One Step Forward

My first step forward was a giant one, something that I already knew but had not accepted—Rob was mentally ill.

Instead of a glimmer, this acknowledgment struck me like a thunderbolt about a month after he died, and it was the skeleton key I often used whenever I felt locked in my grief.

You wouldn’t know it if you met him. He was smart, engaging, cool, and super funny. Over the years, he learned how to disguise his troubled mind and showed us what he thought we wanted to see.

He was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder when he was seventeen, and one of his therapists told us at the time that he was also an alcoholic. We knew Rob smoked and sold weed and dabbled in other drugs (no big deal—back in the day, so did I), but I distinctly remember thinking the shrink was crazy, because that’s what I always did when it came to Rob. I chose to see what I wanted to see. I always chose to view him in the most hopeful and positive light even when everything he said and did pointed elsewhere. It was an act of self-deception that lasted until we lost him forever.

We always used euphemisms when we described Rob—difficult, impulsive, reckless, unpredictable, irrational—but we all knew the truth.

Although I’m not sure he did. Sometimes he’d say he was having a bad day or wasn’t feeling good, but that was the extent of it. Whether it was shame, denial, or a lack of self-awareness, Rob never fully acknowledged that he had a mental illness. He admitted that he was an alcoholic the day I drove him to his first sober house. And he texted Caryn two days before he died to say that he was seriously depressed and needed meds.

The only other times we ever talked honestly about what was raging inside his head was when he was in crisis and were forced to. The first instance happened when he was a senior in high school, and we had sent him to a mental hospital in Westchester for a month. A few Thanksgivings before he died, I drove him to the emergency room in Santa Monica after he threatened to kill himself. They put him on different medications each time, and each time he stopped taking them shortly thereafter.

When we first talked about dealing with the disease, walking on familiar eggshells, he was defensive and belligerent. When we talked about it ten years later in a psychiatric hospital, he was more compliant because he just wanted to get the hell out of there. There wasn’t a whole lot of talk about it otherwise.

And once he moved to LA, it was really just about us being together. I never thought, Oh, I’m just chillin’ with my mentally ill, alcoholic son. Sure, I knew the disease was there. A lot of times, I chose to ignore it or gently navigate my way around it, and a lot of times Rob chose to hide it, but for the most part, it was just us genuinely enjoying each other’s company. In the last two years of his life, I saw Rob at his best and at his worst.

After he moved out of our place in Venice, I insisted on visiting him every Saturday afternoon in Torrance when he was living in a sober house because I needed to see him with my own eyes. I needed to see what he looked like and how he was acting (in both senses of that word) and it was generally just my way to tamp down my own endless worry and anxiety. I was also on the lookout for any clues that he had fallen off the wagon and possibly gone off the deep end again.

Mental illness isn’t always obvious, even when it’s staring you in the face. Even when it’s talking to you and saying crazy things, it’s easy to make excuses and rationalize what you see and hear. And that’s what I did while he was out here, because it was easier, because it kept the peace between us, because it kept him close to me.

I remember telling one of my many therapists, a few months before Rob died, that I wished I had the guts to be straight with him and say the following:

You need to go to a doctor and get meds for being bipolar. You need to get it under control. If you look back at when you’ve had horrible stuff happen to you, it’s always between October and December, and that’s when you get manic, and you need to do something about that or it’s never going to change. You also need to take antidepressants. I’ve been there, dude, I know how it feels, and meds help! Go get help! Go get help before something terrible happens!

I didn’t say any of that to him when he was alive, and it’s one of the few things that will haunt me for all time, even though I’m aware that it wouldn’t necessarily have done any good or changed the way things played out.

So my first step forward was a swift kick in the ass, understanding what Rob was struggling with and that I couldn’t do anything to save him. I’ve taken many other steps since then, but none was as significant as that one great leap. 

Larry Carlat is the author of A Space in the Heart: A Survival Guide for Grieving Parents.