Only now that their mother wasn’t there as a shared focus for them did Margaret see how far apart she and her sister had grown. “Michael and Lindsay don’t like it that I don’t go in with them on the family dysfunction,” Margaret said, “but the boundary is helpful to me.”
Lindsay believed that Margaret saying that contact with the family was unhealthy for her was little more than a dodge—an attempt to preempt any criticism that she, Margaret, wasn’t helping enough. As Lindsay saw it, Margaret’s passion for self-care was really about her own unresolved fury. “She’s got a much higher level of anger towards my mother and my father for how they handled it,” Lindsay said. “She has a lot of anger towards my mentally ill brothers, particularly Donald and Jim. I still see a pretty big victim there.”
Lindsay repeated something she learned from Louise Silvern, her old therapist, and also from Nancy Gary, and, if she’s being honest with herself, from her own mother. “They taught me to embrace the cards you are dealt or it will eat you alive. If you go to the heart of your own matter, you will find only by loving and helping do you have peace from your own trauma.” This, in her view, was the major difference between her and her sister.
“We both have worked very hard to save ourselves,” Lindsay said. “But she didn’t see trying to help them as any part of that, whereas I did.”
A few years earlier, Lindsay asked Sam Gary why she wasn’t brought to their house like Margaret. “Your parents and I thought you had a stronger constitution,” Sam said. “You weren’t as fragile.” This was news to Lindsay.
But Lindsay was human. She needed help, too. For her entire adult life, when something about the family ate away at her insides, there was only one other person in the world who would understand. When she was at her lowest, her sister was there, living proof that she was not alone. Without Margaret in her life, Lindsay felt as if she’d sustained not one but two losses—a mother and a sister.
“I can’t imagine having gone through this without her,” Lindsay said.
Hi Gang,
Matt had his vehicle stolen last week after having a new truck totaled a year ago—not his fault and only liability—ugh!
Yeah, right—the poor guy cannot catch a break in life.
Like having schizophrenia is so fun…
I just ordered groceries to be delivered to his house tomorrow am. Very easy. https://www.instacart.com…
He has no way to go get them and frankly is incapable of grocery shopping.
He would like to move as he is in a really bad area—working on that with section 8 and the Villanni Family, who said they would have him on one of their buildings. It was fun to see all who knew him at Safeway. “Hey, Matt!”
I would be grateful to anyone of you who could call and offer a hello. No guilt—just asking for some genuine human kindness.
Thanks,
Mary
Email from Lindsay to Margaret, Michael, John, Richard, and Mark, June 2018
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IT WAS UNDERSTOOD among the surviving children of Don and Mimi Galvin that the proceeds from the sale of the house would benefit the three remaining sick brothers. Lindsay brainstormed with Michael about little things that they could do for them with the money. Matt could get a new truck. Peter could get pet therapy or music therapy; even a new tenor recorder might make him happy. Donald loved the opera; what if they hired a companion to take him to those Metropolitan Opera performances they screen at movie theaters?
When she thought about this, Lindsay realized that the person who had really known what her brothers liked, what would make a difference to them, was her mother. This was what kept Lindsay up late now: the idea that the true champion of the family, the gold medal winner in the Empathy Olympics, could have been Mimi Galvin all along. “Now suddenly without her here,” Lindsay said, “I’m understanding where she was coming from.”
Lindsay used to talk about nature and nurture with her mother. Mimi, still wary of being judged, felt that nurture couldn’t have had anything to do with what happened to her family. “Well, it was genetic,” she would say. Lindsay told her mother she was not so sure. She believed that some people have a genetic predisposition “that can go either way, depending on your life course and trauma.” Certain things can make a difference, Lindsay said, like “love and belonging.”
She stopped faulting her mother for this, though. “I really believe that my parents didn’t get us as much help as we should have had,” she said, “but they didn’t know what that looked like.”
Lindsay was determined now to channel whatever it was her mother had that helped her connect to the sick boys. So many people—including many of her well brothers—had stopped seeing Donald, Peter, and Matt as human beings a long time ago. Schizophrenia’s inaccessibility may be the most destructive thing about it—the thing that keeps so many people from connecting to the people with the illness.
But the mistake—the temptation, especially if you’re a relative—is to confuse inaccessibility with a loss of self. “Emotions are always accompanied by some kind of cognitive process,” wrote the psychiatrist Silvano Arieti, whose volume Interpretation of Schizophrenia dominated the mainstream thinking about the illness in the 1950s and again, with a National Book Award–winning second edition, in the 1970s. “The cognitive process may be unconscious, or automatic, or distorted, but it is always present.”
Lindsay noticed this most in her brothers whenever they were on the receiving end of any kindness. “Matt called me this morning with just simple, plain gratitude,” she said, shortly after she’d helped him with his groceries. “I wish I could tap into that.”
Responding to some gentle prodding, some of her well brothers began reaching out to the sick ones. Richard and Renée called and asked for their phone numbers. Lindsay planned to get Colorado College hockey season tickets for Matt—something Mark might want to take him to, since they once loved playing together. “Pretty much everyone avoids them like the plague. But if I very clearly and deliberately say, ‘Hey, can you take them out for, you know, whatever, coffee and a donut?’ They’ll do it.”
* * *
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IT TOOK SIX months for the sisters to try bridging the gap. They started talking in January, after spending the holidays apart. At the end of a long face-to-face visit, Lindsay started to see things more clearly. “I found myself angry at everybody in my family for not helping me with my mom at the end,” Lindsay said. “And Margaret perceived my way of helping as not necessarily a good thing.”