Crazy Is . . .

Crazy.  There's a word we throw around with casual abandon.  Not really thinking too deeply into it's meaning or the real connotation behind it.  "She's cra-a-zy as hell!"  or "That's some crazy stuff goin' on there!" and "Crazy is as crazy does."

But what, pray tell, is crazy?

This far into history it can mean a lot of things.  It is both an adjective and a noun.  Meaning ranges from senseless to intensely enthusiastic to bizarre and unusual; there's also the nonconformist, having the jitters, performing an action with great speed or recklessness.

However, with a word origin dating back to between 1570 and 1580, crazy has its roots in the descriptive form concerning mentally deranged, demented, insane.  Those are big words.  Those are darkly powerful words.  They are words denoting a range of brain chemistry which a great many people never fully understand or never have need to investigate.

I am not one of a great many people.  What I am is one of eight siblings.  My youngest sister is in a state mental hospital in Colorado after drowning her children in the grips of a post-partum psychotic state.  My youngest brother was recently admitted to the Napa branch of the California State Hospital system after spending most of his adult life -- 18 out of 35 years -- in either jail or prison for drug-related offenses which stemmed from a long undiagnosed personality disorder.

This is not the time for discussion of my sister.  I love her.  I miss the kids and miss the innocent days for all of us that were ours before their deaths.  This is all about my brother who could aptly be described by any of the above definitions of crazy.  And, yet they would define only the hull of who he is.

Being the 'bridge' sibling, and the eldest of the second round of four in my mother's two sets of children, I am emotionally close to both of them.  Though not always in the best of form, I've stuck it all out with each of them, even when I, myself, felt as if I might 'go crazy' and join them at some point.  Besides the obvious family connection, I look at them in their situations and think I would never want to be abandoned and forgotten.  To an extent, our childhood left me knowing what it is to be on the outside, the fringe, existing as apart from the whole and afraid the black inky void would swallow me up and no one would ever remember I existed. 

For the last two nights, I've listened as my brother decompressed.  Though I try to convince him otherwise, he feels he exists in that inky darkness where all is isolation and invisibility and the forgotten.  My words are meaningless from my vantage point.  They might uplift a girlfriend or encourage a child or amuse a neighbor, they are impotent to a man of his station.  We are joined by love and bound by duty, as trite as that sounds, but our circumstances are not shared.  I can only listen and allow his painful words to march in one ear, across my brain where they burn an afterimage, and fall out the other side as they make way for the torrent of more and more.  The tide can not be stemmed.

He rails over the Godly people who seem to be so busy "goin' to church and praisin' God but they ain't got time for me [or people like me]."  He misses the whole life he never had.  Never even been on one date.  Never attended a concert.  Never had roots and ties to one place and a passel of people.  There's the brother whose bed he shared as children who now forgets all about him.  "I would never leave him rotting up in some cell forever the way he left me.  I can't change it but it hurts.  I don't have a brother now."  He wants to shore up inner walls and trim some of the shit out of his life, "I can't be lettin' people a little bit in and gettin' hopeful."  Just accept it and let it go -- marriage, family, feeling settled and safe, loved ones.  The rantings of a man fully enveloped in the depressing mantle of fear over a future he cannot yet see.

These calls are an exercise in extreme patience and faith for me.  I don't say this lightly.  I fight my own darkness in these moments.  Anger wells up and threatens to spill over.  Helplessness knocks me flat.  Despair over the improbability of his ever actually gaining his equilibrium and self-confidence washes over me in a hurricane gale.  But, eventually that very small, very still voice pierces the heaviness and speaks to me of prayer.  It reminds me of the miracle of years which has brought my brother, Gary, and me, to this point.  It asks me to believe for him.  It challenges me to pray for the very things neither of us has the present ability to see.  And then I do as the Spirit moves me.  No mean feat as my journey with Christ yet extends in an endless vista before me.

I believe Gary's second life is just getting started.  I believe he will jettison bitterness, self-pity, and anxiety for the better side of that coin.  I believe he does yet have a brother and their relationship will be restored once both men have gained enough self-healing to close the gap between their hearts and their minds.  I believe there is a good woman out there who will see into the depths of my brother's soul and pull out the goodness at his core and help it into the light of day.  I believe his future has been written in the Book of Life, and when he lets it all go, it will return to him in the same generous measure by which Job was restored to his own existence.

In the meantime, we hold on by fingertips and count down the 60 days Gary must spend in the intake ward.  And, the 30 days in the next ward before he is finally placed and begins his program of counseling, work, exercise, and acclimation.

I'm right there with him.  As I have been since day one.  That's a crazy story.