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. |
" 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. )
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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