Personal talk about family

 Cousin Les.

Images flash through my mind thinking about him.

He was a barrel on legs, strong stumpy legs.  Legs too short to take him anywhere really fast, but ones that never failed to carry him really far.

Arms strong enough to carry a 200 pound man a full mile.

A warm smile  you could feel across the room.

He had a full mental break down in his twenties and learned to deal with it.

Paranoid schizophrenic.

He hated the drugs that made him close to normal, but he hated what he did to those around him when not medicated more.

The meds worked for a long time.

Then they stopped, and his doctors went through a number of alternatives for over a year.

Nothing worked.

There was an option on an experimental drug, and he signed onto the trial.

It made his mental condition better for a very brief period of time, followed by triggering irreversible violent Parkinson's.

I was two provinces away, and the next time I was visiting family, I went to visit him with my mom.  He was strapped to a chair, wearing a hockey helmet and I could barely understand him.  His whole torso would twitch, and slam his head in random directions.  I mostly held it together during the visit, but somewhere inside I was glad I was heading back home before a second visit would happen.

Both his condition and my reaction to it hit me hard.  I looked into myself and shook my mental reaction loose.  The next time I was back, I would do better in facing him, even if only to just be there, to let him know he was not alone.  I do not know if I would have followed through on that because four months later he was dead.

There is no hard and fast metric for the lessons in this.

At what point is it for you and your mental health to accept restriction imposed by medication to make you better for others?  At what point do you take a chance to make your life better and roll the dice on whether it will work or not?  And if your cousin is willing to take that chance and rolls snake eyes, how do you support him?  And look at him with warmth and compassion as his life grows so much worse?

Did I pass this test of character?  I like to think I did, but one visit is not a passing grade, in my mind.  My mom sat with him many times.  I did not ask how many, but I would be surprised if she visited with him less than once a week, driving the 2 hours from her home to his home and back.  She did not so much pass that test, as fail to notice there could be one.