Margaret, in turn, acknowledged that Lindsay was more capable of handling the family matters than she ever could have been. But a huge gulf remained between them.
They discussed Margaret’s inability to help with Mimi and how angry it made Lindsay. “I just can’t do it,” Margaret said. And Lindsay felt comfortable enough to say that her sister’s decision was not all right with her—that it made her, as she recalled later, “feel sad and frustrated and angry that I feel like I’m left with this whole bag.”
They talked a little about survivors of childhood trauma, and how they often continue to find people in their lives to victimize them, so they can continue to get help. Was Lindsay playing that role for Margaret now? Was Margaret for Lindsay?
At the end of the conversation, Lindsay posed a question to her sister: Were they willing to accept each other for who they were? Or were they going to continue down the path of thinking the other person was somehow damaged, and impossible to be close with?
After that visit, Lindsay decided that she needed to allow all of her siblings to do things their way, even as she did things her way. “It’s about everyone’s own journey,” Lindsay said, trying to find some distance of her own. “How they’re able to muddle through life and deal.”
From her family, Lindsay could see how we all have an amazing ability to shape our own reality, regardless of the facts. We can live our entire lives in a bubble and be quite comfortable. And there can be other realities that we refuse to acknowledge, but are every bit as real as our own. She was not thinking of her sick brothers now, but of everyone—all of them, including her mother, including herself.
“I could just act like I’m a multimillionaire like my brother Richard. Or I could move to Boise like John, or I could play classical guitar all day like Michael. It’s, like, we all just do. Just respecting that about each other. We all survived somehow. Everyone’s different way needs to be okay.”
Lindsay was getting closer, finally, to seeing how nature and nurture work together. Her mother had always insisted, defensively, that the illness was genetic, and in a way, Mimi was right. Biology is destiny, to a point; that can’t be denied. But Lindsay understood now how we are more than just our genes. We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us—the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later.
Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us.
We are human because the people around us make us human.
DONALD
JOHN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
MARK
MATTHEW
PETER
MARGARET
LINDSAY
KATE
JACK
CHAPTER 45
Lindsay’s daughter, Kate, grew up to look just like her mother—the same bright eyes, the same relaxed smile. Before having children, Lindsay and Rick, like Margaret and Wylie, had been assured by Dr. Freedman that the chances of passing along mental illness from parent to child—even in the extraordinary case of the Galvin family—were still very small. But parents always worry. And Lindsay had never been one to leave anything to chance.
When she was a little girl, Kate started to flinch and melt down in loud environments like playgrounds and classrooms. These were sensory processing issues. Kate needed occupational therapy, that much was clear. But when you have six mentally ill brothers and your child starts having temper tantrums that you can’t control, there is very little to keep you from wondering if this is the beginning of a story that will not end well.
Lindsay thought the worst. She hurled every possible solution she could think of at Kate. She sent her to therapy to learn self-soothing techniques. She bought a hammock for her room, to help her de-stress. She stocked up on essential oils to keep her calm. Was this hyper-vigilance—or just being a proactive, responsible mother? Lindsay didn’t know. But something about it worked, or at least it didn’t hurt.
Kate thrived. She took all advanced placement classes in her senior year of high school and got straight As in them all—including an art class in which she won an award for a series of works about mental health. Kate got into Berkeley but turned the offer down. Instead, in the fall of 2016, she enrolled at CU Boulder as a sophomore, where she continued to get straight As and spent her summers taking classes. She was, like her mother, a grind—not romantic in the least about childhood, eager to become a grown-up as soon as possible.
In fact, when Kate looked back on her childhood, what she recalled most vividly was how, as soon as she moved past her sensory issues and started doing well, her mother diverted her worry and attention away from her and toward her little brother, Jack.
Jack got therapy as a child, too—prophylactically, just to be on the safe side. He later told his parents that it was all the therapy and testing that made him the most tense. Jack felt put on the spot, like he was being watched all the time. He wasn’t wrong: Lindsay and Rick both knew that the Galvin disease affected neither of the girls and six of the boys. Jack was Don and Mimi Galvin’s grandson. How could his parents not be watching?
During his freshman year of high school, Jack started skipping class and hanging out in the skateboarding park with a new set of friends. He had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, and he’d supplemented his medication with pot. As a teenager, he was engaging in attention-seeking behavior, probably out of boredom; like their mother, Jack and Kate both were academically precocious and had trouble being challenged in a classroom.
For Lindsay and Rick, a pot-smoking male child of the Galvin family was the equivalent of a five-alarm fire. They went searching for people to advise them, and they found just two who understood both the challenges of childhood disorders and the particular issues of their family: Sam and Nancy Gary.
Just after Labor Day in 2015, Jack enrolled in Open Sky, a ninety-day, wilderness-based youth therapy program. One of the most expensive programs of its kind, Open Sky is designed to pull kids out of toxic or dysfunctional environments and reframe their perspective. Its approach is Buddhist, teaching meditation and other techniques to help young people with oppositional disorders and substance issues. The bill was paid by the Garys. “I would not let anything happen to Mary, or Margaret for that matter,” Nancy said. “I would help her do whatever she has to do.”
Short programs like Open Sky often serve as a prelude to longer-term treatments. When Jack completed his ninety days, he enrolled in a therapeutic boarding school called Montana Academy. Sam and Nancy paid for that, too—$8,300 a month for twenty-one months. Montana Academy attracts kids with a variety of substance and mental health issues: bulimia, anorexia, anxiety disorders. It was there that Lindsay and Rick learned that Jack’s issues had less to do with pot or ADD than with anxiety—the fear of becoming mentally ill.