After we drove her home, Sam told me: “I can’t do this anymore.” I’d been her apologist for so long, but I couldn’t argue. I was exhausted. I respected her visions, but in the face of so much scorn and fear, she really started to slip away. And it didn’t help that throwing up in a shot glass became a routine for her. I don’t know if she did it to shock people, or if she was genuinely nauseous, and I never asked. She did it again, the second time, at Sammy’s bar. After that, it became regular. Everyone avoided her.
I can’t help but wonder about how McGough has managed to accomplish so much, when Kathy struggled so profoundly. Perhaps it’s the meds; the drugs they diagnose people with today for schizophrenia are far less debilitating than the lithium that was used to sedate Kathy. Or maybe it’s McGough’s extensive social network, which “helps her through” her visions.. Perhaps together, this modern collectivism, along with better meds, have allowed her to move through this world in a way that Kathy, born in the wrong place and time, could not.
Somewhere along the way, we had all failed her. It was partly the shame of our immigrant community where everybody knew everyone else’s business, or thought they did. It was also a time in the culture when mentally ill teenaged girls were hidden from the rest of the world; a mid-century version of the madwomen in the attic. Unlike McGough, she didn’t have a community who would try to understand the unique wiring of her brain.
Even I, her greatest advocate, couldn’t be exonerated from leaving her behind. In my last days in town, she had frightened me. I didn’t think she was tapped into a greater reality anymore. I saw how sick she had become. I wish I’d taken the time to speak candidly with her mother. I think we both hoped that the girl we once loved would spontaneously reappear. Neither of us ever said schizophrenia. As Campbell suggests, there wasn’t anyone to help her through: simply by listening, not judging. That was my role, but I had abandoned it.
About 15 years later, I went back to my hometown for my grandmother’s funeral. Taking a break from the service, I went outside and smoked a cigarette on a bench, when a middle aged woman with a bad perm sat down next to me. I thought she was a relative. She didn’t say a word, just smoked in silence. Later, my sister said, Kathy saw you at grandma’s funeral. Why didn’t you say hi?