Letter From Toms River

First in a Series. I said this was a platform to write on any subject of my choosing and I meant it!

My father was declared cancer free in late December. In early March he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital in Toms River, New Jersey. He could not check himself out. Neither could we do it on his behalf. Nor could we visit him.

My brother and I were concerned at first that my father would disappear into a black hole. Lacking prior experience, but primed by dystopian thrillers into a reflexive mistrust of large impersonal institutions where the psychologically ailing are warehoused by the state, we entertained the vague but perfervid fears that anyone would as their 86-year old father moved toward intake. What horrors would he witness on the inside? Would his designation as a psychiatric patient itself demoralize him and plunge him into the very madness that his presence was meant to cure? What could they hope to achieve in the expected 7 to 10 day stay that would help him? These are the standard anxieties. We felt them all.

We are sixteen days into his stay and the ultimate outcome is still yet to be determined. It can be said unequivocally, though, that he did not disappear into a black hole. I consulted with my friend Dan, an attorney who understands the law of involuntarily commitment well, having played a role in litigating the robust protections for the autonomy of the psychologically impaired that now obtain. He assured me that this was a textbook case: my father had forfeited his freedom of movement the instant he told the attending psychiatrist at that he had entertained thoughts of hurting myself. This was the relevant threshold, triggering a duty by the state to ensure that the imminent threat had passed. In the absence of such a statement, it is virtually impossible to have someone confined against their will. In its presence, such confinement was a certainty, despite the fact that when asked again the following day, he had assured us that the impulse had passed.

My father was until recently an autonomous adult who by virtue of the fact that he did not pose an imminent threat to himself or others was held to be a competent executor of his own affairs in the eyes of the law. This was not actually true and had been for many years the source of great sorrow and frustration among those of us in proximity to him. The brunt of this frustration was borne by my mother, who knew before anyone else, and only made us understand belatedly. The threat he posed to himself and others was a slow, incremental one -- faulty judgment, grounded in the persistence of a false belief that was driving him to live recklessly beyond his means in pursuit of a vocation existing only in his mind. We knew it was happening and we could not stop it. He was an autonomous adult and thus the bearer of a right to bring himself and his wife, my mother, into ruin.

Against such dangers we cannot turn to the state for protection. We can only make appeals to the afflicted person, to tell them we love them and want what is best for them and wish only to save them from the cataclysm that will as a certainty arrive if they do not change course. We can put ourselves on the line and implore the afflicted person to change for our sake's. And if they refuse to heed our counsel, or respond to our entreaties — if they are moved to wrath rather than reflection by our interventions — we have no other recourse.

The false belief system that ensnared my father through the decades imbued him with a nearly preternatural energy and vigor for a man his age. This was our dilemma. It gave him a reason to live and to strive and were his resources sufficient to the non-existent vocation he was pursuing, he would merely be an eccentric. But his resources were not sufficient.

The delusion in which he was ensnared can succinctly be described as the belief that he was engaged in private diplomacy that would contribute to the end of the Korean War. This was the conflict that severed the lives of both of my parents in two, accounts for their presence in the United States and my own, and which remains formally unresolved. It is the conflict that will outlast both of my parents, who were teenagers when the war destroyed the world they had known.

I was reluctant to write about my father while he lived. Just a few weeks ago, it seemed he was speeding toward death. He was 86-years old and weighed 100 pounds after losing 30 pounds in four weeks. It now seems that he is going to live. And he has done something I asked him to do: he has taken responsibility. He has faced up to the truth.

I drove from Montreal to New Jersey when his case was beginning to sound hopeless. He was spending 20 hours a day in bed. He was not eating. He had wasted away and could barely walk on his own. I came to tell him that I loved and forgave him, but that I did not believe he was truly crazy -- that I believed he was throwing a tantrum unto death and that it was time for him to stop. In his hospital bed in Toms River, he told me he was sorry he had failed as a father. I told him he had not failed because he did not end the Korean War. He had failed because he had not regarded or treated his family as sufficient reason to live and chosen to live in a fantasy instead. I said he could vindicate himself by eating again and gaining back his weight, and making himself strong enough to be of service to what he would, in references that used to enrage me, refer to as his "long-suffering wife." He could join us here on earth in the time he had left, without the belief that he was a person of world-historical importance that had sustained him against so many injuries at the cost of embedding him in a world of delusion. He could treat us as sufficient — that is what we wanted from him, and that is all we had ever wanted. Having come close enough to death to know what awaited him, he could choose another path.

"Although you do not either deserve my love or my forgiveness, you have it," I told him. "And you can prove yourself worthy of it by not dying under these undignified conditions. By mustering the wherewithal to recover, and by giving your wife a few years of peace. "

While keeping his eyes clamped shut, he nodded his head and seemed to understand.