Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [54]
Lori, with a new, short and bouncy haircut, looked lovely that evening. And then, when the real toasts began, she did something that brought tears to my eyes. She stood up before our guests and thanked me for all the help I had given her while she was in the hospital.
“I'm sorry for all the trouble I caused you then, Daddy,” she said. “Thank you for helping pull me through a rough time.”
When you make a jump from a 1 to a 3 it's not like the 10 you had, but it's still progress.
I tried to keep our relations simple and on an even keel. On Sunday afternoons, we walked on the golf course together. On Saturday afternoons, we did errands. We drove up to Central Avenue in Yonkers to pick things up for the house or the car or the garden. Sometimes we stopped at Caldor's and I would buy her a Diet Coke and a soft hot pretzel, which she seemed to like, and I loved. We tried to make some fun out of simple things. We had a little competition to see who could find the cheapest 93 octane gas in Westchester County. I found a station in New Rochelle; she found one in Eastchester. We'd compare notes and then go out of our way to fill up at the winning station. We probably spent dollars saving pennies, but I didn't care. It seemed to amuse her, and gave us something to talk about.
Nancy was always troubled by my psychologizing. “Why don't you leave that to the doctors?” she kept saying. “Don't get involved in her therapy.” But when Lori returned home I felt I owed it to her to give her my best. I had good training. I would use it to try to help her.
I tried to talk to her about her voices, what they were saying, who they were, what they meant to her. I encouraged her to write down her dreams, and for a while she kept a paper and pencil by her bed. She was having such a difficult time communicating, talking to us—or to anyone—about how she felt, that I encouraged her to write down as much as possible. If she felt free to bring those feelings to me, then I would try to interpret them for her. Over and over I would say to her that it was important to remember how she was now, so we could all look back and appreciate how far she had come.
One thing I insisted she talk to me about was suicide. She had already tried to kill herself twice, and many times in the hospital it was obvious that she would have tried again if she had been able. I tried to talk with her about how final death was. That if she attempted suicide she might actually succeed. That even if she weren't completely serious about the attempt, there was always the possibility that she'd make a fatal error.
“It's not like so many other things, Lori, where if it goes wrong you can try again and do it over,” I told her. “If you make a mistake, you don't get another chance.”
As the weeks went by, I kept asking her: “Are you planning on killing yourself, Lori? You have to tell us if you are.” I would try to drag it out of her. More often than not she would become belligerent.
“Stop hounding me,” she would snap. “You're just trying to provoke me. You don't understand.”
But strangely enough over time our relationship began to grow closer. She had always been my little girl. But these days it was clearer to me than ever before just how much she needed me. She needed my support and my reassurance and my encouragement, and she was actively seeking them out.
She would walk up to me and say, out of the blue:
“You're mad at me.”
“No I'm not, Lori.”
“Well, you're looking at me like you're mad at me.”
Over and over I had to reassure her.
“You hate me,” she would say.
“Lori, I don't hate you. I love you.” Finally it began to dawn on me. When she challenged me like that, she wasn't making a statement. She was asking a question. And she needed to hear the answer. She needed to hear that I still accepted her. She needed to hear that I still cared for her. Over and over again she needed to hear me tell her that I loved her.
During this period, my life was difficult on all fronts. My clique of partners had won the power