What does that numbness say about me, a physician recognized for the depth of my compassion? I think it says severe mental illness is brutally hard - hard to watch and hard to understand. I wondered with some discomfort if I might have had a deeper well of present-day emotion for my brother if I had been his doctor. ![]() She said she would miss his childlike countenance and sense of humor, things I’d never really seen. His doctor sent me a heartfelt message a few days after he died. His death itself is still an abstraction, just like his sudden disappearance when I was a child. He was never tested for COVID the cause of death is one more unanswered question about his life. We reflected on his suffering in private, alone, sharing our complicated memories and sadness in bits and pieces. Like so many who have lost a family member in this horrid time, we did not gather. But before I could decide, he succumbed silently to overwhelming infection, and died. My brother’s deteriorating condition exempted us from COVID-related visitor restrictions, and I debated making the three-hour late-night drive to see him. A grim, resigned sadness settled over us. In the rubble of my brother’s life, she found a person who didn’t remind her of anyone she used to know, and so she was curious about that person in his present life in a way I didn’t know how to be. She chuckled kindly at his tendency to repeat the same bizarre questions verbatim, a pattern that had alienated the rest of us. But it was clear she had a genuine connection with him. Sometimes it felt more like we were two colleagues discussing a case than the reality - the patient we were talking about was a brother I barely knew. Over the ensuing months, she faithfully phoned with updates. She ordered a battery of investigations, but the cause of his leg weakness would remain a mystery. She was friendly and warm, and patiently tried to put together the complex pieces of the story of his life. The doctor who admitted him phoned me to discuss his complex history. He never met my children.Ībout a year ago, he suddenly stopped walking. Some of my friends didn’t even know I had a brother. When my dad visited him in the hospital, he would often tell him to leave. He talked obsessively about natural disasters, serial killers and death. The milestones I remember were ones I wanted to forget - the time he tried to kill himself by wading into a river, the time he was picked up by the police standing on the railing of a bridge. The underlying thread of many casual conversations is normal milestones - graduations, achievements, weddings - and he had none to share. There’s no good script when someone in your family becomes severely mentally ill. And then he largely disappeared from my life, hospitalized for treatment that was often worse than the actual disease. Within weeks, he became paranoid, endlessly tearful, wildly inappropriate. But just before his 15th birthday, illness began dismantling the building blocks of who he was. He was a quiet boy with a penchant for math, who spent hours assembling model airplane kits. After he became ill, nothing was ever the same. Schizophrenia assassinated him, did to him personally what COVID has done to our planet. To say he suffered from schizophrenia is an understatement. ![]() He disappeared from our lives almost 40 years ago, when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. My brother died in April, in the early months of the pandemic, but that’s not when we lost him.
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