While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

by Meg Kissinger

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go —MARY OLIVER, “IN BLACKWATER WOODS”

In addition to freckles and crooked pinkie fingers, we share two signature traits: humor as a subversive form of coping and the willingness to lay ourselves bare to help others.

My mother, Jean Kissinger, an erstwhile debutante with a genius IQ, now spent her days rubbing ointment on babies’ blistered bottoms, wiping snot off our faces, plastering our cowlicks with her spit, and dripping warm medicine into our oozing, infected ear canals. She stuffed our lunch bags with peanut-butter-and-potato-chip sandwiches as she helped us conjugate Latin verbs, folded laundry while she quizzed us on our multiplication tables, and typed our term papers between bouncing a baby on her lap and ironing our uniform blouses. Her own mother was dead and she had no sisters, so it fell to my mother to raise her eight children more or less by herself while my father was out of town most of the week on business.

My father, Bill Kissinger (we called him Holmer), sold advertising space to companies that manufactured tranquilizers and other so-called ethical pharmaceuticals to harried mothers of the baby boom. Business was brisk, especially in our North Shore Chicago neighborhood, where women, a great number of them Irish Catholics like my mother, were expected to fill the pews with as many children as they could bear, whether they had the stamina or not.

The Catholic Marriage Manual that my mother and her friends read religiously cautioned, “When parents consciously choose the small family as their way of life, they are expressing their ambition for material luxury as opposed to the spiritual pleasures which child rearing can give. It is no coincidence that the ‘spoiled little brat’—the selfish monster of popular fiction and newspaper comic strips—is usually an only child.”

When Jake was in seventh grade, kids beat him up on the St. Francis playground so viciously that my parents transferred him to the public school. Not only had I done nothing to stop the harassment, I pretended not to notice. Once, I even laughed nervously. Like Peter in the garden at Gethsemane, I knew instantly that I had just betrayed the one person in my life who most consistently modeled love and compassion, and I was bitterly disappointed in myself for being so weak.

My mother worried about why I didn’t walk or talk or reach for things as early as her other kids. The pediatrician examined me thoroughly and considered all the evidence. You’re right, Jean, he told her. This one is slow. But she’ll probably be okay socially.

Holmer loved that damn football team. He would sometimes sneak us into Bears games by hiding one of the little ones under his coat or have a few of us whiz past the usher while he pretended to be fumbling for the tickets. But the team disappointed him more often than not. A season ticket holder, he once threatened to sue them for a breach of fiduciary duty, claiming they were only “masquerading as a professional football team” to bilk fans like him out of their hard-earned cash.

I don’t think he meant to hurt us. He just didn’t know how not to.

As unlikely a pair as they seemed to be on the surface, my parents would come to discover that they actually had a lot in common. Holmer, it turned out, was not just a party boy in search of an easy payday, and my mother was more than a well-mannered trust fund baby looking to laugh her way out of her grief. They were each stuck in a bad situation, eager for a fresh start. They both longed for someone who knew how it felt to have your life sailing along in one direction and then, suddenly, one day, without any warning, to have it be turned around so completely that you didn’t know where you were heading anymore.

By the time Molly arrived, Holmer had grown so weary of driving my mother to the maternity ward, he told her to just take a cab.

WITH TWO NUNS SUPERVISING ninety-eight first graders, the odds that an adult would take an inventory of our emotional needs were even worse than at home. Those ladies were there to teach us Latin, how to read and write, do simple math, learn the stations of the cross, and make sure no one got too bloodied in the process.

Those women must have been boiling in their robes, but they’d learned long ago how to squelch the suffering. Now it was their job to teach us to do the same.

Secrets fascinated me. What a thrill to know something that no one else does. You decide whom to tell and when to tell it. I used to spend hours collecting treasures from around the house—feathers, rocks from the beach, doll shoes, or my mother’s perfume bottles—and hiding them in a wooden box I called my “secret hiding place.” Then I’d try to get my brothers and sisters to guess where it was. Even if they said they weren’t interested, which was often, I’d tell them anyway. Then I’d start over again. But secrets also made me nervous. Secrets required discipline, a quality I knew that I sorely lacked.

Just as I once urged baby Molly to stay little, I wanted all of us frozen in time so that we could remain together, forever. The world scared me, and I was frightened of what might happen to Mary Kay—or any of us—when we ventured out. I know now that this was anxiety and my tears that night were not so much a reflection of foolishness or sentimentality, but fear.

Nancy embarrassed us. No one I knew had a sister who was sick like this, lying in bed most of the day with some strange illness that had no name, couldn’t be seen on an x-ray or confirmed through blood tests. One doctor said Nancy had schizophrenia. Another said it was mania with depression. Holmer wondered if her wild mood swings were caused by all the street drugs she took at college. They scrambled her brain, he said.

In my naivete, I imagined those doctors would fix Nancy in no time. She would come back sassier, funnier, and cleverer than ever. Insurance covered none of it, of course. Though, clearly, Nancy was in danger of dying, mental illnesses were not considered to be as worthy of treatment like other diseases. If you needed psychiatric care, you had two choices: pay for it yourself or go to a state institution. I knew that the Menninger Clinic was expensive and that my parents didn’t have the kind of money anymore to pay for that and for our schooling at Regina Dominican, the Catholic all-girls school where Patty and I were enrolled.

I had to get out of that house. At the same time, I was terrified of what might become of me if I left home. Look what had happened to each of my older siblings when they came back from college. Mary Kay grew distant. Nancy and Jake dropped out and were now so confused and depressed that they could barely get out of bed. Would that happen to me, too?

Growing up with so many unexplained and unexplored traumas—an emotionally distant mother who leaves mysteriously, a physically abusive father who drinks too much, a knife-wielding sister—I’d learned how to block out what I didn’t want to think or hear or see. When you put on blinders, it becomes easy to create your own reality, to blur fact with fiction. You sharpen the focus to only a few pixels so that you can’t see the whole picture. You start to wonder if something really happened or if you were making it up. After a while, I couldn’t trust myself to know the difference.

our family’s shorthand way of dealing with these situations—by simply not discussing them or making light of it—had an insidious way of fueling shame and blame where none was warranted.

people who live through trauma like the kind our family experienced tend to develop anxiety about being away. We become deeply vigilant.

Well, there goes all my fun, my mother sighed when Holmer declared that he’d had his last drop of drink. Their marriage had been bathed in booze for a quarter of a century. Alcohol had soothed their nerves through colicky newborns and dying parents and business deals that suddenly fell apart. It settled them down as they ventured from Milwaukee to Chicago to Connecticut and back to Chicago, gaining a kid or two with each move. When the going got tough, they headed to the liquor cabinet, and, suddenly, they weren’t so weak or afraid anymore.

Holmer was famous for his drunken antics. Once while he was in New Orleans for a medical convention, he jumped up onstage at a stripper bar. It’s okay, he announced. I’m a gynecologist. And there was the time Mary Kay looked out of the window of her college dorm room during St. Louis University’s parents weekend and saw Holmer streaking naked across the lawn. After a night of carousing, Holmer frequently drove his Cutlass convertible on people’s lawns to drop them off, announcing, Door-to-door service! as my mother sat giggling beside him.

Now Nancy was back in the psych ward on suicide watch. No way will she be home for Christmas, Mary Kay said. As I look back on this now, I see that a more sensitive person would be alarmed, worried sick about this poor woman who keeps trying to kill herself. Poor Nancy! What can I do to help my sister? I might have thought. But no. Instead, I was angry. Nancy had screwed up my dramatic homecoming plans. Once again, she was stealing all the oxygen in the room.

Despite hundreds of hours of therapy and months in various hospitals, she only seemed to be getting worse. We lost count how many times she tried to kill herself by swallowing pills. The antipsychotic drugs she was taking now, Haldol and Stelazine, made her joints stiff and her mouth dry. Her brown eyes, once so clear, were cloudy. She was dizzy, nauseated, and had trouble peeing. She sometimes rambled nonsense or lay in bed howling. She seemed more like a zombie than the girl she had been just a few years earlier—a sassy boy-crazy teenager in Villager shirtdresses and Capezio flats who told her friends that all she really wanted to do was to find a cute guy, settle down, and raise a family.

What’s the matter with you? I asked Nancy. Fuck you, Nancy said and hung up. Those were the last words my sister ever spoke to me.

My thoughts were racing, too. What should I wish for? That she survives yet again or that she is finally out of her misery? These last five years had been especially tortuous for Nancy. She seemed so sick, like an end-stage cancer patient growing weaker each day. Each new suicide attempt had taken a little more out of her. We couldn’t imagine how she would ever be able to have the kind of life she wanted. But Holmer never gave up on her. He’d met enough people at his AA meetings who had turned their lives around to believe that recovery is always possible.

Maybe she doesn’t want to be rescued again and again, I thought as we made our way toward the hospital. Maybe we’re being selfish by working so hard to keep her alive when what she wants most of all is to be out of her pain.

Now what? What do we do without Nancy? She’d taken up so much of the energy in our family, it was hard to imagine what life was going to be like without her. I flopped on my bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

More secrets, more lies, just like when my mother disappeared years earlier. Why couldn’t we just tell the damn truth? By hiding what really happened, we’d not only be dismissing Nancy’s suffering but fortifying the notion that her mental illness was a choice, one that we should all be ashamed of.

No doubt Holmer was embarrassed that his daughter had killed herself. People always blame the parents. Why couldn’t they have controlled that girl?… I heard it was street drugs. But there was more to Holmer’s cover-up than that. He was also scared that Nancy would be denied a proper Catholic funeral. In the eyes of the Catholic Church, suicide was considered a sin, and those who killed themselves were destined to burn in hell. Their bodies were declared to be unclean, unworthy of a funeral Mass or burial in a Catholic cemetery. Holmer knew well how cruel the consequences were.

Nothing captivates a bunch of Irish people more than a sad story and a stiff drink. We offered them plenty of both. The house was filling up fast. We would need to turn on our charm, put on our best party faces, and make these folks feel welcome.

I felt light, like a cloud that could float away, breezy, fluffy, and free. This reaction sounds crazy, I know. Nancy was dead. I would never see her again. I felt like I should be sobbing, and I was confused about why I wasn’t. But for the last several years, I had been terrified of her. She made all our lives miserable. No one wanted to hear that, but it was true. And this is also true: She was the most miserable of us all. Each day seemed worse than the last for her. Who would want to keep living like that? The fact is, I was relieved she was gone, for my sake and hers. And now a houseful of guests were downstairs, waiting to cheer me up and comfort me, the sad, grieving little sister.

Journalism was providing me with a perfect escape. If I could focus on the tensions of the stories I was working on, I wouldn’t have to think about the drama at home.

If she’d been diagnosed with cancer or had suffered a heart attack, I’m sure I would have left school right away and gone home to visit her. At the very least, I would have called her and told her how sorry I was that she was not well. I would be worried sick, praying for her and asking my friends to do the same. But this was her mental illness, something many of us at that time considered a weakness in her character, real “Days of Wine and Roses” shit. If only she could be stronger. I kept my distance and my mouth shut.

Holmer still was not prepared to talk about feelings—his or mine. He was there to “jolly me up,” give me a shot of confidence. But the unspoken message of his visits was clear: I wasn’t Nancy. I was different. Yes, I was emotional, and I felt things intensely. But that didn’t mean I was destined to end up like she did. If I could take on these authority figures, challenge the status quo, arm wrestle a radio announcer, and stand up to a misogynistic army officer, I could get past a “case of the blues.”

Larry’s fresh tomatoes were so sweet, my knees buckled the first time I tasted one. He made salsa, baked pies, and knit his own scarves. Larry introduced me to a whole new world I never knew existed—fresh food, fresh air, stunning mountain views, the thrill of waking up in a tent as the sun rises and watching an eagle swoop by.

Our family room closet was stuffed with dismembered dolls, broken musical instruments, scattered Chinese checkers pieces, and an occasional empty soda can or half-eaten peanut butter sandwich. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a full deck of cards in the house, a metaphor lost on no one.

As my due date drew near, I began to panic. How the hell is a baby’s head supposed to get out of my body? I asked my mother. Beats me, she said. God must be a man or he would have figured out an easier way.

I wanted direction, some practical advice that I could use to help me care for my newborns. After about the tenth time she told me I would figure it out, I finally realized that she wasn’t being coy. She genuinely did not remember. All those kids. All that laundry. All those feedings in the middle of the night. We were a blur to her now. She had been so overwhelmed by all of us—or by the gin and Valium—that the memories of those delicate, precious days had disappeared.

In her day, women in labor were put into a drug-induced trance, a procedure known as twilight sleep. With the help of a drug called scopolamine (also known as the date rape drug, “the Devil’s Breath”), women felt the pain of giving birth; they just couldn’t remember it. If she was too loopy to push, my mother would lie on the table like a stunned cow before the slaughter while the doctor grabbed a pair of forceps and yanked out one or the other of us. Eventually, she would “come to,” to find yet another frantic, cone-headed newborn in her arms and stitches in her perineum, clueless of how either came about.

She was held back from us by a gauze of her lifelong anxiety and ensuing postpartum depression. My mother could see us. She just could not get to us, completely. Each birth—blessed event though it was billed to be—was also a form of trauma for her, one that deprived her of memory and now my siblings and me the benefit of her expertise.

You’re turning into your mother. For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, I considered that a compliment. Once the source of my frustration and bitter disappointment—and, if I am being brutally honest, disdain—my mother was fast becoming my role model, someone I looked to for strength. Quitting drinking had made her strong in ways I never imagined that she could be. It gave her a sense of accomplishment that we all admired. She looked younger and healthier.

So, I lied and said Nancy taught music. Oh, yeah, I said. Sorry about that. After I hung up, I went and hid in a stall in the ladies’ room so no one could hear me crying. Poor Nancy. She wasn’t a music teacher. She wanted to be, but she was too sick to finish school. That’s the real story. She was sick and nothing she tried or we tried could make her better. And when she couldn’t stand it any longer, she jumped in front of a train because she would rather get crushed to death than live one more second in that much pain. I’m glad I could set the record straight. Nancy deserved to be remembered for the way she really was, not for how we wanted her to be.

Leaving the house we grew up in felt like another death in a way. It was hard to let go. Like each of us, that house had seen a lot of sorrow, but somehow still managed to be a source of great joy and welcoming to all. No one was too eccentric, drunk, or disheveled to be denied a place at the Kissinger dinner table. Our house was the spot all our friends gathered on summer nights and on weekends. We never locked the door. People knew to just come inside and not to bother ringing the door bell.

How did you find the strength to keep going? I asked him. I knew from Nancy’s death and, even more so, my mother’s near suicide a few years earlier, how bitter that can make a person feel, so unimportant and abandoned. I had a choice, Nat told me. I could feel sorry for myself and wallow in pity or choose to be happy and do what I could to make that happen.

I saw what I wanted to see and didn’t know how sick he really was becoming. We were swept up in the sadness of losing our mother. It was easier to imagine that Danny was doing well, even though we all had nagging doubts. Mary Kay and I were busy raising our kids, and Molly and Patty lived far away. Danny rarely came around for family gatherings and holidays. When he did, he was very guarded about what he would say,

I didn’t know that when someone tells you that they have a plan for how to kill themselves, they are in imminent danger. I thought, wrongly, that encouraging Danny to talk about his fantasies of suicide would make him want to act on them even more. I didn’t understand then that it could have helped to let him talk about how he was feeling, that sometimes you have to let uncomfortable conversations continue. It was another lost opportunity. With hindsight, I wish I had said, I am sorry that you are feeling this lonely. You can get through this tough time. I will help you. We all will. You are not alone. But I was scared. So, instead, I punched him in the arm and said, Cut it out.

As we saw during his Weiss trial days, Danny was a champion denier. If he dug in his heels hard enough, he thought, he could avoid the reality of his illness. Now he had found a way to describe his behavior in a way that was much more acceptable to him than the truth.

Jake aspired to a career in international trade, but his depression made full-time work and living independently impossible for him. Some days, it was a chore for him just to get out of bed. We always assumed he would live with Holmer and my mother forever. Jake had a nice group of friends and a sweet girlfriend he saw twice a week. But he never talked about wanting to move away from home, and my parents never encouraged him to.