My Family and Mental Illness (Part 1): The Phone Call that Would Change My Life Forever

Sheldon's note: This will be a long story, and one that is very difficult for me to write, so I will be splitting it into a series. I have alluded before to my father's struggles with mental illness in past posts, but I have never gone into detail as to what his health conditions are, or how it profoundly changed my life as a teen. This series will change all that. 

This series will probably be as hard for me to write, so please, bear with me as write this. It's been over 10 years now since my father had to quit his job due to his health conditions, but beginning to write this is dredging it all up again, and my emotions feel almost as raw as when it happened.

I was 14 years old when one day, there was a call from the owner of my dad's company. I was busy working on my ACE coursework, as a hard working home school kid, the same ACE coursework that I had in the fundamentalist private school I was in until the 4th grade.

My dad worked as an industrial mechanic for a small family owned company in St. Louis for 25 years, but I still had never spoken to the owner of his company before, he refused to say why he was calling, since he knew I was only a teen at the time, and the fact that he would make this kind of call, and refuse to say what it was about meant that something wasn't right.

I was full of dread of finding out what this call was about, but I didn't know if my mom would be happy with me leaving my coursework for a moment, (she was at the house of an elderly neighbor of ours, and this neighbor could tend to talk for quite a while). After my father's boss called several times, about once every 30 minutes, to see if he could talk to my mom, I knew it couldn't wait. I walked down to the neighbor's house, and as I thought she would react, she wasn't happy at first, and was demanding to know why I had stepped out of the house.

I had told her about my father's boss repeatedly calling, and that it apparently was important, because he refused to tell me what was going on, and was insisting to talk to her only. She tried to hide her fear, and pull herself together, because just like me, she knew something wasn't right.

You see, there had been a lot of strange occurrences and patterns in his behavior leading up to this time. For about a year before this day, his normally good memory had been failing him at times, and he wasn't able to understand some things that he had been very good at figuring out. All his life, he was the problem solver, his mind could think through any problem, large or small, and he could react with ease, figuring out the best course of action, whether it was a major decision in life, or how to put something back together that had come apart.

It was a life skill that had served him well over the years, especially in his professional life, in his days as a young man in the construction industry, or at the job he had at the time as a mechanic, working on parts for buses, construction equipment, larger trucks, and even large generators (his company had even worked on generators for the massive Midwestern utility company, Ameren).

Those skills were failing, however, and his personality was rapidly changing. He was growing increasingly more frustrated with himself, and with everyone around him, when normally, he was a happy, easy going man (other then when my mother would be constantly trying to pick fights with him for no good reason, she loved drama). He would get very confused sometimes, and then several hours later, be back to his normal self again.