He Donned the Safety Vest on Day Two

We knew what was coming. That didn’t make it any less relentless, absurd, and heartbreaking.

There’s a photo from the redwoods I keep circling back to. It’s me and B., walking side-by-side along a stream, ancient tree trunks rising around us like columns. Nina took it. We’re holding hands. We look happy.

But, it was an act, a plea. I was hoping to pacify B. and maybe us too. I was running on fumes, pretending with what energy I had left that we were still in some version of normal. We had only a few more hours to go before we’ve leave for the airport, after a visit that could only be called harrowing. Once B. was on the plane, I could breathe again.

The original plan was a three-week visit. B. had been living in Caracas for several years. I’d told the kids if no one visited him there, he would come back. It was obvious, and I wanted to avoid it.

No one visited. Bo said, "Mom, I'm not ready." Nina was afraid of Caracas, and I didn’t blame her.

When we agreed to a three week visit, and B. booked his ticket for six, we recognized the act as a warning sign.

On day two, he began wearing a yellow safety vest. Our hearts dropped. During every prior episode—we’ve been through six now, maybe seven—this fashion choice is one of the first signs of mania. An incredible, almost on-the-nose metaphor, like a warning label he affixes to his own body. To say we were alarmed is putting it mildly.

When he balanced a prism over the lamp in the guest room, casting spinning rainbows around the ceiling and wall, we grew more uneasy. PTSD was stirring in all of us.

Within days, he was bringing trash home and filling his room with it. He found a dirty, discarded pink pouch with a used syringe zippered inside somewhere and tucked it into a drawer, along with string, paper, flyers, wire, wrappers, cans, food, post-its, plastic bins, articles of dirty clothing from who-knew-where. Scissors, headlamps, duct tape that he’d ordered on Amazon. He began visiting a hardware store daily, dropping $60 to $70 on things we already had in the house, things he had no reason to buy. All signs of mania.

One day, he made a mountain of quinoa in my largest pot—enough for thirty people—and then disappeared. When I tried to put the heavy pot in the fridge, I wrenched my back and spent six days in bed with breathtakingly painful muscle spasms. It wasn’t until I got a heavy-duty anti-spasm medication from my doctor that the pain began to ease. I’m still recovering, weeks later.

Our daughter Nina arranged a high-stakes visit to Santa Cruz. B.’s youngest daughter, A.—by a different mother, Mary—had finally, at seventeen, shown a flicker of interest in getting to know her biological father. Nina planned everything, and it’s safe to say it was a total disaster. He was rude, disruptive, and bizarre.

He stole a wetsuit and the top of Mary's air fryer. Mary said he could pick one bucket of citrus from her trees, and he stripped every tree of all reachable fruit. He came home with crates and bins—which he also took from Mary—of lemons and oranges. Soon there were multitudes of oranges and lemons rolling around and molding on every surface in my kitchen. I threw them out by the armful for weeks.

Nina was heartbroken and ashamed. None of his four children are talking to him now. Mary said he isn't welcome back, and it's safe to say that's an understatement. He also tried to walk out of a grocery store with a bag of coffee under his arm. Mary caught him at the door and made him return it. She said, “B., you’re going to get arrested. It’s just a matter of time.”

Then there was the steady stream of injuries. Bruises, scabbed shins, blackened toenails on one foot. A swollen eye, a scratch across his forehead. Two or three weeks in, he started wearing a single glove on his right hand. I made some lame Michael Jackson joke about it at the time.

One night, outside a local art show, I glimpsed his hand in the dark as he unlocked his bike. The middle finger was grotesquely swollen and misshapen, the tip as round as a golf ball. “Oh my God,” I said. He hid it and said, “It just needs salt water. I’ll soak it when we get home.”

The next day, in Santa Cruz, his daughter A. saw it and called her mother. They took him to the ER. The doctor said he was close to losing the fingertip. They cleaned it and gave him a course of strong antibiotics. Later, he denied anything serious had happened. “It was nothing,” he said. “You’re lying,” he said.

He developed a verbal tic. Where a normal person might say, “No way!” he’d blurt, “Fuck-you-shut-the-fuck-up.” It was constant. Mary asked him to stop swearing in front of her 13-year-old son. He couldn’t.

A few of days before his departure date, we took him to Stinson Beach for a night to celebrate his 63rd birthday. He boogie-boarded for hours with the kids, and I think they had fun and maybe even, hopefully, created a couple of good memories for the future. We had cheeseburgers in the park and tossed the frisbee. There were moments of ease, but we were holding our collective breath.

That night, B. went to bed early. “I think I overdid it,” he said. I’ll say. He’d even managed a headstand at the beach. I was terrified he’d break his neck.

The next morning, over pastries, his eldest son Daniel tried to talk to him about medication. B. deflected, denied, blamed, and accused us of harshing his vibe. Nothing was wrong. He was fine. He felt great.

Of course he did. Mania is addictive. It flatters, lies, and makes you feel like a god.

The night of his departure, we were supposed to be at home. I’d seasoned a chicken, set the table. I thought we’d have a quiet dinner before leaving for the airport. A friend joined us, time slipped, and we ended up at a local sushi restaurant, five of us around the table: me, B., our son, our son’s girlfriend A., and our friend J. Nina was sick.

Throughout the dinner, B. was fixated on his phone. Bo and I exchanged a look. He leaned over. "Mom, maybe see if you can look at Papi’s screen." I tried. He shielded it. But later, passing behind him, I saw the following emblazoned on his screen: They don’t know yet that I’m defecting!

My stomach dropped. I wrote the words down on a chopstick wrapper and slid it to Bo. He read it, paused, then said, "Papi, can we talk outside?"

Everything fell apart from there.

People, including my therapist (who is rather pissed at me, honestly) ask why we didn’t kick him out earlier. I have no good answers. We had rules. We wrote them out and made him read and initial each one. He broke them all multiple times.

He ran a fake fundraiser at the senior center. Took cash from the elders. Filled our fridge with expired food that he’d transport in his bike basket and in bags hanging from his body from pantries all over town. He took $60 from my wallet, then returned $40 of it by dropping it on the floor in front of me and insisting I had dropped it.

I didn’t throw him out because I wanted to make sure he got on the plane. I didn’t want to lose track of him. I didn’t want him to get arrested, or attacked. I thought I could protect him. My therapist made me say three times, “I am not the savior.”

We thought we could hold out. And we did. I mean, we’re alive. We survived. But we’re staggering around a bit. It’s not an exaggeration to say we’re all in shock and licking our wounds.

The morning after he didn’t leave, the senior center called. “B. is here,” Tamika said. “He says he’s homeless. Is he a runaway?” I laughed ruefully. “I guess you could say that. He neglected to get on his flight last night.”

Yes, he’s a run-away. He ran away from everything. From commitments, the truth, responsibility, rationality, a loving family, an apartment in Caracas, security, safety.

Last Sunday, a stranger called. He’d run into B., who is now living in a van—the van of the woman I filed an elder abuse claim against during B.’s last manic spiral.

The man introduced himself and said, "I knew B. 40 years ago. I recognized him at a cafe in Berkeley. He doesn’t look good. He’s clearly manic, and OCD. He was touching things repeatedly and in patterns. This isn’t a good place for him. He’s got such a big heart. How can I help? I’ll buy him a plane ticket. He needs to be with his family in Venezuela."

I said, "There are five people who would buy him that ticket. But you can’t make someone go if they don’t want to."

And B. doesn’t want to go.

My therapist wants me to file a restraining order. But I won’t. I don’t want to escalate the situation, I don’t want to be responsible for his incarceration. We’re trying to carry on with our lives with as little collateral damage as possible. We’ve been here before—5150s, court dates, psych holds, hospital visits, the threat of prison, calls from police and various concerned society members. The impossible paperwork, the vanishing options.

I sprung him once from all of this, got him to his family in Venezuela, where he had an apartment and a maid who came once a week to clean his place and cook for him. And the rest of us had relative peace of mind.

I can’t do it again.

This is what mental illness looks like, at least in the U.S. There’s no net, no plan, no mercy. You can draw a line. You can block the person for your own wellbeing. You don’t stop loving them or fearing for them or wishing things were different. There are no good answers. Only choices you learn to live with.