Stuff I know
I know a thing or two about mental illness. It runs in the family.

My maternal grandfather was an incredibly intelligent and driven human being. When he was in his mid-20s, he was an accountant in Cleveland. An image that stands out in my mind is a picture of this man and his two daughters standing in front of a car with a 1956 Ohio license plate. The car was a '54 Cadillac. The daughters were my mom, who would have been 4 or 5, and her sister, two years older. Clearly, to get himself into a ride like that, he was doing something right.

Five years later, my mom found herself in the back of an old Buick station wagon, leaving Cleveland, headed for Springfield, Mo. Her dad had chucked everything to go to a Bible college in the Ozarks, a place he'd never been. He packed his wife and two kids and whatever possessions they could fit into the Buick and headed west. God had told him to.

If God speaks to you, that doesn't make you insane. But it wasn't God's voice he was hearing.

My mom has, thankfully, been stingy with details about what her life was like during the 1960s. The only thing I know clearly is that her life was bad enough that she believed the only way out was to get married at 16 and have a kid.

My grandmother divorced my mom's father in 1967, which was a pretty gutsy move, not just because divorces were uncommon in the late '60s, but also because it left her and her newly married, pregnant, high-school sophomore daughter without any discernible means of support other than my soon-to-be-dad's wages as a fry cook. My grandmother went to work, for the first time in her life, in her late 30s, and later married the man that I called Grandpa when I was growing up, a retired Army guy who was 18 years her senior.

I knew nothing of my biological grandfather until I was 5 or 6; at that point, because I wasn't very good at assembling details, I thought he lived in Cleveland. And because I had what I believed to be a complete family unit -- two parents, four grandparents -- his lack of presence didn't bother me in the least.

As I got older, I started asking more questions and getting fewer answers. It turned out that I actually had met the man, when I was 2 or 3. My mom had broken off contact with him shortly after my sister was born in 1971, because his illness had progressed to the point where she not only was uncomfortable around him, she felt unsafe.

Treatment and medicine advanced, and by 1978, my mother and her father had reconciled. I was allowed to meet him when I was 10. He wasn't living in Cleveland at all. He was living in Anytown, not 5 miles from my house. He was married to a charming woman, who happened to be 2 years older than my mom.

I spent quite a bit of time with him when I was 10; he was smart, and fascinating, and funny, and creative. He and I shared a love for American history. His political hero was Stephen Douglas; mine was John F. Kennedy. We also shared a love for old cars, although I found his obsession with Cadillacs a bit odd. Deferring to the fact that he was my grandfather and I was 10, I didn't question that obsession, nor did I question the fact that he called himself "Steve" when his name was actually Rupert. Hell, I thought, if my name was Rupert, I'd have come up with something different, too.

I was also fascinated with his smoking habits. He was the only person I've ever known who smoked Old Gold cigarettes. He would open a new pack very carefully, tearing the foil portion so he could re-close it after he got a fresh smoke rather than just tearing it off. When non-filtered Old Golds were unavailable, he'd buy the filtered variety, very carefully open the pack, and even more carefully pop the filter off each cigarette.

I did notice that he signed his name with the title "Rev.," when, my mom told me, he wasn't ordained in anything. I ran this by my other grandfather, who was in fact ordained as a Baptist minister, and he quickly and not very subtly changed the subject.

I later learned that in the late 1970s, my mother's father was very well medicated, and he was diligently taking his medicine in an effort to stay in step with the world as much as possible. His charming young wife worked in the millinery department of a downtown department store; he didn't work at all, best I could tell. But other than that, he was trying to get by as best as he could around the limitations of his illness. My mom leaned on him very hard to take his medication, but it was hard; he felt fine when he was on his medication, he believed, so, clearly, he was cured, and therefore he no longer needed it.

Then, in 1980, he suffered a heart attack while shoveling snow. He had not been diligent about his medication before his heart attack, and the voices in his head had been telling him to be mean to his charming young wife -- mean enough that, after he had his heart attack, she threw him out of their house. He moved in with us while recovering from open heart surgery, and argued that his medication wouldn't mix well with his heart pills, and given the choice, he was going to take his heart pills.

The decline happened fast. His presence was the last straw on my parents' faltering marriage. My mom threw her dad out, and shortly after that left my dad. My grandfather went back home, reconciled with his charming young wife, then began accusing her of cheating on him with my dad, then began threatening her life. She, wisely, left again.

My mom tried as hard as she could. She ignored his threats, she bought him groceries, she made sure he at least took his heart pills. One day, he threatened suicide. She delivered his groceries while he was gone somewhere, went into his house, and took his gun.

I came home from school to find several bags of groceries on the front porch, with a note scrawled in his very distinctive handwriting: "I WILL NOT accept CHARITY from THIEVES." The tail on the "s" went all the way across the paper, from right to left, as an underscore for his indignance.

That was it. She cut him off at that point.

My mom was angry, and sad, too. Me, being a teenager by that point, I had no time for simultaneous anger and sadness, so I stuck with just anger. We went on with our lives.

When I started writing for the newspaper, my mother noted that he might try to seek me out sometime. "He'd be very proud of you, I think," she said. "Don't be surprised if he tries to make contact with you."

"If he does," I fumed, "I won't be responsible for what I'll do."

A tear formed in my mom's eye.

"I know, and I understand," she said. "But he isn't either."

That exchange happened in 1988. Two years later, my mother's father was dead of a heart attack. He had just turned 60. I couldn't tell if my mom was sad or relieved. I suspect it was a completely unexplainable and justifiable mix of both.

I don't have nearly enough megabytes to go into all the complexities of my mother's immediate family -- her mom, strong as a rock, who died of a heart attack six months before her ex-husband died; her sister, insecure, overweight, trapped for years in abusive relationships, who died of a heart attack in 2002; my mom herself, who is so detached from everything that she allows herself to be close to nobody. But at the heart of so much of that was a man whose greatest sins in life were caused by something over which, for much of his life, he had very little control.

I learned a lot from those experiences. I learned that mental illness is real. I know that perfectly wonderful people can carry a mental illness, and that they're no more deserving of your contempt than somebody who has diabetes or MS.

I also know that many mental illnesses are genetic. This is always in the back of my mind. Schizophrenia, for instance, often doesn't show up until a person is in his mid-20s. I'm 35, safely past that point, but I still worry when I don't feel like I'm in complete control of my emotions. I worry about my sister, whose ability to handle average, real-world stress is zero. I worry about my kids.

I've been scared into therapy a couple of times, and both times, I was reassured that my worry about having a problem was a sure sign that I didn't have one. Many of the elements of my dad's side of the gene pool cancel out those from my mom's side.

Society and science are starting to come around to understand that mental illness is just that, an illness, and it needs to be treated accordingly. It's difficult to say it's just like any other illness, because few other illness cause people to lash out at those they love or at total strangers and say and do hurtful -- or possibly violent -- things.

But in most ways, it is. And I know that somewhere inside my mother's father was a smart, and fascinating, and funny, and creative man.

If you know somebody who's mentally ill, stick with them and support them. Do everything you can to make sure they get the help they need. I understand -- deeply -- that there may come a point where you have to cut them off, for your own sanity or, perhaps, safety. But all you can do is all you can do, and that's all I'm asking.

No, vember
Around here, we hate November. Take a look through the archives and check it out. Big gaps in each of the Novembers. If you were to page through the archives of my brain and look through the previous Novembers, you'd most likely find the same thing.

I've always hated November. I hated November when I was a little kid, when school started to get monotonous and the days started to get shorter and the weather brought the season's first snow. I hated November as a young sportswriter, when football and basketball overlapped, meaning we covered neither particularly well. I hated November when it took my dad away from me 16 years ago. I hated November in 1993, when it came time to decide that it was time to leave Anytown and head out into the world. You can pretty much rattle off the last four: November 2000, the interminable presidential election; 2001, the month of never-ending ennui; 2002, the mind-jarring readjustment to life on the Edge after giving up the Texas experiment. And this one, which simply is the tail end of what has been a really arduous year.

So that explains everything. That's the "why" behind my recent dark spell. It's just November. It'll be over soon.

Thanks for dropping by, eh?
A quick stroll through the logs reveals we seem to have picked up a semi-regular visitor from Canada. Welcome aboard, and feel free to explain that selection process for a prime minister to me at any time.

Hit the road, Jack
It occurs to me that in the last four weeks, I have not ventured outside my immediate home-to-work corridor. That seems to be the problem. Must break free and see something outside of my home area code.

It's good to have a goal.

Me, crying my eyes out for a girl I never knew
Her message: "Make every second count."

She damn sure did. The rest of us can take a lesson.

Fair warning
I'm allowing my job to eat me alive. It's probably too late for me. Please don't let it happen to you.

It all comes spilling out
A roundup of unrelated items from the Edge:

Uncle John, who was hospitalized three weeks ago after a brain aneurysm ruptured (has it only been three weeks?) has "graduated" to rehab. Days of grueling physical, speech and occupational therapy are helping to bring him back around. The Cousin Who's On TV and Dr. Cousin have been rocks for their family, putting everything on hold at their homes in the Carolinas to be with their Mom and Dad back in Anytown. Thanks the miracle of technology, my cousins have been keeping us up-to-date ... via a blog, of course. (Because I'm absurdly protective about my family's identity in this forum, I won't link directly; however, send me an e-mail and I'd be more than happy to send you the link.) Bottom line is, it's starting to look like a happier holiday season in Anytown -- and that soothes my heart greatly.

Oh, by the way, we moved. Avid readers of this forum know that we change residences as often as some women change their hair color. This move was a simple cross-county move, however -- and it was embarked upon for many reasons. We were overpaying for a house we really didn't like all that much. The Wife took on the tasks, damn near singlehandedly, of 1/finding the house, 2/negotiating a mortgage that was actually favorable to us 3/selling our own house (for a tidy profit, after owning it for only 9 months) and the hardest part, 4/convincing me it was a good idea. Because of her work, we're in a house we do like, with a mortgage payment that's much more in line with our budget, in a more convenient location. My role in this was really very minimal, as is the amount of credit I should take. Further proof that The Wife is a goddess.

Helping to complete my technological circle, I became the proud owner of a slightly used Macintosh G4. Dual-processor 500 MHz, 256 MB of RAM (at the moment), OS X Panther. I started my tech life as a Mac user, and the reconversion is almost complete. Because I haven't found time to buy a router or a KVM switch, and beacuse I only have one monitor, I have to disconnect the Monster Dell and manually connect everything else to use the Mac. But the time I have spent with Mac OS X convinces me that it's radically superior to the previous Mac interface, and, as always, it's way better than Windows. I love being able to justify being an annoying Mac user again. And being surrounded by comptuers makes me feel like a geek, which I like.

I haven't had time to buy a KVM switch or a router because I find myself spending a lot of time at work these days. We're in the process of a "workflow conversion," a conversion which was envisioned late last year but has only recently been implemented. Change is abhorrent to most journalists, especially those of us on the production side. We're especially resistant to any change that we perceive to overemphasize the "production" part at the expense of creativity. We (me, too) sometimes forget that one can be extremely creative in the production parts, too. I also apparently missed the part of my management class (I did take a few of those while I breezed past college) that would have informed me that recruiting and hiring an experienced, talented employee could be bad for morale. I anticipate the waters will settle soon, but until they do, I'm going to spend a lot of time at the helm. It's thrown my schedule completely asunder: I'm now working mostly nights, including Sundays. Neither my body nor my family is adjusting well. But dammit, I enjoy a challenge, on some levels.

Speaking of The Wife (we were speaking of her earlier, you'll recall): She and Champion Dog I (the female) took fourth place at a large-ish dog show this weekend. You'd be forgiven for yawning at that development -- until you were informed that she and her dog did this all by themselves. Up to this point, she's spent a ton of money on "professional handlers" to show off her Champion Dog. Because she became mildly miffed at the most recent professional handler, she decided to take the leash in her own hands. Beware The Wife when she becomes mildly miffed. With no real previous experience to speak of, she stepped into the ring and earned a ribbon in a very large field -- and, I might add, blew the doors off the person at whom she was mildly miffed.

Whew. I think that about covers it, for now, anyway. It's good to be back.

Out of Creativity AutoReply
Currently recharging. Lots to talk about, little time or motivation to write it. And, as I write this, a water-line break has left us without running water. There's a parallel there, somewhere.

I sense being on the way back. Hang tight.

Exhale
Uncle John is recovering from having undergone three brain surgeries in less than a week. The surgeries were, by all accounts, successful, and he's doing about as well as can be expected under the circumstances. The prognosis for recovery is good, although only time will tell what damage the aneurysm left behind.

I have been reminded that the bond that holds my extended family together is very strong. We're scattered all over the country, and we don't communicate with each other nearly as much as we should, but it's inspiring to see the loyalty that my aunts and uncles and cousins and parents have toward each other. I need to ensure that I don't need a crisis to remind me of that bond, and of why it's important.