My Formerly Bipolar Sister
My Formerly Bipolar Sister
We wear glasses to correct vision. Delaine needed them sooner but started wearing glasses when she was eight years old. But what about ears that don’t hear perfectly? Delaine was exposed to helpful music often in her life but did not get the specific therapy she needed until she was almost 76 years old.
We were one-and-a-half and three years old. From the grass yard, we crawled under the wooden entry at the back door of the kitchen. Painted a loathsome crayon green, the small shed held untouchable long-poled mops, a rake and shovel, and other tools for tending the prize-winning roses. Under its floor, the lattice cast triangles and diamonds of golden sunlight into the earthy darkness. It was no place for her embroidered pink cotton dress. We found and shared pebbles and bugs and bits of colored glass, using a private language of sounds, gestures, words, or concoctions of sounds-like-words that made sense to us. The third time, Mother discovered us. She told Father to nail the lattice back against the shed foundation posts. I remember my disappointment and confusion. Did I protest? I felt our expulsion from the sheltered place suppressed our private language.
Our dad was bipolar — although no one understood that behavior pattern or used that term in those days while he and his confrѐres were developing atomic energy near Ottawa during WW II. My sister was bipolar, but my parents didn’t recognize those symptoms in a child or notice how much more she resembled Daddy than Mummy. During a visit from an aunt and her boyfriend, Daddy was taking photos of everyone in the back yard, and she would not stand still for hers. Mummy’s coaxing failed, so she suggested I speak to her in our private language. I tried, but our language lacked a vocabulary of coercion. The resulting photo of a child with a wisp of blond hair, wearing a pale blue knitted coat, and holding a twig of lilac reveals an unhappy, frowning toddler. Along with one of almost-bald me in a white lawn chair, these photos were framed and displayed in grandparents’ homes for decades.
The stories of her mispronunciations (“the diamond room” for “the dining room”), objections to hugs (“I kissed you yesterday!”), accidents (pulling a white damask tablecloth set with crystal goblets of grape juice) became cuteness legends. Notice my mother’s “absence” from that last story. How could a toddler at floor-level imagine what might happen when she tugged on a drooping corner of the tablecloth? After babyhood, they emphasized her stubbornness. They nicknamed her “Thunderhead” after an unruly horse in a movie. She had learning difficulties, until her Grade 3 teacher noticed she needed glasses. Mum taught the elementary grades. Dad lectured at university in the optics department. How could they not have noticed her astigmatism much earlier? Why could they not see her as I did, as my intellectual equal? While our parents tried to be even-handed, they believed she was “not as smart.” By my teens, I was arguing with their tone-deafness in private to defend her intelligence.
Her moods intensified as she came into her flat-chested teens. What pimples she had, she picked into scars. She idolized me and my friends while feeling that she could never attain to something we enjoyed. But she had friends, especially when our ages or some administration decision placed us in different schools. She lived a tumultuous life, although, if I were to say so, her blue eyes would narrow and her lips purse and she would bark one of her pop psych theories in her defense, reinforced by references to movies or her favourite soap opera.
She was generous with her meager supply-teaching income to the point of being unable to take care of herself. She had dark, raging, and ecstatic moods, with few times of rewarding happiness and calm. Her relationships were manic and obsessive or pallid and confused. The best of times were her choir years, especially the choir that performed in England and Scotland, when she also managed a side-trip to “our” Dunster Castle. Its lands were granted to our ancestor William de Mohun (de Moyen) after The Conquest and remained the family seat until 1376 when it became the home of the family Luttrell.[i] She was third-generation Canadian but occasionally identified herself as “English” during chance encounters with people from Great Britain.
When I began reading psychiatry texts to try to understand our son’s diagnosis of schizophrenia, I discovered Dad, my sister, and quite a few other people I knew were no longer described by the vague term “neurotic” but as “bipolar” on a scale of severity of disabling mood swings. However, a label that may help others to recognize “behavior beyond the range of normal” offers no cure. The medications prescribed for such people usually cause more harm than good.[ii] The better I came to understand her, the trickier the balancing act on my end of our teeter-totter relationship.
She lived with our parents, partly to provide Mother with an ally in domestic disputes. While in some ways her motivation was admirable, it led to an unhappy merry-go-round. When Dad started on Valium, the drug muted the peaks and valleys but didn’t alter his fundamental bipolarity. My sister took teaching jobs 1200 miles northwest of Toronto. Mother suffered a massive heart attack. Dad increased his Valium and retreated to the family cottage. Mother needed physical and financial support. But she also needed a defender from her husband’s fluctuating moods, criticism, and obsessions. My husband and I were living in the southern US. My sister came back to the Toronto area to become a substitute teacher, with French and Music specialties.
On this winter day in mid-January, my sister turned 79. She has aggressive, metastatic cancer. For the past three years, she has used my music therapy Focused Listening™ (FL™), which stimulates only the right ear to feed more sound energy preferentially into the left, rational half of the brain. While FL™ has made her much more rational, the detritus of her life-long vacillating decisions surrounds her. She insists on living alone although she cannot afford the upkeep on her debt-saddled house. Since she gave me Power of Attorney for her finances, I can keep it barely habitable. After unsatisfactory, short-term room rentals, she refused to consider another. Her newspapers and paper souvenirs followed her in multiple containers like the tail of a comet. Her constant unpacking and re-bagging have taken much of her time. Every room in the house has its stacked, boxed, and bagged storage area. Any suggestion of parting with some of it has infuriated her, until her cancer diagnosis pressed upon her the reality that I soon would possess all of it.
The attractive antique pine dresser she bought to store kitchen equipment is full of bed linens. Her kitchen is “organized” so that most food items and cleaning products are on open shelves while useful dishes and utensils are unreachable, bagged, boxed, and enclosed in large plastic tubs. To be fair, until she started Focused Listening™, she rarely cooked for herself, eating instead out of cans and take-out. Her nine bookcases are meticulously arranged and adorned with glass, plaster, metal, plastic, and china knickknacks. The ceilings have leaked (until I had half of it re-roofed out of my pocket last fall) and streamers of plastering tape mingle with the cobwebs dropping from the stained ceilings. Walls with patched plastering have not been sanded or painted. It’s hard to know if the house is under repair or falling apart. She keeps parts of it spotlessly clean. Yet, the dogs’ “toilet” is in the middle of what was the dining room, separated from the kitchen by a floor-to-ceiling sheet of plastic. She never, to my knowledge, has lifted a tool or a paintbrush. Yet, she can reduce to tears anyone hired to do repairs by objecting constantly and rudely to their workmanship.
Last night, as I looked through her daily offering of ancient newspaper clippings and souvenir paper items, she shared two of her favorite poems. Robert Frost’s “The Two Roads” is printed carefully on lined paper with the rhyme scheme lettered on the right. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” has been saved from a classroom printout. Both deal with the difficulties implicit in making decisions — the crux of the pain in the bipolar mind that creates a stop-and-go life. Both have ambiguous endings regarding the outcome of the poet’s decision. She hands me a poem in a church bulletin that Dad arranged to be printed shortly before his death.
ADVENT
Christmas approaches nearer day by day,
But in my heart no Christmas Spirit stirs,
And though the Christ Child in His manger lies
I feel inside no spring of joy or tears.
How can a new-born baby boy impart
The strength and love this seething world requires?
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How can we right a world of selfish strife
When only helpless manger-child inspires?
Behold the Man the Baby will become
In whom the hopes of all the years abide,
The strength and love which Easter will reveal
Comes first with joy and peace at Christmastide.
— M.D.M.
I am thunderstruck. She says she has a notebook somewhere with other poems. She quotes one of them to me. I know that her best high school subject was English, but she decided she could not pursue it in university because I had already chosen that subject. Of all her dreadful decisions, this one cuts me as deeply and persistently as it must hurt her. I understand now why her brain betrays her so that she undercuts her own best interests.
Twice, she slipped into extended episodes of dementia. I recognized the symptoms because we cared for my mother-in-law, who had Alzheimer’s, during the last few years of her life. Furthermore, our son Dan was schizophrenic during those years, so I had constant opportunities to compare the similarities and differences among their symptoms. I have two stories to tell about my sister’s healing. In the first one, an astonishing coincidence exposed her to ambient high-frequency sound in a rooming house with a broken clothes dryer’s screeching bearings. She masked the sound that was directly above her room with a radio tuned to the classical music station, positioned near her right ear while she lay in bed. Within about two months, she lost her dementia symptoms and her bipolar disorder receded. The second episode of dementia, after she had moved back into her house in the countryside, occurred with a bladder infection while she already was receiving home nursing care for ulcers on her left ankle. Once again, she had to move into our home for several months. While most of the nurses recognized her dementia, a new nurse with 17 years of experience at CAMH (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) saw how acutely irrational she was. The nurse told me my sister needed a psychiatric assessment. (No kidding! Also, lots of luck!) She hated the nurse and treated her like a hostile intruder. But the nurse persisted and, a couple of weeks later, we three came to an agreement that she would have her ears tested. If they showed right-ear hearing loss, she would try Focused Listening™ to see if she could become well enough to avoid the psychiatric interview that she had avoided all her life.
Over the next three years, her use of Focused Listening™ not only freed her from dementia symptoms, she also lost most of her bipolar symptoms. While the neurological-behavioral patterns of a lifetime did not disappear entirely, she developed insights into her behaviour that were entirely new and rational. She learned how the electric stove worked and began to cook her own meals. She cared for houseplants without killing them. She planted and cared for a tiny garden at her mailbox. She no longer felt paranoid about my efforts to fulfill my Power of Attorney responsibilities. Her memory became excellent. We could share our viewpoints companionably. The last time we walked together, I plucked a twig of blooming choke cherry and handed it to her. She took it with shining eyes and a tiny smile, “Choke cherry? Who else will know?” As children, we had climbed and ridden the springy branches of a huge, partially felled choke cherry tree as our gorgeously blossoming rocking horse. (Written January 18, 2022, Delaine’s 79th Birthday)
Coda: Broken and Mended
Delaine was able to be her best self, with great courage and grace, to the end of her life, supported every day by her Focused Listening™ music therapy. Our home became her hospice. Months after she died, I found time to start looking at the boxes of “stuff” she had considered most important. They were in cardboard cartons within plastic tubs, carefully wrapped in bubble plastic or tissue or paper toweling. I recognized little “treasures” I had not seen for decades. The delicate Lladro porcelain figurine my friend Margaret had given her as a university graduation gift is a young girl wearing a nightgown like the one I hand-sewed for her. She holds a lighted candle. As I carefully free it from its wrapping, I am shocked to see that its head was glued after it had been knocked off and broken into three pieces.
She loved the colour blue. A small china pitcher with a blue and yellow bird set into its frosted-blue glaze above a spray of blue and yellow blossoms carries a strip of adhesive tape on the bottom with her name lettered in Mother’s hand, a sign that she was to inherit it. I gasp as I realize the tissue stuffing its interior contains its broken handle. Next, I unwrap a crystal pepper shaker. What was the occasion when we gifted our mother with that expensive set? An anniversary, perhaps? Here is the salt — but where is its perforated crystal top? No sign of it anywhere in the packaging. It must have been hopelessly shattered or she would have saved the pieces. As she had been saving the bits and pieces of her shattered states of consciousness for decades.
The next item puzzles me for its weight. Alabaster. A memory deeply buried surfaces like a mermaid. I was passing through an airport when I noticed it on a pedestal in a giftshop window. A footed vessel with a teardrop finial topping the lid, it would recall the jar of perfumed ointment that Mary of Magdala had spread on the feet of Jesus, with her tears. To my surprise, the jar was affordable, so I bought and gave it to her. She disliked it instantly. My explanation of why I thought it was lovely did not impress her. She said it looked funereal. (Of course, but not only.) I would have thought the marble quite hardy, but the tip of the finial has chipped off.
Here is a cylindrical pot, lidded with a “handle” in the shape of a butterfly — her chosen symbol — that I made for her in my ceramics studio. Under the blue lid rest its two spotted wings wrapped in facial tissue. I suppose they could be glued back on. A miscellany of other china what-nots remind me of our profoundly deaf Great-Aunt Gerty, whose personality my sister reflected in many ways. The cheap little full-skirted, seventeenth-century girl and the leprechaun dragging an upside-down snail shell have no raison d’ȇtre except that they had caught Gerty’s fancy for her sparsely furnished room in our grandparents’ home, so Delaine had kept them safe, for at least half a century.
I had not realized until now that her bipolarity made her inattentive and clumsy. I knew she avoided some kinds of activity. She was not dexterous, although she could be aggravatingly painstaking in placing a stamp so that its sides were parallel to the sides of the envelope — and sharply critical of anyone who did not take such care. When she decided to pull the goldenrod from the jungle of weeds in her yard because she believed that plant caused her hay fever, she counted every one of the hundreds and thousands of plants she uprooted and reported the numbers to me daily.
Among her papers I found an audiogram made in 1982 when she was 39. She had very acute hearing with some bilateral distortions and the 2–8 curve of severe depression (according to Dr. Guy Bérard) that she had experienced for most of her life in the fluctuating moods of bipolar disorder. The sharp decline in her hearing in later in life exacerbated that depression profile. The Focused Listening ™ music therapy had moved a bigger mountain than she would have had as a child.
Apart from the house disaster, the only thing of potential material value she left to me is a European oil painting resembling the The Hague school of the mid-to-late nineteenth-century, of skaters on a frozen river. It evokes Andreas Schelfhout without his carefully rendered figure modelling and architectural details. Apparently, during the last few weeks of her life, she discarded the sales slip that might have revealed its provenance. The painter’s signature looks like a recent, flamboyant addition over a deliberately obscured, carefully lettered signature. “A mystery wrapped in an enigma.” After a few weeks of research, sleuthing, and photographing the work under UV and other lights, I uncovered masses of coded material, mostly beneath a thin surface layer of paint, including photos cleverly secreted in the painting, but some coding quite obvious under magnification when the images were inverted. It evidently was created as spyware during WW II, when we were born. While I have not uncovered all of its secrets, I know what it is — not an Old Master but an amazing deception. Similarly, my sister’s life was comprised of more loves and disappointments, gifts given but also received than I can know. But in some ways her life was a deception, even to herself. If her ears had been treated with Focused Listening™ at the same time as she got glasses, her life would have been less tumultuous, more rewarding, richer in communication, and less burdened by memories of losses of self-esteem and by mementoes preserved, even when broken, to staunch the pain of such losses.
A few weeks ago, I had a vision of Mum and Dad standing together in the hall of my sister’s house, where they, too, lived and died. They are limned in glory. They regard me with unfettered approval. They see us communicating in our private language of shared experiences and discoveries, in shadow and in sunlight. Our shared love of music, thanks to Mum, eventually brought Delaine a healing technique for her moods. Our shared love of reasoning and discussion, thanks to Dad, at last enlivened our conversations about those poems and stories I read to her in the short weeks before she required a narcotic. Before the end, tense competition yielded to deep, mutual appreciation. The playing field is level now, forever.
[i] https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/somerset/dunster-castle-and-watermill/history-of-dunster-castle
[ii] Alexander et al. “Primum Non Nocera [First, Do no harm]”
