Jack was angry. He had been saddled with a genetic legacy he’d never asked for, and made to feel like a freak. Lindsay blamed herself for this. “I made such a deliberate effort to expose my children to my mentally ill brothers, so they would not have a bias or feel shame around it. It sort of backfired a little bit.”
But it wasn’t just the brothers themselves who affected him. For both Jack and his sister, it was witnessing the strain that their mother shouldered, the burden she carried. “My kids have seen how much pain all of it has caused over all the years, and I think they’re protective of me,” Lindsay said. “Anytime I’m having to deal with something—my sister, or my mom, or one of my brothers—there’s angst and frustration around it.”
When Lindsay looked at Jack, some part of her had to recognize herself—the little girl she’d once been, walking rings around her brother Donald, tightening the rope, planning to burn him at the stake, bursting with fury and shame.
* * *
—
A FEW MONTHS into the program, Lindsay and Rick traveled to Montana to see Jack and take part in some family therapy exercises together. Margaret came along, mostly to lend her sister moral support. They stayed with the Garys at Flathead Lake, just like the old days. It was a time warp for them both—the meadows in shades of green, yellow, and rust; the dusting of snow on the trees; the gorgeous home; the tennis courts, the orchard, and the horses. Even Trudy, the housekeeper, was still there, embracing both sisters warmly.
That weekend, Margaret’s own past replayed in the back of her mind—not just being back in Montana with Sam and Nancy, but watching Lindsay and Rick in the same position her parents must have been in so long ago, when they decided to send her away to the Garys. But she was there to help Lindsay, not to relive the past. Lindsay was going through huge emotional swings. On one hand, Lindsay understood the privileged position she was in. On the other hand, her son was going to be away from her for two whole years. What kind of mother does that? Of course, both she and Margaret knew the answer to that question.
For both sisters, being around the Garys gave them that feeling they had become accustomed to so long ago—the awareness that they were, simultaneously, some of the unluckiest and luckiest people on the face of the earth.
When he got home, Jack did well, attending school, staying sober, and earning good grades again. Jack had learned to manage his anxiety with rock climbing, meditation, even journaling, though he was quick to acknowledge that all these techniques were just deflections. “There’s no real way around the anxiety,” he said now. “You have to go through it.” Jack had become so therapized that he policed everyone else in the house. “He calls us out on our stuff all the time, and uses all the technical language,” Lindsay said, awash in relief.
Nancy gave Jack a fly rod as a graduation gift. “He’s a different kid,” she said. For college, Jack was looking to study early childhood education. After that, he wanted to pursue a career in outdoor wilderness therapy.
When Lindsay looks at Jack now, she thinks not of herself, but of Peter and Donald and Matt and all of her sick brothers. What sort of early interventions might have helped them before the medications took their toll, neutralizing them without curing them? And what about the thousands of people who couldn’t afford what her son had—who languish because of a lack of resources, or a stigma from a society that would prefer to pretend that people like them do not exist?
“The haves have these options and the have-nots do not,” Lindsay said. “To see this kid take this other track and have it be so successful—it could have easily gone the other direction. I genuinely believe if my brothers had had the opportunity to do something like this, they may not have become as ill as they became.”
* * *
In the summer of 2017, at his laboratory in Denver, Robert Freedman took the unusual step of allowing an undergraduate to work as an intern—a young pre-med major from CU Boulder with a special interest in neuroscience. She wanted to be a researcher, like Freedman, focusing on schizophrenia, her family illness.
On a sunny day in June, Kate walked into Freedman’s lab for the first time and met the lab techs and assistants, all graduate students, some five years older than she was. When they learned that she was just eighteen, they took notice. This was a highly sought-after position. One of them made a crack about how her family must have been huge donors to get her in there.
Kate smirked. “Well, are you talking money,” she asked, “or tissue?”
Lindsay’s daughter walked past the room where her mother and aunt and several of her uncles had come to test their auditory gating, listening to those double-clicks with electrodes affixed to their heads, years before she was born. She moved alongside the counters where genetic material from her family and others had been analyzed for evidence of the CHRNA7 irregularity. She stood near where the data from choline trials on little children were studied for signs of schizophrenia—tests that could change everything for a future generation, thanks to six of her uncles.
Her grandfather’s brain was probably lying around there someplace. She wondered how long it would take before she could have a look at it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In early 2016, my great friend Jon Gluck first introduced me to Margaret Galvin Johnson and Lindsay Galvin Rauch. The sisters had been searching for a way to let the world know about their family. They knew that to do their story justice, every living Galvin family member would have to agree to participate—to speak frankly and unreservedly about what, until then, had been private and often very sensitive family issues—and the author would need the independence to follow the story in any direction. I’m extremely grateful that everyone agreed. My deepest thanks to Margaret and Wylie Johnson, Lindsay and Rick Rauch, Peter Galvin, Matthew Galvin, Mark Galvin, Richard and Renée Galvin, Michael Galvin, John and Nancy Galvin, and Donald Galvin—and, most poignantly, Mimi Galvin, who was so willing to open up about her life before her death in 2017. This book is a testament to the entire family’s generosity, candor, and faith that their story can be a help to others.
Lindsay and Margaret deserve special acknowledgment. As her mother’s executor and the legal authority for her mentally ill brothers, Lindsay worked tirelessly to locate medical records that no one knew still existed, filing reams of paperwork and connecting with a platoon of mental-health professionals and hospital administrators. Margaret, in turn, offered up decades of personal journals and diaries and biographical essays, supplying many priceless details about life on Hidden Valley Road. Both sisters have spent countless hours with me, in person and on the phone and over email, never once balking at the most picayune or intrusive questions or requests. My heartfelt thanks to them both.
I also owe a world of thanks to the psychiatrists and researchers who studied the family—Lynn DeLisi, Robert Freedman, and Stefan McDonough—each of whom spent many hours with me, explaining their research and, with the family’s blessing, connecting the dots between their work and the Galvins for the first time publicly. Several other experts in genetics, psychiatry, epidemiology, and the history of science helped me gain a broader understanding of the debates and theories of mental illness: Euan Ashley, Guoping Feng, Elliot Gershon, Steven Hyman, John McGrath, Benjamin Neale, Richard Noll, Edward Shorter, E. Fuller Torrey, and Daniel Weinberger. And I am eternally grateful to Kyla Dunn, whose expertise in genetics helped me ask the right questions in the beginning of this project and saved me from a number of embarrassing errors at the end. (Any errors that remain are, of course, my own.)