Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [112]
All along the staff at the hospital had been encouraging Lori to enter a halfway house and to join a day program at the hospital. I knew Lori would never do it. She had been there before. She had seen people locked in what seemed to be unending cycles, in and out of hospitals and halfway houses. She didn't want that kind of a life. “I'm not going to keep going through the revolving door,” she said.
So what were our other options?
We could send her to a state hospital, they suggested, adding hopefully that some of them weren't all that bad. Marvin and I just stared. Or we could send her to a nice custodial facility. There was one, a farm in New Hampshire …
So we were supposed to send Lori away to graze like cattle? I remembered the very first doctor we had dealt with, way back at Payne Whitney, who suggested that we put her away immediately. Was this what it had come to after all these years?
They said she had improved. They said she was better. But they hadn't known Lori when she was well. I looked at Lori. She weighed 170 pounds. She was enormous. She was unkempt. Her expression was flat and her eyes were glazed. She bore no resemblance at all to the real Lori. Cousin Sylvia flashed into my mind.
“My God,” I thought. “She'll be sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons.”
It was unthinkable. We had to consider not just where to put Lori, but of how Lori herself would live. For I knew that Lori would not accept for long the bare existence that was her life now, and that these suggestions were offering her.
I could already feel how frantic she was becoming watching her life slip away from her. The reminders were everywhere. I felt them myself. Every time I saw an announcement of one of her classmates’ weddings, I felt sad for what she was missing: Why had this happened to Lori? I thought. When her university held its reunions and annual alumni dinners, I answered for her. “She won't be able to attend. She's out of the country,” I lied. From time to time one of the men she had dated during her first time out of the hospital would call looking for her. “She's not here,” I simply said, and wondered when or if she ever would be.
When we talked about it with her when she was home on leave, she seemed depressed and pessimistic. “I don't have a job. I don't have a boyfriend. I don't have any friends,” she said. Every so often when she was out on leave she would hear about one of her friends from the hospital, or from the halfway house who had killed herself. I knew she was thinking about herself.
When Dr. Doller and the social worker explained the possibility of trying the new medicine clozapine on Lori, they seemed pessimistic. They said it had dangerous side effects. They told us it could kill her. They gave us reprints from scientific journals. Marvin looked them over. It appeared that it was the very sickest patients who got the most benefit from clozapine. There were examples given of near catatonic patients who had responded to the drug.
How many times over the past few years had I wondered why we had fought so hard to keep Lori alive. She was so miserable. She was so unhappy. She was only staying alive to please us. When she ran away and came home, I took her back.
“Why did you run, Lori?” I asked.
“Because there is no hope,” she said.
I took her back. I told her there was hope. But in my heart, I thought there was none. I considered our options. I didn't want Lori to have to live her life the way she was. Was this girl who was so achieving and bright and creative to be doomed to just existing? That was death already.
“You've tried everything else known to man and nothing has worked,” I told them.
“You've got no choice but to try this drug, ” Marvin chimed in. “If it kills her—well, maybe she's better off dead ”
When I heard what we had said, I was horrified. How could any parents say that about their child? But I thought about it and realized we meant it. If this drug