INHERITANCE: “ENTR’ACTE”

AUGUST 1, 2023 – Thus far I’ve posted less than one-half of the written portion of my incomplete memoir, Inheritance. I pause here to qualify a few aspects of this figurative travelogue through a significant swath of my life.

What I’ve published to date are mostly pleasant reminiscences viewed through the prism of my youth. The story is about to take a dark turn, however, as lives become ravaged by age and mental disorders. Mother winds up in the psyche ward—several times, in fact—and UB goes off the deep end, irretrievably. If Mother’s condition is tempered (more or less) by medication, no amount or variety of pills, therapy or reasoning—even if tried—will moderate UB’s ever-worsening mental and behavior disturbances.

By 2012 my impression of UB’s psychological condition is best captured in an exchange that Elsa and I have with one of Mother’s psychiatrists. The occasion is the “exit interview” on the day of Mother’s release from her third stay on the psych ward—fourth, if you include her nine-month confinement at the sanatorium in Belle Mead, NJ before I was even born. The psychiatrist in 2012 came highly recommended. Educated in India and the U.K., he is well known for his expertise in the realm of bipolar disorder in geriatric patients. For a week Mother gave the poor guy a run for his money, and he explicitly acknowledges this fact.

“I’ve been doing this [work] for a long time and in a lot of places,” he says, “and I’ve never encountered a patient as challenging as your mother.”

“You haven’t met the brother,” I say.

Depending on how much I choose to sanitize the narrative henceforth, what await the reader are scenes as disturbing as they are sometimes hilarious and otherwise captivating. Left entirely to my own devices, I would divulge all that I know, though as I have learned many times in life, “all that one knows” about one thing or another is rarely everything that is to be known about such a thing. We think we know everything, but inevitably there’s a fact or factor that eludes us and if revealed and duly considered would radically alter our conclusions about a circumstance or about the totality of an individual such as UB—warts, gems, murky waters and all.

My reticence about disclosure is not my own. It belongs to my living relatives, some of whom for their own reasons might not wish certain lines to be crossed. If we think we are absolutely free to hang whatever we please out our attic windows, we are woefully out of step with a civilized society. I do not wish to be counted among the uncivilized.

Perhaps I have already crossed the Rubicon of privacy as demarcated by others in the family. But that river is gentle compared to the raging fluvial currents to which I now allude: extreme disorders of thought and behavior on the part of UB—Mother’s eccentricities and bipolar disorder being mild by contrast.

As I venture forward on the journey I’ve begun, I shall endeavor to cross troubled waters without capsizing my relationships with the living—which, after all, are by far the most valuable features of my “inheritance.”

The challenge surrounding disclosure—providing sufficient detail without offending sensibilities—is a technical problem for the writer. The larger challenge—and point of the whole exercise—is identifying the essential truths that give the story meaning beyond some fleeting, self-indulgent, cathartic purpose. By an arduous, convoluted trek through time and memory I’ve reached those truths, at least as revealed to me. This memoir is the map of my course through hell and high water, not to mention unimaginable heaps of solid waste. Yet as so brilliantly perceived by the Bard himself, the tragedy of our condition is matched by life’s comedy. This latter quality certainly fills my inheritance, thanks in no small part to . . . Cliff, who throughout the journey ahead will also prove to be a one-man rescue squad.

And now, my friends, back to your seats. The next act is about to begin. (Cont.)

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson