Morale and Safety

My mom told me when I was 20 years old that my father had lived with bipolar disorder for his entire adult life. I had no clue. There was no reason to tell us about it previously, she said. She was forced to finally reveal this to my brother and me because he had just tried to commit suicide by taking a knife to his throat.

Prior to that, there had been no indication (in my view) that I had grown up in anything but a “normal” family with two loving parents in a sleepy town on the outskirts of Cincinnati, OH. But the narrative I had built throughout my childhood started to fall away like giant rocks shearing off a cliff face into the ocean with every new (to me) revelation.

This had not even been his first (or even second) serious suicide attempt. He jumped off the tallest bridge in Ohio the day after Thanksgiving in 1982 - two years before I was born. After his death nearly 40 years later, I found a set of 5x7 index cards with a speech he had written titled Morale and Safety intended to address the event at a workplace safety meeting just six months later.

My grandpa, whom I thought had died of natural causes when my father was a teenager, had actually committed suicide. He jumped from the 6th floor of the local VA hospital after a short struggle with terminal cancer. My father would later be hospitalized for months on the exact same floor 50 years later after a particularly bad mental episode.

Even more, this same grandpa tried to commit suicide prior to that by wrecking his car into a telephone pole with his wife and youngest daughter in the car. He apparently said, “I wanted to take you with me” to his wife, my grandmother, after the incident.

My father’s story, as conceptualized in the character Curtis Brenner, of a lifelong struggle with mental illness and tragedy will be told over the course of his entire life, starting with the inception. He joins the Marines to honor his father after his death and also to please the new man of the house, his asshole older brother. At bootcamp, it becomes clear he is not cut out to be a soldier. During a live ammo drill, he has a psychotic break and almost accidentally kills one of his squadmates. He’s medically discharged and diagnosed with bipolar at age 21. The doctor prescribes lithium to “regulate” Curtis but warns that it could have serious physical ramifications with long-term use.

In spite of his unevenness, lithium does work and he raises a family with a wonderful and supportive wife, Amelia Brenner. The family grows up in relative peace and the period where the children are growing up from elementary to high school age is everyone at their happiest. With the happiness that comes with sending children into adulthood comes the devastating news that Curtis’s kidneys are on the verge of failure after 40 years of ingesting lithium, a substance toxic to the human body. The doctor presents the hard choice to Curtis and Amelia of either staying on lithium and possibly being on dialysis for the rest of his life or switching to something else that may not work as well. Curtis is adamant that he is deathly afraid of dialysis and tells Amelia not to worry – that he is confident another medication will work.

No other medicine ever does work, and he starts to wither away in a nursing facility he is placed in after being mentally unable to take care of himself (despite being fully capable physically). Eventually, his physical strength begins to waver. His children, desperate to find some sense of closure, are able to get some semblance of it just before he dies by engaging with him through music and writing, his original loves. The closure they find would look menial to anyone else, but it answers the question they’ve been asking the whole time: what has it meant for their father to have lived on in spite of all his issues?