Everything Is Fine

by Vince Granata

I knew how much murió didn’t say.

Sometimes I listen to that nocturne now. The most beautiful version I’ve found is on YouTube, played by Lithuanian pianist Vadim Chaimovich. The video features a single still image, Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

But even then, Tim was accelerating. Somewhere, in ways mostly invisible, Tim was accelerating. Somehow it started, on an atomic level, a single cell, something misfiring, an electron hitting the wrong synapse, a chemical imbalance slowly putrefying his brain. Even in high school, that reaction must have been building, accelerating, mounting some type of dysfunctional momentum, a force too big for him to control, too unwieldy for him to lift over his head, too heavy for him to set down among his weights on the basement floor.

His illness had begun its work, separating Tim from the world. His brain began bending reality, making social situations intolerable.

During some of these conversations with Tim, I started to recognize what would become one of his disease’s signatures—malleable religious language, ways to shape a world he struggled to recognize. We had not been raised with this specific type of religion, but religion, for Tim, had become the arena for schizophrenia’s coup. Religiosity, a smoldering brand of fire and brimstone, endowed his delusions with cosmic significance, gave him a language for his psychosis—the demons, Tim would say, the demons in my head.

One of the greatest tricks Tim’s schizophrenia would ever play was convincing him that it didn’t exist.

This transference—shifting the source of his pain from illness to invented trauma—was his disease’s defense mechanism. The source of this defense, anosognosia, did double duty. It rejected the sickness in his brain and convinced him that he was a victim.

I never saw my mother dance. I can’t think of a single time. Dancing does not remind me of my mother. Were I to get married, were she still alive, we might not have done this part, the mother-son dance. Or maybe we would have fumbled through it, my mother laughing, looking at her feet, watching them shuffle in ways I had never seen. I can’t know the answer to this question, Would my mother have danced with me at my wedding? And this, the certainty that I would never find out, that there would be nothing new between my mother and me, descended while I watched Andrew dance with his mother, a new pain, a way I hadn’t hurt before.

I don’t know what it feels like to have a psychotic disorder. I don’t know that pain, no matter how I hard I try. I’ve read dozens of books, listened to lectures on abnormal psychology, stared at brain diagrams until my own brain aches, taken hallucinogenic drugs that made plane contrails sparkle, my skin look like shimmering lizard scales. With headphones I’ve listened to “schizophrenia simulations,” blurred my eyes and imagined hallucinating spiders crawling on my bedsheets. But I don’t know—I can’t know—what Tim and millions of others feel when waves of neurotransmitters run roughshod over their brains. No book or interview or simulation can give me this experience, can make the specter of the disease real for me.

But the strain of these efforts left me feeling like an imposter, like a poor facsimile of my mother, the woman who had tried to protect us with everything is fine. On that night my father found me, drunk, alone in the family room, when he said, Vince, this isn’t you, I couldn’t tell him how right he was. I couldn’t tell him how exhausted I’d become hiding from pain. But pain finds its way. We try, but we can’t stop the pooling, how trauma saturates.

More than a year after my mother died, I stumbled on an old Toni Morrison interview, something I found after rereading Beloved. In the interview, Morrison dissects the word remember, breaks the word in two—re-member, the opposite of dismember. She speaks about remembering in this way, as an active reconstruction, memories the result of a piecing together, a re-membering of the past. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a more beautiful reflection on a single word. I would come to think this way when Tim and I shared memories, both of us re-membering, our past something that needed reconstruction.

I miss her when I remember how we spoke about Tim—briefly, not long that night—when she said that he had mentioned taking a course at a local college, transferring credits so he could graduate. Even then, this is what she saw in him: hope, a future. Now, I can miss the way she loved Tim, two months before her death.

During that first year without my mother, I would have been too afraid to look at the cover of Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, to let myself remember where I had been when she died. But when I cried with Elise, when I tried, at first, to separate this from that, I was allowing the type of sadness I had fought so fervently, the sober tears I had shunned while I tried to endure, tried to conquer. I try to welcome that sadness now, when I see my mother in Lizzie’s handwriting, when I hear my mother every time Tim says, Bye for now. Without allowing that sadness, I let loss dismember, eliminate my mother from my memories, the place I keep her now.

Now, I know that my mother is never out of view. I know that I remember her every day, Rocky Road ice cream in a grocery store, the stack of books next to my bed, a Guns N’ Roses song on the radio—yes, my mother loved Axl Rose. I remember her when I see nothing but the white wall behind my desk—she’s rubbing sunscreen into Chris’s shoulders, writing messages in the margins of my grade school stories. I’m grateful to have her this way now, in my students’ groans when I make a pun, in Lizzie’s voice on the phone, in a woman’s laugh when I imagine, What would Mom think of her? This is loss. This is Mom, there are so many things I want to tell you.

I had to learn a new way to remember my mother, to remember Tim before the terror of his illness. To learn, I had to look at pieces of my life that seemed impossibly at odds with each other. I had to understand that these pieces could be simultaneously true. I love my brother—and—my brother killed our mother. This pair, this impossible simultaneous truth, is what I learned to hold.

So, for the first time, I chose the pain of keeping my eyes open. For the first time, I let myself begin to hold the pieces, all the shattered pieces, even my mother’s body—her real body—broken on our family room floor.

My father’s strength used to be difficult for me to understand. As a child, I was never in awe of him physically. Though his three sons would become college athletes, he was not a physically impressive man. My father couldn’t throw a football over the roof of our house, beat me in a forty-yard dash, split logs for our suburban fireplace. He was not the superhero some boys make of their fathers, not one who performed feats of physical strength. But I can’t remember a promise that he ever failed to keep. For hours, he would sit with me in the family room, build elaborate Lego structures, cut balsa wood with an X-Acto knife, construct a model of the great pyramids we painted in glimmering gold. After every childhood basketball game, he took me to the diner, watched me eat pancakes topped with mounds of powdered sugar, showed me how to make a saltshaker balance on one of its edges, held magically by a few coarse grains. When I was a shy new student at high school—slow to make friends, alone on many Friday nights—we would watch reruns of Iron Chef, assemble our own modest culinary masterpieces—sandwiches layered with cold cuts and cheese. My father didn’t teach me how to bait a fishing hook, how to throw a strike, how to fix a leaking pipe. He didn’t take me up mountains or show me how to carve my way down a ski slope. No, his strength was not the kind that inspired me, that moved me through heroic awe. His strength was a kind I learned to take for granted, the quiet strength o...

But I was starting to believe that looking at the story might, somehow, let me make sense out of the senseless. At first, this wish, to make sense out of the senseless, felt fleeting, like a fantasy. But through reconstruction, through careful assembly, I could examine all the pieces that had left me terrified. I could hope for a new way forward. I could start to believe that the past would lose its power over me.

Our father remains at home, surrounded by memories, but he’s helped teach me that these reminders are far more than just signposts on the way to tragedy. He’s helped me remember, Vince, there was a happy life here too.