How To Love Through Mental Illness | Mark Lukach

ladies and gentlemen mr. mark Lukacs I [Applause] came home from work one day and I found my wife sitting on the floor in the guest room and she wouldn't look up at me and I had learned to read her body language well enough to know that when she wouldn't look up at me she had something she was really lost in and finally after a little while I coaxed it out of her what what's wrong and she said I've been thinking about what I'm gonna do with the vest McKee I didn't know what she was talking about we have a Vespa but and so she said when I go to the Golden Gate Bridge I need to take the scooter to get there and when I jump off the bridge I don't know what I'm gonna do with the Vespa key I could leave it on the scooter but then someone might steal it and I could bring the key with me but they might not find my body and then you lose the scooter too so I've been thinking about what to do with the Vespa key now I had been terrified that my wife might act on her suicidal impulses I had hit her medication I changed I changed the hiding place every few days but I didn't know exactly how I was supposed to hide the Golden Gate Bridge I met and fell in love with my wife Julia when I was 18 and when you're 18 you don't think about the future very much and when I thought about it I thought it was gonna be bright and shiny I didn't think that someday this person that I loved so much was gonna get really sick and that she was gonna experience so much pain and that I was gonna spend so much time afraid and worried about whether she would live or die we married young and we had these incredibly charm lives and everything started to change when she took on a new job and the stress she had to the work quickly became something much bigger than just normal work stress at first manifested itself in not being able to sleep at night and I would try to stab with her and I'd try to talk to her and give her massages and tell her it just relax it's okay and then I'd fall asleep and I wake up and she'd still be sitting on the bed staring at me when all I wanted to do was help I couldn't do anything and then one morning when I woke up she said God spoke to me last night then he said everything's gonna be okay and I'm gonna be fine which was unsettling to hear but it was also at least comforting and then a few days later I woke up and she wasn't sitting on the bed she was frantically pacing around the room and when I finally cornered her she said I spoke to the devil last night he said it's not going to be okay he said I'm not getting better he said I'm not worth getting better and I didn't know what to do I was completely over my head and so I took her to the hospital and I had to literally grab her well she was kicking and screaming and trying to grab onto doorknobs in order to get her into the car to take her to the hospital and once we got there they admitted her to the psych ward and let me just tell you the psych ward he's just as horrifying as it looks in the movies with the blank white walls and the bars on the windows and the little cups with medicine and I visited her every day from seven-day 30 during visiting hours sometimes she didn't want me to visit she was scared that if I came close to her this thing that was inside her might get me too and so in this perverse way she was trying to protect me while I was trying to protect her and I didn't know I I didn't know what to do so I did everything because I thought somehow maybe I could love this thing out of her maybe I could say the right thing to her or I could hold her close enough or I could ask the right question to the doctors and I could somehow make this go away but the day's added up to weeks and I had realized couldn't and the doctors were perplexed she had no previous hint of a mental illness and here she was and as they described her she was acutely psychotic so one afternoon before the hospital visit I went out surfing and I didn't even really feel like surfing I just needed to be in the ocean and I paddled out way past the waves and I was just kind of sitting in the middle of the open ocean and I just sat there and I cried for a really long time and I asked myself is Julie gonna get better or is this it for us because I didn't really sign up for this when I was 18 I don't know if I can do this and this is gonna sound like a cliche but you have to believe me this actually happened to dolphin swam right at me and I heard and they were right there on my right I swam right under and they rub my left I looked at these dolphins and I thought of how vast and terrifying the ocean is and I saw them swimming together and I knew then that if they could do it so could I and I was gonna stand by my wife no matter what no matter what turned out to be 23 days in the psych ward and when she came home she was very heavily medicated and the medication changed her it slowed her down I'd asked her question and she'd often have to repeat the question to make sure she understood it and then her answer was often just yes or no some of it actually changed her physically made her stiff like arms frozen at her side and some of the medication led to really rapid weight gain and the worst thing it did was to her eyes these beautiful brown eyes that I looked in and fell in love with when I looked in them now there was nothing it was just looked looking in the eyes of a non-person but you know we did what we could we took one day at a time we trotted along we we tried to tackle the problems we could actually solve like for example the waking Julia hated the way Cain and I thought this is something I can do I can do something about this so I found a nearby gym and I called him and they're only ten bucks a month so I signed us up and they did group classes and she loved group classes before she got sick so we went to our first class and this gym was ten bucks a month it was pretty horrible it had bright red wall-to-wall carpeting and rusted machines and a tanning booth and it was just oh we went to the class and I don't even remember what the class was called but it was basically an aerobics class and it was all old Chinese women and us and the teacher was an old Chinese woman and she didn't speak English very well and I think she mostly made up what she was doing as she did it so we had no idea what we're just kind of trying to keep up and follow along and I got to be honest it was awesome all right it was so much fun because it was just the right amount of absurdity and bizarreness that it could get me out of my life but the thing was an aerobics class had to do my best to not watch Julia because in that class the her slowness and the physical manifestations of her illness were most obviously on display now when she was discharged I took three months off work in order to stay home and take care of her and I thought three months is gonna be plenty of time well she'll be fine and after three months I had to go back to work to keep her up my insurance and she wasn't fine at all she was you could say worse because she was openly suicidal at that point and so I go to work and basically panic all day and then I come home and pretend everything was fine and dance around the house and be goofy and just try to keep keep life light for her and for me and and this was our life for months you know for months I was her cheerleader and I was her watchman but I was also terrified and I was slowly falling apart inside and for a month the doctors they they experimented with so many combinations of drugs and different tweak this and change that and get rid of this and nothing was working finally after nine months they sat me down they said we think it time we consider ect ect stands for electro convulsive therapy and I know that a lot has changed since the 60s and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but when they said to me they wanted to give my wife shock treatment that's when I really I know it was at the edge and I once again feared is Julia ever gonna get better but they said we're gonna give it one last try we're gonna give one last drug combination another shot before we go that route and hope for the best two weeks later were in that aerobics class and I look in one of the mirrors and I see Julia and she's smiling you have to understand how rarely she smiled I smiled back and I stopped and I watched her for a little bit and she was less slow she was more in control of her body she was coming back I turned in I faced her and I looked in her eyes for the first time in nine months I saw a life again I saw this spark of health that we all take for granted so much and I knew she was gonna make it and I turned back to that aerobics teacher and I kept going so hard I thought my arms are gonna follow their socket I was so victorious and that and I fell in love with my wife when I was 18 I had no idea how demanding and scary love is how much it asks of us you know I had no idea she would get sick and she has bipolar disorder which is a lifelong illness it's gonna always be part of her it's gonna always be part of me you know I didn't think about that this person is gonna someday die you don't think about that when your kid and I knew that would happen but I didn't process it and I now I clearly have a preference for what that looks like I want us to make it into old age but ultimately I don't know that much of a say my wife's mental illness has had it has added tremendous layers of sadness and uncertainty and fear into our lives but it's also shown me that there truly is no greater reward than to love someone and to be loved in return to lose someone into the deepest depths of depression and then find yourself at a robux class surrounded by old Chinese women in a room with bright red carpeting and to look into her eyes and let's see that she was gonna be okay thank you [Applause]

Channel: The Moth

Views: 51,057

Keywords: The Moth, The Moth Radio Hour, The Moth Podcast, story, storyteller, storytelling, mental health, mental health awareness, mental health awareness month

Id: EHZQvIN-7pk

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2019