“You know, Peter, could you bring that with you?” Lindsay said.
“Yeah, yeah. I think I should, I think I should and cooperate, with the Bible. I love you!”
“Jeff is going to come pick you up tomorrow morning,” Lindsay said. “We’re just going to go have lunch today.”
“Can I go with you for lunch?”
Lindsay laughed. “Sure!” This, of course, had been the plan all along.
Peter was beyond thin now—bony, his pants cinched in order to fit him. He had emerged from his room to meet his sister smiling, wearing a hockey jersey, a plaid flannel bathrobe, a ratty ski jacket, a baseball cap, heavy work boots, and winter gloves. His voice was low and gravelly, his mustache scraggly. But he still had his same puckishness, dampened only a little by exhaustion from shock therapy. Lindsay’s visit happened to land on a Tuesday, and Peter had just returned from his weekly ECT at the hospital.
When Peter wasn’t on a tirade, claiming his doctors were working for Satan, those same doctors found him as charming as always, even sweet. “He’s the only patient I’ve ever gone that far out of my way where I would take him for walks,” said one of his doctors, Matt Goodwin, who treated him for years when Peter lived full-time at Pueblo, and who still often administered his ECT sessions. “I would take him out for lunch.” On the wards, Peter would serenade patients and doctors with his recorder, playing “Yesterday,” “Let It Be,” and “The Long and Winding Road.” Every Christmas, he’d take out the photo of his family on the staircase at the Air Force Academy, showing everyone who was who, and talk endlessly about flying falcons with his father.
In 2015, Goodwin had petitioned the court controlling Peter’s care to compel El Paso County, where the city of Pueblo is located, to make a space in one of its local assisted living facilities available to Peter. As long as he had ECT on a regular basis, Goodwin argued, Peter had no need to live inside the state mental hospital. A month later, on December 17, Peter moved to Riverwalk, which primarily serves people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. Peter was by far the youngest resident there. His diagnosis: bipolar 1 and psychosis. His prescriptions: the mood stabilizer Depakote; Zyprexa, an antipsychotic; and Latuda, an antidepressant often prescribed to bipolar patients.
At Riverwalk, Peter liked to keep to a schedule. His smoke breaks had to happen at a certain time. If they didn’t, he’d get agitated. “It’s something for him to do out of the monotony of the day,” a supervisor at Riverwalk said. “It gives him an activity.” He was never violent or aggressive, though he could sometimes be loud and persistent (“You said you were going to get my cigarettes!”). He often played his recorder at a long-term care facility across the street, where the patients applauded him and asked for more. He’d play there every day if they let him.
For their lunch outing, Lindsay coaxed Peter into losing the bathrobe. It was the middle of summer. The treatment had depleted Peter. He hadn’t eaten since the night before. But he was excited to leave with Lindsay. “I think I’m gonna get a big thirty-eight-ounce Coke,” he said. “I want to get a cup of coffee. I like coffee….I shampooed all my hair and got everything all cleaned up and put socks on and new shoes and new underwear….Hey, can’t we stop and get a pack of cigarettes? I want to stop and get a pack of cigarettes with a five-dollar bill.”
What does he think about ECT?
Peter’s expression darkened. “They knocked me out. They knocked me out cold with oxygen.”
How does he feel afterward?
“I just cooperate fully and do everything that they say.”
On the way out, Peter stopped in the lobby, pulled out his recorder, and performed a Christmastime favorite—“Angels We Have Heard on High”—before walking stiffly out the door.
“I want to go get a burger!” he said in the backseat of Lindsay’s SUV. He flashed cash from his wallet. “I got all the money. Twenty-five dollars, right here.”
“That’s all right, I’ve got it,” Lindsay said.
“Okay, I’ll cooperate fully.”
“So it’s going to be a big crowd tomorrow, Peter,” Lindsay said.
“Yeah, it will be.”
“Do you have something nice you can wear?”
“Yep.”
“All of Mimi’s grandkids and great-grandkids will be there.”
“I’m going to go smoke! I wish I could have gotten cigarettes.”
“After lunch we can go get some cigarettes.”
They pulled up at a pub in downtown Pueblo, where Peter ordered a large Coke and a burger with fries and ketchup, tearing through the fries first. Some Riverwalk employees noticed him from across the room and walked over to say hello, smiling and asking how Peter was feeling today.
“So who were they?” Lindsay asked, once they returned to their table.
“I don’t know,” Peter said.
“Were they from the hospital?”
Peter did not answer.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“No. I’m sick of everything that I went through. I want to get a pack of cigarettes and cooperate. I’ll go buy it myself and cooperate with you in full to do everything you want me to. Just don’t smoke ’em. I’ll smoke ’em myself….I can’t eat this ketchup with cheese. I think I have an upset stomach. The ketchup makes me feel funny….I’m cooperating full. I want to cooperate—do anything for you that I can.”
* * *
—
AFTER LUNCH, LINDSAY pulled up to a store and let Peter out to get cigarettes by himself, giving her a moment to speak openly about his condition. “Dr. Freedman explained it to me,” Lindsay said. “Years and years of overmedicating. That’s why they do these ECTs, because the medications really don’t work for him.” This was a version of the same problem all her sick brothers had. The less consistently you take the medication, the worse off you were—the more psychotic breaks you have, the more far gone you become. It was a painful catch-22 to witness a loved one experience: Not taking the drugs makes them more sick, and then taking them, in some cases, makes them sicker. A different kind of sick, she agreed, but sick nevertheless.
“He said eventually the medications will have no more impact,” Lindsay said. “And it’s really the ECTs that have caused the majority of the memory loss. This is more disorganized thinking. Not able to answer questions. And the mantra—I cooperate fully—is constant.”
That saying, so specific, must have some meaning to Peter. All those years of parents and doctors telling him he was not cooperating, Lindsay said—maybe they’ve made a mark on him.