I think I am reading it with a different lens.
For more than 20 years, as part of the extended family, I was party to just how deep the knife of MIL's mental illness cut those around her.
As one of those who cared for her I bled alongside those who loved her most.
It's right and proper that the person with the mental illness is considered the protagonist of their life. But I saw the extent to which everybody else can be relegated to mere bit players in the movie of MIL's self destruction. And I noted that, according to the observers, the cost to us was supposed to be borne, absorbed and moved on from. It got to the point where I started to wonder if, in our prescribed role as the family of a very unwell woman, we somehow ceased to exist as real, live people in our own right.
It can also be hard to unpick which part of somebody is the mental illness ends and which part is the real personality/character. Especially in the case of people who have shown signs of being unwell since childhood. You can love somebody, know they are ill, but still utterly hate the way they treat you and the people you love. When their behaviour has significant impact, you can be lose struggle to work out where illness ends and the "real" person begins. Over time, worn down by the relentless nature of the situation, you can end up loving and loathing somebody simultaneously.
I can read the frustration, attempt to make sense and pain in what he wrote. I suppose to others it looks emotionally removed, distanced and devoid of any feelings for the person he is talking about. But I think I sound like that too. It became a survival tactic. Pressing down the huge feelings as I watched people I loved being steam rollered, and then flattened, by the ramifications of trying to save a mentally ill person from their symptoms. While the legal aspects of medical ethics limit your ability to do so. All while the world and its mother looks at you aghast, for failing to "just DO something!"
Even now MIL is several years dead I press the feelings down. Because if I don't I'll have to look at the full extent of what her illness did to all of us as individuals and as a group. And I don't think I'll cope well with the tsunami of feeling if released.
I don't judge him. It can be a life changing, horrible, relentless, losing battle. One you can't opt out of. One that can lead you to learn that you may have been a hero in your imagination, when everything was theoretical. But when therory became practice, you find you have ever so human feet of clay to contend with.
Feet of clay the rest of the world won't forgive. Because the bit players tend to viewed as two distinct types characters.
The damn near saint like, who sacrifice without complaint and are tragic/strong figures worthy of praise that can never begin to compensate for all their pain.
Or the heartless villains, who are bad mannered and selfish. Because they to see themselves and those they love as having been the unwilling, forgotten, diminished "collateral damage" of somebody who was patently ill, but still the real, live person still lobbing new bombs into the heart of the family, before they'd stopped bleeding from the last round of shrapnel.
If we are going to have successful "care in the community" I think the general public is going to have to get its head around the concept that the family left to do the heavey lifting are real people. Flawed like everybody else. In sometimes exhausting and traumatic circumstances. For decades. With both hands tied behind their backs in terms of getting the degree of oversight and care required. While being castigated for not doing enough, or being enough.
People can feel good about themselves looking down their noses at this man if they so wish. But all that will do is help cement in place the extensive human tragedy that occurs daily. Whereby mentally ill people, and their families, are left to cope with the impossible, and then roundly critised when it leaves them scarred, stunned, bowed and damn near broken by the time the ill person has died due to a lack of much needed, professional care and supervision.
Judge me too if you like. I lost chunks of who I was caring for MIL. Possibly the biggest loss was the illusion that not only was I not perfect, as it turns out, I am deeply flawed. Just like the writer of the piece.
I didn't used to be this flawed. It's just one aspect of being the collateral damage that many societies are still a tad too keen to sweep under the carpet. Cos it's cheaper this way.
I see a bereaved grandfather, trying to cope with a particularly complicated form of grief. I am not surprised if he is perceived as something else. He can come sit on my bench. He won't lack company. There's thousands of us. Who are very used to millions of fingers being pointed at their outrageous, contemptible lack. Our "prize" for years of bumbling around in the dark. Doing our "not good enough" best to deal with what we were left to deal with, without the necessary tools, guidance, support and funding.
