My Family and Mental Illness (Part 2): The Father I No Longer Knew

Sheldon's note: This is part two in a continuing series about my father's struggles with mental illness, and how it affected my family as a teen, for part 1 (click here). Please read that post, if you haven't already, before continuing to read this post.

After receiving the phone call from the owner of my dad's company that he had went missing from work, my mom tried to regain her composure, but she knew she was still too shaken up to drive, she didn't necessarily like driving from the Illinois suburb we lived in across one of the bridges across the Mississippi River in the first place, fighting all the traffic, and she knew she was definitely in no shape to try it at this point.

A longtime neighbor who lived across the street at the time drove us across the river to my dad's company in St. Louis, about 15 miles away, the building was about two blocks from of the buildings on the campus of St. Louis University.

We went across the Poplar Street bridge, down Highway 40 into St. Louis, and as we pulled up to the building, my mom sternly told me to stay in the neighbor's truck, she would handle this.

She went into the building, not knowing what to do from there, she had already called St. Louis' police department on her cell phone, she was transferred to a detective who said that unless there was proof that he was in immediate danger, had been taken somewhere against his will, etc, that there was nothing they could do for us but let us file a missing person's report 24 hours from that time. My mom tried to explain the circumstances to him to no avail.

She went into the building, and came out about 15 minutes later with my father. She had told me that she had found him the break room with a co-worker of his who was waiting for her to show up, they were just as surprised and confused about what was going on as we were. They had all known him for most of their adult lives, since he had worked there for so long (25 years), it was a small company (at most would have around a dozen people on staff at any given time), and there was a core group of men that had been there almost as long as him.