Maria…

She was a Beauty!

Most said she was a cross between Marilyn and Lucille. She had the looks and the innocent laughter of Marilyn; coupled with the silliness in mannerisms when interacting with others, similar to the comedienne. Hazel eyes, hourglass figure, designer dresses, and each week a change — sometimes blond, but most times her natural bright red hair.

You would think she had it all — a beautiful new house with swimming pool and freshly landscaped yard, a Mustang convertible, two beautiful babies, and her husband a successful businessman. Not bad for a little girl who started out poor and destitute within a family of eight siblings born to an exhausted family on a decaying farm on the island of Ischia, Italy.

Things were more than just okay for her until I turned six.

Within a year, she would succumb to paranoid schizophrenia, have open-heart surgery due to a heart murmur caused by Scarlett Fever back in Italy when she had been just a little girl, and would have to learn to deal with being a divorced mother. She would not get custody and so would only see her boys on weekends. Since the older of the two hated her now, she would have to settle for seeing only her youngest (me).

When I was a boy, I watched my mom slowly decline through horrific mental illness, which would eventually take her life when I was 24. On my weekend visits, I endured what I would never wish on my worst enemies. Needing her love, I instead witnessed mad spells of rage, hours of hysteria intermingled with long bouts of hysterical crying, and behaviors such as nailing the window shut and writing Bible verses on the walls of her boarding room with red lipstick.

Throughout this time, my older brother only exasperated her episodes by blaming her for her illness and otherwise did nothing to offer any help. On the handful of occasions he did come to see her, he would only be angry and yell at her, blaming her for her own illnesses. I did the best I could, but was against almost insurmountable odds. Long days with her alone in our boarding room as she suffered were hell on earth for me.

My security depended upon her being as well as it was possible for her to be. She would call during the week from a payphone to my dad’s house and we would talk. I worried incessantly for her. I did not want her to go to the mental hospital, because I knew what they would do to her there (bind her, medicate her to the point of zombiehood, and threaten her with the use of electroshock therapy). Nevertheless, she would wind up there for thirty-day stays at least twice each year.

I forced myself to go visit her every weekend, although I would have preferred to stay with my friends climbing trees, exploring the woods, and swimming during the summer. I used to think there was no recovering from those long weekends embedded together with a mother with severe mental illness.

But now I look all around America and realize that the vast majority of us know nothing about how to deal with mental illness even today. We are so damn competitive and want to get to the top — at the expense of any effort finding kindness, love, and kinship with those who may offend us due to their own mental struggles. We have to get over that.

Today, I believe we have our values all messed up. Community psychosis in the form of poor leadership, corrupt media, no matter which side you are on, and lack of direction, or rather, too many different directions with no compromise, only rage.

It has risen to the level of psychosis, trust me. Just look around at your unhappy and suspicious neighbors, the TV reports of our leadership, and the events of violence and rage throughout our nation over the last ten years.

Still, nobody sees it this way. They only see what they want to see because they are mostly interested in getting ahead at all costs. Trying to get ahead at all costs is what has caused this community/national psychosis to fester, rather than to be treated.

The price of competition in our country is too steep. Sure, we have lots of winners.

But not really, we have too many more “losers,” whose pain echoes throughout the halls of their chambers each and every day — even as others, who could have made a difference at an opportune time, had turned away.

We have to create winners who would never leave anyone else behind, no matter the personal cost to their own lives and success. Those are the winners who know how to make a difference in the lives of those left behind, and through their unconditional love, will perhaps prevent another senseless tragedy.

Then, perhaps, we can begin to heal from our national psychosis.

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