After coming back from visiting my mother and sister for the umpteenth time — after another round of me convincing Mom not to make a fifth dish, after another round of my sister asking if my glasses were new (no, it’s the same pair I’ve worn for three years) what color my jacket was (black fleece, a reluctant gift from Dad from Mainland China) or why my shoes look like golf shoes (“they just do, okay? They don’t have the spikey things at the bottom, though”) I’ve always tried to explain to my friends — actually, no, fuck my friends, I’ve always been trying to explain it to myself — what the situation was with Angela. My sister, she who can start with the most basic of small talk to members of the family before watching an infomercial on TV and quietly muttering to herself, trying to read between the secret definitions and profound subtexts that lie behind things like “carbonate steel Bo-Flexes” or “CODs.”
On the train ride back home, I came to the following conclusion: Angela has chosen to interact in the space around her in her rules of reality. At some point, there was our side, the side of my family and of the television and the newspapers and the world around us, and on the other side, the safe comforting world of the voices in her head, her skitzophrenic reality of Jesus and Satan and Barbara Bush and Princess Diana all telling her the same thing at the same time. Being a sibling of someone mentally ill you grow up reading a shit-ton of material on people who have schizophrenia, and they all have this weird pattern of how they all feel like their “double agents” — like they have one foot in our world and one foot in their own, but they’ll be more than happy to stay in their world forever if you fuck it up for them enough.
Honestly, I think this is where we fucked it up for her: between the stress and the lousy home life and the unattainable expectations — and yes, from my lack of support as a sibling, because how the fuck was I supposed to act when someone breaks down when you’re a teenager? — she gave in. Not because she’s weak, but because she is human with a mental illness. Everyone in my family learned the hard way that while all the Zyprexia can take away the voices in her head, the medication can’t fix the fact that all this is all she has known, and will know.
And there it is. That “with proper treatment, your sister will be a normal person again” mantra my father spouted to me for thirty years? Bullshit. There’s nothing to fix. Plenty to control, perhaps, but nothing to fix. This is how my sister will be when my parents eventually pass, this is how my sister will be when I become her default guardian, even though I am ten years younger than her.
We’ve known that reality for a while, and we’re all dealing with the repercussions in our own ways: My father has started his new life, trips around the world with his girlfriend. My mother plays Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony at deafening levels, partly to drown out my sister, the C-SPAN she watches, and maybe her own loneliness. As for me, well, I’m writing this blog entry. But we’ll deal.
That said, if there was a God, He done fucked up this one bad. Or maybe we did. Or maybe everyone did.