Court Date
Kim Livingston
“Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like
me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably
those referred to as ‘our brother's keepers,’ possessed of one of the oldest
and possibly one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting
instincts. It will not let us go.”
-- Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
Offering to drive my brother to court was a mistake. I know it as soon as I spot him outside smoking rather than waiting for me in the lobby of his nursing home. He is not happy to see me this morning, just angry that I’m twenty minutes late, resenting today’s guardianship hearing. He doesn’t care that I have used a day off of work or that I’m late because my son needed a ride to school. He gives me a hard look and says, “I was ready at 8 sharp, but you weren’t there. I figured you blew me off.” His receding red hair is cut very short. He hasn’t shaved, maybe for a few days, but his teeth look a bit better after two visits with the dentist. He glares at me while he pulls nicotine into his lungs.
On the nursing home’s smoking patio I know a few of the residents from my previous visits. Mike forgets his anger for a moment and introduces me to them again, connecting each person to somebody in his past, as if this world is very small, and his life is smack-dab in the middle: “Hey, you know who this guy is? That’s Jerry Dunn. Wasn’t he Martha’s husband? This is Deb Lafferty from high school. And Cheryl Coffman, you remember her. And see the lady over there, the one in pink? That’s Mary, but she uses a stage name, guess what it is…Madonna.” He waits for my expression of shock, which I don’t give because I’ve heard this all before, and then he laughs a high-pitched giggle at the good fortune of being so near the world-famous singer.
Sometimes I don’t recognize Mike right away, amidst the other residents. He looks older than 49, rough and worn. My mother warned me not to drive him today. She knows about his delusions that I’m trying to get my hands on the billions he thinks he owns, from all the inventions he thinks he’s created and companies he thinks he runs. I could let the social worker drive him to court. But he’s my brother, and I don’t really believe he would hurt me.
We have a long history of fighting with each other, as siblings usually do. In fact, I’ve always thought that our fighting was good for us as kids—that we used each other for a release of anger and frustration. I could call him any name, usually just “idiot” or “jerk,” sometimes “asshole,” knowing it would bounce right off. I could scream at him to shut up or to leave me alone, and he could do the same to me. Our anger never went very deep.
Mike talks incessantly while he smokes, and now his animosity is back. He says that if the judge gives me guardianship, then any sane person can lose his rights, so he’s sure that’s not going to happen. “You know what I’M gonna do, Kim?” His hand shakes with each drag, but his voice is strong. “I’M gonna apply for guardianship of YOU. Yeah, we’ll see how you like THAT. I’m gonna talk to MY lawyer about that today.”
Mike and I have been to the Dupage County Courthouse twice already for this business. The first time, the judge appointed a guardian-ad-litem (GAL) to interview all people involved: Mike’s psychiatrist, Mike’s wife, our mother, and the both of us; then to recommend a solution. The second time at court, the GAL reported that Mike had indeed been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he hadn’t seen his wife in years, and he didn’t appear able to make important decisions. Since nobody else was applying for the position, the GAL agreed that I should be guardian. Mike contested the recommendation, the judge appointed him an attorney, and now we go another round, not sure what to expect.
I remind him that we need to get going to make it to court by nine. He doesn’t like me telling him what to do, so he takes his time lighting Madonna’s cigarette with his. Then he flicks his butt into the bucket ashtray, raises his chin, and walks ahead of me to the building. “Let’s go,” he orders.
He mumbles and laughs to himself as we walk through the empty cafeteria toward the home’s exit. “Why are you so hyper?” I ask him. “Coffee, coffee, coffee,” he sings. “Coffee is good. I had a lot of it last night. Justice will prevail.” He giggles again, as if aware that good things are coming his way, and I wonder if he had any sleep at all. Our last stop before signing out is the nurse’s cart, where he lines up and tells me to wait. The small Asian nurse, in crisp white uniform, gives him a paper cup with four or five pills inside, and some water in another cup. He looks huge next to her. He is thin now, but his height is still impressive. After dumping all the pills into his mouth at once, he takes a swig of water and swallows. I don’t know what he is taking, because his psychiatrist cannot breach Mike’s privacy, but I’m hoping these meds help him calm down. When he gets nervous he is much more manic and delusional. At this place his medicine had seemed to be working pretty well until I started the guardianship case. Today he is so hyped with contempt, I’m wondering if I should have taken my mom’s warning seriously.
On our way out Mike begins taunting me, saying that he’s gonna kick my butt in this case. It sounds as if he’s talking about one of our old driveway basketball games, but his underlying anxiety betrays the bravado. He knows the gravity of this competition.
I have tried to allay his fears about guardianship. He imagines that I will take him out of the current nursing home and send him far away to some cold, frightening institution like the ones in textbooks on the history of psychiatric care, in the grainy photos of patients caged like rabid animals, quarantined for the safety of others. I tell him that I want only to prevent him from being homeless again, from leaving this nursing home Against Medical Advice when he has nowhere to go. “Yeah, well, that’s my decision to make, isn’t it,” he says. For a long time I thought he was right, and I am still reluctant to take away his control of his own affairs, the one source of power he has.
We get to my minivan, and Mike reminds me that I once agreed to sell him this car when I get a new one. “You made a bond,” he says. Really all I said was maybe. Maybe I could sell it to him some day. He has no job, no license, no business driving any car, but I don’t want to tell him that, so I say “we’ll see,” the same answer I give my kids when I’m not ready to make a decision–or not ready to deliver the crushing blow. I realize more and more that he feels like another kid to me, another willful self-centered teenager.
Once we’re driving he asks, “So how’s Dave doing?” His incriminating tone tells me he doesn’t really want to know how my husband is. But I attempt light chit-chat and say, “He’s fine, had to work today.” “How’s Emmy?” he asks, but now I’m getting mad because I know he thinks Dave is molesting our daughter. This “truth” came to him in some sort of revelation. He doesn’t say how he knows things like this, he just does. Last time I brought the kids to visit him, he hinted at this story in front of Emmy, and I swore I wouldn’t bring her again. The kids accept him pretty well, and they are used to his delusions, but this one is too weird.
In the 10-minute drive to the courthouse, he continues shooting questions in that sanctimonious way, as if he already knows the answers and just wants me to know that he knows, that I’m not fooling him.
“Did you like that blanket you sent me, Kim?”
“What blanket?”
“What blanket. You know you sent me a blanket.”
“A long time ago?”
“It’s a very nice blanket. But you’re strapped for cash, right?” He’s accusing me of something.
“What do you mean?” I say.
“Yeah, I heard about the drug dealers—the ones in Tinley Park? I suppose you don’t know anything about them either.”
“Mike, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I plead, trying to find my way through morning rush hour.
Finally inside the courthouse, waiting for our turn at the security check, it occurs to me that I did not think this trip through very well. When I told the nursing home’s social worker that he needn’t drive Mike to court, that I could do it instead, I did not picture standing with Mike in this long line, where we wind back and forth, very close to other people—where now he mumbles incoherently, chuckles, then abruptly asks me if I think drug dealers kill judges. We get a few looks. This is less than two months after an “alleged mentally ill” gunman murdered more children at yet another school, and people are on edge. I feel bad for a woman carrying her baby, snaking through this line with us. I want to tell her that he’s not dangerous, just crazy. I want to tell her that.
Instead I ask him to keep his voice down, but he says he can say what he wants, that I won’t take away his rights, and he gets louder. “Drug dealers are bad, Kim, and they can’t be allowed to kill judges.” I haven’t heard this bit about drug dealers before, so I’m not sure what to make of it. The lady with the baby looks at me.
After twenty-three tense minutes, we make it to the check point at the end of the line. I shove my purse and coat into the x-ray tunnel, walk through the metal-detection frame, and wait for Mike. The detector beeps, so the security guard frisks him with a handheld wand. For a second I wonder if they’ll find a weapon. Of course they don’t. He tells the security guard that it was probably the button on his jeans that set it off. As he hikes up his loose pants, I can tell that he is not wearing underwear.
For the first two appearances he wore a suit, the pants and shirt from me, the jacket from the nursing home’s charity box. He was excited about appearing before a judge and wanted to make a good impression. He felt official and used language from television court dramas, asking, “May I approach the bench?” Today, though, he is much more casual with his jeans, a thermal shirt too short for his long torso, and new gym shoes.
We find our way to room 2009. I walk in first and sit down on the right side, assuming he is following, but he passes me and continues toward one of the suited women in front. “Are you my lawyer?” he asks her. “I’m Michael Thomas David Sullivan.” She says she is not his lawyer. I’m surprised by the two middle names. I expected only Thomas, which was also our dad’s middle name. Hearing it reminds me that today, February 5th, is Dad’s birthday. Mike remembered it before I did. He and Dad, who would have been 79 if he had survived the heart attack at 46, were very close. David, I realize, is Mike’s confirmation name from 8th grade.
He turns to find a seat, I motion him to come by me, and he takes a chair on the opposite side of the room. I then move to a seat near him and say, “We don’t have to sit on separate sides. We’re not enemies.”
He leans over the empty chair between us and whispers, too loudly, “I know you’re a drug dealer, Kim. You put on this great act, but I know the truth. And you know what? People who hurt judges should be killed.” He raises his eyebrows at me as if to say, “So there.” He gets up and moves to the other side of the courtroom.
This threat unnerves me. It reminds me that when Mike is in this frame of mind, it doesn’t matter that I am his only sister, that he’s my only brother. I’m holding back tears and dreading the car-ride back, alone with him. I take a deep breath and struggle for composure. I am strong and professional, I tell myself, not an emotional weakling. But if the case is decided in my favor today, he will be furious with me.
I am relieved to see our respective lawyers, who meet with the judge and tell him again that Mike is contesting the guardianship. The judge says the matter is continued, and it turns out that Mike and I didn’t even need to be here today. We will schedule a trial to hear both sides. (Mike is expecting “a jury of my peers,” but the lawyers tell us it’s much more informal than that. I am dreading the moment when he watches me argue that he is delusional and hopelessly dependent.)
Mike is anxious to talk privately to his attorney, and I overhear him telling her that when he was nine years old, his mother sent him to Vietnam where he met Vice President Gerald Ford. She can check it out online, he says. She politely brushes him off and while walking away tells my lawyer that this should be an easy case.
For a moment I picture my brother at age nine, in his 1973, 4th-grade school portrait: bright, shaggy red hair; freckles covering his sunburned face; chipped front tooth; mustard-yellow turtleneck. He was a bright student, an athlete. In high school he would be a starting pitcher as well as jazz saxophonist and lead in three musicals. He would earn two college scholarships, one for acting and one for baseball. But in his first year away, Mike will start hearing voices that other people say are not real, and he’ll come home mid-term second semester.
At that time my mother, still reeling from her husband’s death one year earlier, did her best to help him find a future. The local mental hospital, where my father had spent his career as a psychologist, had recently closed down and nothing had taken its place, so after a brief stint in a psychiatric ward, Mike lived at home. There was nowhere else for him to go. He couldn’t focus on college courses, couldn’t keep a job for more than a few weeks, and couldn’t live on his own without alarming neighbors and badgering the landlord with illogical requests. (After unscrewing the hinges of his neighbors’ door, Mike complained to the landlord that those neighbors were bullying him and demanded they be evicted.) Mike had stretches of relative sanity, which were when he got married—twice—and had one son. But as the years went on, those sane periods waned, and after he allegedly strangled my mom’s cat, he had no real home.
Un-medicated for a long while, after wandering the town with no place to stay, he started breaking into the basement window of Mom’s house. Nobody knew what wild thoughts assaulted his mind, and Mom called me in a panic. We met with a judge then, too, and convinced him that Mike “was a danger to himself and others.” This was nothing new, a familiar routine by then. The police would take him to a psych ward, where he would stay for a few weeks before coming back home.
Mike remembers this particular time, though, and often brings it up because he sees it as my supreme betrayal. To help the officers find him, I had to set the trap. I told Mike I would meet him at the house with money for a hotel. But when he got there, I was waiting around the corner as the police met him instead. Because the court order dictated that I be present, I moved closer as the officers cuffed his hands. Mike resisted them until he saw me standing at the end of the driveway, no doubt thinking I would straighten this all out. When I told him we would be in touch soon, he stopped struggling, stared at me, and cocked his head as if unable to compute my role in his capture. He stood there, silent, until he was nudged toward the squad car and guided into the back seat. And even though I know it was the right thing to do, I still feel the horror of that betrayal, the truth that unlike our childhood fights, this one hurt him to the core.
Most recently Mike has lived in at least ten different private nursing homes around Chicago, most designed for the mentally ill—not the planned ideal to replace the state-run mental hospitals but still a place to live, and much better than Cook County Jail, where he spent a few long months. For brief periods he has lost touch with us when bouncing from one of these places to another, but we have always managed to find him.
One goal of my guardianship pursuit is to make sure we’re always connected. As we approach the revolving door to exit the courthouse, Mike pointedly tells me that he does not need to put on his coat, even though it’s a typical winter day in Chicago. He slings his Army surplus parka over his shoulder. I don’t challenge him, but he is determined to make his point: “Try spending a night in the park, Kim, shivering under the slide because it’s 7 degrees outside. You get used to the cold.”
I tell him I just want to help.
“Oh, like you helped when I couldn’t live at home,” he says.
Attempting to defend myself, I say that back then I did my best to find him places to stay. I try to sound strong, but the memory of him sleeping in the park, where we used to play as kids, almost unravels me. And really, most of the time I let Mom handle it on her own while I got away from there, to college and grad school, then marriage.
He tells me he doesn’t need my help now, that he can do fine on his own: “Just stay the hell out of my life, please.” I am tempted to give the whole thing up. It’s making him more unstable than ever, it’s costing me a lot of money, and I’m afraid he’s starting to really hate me.
Then in a less biting voice he says, “Hey, we gotta pick up four buckets of chicken and some smokes.”
I tell him in the car that I can’t buy chicken for everyone at the nursing home, and he informs me that my money is really his anyway because when I sold Mom’s house, I stole all of the profits. I remind him that she used the money to buy her new house, but he says that Dad left the house to him, not to Mom. He then asks if he can have two of the quarters in my cup-holder. I tell him to take them all, and I agree to buy him cigarettes. I half-heartedly urge him to quit smoking, but I know that for him they are medicinal: calming and satisfying. After the hand he has been dealt, I won’t deny him this pleasure.
While we’re walking in to Jewel, he asks me whether I would rather be a Christian or a devil worshipper. I say Christian, but he doesn’t believe me. At the cigarette counter, in his big, belligerent voice the first thing he says to the cashier is, “This is a Christian store, right?” She steps back and looks at me. She doesn’t know what to say.
“Mike, just tell her what you want.” I’m exasperated, and for a second it feels good to be a bossy sister again, to bark at him without retribution.
“I’ll take five packs of Pall Mall red, and five of the menthol. ” These cigarettes are not just for him; they’re for his friends back at West Chicago Terrace. He looks at me and says, “I need some of those cigars, too.” The cigarettes alone will be over fifty dollars, so I tell him I can’t afford both. I desperately want to get him back to the nursing home. Slowly, articulating each syllable, he says, “No, Kim, I need to pay back some people. I need the cigars.” To the cashier he says, “I’ll also take five boxes of the cheapest cigars.” She looks at me, and I say, “No, just the cigarettes.” Mike gets louder and tells me I don’t understand. He tells the cashier he wants the cigars. “Just the cigarettes,” I insist, praying for her to hurry so we can leave. I don’t want to push him too far, but I can’t let him bully me. I am strong and professional, not an emotional weakling. I pay for the cigarettes, and we leave. He doesn’t say thank you, just calls me a selfish bitch and tells me to have fun in hell.
My mother dealt with this for 20 years, and it almost killed her. She did not have the strength to battle my brother’s overpowering, demanding insanity. When we finally sold her run-down house and moved her to my new town, she was pale and unkempt. Unable to follow our conversations, she would stare off at nothing, lost in her worries.
At times like today, as I finally deliver him back to the nursing home and I am ready to fall apart, I wonder: Do I really want to saddle my life with this responsibility? In addition to my all-consuming working-mother existence that at the end of a day leaves me spent, everything good already tapped out, am I even capable of helping him?
I don’t know.
I guess that I just have to keep trying, keep pushing forward. I have been blessed with sanity while he has been cursed. How in the world could I leave him out there alone, shivering in the park, again?
-- Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
Offering to drive my brother to court was a mistake. I know it as soon as I spot him outside smoking rather than waiting for me in the lobby of his nursing home. He is not happy to see me this morning, just angry that I’m twenty minutes late, resenting today’s guardianship hearing. He doesn’t care that I have used a day off of work or that I’m late because my son needed a ride to school. He gives me a hard look and says, “I was ready at 8 sharp, but you weren’t there. I figured you blew me off.” His receding red hair is cut very short. He hasn’t shaved, maybe for a few days, but his teeth look a bit better after two visits with the dentist. He glares at me while he pulls nicotine into his lungs.
On the nursing home’s smoking patio I know a few of the residents from my previous visits. Mike forgets his anger for a moment and introduces me to them again, connecting each person to somebody in his past, as if this world is very small, and his life is smack-dab in the middle: “Hey, you know who this guy is? That’s Jerry Dunn. Wasn’t he Martha’s husband? This is Deb Lafferty from high school. And Cheryl Coffman, you remember her. And see the lady over there, the one in pink? That’s Mary, but she uses a stage name, guess what it is…Madonna.” He waits for my expression of shock, which I don’t give because I’ve heard this all before, and then he laughs a high-pitched giggle at the good fortune of being so near the world-famous singer.
Sometimes I don’t recognize Mike right away, amidst the other residents. He looks older than 49, rough and worn. My mother warned me not to drive him today. She knows about his delusions that I’m trying to get my hands on the billions he thinks he owns, from all the inventions he thinks he’s created and companies he thinks he runs. I could let the social worker drive him to court. But he’s my brother, and I don’t really believe he would hurt me.
We have a long history of fighting with each other, as siblings usually do. In fact, I’ve always thought that our fighting was good for us as kids—that we used each other for a release of anger and frustration. I could call him any name, usually just “idiot” or “jerk,” sometimes “asshole,” knowing it would bounce right off. I could scream at him to shut up or to leave me alone, and he could do the same to me. Our anger never went very deep.
Mike talks incessantly while he smokes, and now his animosity is back. He says that if the judge gives me guardianship, then any sane person can lose his rights, so he’s sure that’s not going to happen. “You know what I’M gonna do, Kim?” His hand shakes with each drag, but his voice is strong. “I’M gonna apply for guardianship of YOU. Yeah, we’ll see how you like THAT. I’m gonna talk to MY lawyer about that today.”
Mike and I have been to the Dupage County Courthouse twice already for this business. The first time, the judge appointed a guardian-ad-litem (GAL) to interview all people involved: Mike’s psychiatrist, Mike’s wife, our mother, and the both of us; then to recommend a solution. The second time at court, the GAL reported that Mike had indeed been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he hadn’t seen his wife in years, and he didn’t appear able to make important decisions. Since nobody else was applying for the position, the GAL agreed that I should be guardian. Mike contested the recommendation, the judge appointed him an attorney, and now we go another round, not sure what to expect.
I remind him that we need to get going to make it to court by nine. He doesn’t like me telling him what to do, so he takes his time lighting Madonna’s cigarette with his. Then he flicks his butt into the bucket ashtray, raises his chin, and walks ahead of me to the building. “Let’s go,” he orders.
He mumbles and laughs to himself as we walk through the empty cafeteria toward the home’s exit. “Why are you so hyper?” I ask him. “Coffee, coffee, coffee,” he sings. “Coffee is good. I had a lot of it last night. Justice will prevail.” He giggles again, as if aware that good things are coming his way, and I wonder if he had any sleep at all. Our last stop before signing out is the nurse’s cart, where he lines up and tells me to wait. The small Asian nurse, in crisp white uniform, gives him a paper cup with four or five pills inside, and some water in another cup. He looks huge next to her. He is thin now, but his height is still impressive. After dumping all the pills into his mouth at once, he takes a swig of water and swallows. I don’t know what he is taking, because his psychiatrist cannot breach Mike’s privacy, but I’m hoping these meds help him calm down. When he gets nervous he is much more manic and delusional. At this place his medicine had seemed to be working pretty well until I started the guardianship case. Today he is so hyped with contempt, I’m wondering if I should have taken my mom’s warning seriously.
On our way out Mike begins taunting me, saying that he’s gonna kick my butt in this case. It sounds as if he’s talking about one of our old driveway basketball games, but his underlying anxiety betrays the bravado. He knows the gravity of this competition.
I have tried to allay his fears about guardianship. He imagines that I will take him out of the current nursing home and send him far away to some cold, frightening institution like the ones in textbooks on the history of psychiatric care, in the grainy photos of patients caged like rabid animals, quarantined for the safety of others. I tell him that I want only to prevent him from being homeless again, from leaving this nursing home Against Medical Advice when he has nowhere to go. “Yeah, well, that’s my decision to make, isn’t it,” he says. For a long time I thought he was right, and I am still reluctant to take away his control of his own affairs, the one source of power he has.
We get to my minivan, and Mike reminds me that I once agreed to sell him this car when I get a new one. “You made a bond,” he says. Really all I said was maybe. Maybe I could sell it to him some day. He has no job, no license, no business driving any car, but I don’t want to tell him that, so I say “we’ll see,” the same answer I give my kids when I’m not ready to make a decision–or not ready to deliver the crushing blow. I realize more and more that he feels like another kid to me, another willful self-centered teenager.
Once we’re driving he asks, “So how’s Dave doing?” His incriminating tone tells me he doesn’t really want to know how my husband is. But I attempt light chit-chat and say, “He’s fine, had to work today.” “How’s Emmy?” he asks, but now I’m getting mad because I know he thinks Dave is molesting our daughter. This “truth” came to him in some sort of revelation. He doesn’t say how he knows things like this, he just does. Last time I brought the kids to visit him, he hinted at this story in front of Emmy, and I swore I wouldn’t bring her again. The kids accept him pretty well, and they are used to his delusions, but this one is too weird.
In the 10-minute drive to the courthouse, he continues shooting questions in that sanctimonious way, as if he already knows the answers and just wants me to know that he knows, that I’m not fooling him.
“Did you like that blanket you sent me, Kim?”
“What blanket?”
“What blanket. You know you sent me a blanket.”
“A long time ago?”
“It’s a very nice blanket. But you’re strapped for cash, right?” He’s accusing me of something.
“What do you mean?” I say.
“Yeah, I heard about the drug dealers—the ones in Tinley Park? I suppose you don’t know anything about them either.”
“Mike, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I plead, trying to find my way through morning rush hour.
Finally inside the courthouse, waiting for our turn at the security check, it occurs to me that I did not think this trip through very well. When I told the nursing home’s social worker that he needn’t drive Mike to court, that I could do it instead, I did not picture standing with Mike in this long line, where we wind back and forth, very close to other people—where now he mumbles incoherently, chuckles, then abruptly asks me if I think drug dealers kill judges. We get a few looks. This is less than two months after an “alleged mentally ill” gunman murdered more children at yet another school, and people are on edge. I feel bad for a woman carrying her baby, snaking through this line with us. I want to tell her that he’s not dangerous, just crazy. I want to tell her that.
Instead I ask him to keep his voice down, but he says he can say what he wants, that I won’t take away his rights, and he gets louder. “Drug dealers are bad, Kim, and they can’t be allowed to kill judges.” I haven’t heard this bit about drug dealers before, so I’m not sure what to make of it. The lady with the baby looks at me.
After twenty-three tense minutes, we make it to the check point at the end of the line. I shove my purse and coat into the x-ray tunnel, walk through the metal-detection frame, and wait for Mike. The detector beeps, so the security guard frisks him with a handheld wand. For a second I wonder if they’ll find a weapon. Of course they don’t. He tells the security guard that it was probably the button on his jeans that set it off. As he hikes up his loose pants, I can tell that he is not wearing underwear.
For the first two appearances he wore a suit, the pants and shirt from me, the jacket from the nursing home’s charity box. He was excited about appearing before a judge and wanted to make a good impression. He felt official and used language from television court dramas, asking, “May I approach the bench?” Today, though, he is much more casual with his jeans, a thermal shirt too short for his long torso, and new gym shoes.
We find our way to room 2009. I walk in first and sit down on the right side, assuming he is following, but he passes me and continues toward one of the suited women in front. “Are you my lawyer?” he asks her. “I’m Michael Thomas David Sullivan.” She says she is not his lawyer. I’m surprised by the two middle names. I expected only Thomas, which was also our dad’s middle name. Hearing it reminds me that today, February 5th, is Dad’s birthday. Mike remembered it before I did. He and Dad, who would have been 79 if he had survived the heart attack at 46, were very close. David, I realize, is Mike’s confirmation name from 8th grade.
He turns to find a seat, I motion him to come by me, and he takes a chair on the opposite side of the room. I then move to a seat near him and say, “We don’t have to sit on separate sides. We’re not enemies.”
He leans over the empty chair between us and whispers, too loudly, “I know you’re a drug dealer, Kim. You put on this great act, but I know the truth. And you know what? People who hurt judges should be killed.” He raises his eyebrows at me as if to say, “So there.” He gets up and moves to the other side of the courtroom.
This threat unnerves me. It reminds me that when Mike is in this frame of mind, it doesn’t matter that I am his only sister, that he’s my only brother. I’m holding back tears and dreading the car-ride back, alone with him. I take a deep breath and struggle for composure. I am strong and professional, I tell myself, not an emotional weakling. But if the case is decided in my favor today, he will be furious with me.
I am relieved to see our respective lawyers, who meet with the judge and tell him again that Mike is contesting the guardianship. The judge says the matter is continued, and it turns out that Mike and I didn’t even need to be here today. We will schedule a trial to hear both sides. (Mike is expecting “a jury of my peers,” but the lawyers tell us it’s much more informal than that. I am dreading the moment when he watches me argue that he is delusional and hopelessly dependent.)
Mike is anxious to talk privately to his attorney, and I overhear him telling her that when he was nine years old, his mother sent him to Vietnam where he met Vice President Gerald Ford. She can check it out online, he says. She politely brushes him off and while walking away tells my lawyer that this should be an easy case.
For a moment I picture my brother at age nine, in his 1973, 4th-grade school portrait: bright, shaggy red hair; freckles covering his sunburned face; chipped front tooth; mustard-yellow turtleneck. He was a bright student, an athlete. In high school he would be a starting pitcher as well as jazz saxophonist and lead in three musicals. He would earn two college scholarships, one for acting and one for baseball. But in his first year away, Mike will start hearing voices that other people say are not real, and he’ll come home mid-term second semester.
At that time my mother, still reeling from her husband’s death one year earlier, did her best to help him find a future. The local mental hospital, where my father had spent his career as a psychologist, had recently closed down and nothing had taken its place, so after a brief stint in a psychiatric ward, Mike lived at home. There was nowhere else for him to go. He couldn’t focus on college courses, couldn’t keep a job for more than a few weeks, and couldn’t live on his own without alarming neighbors and badgering the landlord with illogical requests. (After unscrewing the hinges of his neighbors’ door, Mike complained to the landlord that those neighbors were bullying him and demanded they be evicted.) Mike had stretches of relative sanity, which were when he got married—twice—and had one son. But as the years went on, those sane periods waned, and after he allegedly strangled my mom’s cat, he had no real home.
Un-medicated for a long while, after wandering the town with no place to stay, he started breaking into the basement window of Mom’s house. Nobody knew what wild thoughts assaulted his mind, and Mom called me in a panic. We met with a judge then, too, and convinced him that Mike “was a danger to himself and others.” This was nothing new, a familiar routine by then. The police would take him to a psych ward, where he would stay for a few weeks before coming back home.
Mike remembers this particular time, though, and often brings it up because he sees it as my supreme betrayal. To help the officers find him, I had to set the trap. I told Mike I would meet him at the house with money for a hotel. But when he got there, I was waiting around the corner as the police met him instead. Because the court order dictated that I be present, I moved closer as the officers cuffed his hands. Mike resisted them until he saw me standing at the end of the driveway, no doubt thinking I would straighten this all out. When I told him we would be in touch soon, he stopped struggling, stared at me, and cocked his head as if unable to compute my role in his capture. He stood there, silent, until he was nudged toward the squad car and guided into the back seat. And even though I know it was the right thing to do, I still feel the horror of that betrayal, the truth that unlike our childhood fights, this one hurt him to the core.
Most recently Mike has lived in at least ten different private nursing homes around Chicago, most designed for the mentally ill—not the planned ideal to replace the state-run mental hospitals but still a place to live, and much better than Cook County Jail, where he spent a few long months. For brief periods he has lost touch with us when bouncing from one of these places to another, but we have always managed to find him.
One goal of my guardianship pursuit is to make sure we’re always connected. As we approach the revolving door to exit the courthouse, Mike pointedly tells me that he does not need to put on his coat, even though it’s a typical winter day in Chicago. He slings his Army surplus parka over his shoulder. I don’t challenge him, but he is determined to make his point: “Try spending a night in the park, Kim, shivering under the slide because it’s 7 degrees outside. You get used to the cold.”
I tell him I just want to help.
“Oh, like you helped when I couldn’t live at home,” he says.
Attempting to defend myself, I say that back then I did my best to find him places to stay. I try to sound strong, but the memory of him sleeping in the park, where we used to play as kids, almost unravels me. And really, most of the time I let Mom handle it on her own while I got away from there, to college and grad school, then marriage.
He tells me he doesn’t need my help now, that he can do fine on his own: “Just stay the hell out of my life, please.” I am tempted to give the whole thing up. It’s making him more unstable than ever, it’s costing me a lot of money, and I’m afraid he’s starting to really hate me.
Then in a less biting voice he says, “Hey, we gotta pick up four buckets of chicken and some smokes.”
I tell him in the car that I can’t buy chicken for everyone at the nursing home, and he informs me that my money is really his anyway because when I sold Mom’s house, I stole all of the profits. I remind him that she used the money to buy her new house, but he says that Dad left the house to him, not to Mom. He then asks if he can have two of the quarters in my cup-holder. I tell him to take them all, and I agree to buy him cigarettes. I half-heartedly urge him to quit smoking, but I know that for him they are medicinal: calming and satisfying. After the hand he has been dealt, I won’t deny him this pleasure.
While we’re walking in to Jewel, he asks me whether I would rather be a Christian or a devil worshipper. I say Christian, but he doesn’t believe me. At the cigarette counter, in his big, belligerent voice the first thing he says to the cashier is, “This is a Christian store, right?” She steps back and looks at me. She doesn’t know what to say.
“Mike, just tell her what you want.” I’m exasperated, and for a second it feels good to be a bossy sister again, to bark at him without retribution.
“I’ll take five packs of Pall Mall red, and five of the menthol. ” These cigarettes are not just for him; they’re for his friends back at West Chicago Terrace. He looks at me and says, “I need some of those cigars, too.” The cigarettes alone will be over fifty dollars, so I tell him I can’t afford both. I desperately want to get him back to the nursing home. Slowly, articulating each syllable, he says, “No, Kim, I need to pay back some people. I need the cigars.” To the cashier he says, “I’ll also take five boxes of the cheapest cigars.” She looks at me, and I say, “No, just the cigarettes.” Mike gets louder and tells me I don’t understand. He tells the cashier he wants the cigars. “Just the cigarettes,” I insist, praying for her to hurry so we can leave. I don’t want to push him too far, but I can’t let him bully me. I am strong and professional, not an emotional weakling. I pay for the cigarettes, and we leave. He doesn’t say thank you, just calls me a selfish bitch and tells me to have fun in hell.
My mother dealt with this for 20 years, and it almost killed her. She did not have the strength to battle my brother’s overpowering, demanding insanity. When we finally sold her run-down house and moved her to my new town, she was pale and unkempt. Unable to follow our conversations, she would stare off at nothing, lost in her worries.
At times like today, as I finally deliver him back to the nursing home and I am ready to fall apart, I wonder: Do I really want to saddle my life with this responsibility? In addition to my all-consuming working-mother existence that at the end of a day leaves me spent, everything good already tapped out, am I even capable of helping him?
I don’t know.
I guess that I just have to keep trying, keep pushing forward. I have been blessed with sanity while he has been cursed. How in the world could I leave him out there alone, shivering in the park, again?
