Everything Is Fine

by Vince Granata

Would one be born with a long coiled fuse, a fuse that would wait twenty years to ignite?

Though he was quiet, his lifting was controlled violence.

that word was still more colloquial than clinical, an insult mocking inconsistency.

We looked to each other, uncomfortable in the presence of someone who seemed unhinged, insane, bat-shit crazy.

one person experiences as a slight glitch in audio perception—light static—another will experience as strident persecutory voices—you’re a fat bitch.

I don’t know my father’s specific pain, the pain of losing the love of his life at the hands of his son. I will never tell him to get rid of my mother’s things, to leave the house, to move, to move on.

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.

His illness adopted religious language, a spiritual vocabulary that would animate his delusions.

been able to hide much of his disorganized thought process through immersion in philosophy and religion. He intellectualized the cacophony in his head, normalized the disturbances as part of a spiritual and philosophical struggle.

Our laws regarding diseases that spawn delusions are delusional themselves.

Then, I made another mistake. “Tim,” I said, “you know that wasn’t actually there, right?” Challenging what was real to Tim separated us further, truncated one of the most honest conversations he would have with me about his terrifying world.

When Chris and Lizzie exorcised anger—fuck him, fuck him, he’s dead to me—they fought against trauma’s paralytic hold.

At my most skeptical, I saw dream interpretation as a little hokey, as pseudoscience, but I also knew that I wanted my dreams to matter.

To figure this out I decided that I needed to know what my mother would want. Knowing her wishes became desperately important. But this phrase—what she would want—can be a trap, an impossible puzzle, the living left to guess at the wishes of the dead.

I hated that she said it, God has a sense of humor. In that moment, I despised this flip turn of phrase. I hated this idea, that the divine was filled with whimsy, fate simply a frivolous matchmaker.

And I hated that I felt this way, how quickly an innocuous comment—a lighthearted line played for laughs—could pry me from happiness, even as I was surrounded by my closest friends, celebrating two people we loved.

One of our greatest mistakes is painting all mental illness with one broad brush.

I know that the district attorney took no pleasure in prosecuting my brother, in building the story around my mother’s death. For him, my brother’s trial was not a righteous crusade to punish the guilty.

I learned not to implode when his illness lashed out. I learned to look at Tim’s struggle as a longer story, a battle not easily won.