Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [111]
Then the very next time, she would be hallucinating and out of it, and I would be filled with such guilt and sorrow. She looked right through us, listening to some inner cacophony. I would grab her face in my hands and pull her right up to mine.
“Look at me, Lori!” I shouted, “listen to me.” But on her face would be the look, the same look that I had seen on my mother's face—the same look we had been seeing on Lori's face all these many years. Would it never go away?
When she herself became angry and enraged I tried to tell myself that she was ill, that it was her illness talking and not my Lori. But when her fury began to spill out of bounds and we had to leave, it cut to my heart. I had to slink out through the unit, with the screams of my daughter shouting “I hate you! I hate you!” following me out into the stairwell.
Coming to visit Lori was hard, but leaving was harder. As Marvin and I walked down to the car we would look up, and there she would be, her white face looking down at us from behind the safety screen. And I would drive down the long drive, crying as I had come, leaving her there locked up behind me.
What was to happen to Lori?
We had grown more and more pessimistic. The roller-coaster ride of dashed hopes over the past few years had been so hard to bear. Every time they tried some new medicine or some new technique, we would see a brief period of improvement. Maybe this was it, we thought. Maybe she's getting better. But every time her body would seem to adapt to the change, and her illness would come crashing back, sometimes even harder than before.
What made it worse was that, unlike earlier in her illness, this time we really felt that Lori was getting the best possible care. Lori was connecting to Dr. Doller and Dr. Fischer as she had never connected with anyone before. What's more, we could see that everyone genuinely cared about her. There seemed to be a real partnership there. When we visited, Rose, one of the mental health workers, would say: “We know how you care about her and we care too.”
“Lori is such an unusual girl,” Sorin would pull me aside to say. “She has such fighting spirit. She is going to get well. We can't let her down.” Yet more and more I felt that we had let her down. She was getting tired and discouraged, I could see that. We were getting tired and discouraged. These days when people we didn't know well asked us about Lori, I was simply evasive. “She's trying to find herself,” I said. “You know how they are at that age.” We weren't trying to hide it anymore, it was just that we couldn't face talking about it more than we had to.
By the time the social worker called Marvin and me in for a joint meeting with Lori and Dr. Doller, we knew that Lori was near the end of the line. We knew they had kept Lori in the hospital longer than they were really supposed to. They had bent rules and cut corners because they were really convinced they could help her.
And they had helped her. She was better, but still not well enough to live alone. We all needed to talk about what she was going to do next. She couldn't come home, that was certain. Dr. Doller and the social worker, both recommended against that. They felt that at home she would drop back into passivity and dependency and never make any further progress toward being her own person.
Marvin and I agreed. What's more, I knew that for my own sake I couldn't have her at home. I remembered the two and a half years she lived at home after her first hospitalization as the most stressful, awful time I have ever lived through. I was always walking on eggshells, always afraid I was going to do something or say something that would set her off. Should we take her out for dinner? Should we let her stay in her room? She was trying so hard to please us, nothing was normal or natural.
I never slept well. I got up every night to see if she was still breathing. I would come home in the