Ericka Russell
Controlled Substance
I found the fragile, yellow newspaper clipping by accident. I was looking for childhood photos to display at my high school graduation party. The obituary was just a thin thing. Just a slip of paper. My grandmother, Caroline, “died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound” on a Sunday, 12:40 PM, after church and lunch. My uncle Eric, barely a teenager, was the one who found her.
She ended her life in the barn that still stands on my grandfather’s property, the one closest to the house, always visible through the living room window, so close you can see the chipped paint and splintered wood on the antique barn doors that store my grandfather’s tools and machines. The barn I used to try to sneak away into—before I knew—but was always locked. That barn always pulled me toward it, and I’d stalk around it, looking for cracks to get inside.
My parents did not tell us Caroline was schizophrenic. We did not talk about Caroline much because of how painful it was for my father. Until I found the nerve, having gone off to college, to ask my mother why Caroline killed herself. She said Caroline’s schizophrenia was triggered by a minor dental surgery—anesthesia affects brain activity.
My mother almost didn’t marry my father because of his family’s mental health history. Both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are genetic. But the stress of a mother with a child in the womb plays a significant role in the child’s mental health. And my mother has understandably carried galaxies of stress in her womb. Carried them more than her babies.
They say there is a spiritual connection in numbers, but I’ve long lost the ability to intuit premonitions. Caroline only had 45 birthdays, and, as a Lutheran, she didn’t celebrate a single one.
Caroline died on March 19th. Early spring, the same time of year when my mania symptoms started.
***
Mania is like that woman who was attacked and kept walking home, shaking, not realizing there was a knife sticking out of her shoulder, blood staining her dress shirt.
I didn’t realize my general anxiety, my compulsions, and intrusive thoughts were all red herrings for a larger beast. Six years after reading Caroline’s obituary, my own hallucinations began.
The hallucinations felt so real because they were simple, harmless even, at first. Washing my face in the mirror, a man ran like a blur behind me. It’s nothing, I thought, I would have heard the apartment door unlock. Or a white cat scurried between my legs. It’s nothing, I thought, just your imagination. I recognized I was seeing things, but I always saw things: gnats, shadows, someone I thought I knew, ghosts. How could I know what I’d turn into?
Mania comes with epiphanies. It delivers what you most want and manifests utopia. Epiphany: I am famous. Epiphany: there are hidden microphones and cameras in my apartment, watching me. Epiphany: I am the source of love songs, movies, books, fashion, and culture. Epiphany: I am God-like. Epiphany: I am God.
I didn’t need sleep—why would I? All the hurt didn’t hurt anymore. Work stress, loneliness, loss—it was all meant to happen, and nothing was wrong because everything was right.
Mania is believed to be a nasty beast, insurmountable without medicine, sanity, treatment. But never in my life had I accepted myself so unconditionally, so assuredly.
Mania told me I was the center of the universe, and that meant there was something after death, I was special, and everything happened for reasons beyond the accidents of atoms.
***
At church, Caroline hung on every word the preacher preached. If he’d said sell all your possessions and donate your money, then they must. If he’d said to move to a foreign country to help dig wells, then they must. If he’d said to fast for forty days and forty nights, then they must. They stopped taking her to church.
Caroline believed the government, the FBI, someone, was after her, after her family. She sensed she was being surveilled, stalked, hunted. My grandfather, Don, put metal bars in all their windows to try to fight her paranoia. And Caroline was terrified of who would come in, but I wonder what it was like for her looking through those bars, how easy it might be to forget which side was keeping the other out.
***
It was April Fool’s Day, 2020, one week after my hallucinations started, when my dad drove six hours to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to take me to the hospital. I thought the emergency room was a film set with a live studio audience, so my dad distracted me by taking pennies out of his wallet and asked me to compare the years they were made. They put me in a wheelchair and took me up to the psychiatric unit with Ericka Mary Caroline Russell, my DOB, and allergen (AUGMENTIN) wristlets strapped to my left arm—there was not enough room to include how I don’t like stepping barefoot onto tile after a shower, or I have 1-2 coffees every morning before nine AM, or that I prefer to eat lunch early.
I go voluntarily because I think I am being rewarded with a retreat. A writer’s retreat, a sex retreat, an Ayahuasca retreat—who knows! I didn’t question it because I just had another of my many epiphanies.
Blue Eyes, a nurse with blonde hair who smelled like cigarettes, sat next to me on the tiny bed in my room. She handed me papers and went over the rules quickly, but emphasized how they’d take care of me, they’d make sure I wouldn’t fall, that I was safe here. Yes, yes. I sign this? Then I get the drugs? Blue Eyes exited stage right.
The sheets felt nice, starchy but warm and clean. I wondered how long I had to wait for the drugs. Were they in the air ventilation? Was everyone running a little behind? What time was it?
Blue Eyes returned with a puke bucket, holding a roll of toilet paper, No Tears shampoo, a bar of White Marble soap, a comb, a flimsy, soft-bristled toothbrush, and alcohol-free toothpaste. In the shower, I held my chin up to the stream and voluntarily waterboarded myself. Water gagged my mouth, the heat of it burning my throat, my neck, my face. I breathed in, through my nostrils, into my lungs. I waited until I felt like throwing up or dying. I gave myself a moment to gag. I resumed. I did this until I could no longer stand, until I aspirated, until I couldn’t hold my head up anymore.
Exhausted, unattended, and sitting in the corner of the shower, I finally cleaned myself. But I believed there was LSD in the soaps and shampoos, working its way through my hair follicles, tingling like Nair on open cuts.
With no miraculous medical intervention, the water turned cold, the hallucinations suspended. I crept out of the shower onto glossy white tile.
On my ligature-resistant, tamper-proof hospital bed drilled into the floor was orange sherbet, vanilla ice cream, and a chocolate smores malt. I ate my treats up, narrating like describing a porn scene. The hallucinations returned; to chase the LSD high, I started eating the alcohol-free toothpaste. Thanks to my narration about “eating out” the toothpaste container, Blue Eyes came in to stop me. Mania-induced waterboarding: ok. Pornographic narration: not ok.
Blue Eyes told me it was getting to be bedtime, but, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what tired felt like.
That first night in the hospital, after I “showered” and ate dessert and toothpaste, I spent most of my time trying to escape. I thought I had found the exit code. E = M C2. Ericka=Mary Caroline2!
I left my room to tell the night nurse the code. She didn’t get it.
“E = M C 2,” I say again and again.
“Ericka. It’s time for bed. Please go lie down.”
I went to my room, shut my door, lay down for a second, closed my eyes, reset, then came right back out.
“Eee. Equals. M. C. Squared.”
I don’t know how long we went on like this, but we were equally persistent. “Ericka. It’s time for bed. Please go lie down.”
Eventually, I tried to fight my way through with brute force, crawling between the nurse’s legs in the doorway. The nurses thought I was insane, but they, too, were doing the same things over and over again with the same results.
“Ericka. It’s time for bed. Please go lie down.”
***
None of those in charge of my care told me what was going on, how I was experiencing a manic episode, how I was hallucinating in all five senses, how some things were real and some things were not, and I couldn’t effectively differentiate them.
Whatever cocktail of medication I was given was about as effective as my grandma giving her pet lab sour cream to treat its seizures. Very routinely, I brought my blood-pressure cuff out to the nurses’ station at shift change, before lunch, before dinner, before bed. Constantly, I felt my heartbeat, chasing to catch up to me.
I conspired in my room. Undoubtedly, they were giving me meth. I picked at the labels on the clothes my father dropped off. I didn’t like labels. I kept tearing off my identification wristbands. It’s hard, carrying the name of a woman I never met. Ericka Mary Caroline. They printed another. I picked at the scabs on my legs. I picked at the scabs on my scalp, and the dried, red flakes hung in the strands of my hair like Christmas ornaments. Pick, pace. Pick, pace. Pick, pace.
I was granted my first visitor on day three or four. My partner lasted ten minutes. Wasn’t he going to take me home? I had done everything right, I behaved, I cracked the code! E=MC2. I couldn’t sleep. The back of my neck hurt. My feet had blisters from pacing. I couldn’t see well with my glasses. They didn’t tell me what medicine I was taking. Please. I’d be good. I’d sleep. I promised.
I kept crying under the bright fluorescent lights, in front of my doctors, distanced six feet across the room with masks on. The doctors were one big microscope, and quickly, I saw I was just another pesky specimen on a slide
.***
Caroline’s doctor failed her. He didn’t ensure she was staying on her meds, as faulty as they were. He didn’t try other medications. He didn’t check in as routinely as he should have for someone with paranoid schizophrenia. He didn’t hospitalize her despite her debilitating, insatiable paranoia, despite her worsening condition, despite imagining for one second how hard it must have been to have to try to live with a brain like that. He didn’t know how to treat her, and worse, he wouldn’t admit it.
Caroline lived with schizophrenia for three years. Three years of trying to cohabitate with it. Three years of voices in her head, of bars on the windows. Three years of believing her doctor was poisoning her through her medicine. Until she stopped going to church, until she stopped taking her medicine, until she believed she was the only one left fighting her illness.
One morning, when her husband and two boys went off to church, she made them lunch, set the table, and left it for when they got back. Then she took herself and a shotgun out to that barn.
Today, surely, Caroline would not have killed herself. Doctors are supposed to be better, our brains more understood.
“I wanted Don to file a malpractice suit against her doctor. Her death was completely preventable,” my mother explains. “Her suicide should not have happened.”
And I agree. But it did happen.
I never got the chance to try to save her. To keep her here. To say, “I believe you.”
***
After eight days of my “voluntary” hospitalization, I moved back in with my parents. I wasn’t healed; the mania lingered, clinging to me. I woke up repeatedly in the middle of the night, so my father told me stories, sometimes for hours, until I fell back to sleep.
Routinely, I asked my father to tell me about Caroline. I knew it hurt him, but I let my hurt take precedence over his, like I always have as a daughter to a father. My father knelt next to his and mom’s bed—the only place I could remotely sleep for a long time—and warmed my hands in his and told me about how his mother loved their family trips. How she’d wake up early and pack up the car with blankets, board games, and snacks. Then she’d come in and wake him and Uncle Eric, and they’d ride for hours and hours from Ohio to Ontario.
He told me about how much Caroline loved to catch fish and to eat fish. How they’d spend a week in Canada, and all they’d do was catch fish, clean fish, and fry fish. Just the four of them. Fishing in the same five lakes where my grandfather, uncle, and father still go in the same aluminum fishing boats. Catching the same generations of bass, walleye, perch, and pike that she caught.
He sometimes fell asleep, and I’d almost follow, but the loosening of muscles, the head relaxing into the pillow, would snap me back. My startled movements would wake him, and he’d stir, not angry, and start all over again. I couldn’t sleep, and he wouldn’t.
That’s the kind of man Caroline raised. The one who told me stories until I fell asleep, who slept on the bathroom floor with me in our old house because I was scared I might throw up, who would make a pallet to sleep on in my room after I’d watched a scary movie at a friend’s house, who couldn’t hide his fear of injury, mistakes, death, unpreparedness, so I caught those fears too. After my stay in the hospital, he was the one who woke up with me every two hours, who drove me around the same country block because I could only sleep in the car, who helped me brush my teeth and blow my nose and push in my chair to eat because the hospital overdosed me on dopamine and rendered me lock-jawed, drooling, and catatonic.
How hard, I wonder, was it to keep Caroline here? If I stayed alive, would that keep her here?
It took twelve pills a day to help get me back. We purchased a rainbow weekly morning/night pill holder. I couldn’t keep track of what I was on, which pills needed to be halved or doubled. I basically knelt over it in prayer each night. Begging it to fix me.
Eventually, I wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming in agonizing pain. Eventually, I could look in the mirror and see a self. Eventually, I found the fight in me was strong enough. Yet, something of myself is still caught on the hinge of that time; I stalk around it, and I try, and I try, but I cannot release it.
***
In another time, my grandmother and I would be soothsayers, deities. Caroline would see in me what everyone else looks away from. Our minds are valued, not sick.
Caroline would be alive. She is beautiful and has this smile that has known so much. There is an infinity behind her eyes. She is happy. Her fingers are long and thin, like mine are, and I get to hold her hand. I imagine I have her laugh, but I don’t. I have my mom’s. But we share the same Irish blood and freckles. And Caroline’s creative, like me. She puts everyone else before her, and I understand. She carries so many pieces in her heart, so I watch and try to carry mine the same, but I stumble. “We are not meant to be the same, Ericka,” she tells me. “Be your own you.”
I can’t stop looking at her. She sees me, not just the person in her vision, but the soul beneath it that craves being understood, being good enough.
My grandmother would tell me that as long as you have the sun, you are alive. “Light is the opposite of absence,” she would say under her breath, straw grass between her fingers.
She touches my face, but when I lean in, I get that looming feeling like the moment won’t last. I love her so much that I carry the hurt.
***
After returning to my apartment, my parents visit more than ever. They tiptoe around me, defibrillating questions to try to get a register, a hint. I know my parents will worry about me if I’m not talking enough, not spreading complex sentences along with the butter on the table. I split gruesomely into two. The Ericka who performs, who talks back, who sits up in her seat, who wears earrings, who brushes her teeth, who parrots. The Other stares out the window, down the blue of the sky, at anything but a face. Static.
I fantasize about putting on my plainest clothing and walking to some country hillside in Kentucky. I’d find some overgrown, abandoned house. A one-story that’s nothing but chipping white wood planks and broken windows. I’d find a corner and lie down to rest. Finally, I would not eat, I would not bathe, I would not brush. No one would know where to find me. And I’d fade away into those creaky floorboards. I’d get lost to the worms and the mushrooms and the cobwebs and the liverworts.
The curse would break, and then I would say, Caroline.
It’s time for bed.
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Image by Анастасия Быкова from Pexels
Ericka Russell is a full-time instructor of literature, composition, and creative writing at Western Kentucky University. Her publications can be found in Writing on the Edge, Bridge Eight, Asylum Magazine, Feminine Collective, and Knee Brace Press.
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