for our neighbors, and insisted we remain "good, moral children." Lester and I were both confirmed in a Lutheran church and later attended a Christian Science church , where Mom taught Sunday school in those early years. How often I heard Mom wistfully tell Dad ,   " I am searching . " A few years before my father died of congestive heart failure, I asked him about his faith .  Tapping his pipe,  Dad replied , " I just ask myself what would Jesus do, and then try to  do it. " He loved to read Plato and  for years kept a Bible on his bedroom night table, often reading the book of Romans . 
         ***
Lester reentered the room and quickly left again.  I left a few minutes later . Her  parting words were. " Well, son ,  you know that  as ye sow, so shall ye reap . "  Then she  looked at me and, as if sharing  a long-concealed and precious secret, said ,  " I love Jesus and pray to Him every night  ." 
            I didn't know what to think now   about my mother's unorthodox faith.     
            I hugged and kissed  Mom and left . As  I did , two cheerful  nursing assistants entered and began a tea-party-like  conversation with my mother.  I eavesdropped outside the door, and when another cheerful staff  member brushed by me to join her colleagues in their   light-hearted conversation,  I asked  her, " What in the world is  going on in there ?" She  quickly replied,  " Really nothing. I guess we go in there now and then to get  cheered up by Mrs. Schwarz. " 
            My thought was: Aren't you  the ones paid to do the cheering up ?!
            Driving home,   the tenderness of my mother's  feelings  somehow saddened me and, oddly, stirred a few  scenes of what she had once told me of her childhood. There was that old Schindler vaudeville theater near Bucktown in Chicago, where she was raised by her Swedish  mother and Russian immigrant father . Her mother was the ticket cashier and her father, Victor Rossnagel,   managed the theater which, with its silent movies,  often was a substitute for my mother's  babysitter .  I also imagined Mom , when  only 20 , playing classical piano for a Chicago radio station and singing in her church choir. 
***
            At the dinner table in my home that night, my wife asked why I was so silent. "  I can't reconcile my mother's  occult beliefs  with what she told me about Jesus," I said.  Neither could my wife.  Later,  I spent an hour rummaging  through old family documents and  came across a   poem Mom  had written at  age 18 , a few days after  Lester was born.  I believe it was her first and  only  poem she  ever wrote.
                        Where did you come from, Baby Dear?
                                Out of the Everywhere into here…
                                Where did you get those eyes so blue?
                                Out of the sky as I came through.
                                What makes the light in them sparkle and spin ?
                                Some of the starry spikes were let in.
                                What makes your cheek like a warm white rose?
                                I saw something better than anyone knows.
                                Where did you get this pearly ear ?
                                God spoke, and it was made to hear.
                                Where did you get those arms and hands?
                                Love itself made those arms and hands.
                                But how did you come to us, you dear ?
                                God thought about you, and so I am here.

                  In re-reading Where Did You Come   from Baby Dear?  before writing this report, I was struck by these words written about the Baby Jesus   by Caryll Houselander , a British mystic and poet:   It would have been unbearable to hold that infant Son in her arms , knowing that He must go away to a life of suffering and a cruel death, were it not for her faith in His heavenly Father , were it not for the certainty that the hands of God would  always be holding Him, and that God's hands, incredible thought it seemed, would hold Him even more tenderly, even more securely, than hers. )
         
   Mom's  poem also made me think of those later years when my father's steadfast love for

Lester and the many apologies he had  given  to friends and a few   complete strangers for  his son's  

demented behavior.

My brother in his last weeks  with his favorite nurse 
            As for  my anger with Mom for  repeatedly forgiving Lester's loathsome acts and her  absence of any tough  love , I soon realized how stingy I  had been with my compassion for her and for all the forgiveness she had given me through the years--to a son of good mental health yet  so often  empty of innocence.   Fortunately , I received a painful epiphany about my own dark upon  hearing several years ago  a radio broadcast of an interview with Corrie ten Boom, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp where her sister and hundreds of others had   suffered  slow deaths.  
            Corrie had just ended her story before an audience in a Munich, Germany  church and was exiting the building  when  approached by a man who identified himself as a former  guard  in that death camp.  She was shocked. " I remember him as that guard and with that leather whip swinging from his belt, " she said in her  radio interview. " It was the first time since my release that I had been face to face with one of my captors, and my blood seemed to freeze."
            " 'Will you forgive me for the cruel things I did there ? ' "  the former guard  asked Corrie.
            " I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart , " Corrie continued.  " But forgiveness is not an emotion–I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.  'Jesus, help me!' I prayed silently. And so …I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me.
            “ 'I forgive you, brother!' ” I cried. “ 'With all my heart! ' ”
***
            During the week of Dec. 4, 2001, my brother sat in his room sipping whiskey to  sooth  the discomforting  side effects or  Zyprexa, Haldol,  and Depakote , which  for more than   three decades had  tormented him with clinging drowsiness  and  a rapid,   frightening heartbeat .    "  That night, Robert," he would later tell me in a rare moment of  introspection, " I  wanted to get a sense of power I never had. "
            Though Lester , I believe, had stuck to his regimen of psychotropic drugs  with a self-discipline unusual for paranoid schizophrenics , one night he rebelled. Four days later,  his mind and body now dangerously weaned from the meds which shielded him from hallucinations and other disordered thinking,  my brother walked into a gun shop and, with a gun permit he had falsified, purchased a .45 caliber automatic pistol and a .38 caliber handgun.  Over the next  two days, he fired his weapons at two inanimate objects outside his retirement home and then, while driving his car down a toll way, fired at a passing car. ( Lester, according to police reports , never did fire at a person nor intended to . )

All comments are welcome.
rrschwarz71@comcast.net
© 2017-18,  2023,  Robert R. Schwarz



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