The Light in His Soul E-Book

Rebecca Schaper

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 266

Beschreibung

Call Richmond went missing. Twenty years later he showed up on a family member's doorstep. He was homeless, broken, and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. For the next fourteen years, his sister Rebecca took on the struggle to restore him as they faced the dark traumas and painful memories of their past. The Light in His Soul: Lessons from My Brother's Schizophrenia is her intimate memoir of helping Call as she learns that his extraordinary gifts are helping heal her and her family. Both Call and Rebecca bring light to the dark shadows of their past.The book recaps the story of the award-winning documentary film A Sister's Call, supplemented by Rebecca's insights about the soul contract she has with her brother.

Leseprobe

Copyright © 2018 by Rebecca Schaper

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher.

GreyHawk Media

3000 Old Alabama Road, Suite 119Alpharetta, GA [email protected]

Kindle ISBN: 978-0-9992771-2-6EPUB ISBN: 978-0-9992771-3-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952089

Portions of this memoir are based on the documentary film A Sister’s Call (2012) by Rebecca Schaper co-produced and directed by Kyle Tekiela (Tekiela Creative) for GreyHawk Films in association with Kartemquin Films. Photos in this book are adapted from the movie except as noted below.

Photo of Kim in chapter 16: Courtney BuchananPhoto of Lauren in chapter 18: Gabe SimpsonPhoto of the author: Marion Yarger-Ricketts

Copyeditor: Robin Quinn, Quinn’s Word for Word Proofreader: Mike MollettCover and interior designer: Gary Palmatier, ideas-to-images.com

In Memory of Call

Beyond all I see through the eyes of my brother,Call gave me the inspiration to write this book.

Contents

Prologue

CHAPTER 1

Call Returns

CHAPTER 2

I Take Responsibility for Call’s Care

CHAPTER 3

The Richmond Family Legacy

CHAPTER 4

Jim and Me, a Movie Romance

CHAPTER 5

Call Opens Up to Me

CHAPTER 6

Kim’s Struggle and Her Revelation

CHAPTER 7

My Mission and My Family’s Journey

CHAPTER 8

Call’s Treatment Plan

CHAPTER 9

I See a Light

CHAPTER 10

Thinking About Mother’s Anguish

CHAPTER 11

I Reflect on Abuse and Its Consequences

CHAPTER 12

Call’s Process

CHAPTER 13

Call’s Symptoms Return

CHAPTER 14

Dealing with My Overwhelm

CHAPTER 15

Return to the Family Home

CHAPTER 16

Kim’s Path to Recovery

CHAPTER 17

The Schapers Come Together and Reflect

CHAPTER 18

Call’s Reawakening

CHAPTER 19

Lauren Chases the Sun

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

For Further Reading

Support Organizations

Discussion Questions

Watch the Documentary

About the Authors

Prologue

IN THE SOUTH, CALL IS NOT UNCOMMON AS A MAN’S NAME. It was my father’s and my brother’s. Also in that part of the country, inspired Christians talk about receiving the call—a call of duty, a call to action—an outright order from God. My brother Call Richmond Jr. was my call to action. He had been a cheerful but disturbed and misunderstood young man. One day not long after he’d dropped out of his last year of college, Call ran away from home and disappeared.

I found him twenty years later. His paranoid schizophrenia was not yet formally diagnosed. I knew right away that it was up to me to get him whatever help he needed.

This is our story.

Rather, this is my memoir of caring for—and learning from—Call.

As a society—as a community of law-abiding, cooperative citizens—we tend to think of mental illness as a disease to be managed, disruptive behavior to be minimized, perhaps even an embarrassment to be hidden away. (And there are still those who think of illness as Satan’s possession of the weak or the wicked.) The professional caregivers have trays full of drugs that, in clever combinations and dosages, may seem to be helpful. But, for the most part, today’s pharmaceuticals suppress the symptoms but never heal the problem—nor the hurtful effects on other people. The result might be acceptable to the community because the patient is now compliant and seemingly self-sufficient. However, the nightmare they’ve been living is not extinguished. Their internal television show—the swirling perceptions and misperceptions in the mind—has just been temporarily switched off, or its volume control turned way down.

The average person rarely has reason to question perceptions that seem real. During our dreams, haven’t we all wondered whether we’re participating in a real event? But a hallucination is another thing altogether. Imagine being wide awake, reaching for a doorknob, and not knowing if it’s a real object or a figment of your obsessively creative mind. You reach out and grasp it. The feedback through the nerves of your hand, the coolness of the metal, and the hard slickness of its surface make you think it’s a real thing. You tighten your grip and turn it clockwise.

It is a real knob in a real door, the door to your bathroom. You’re standing there because the pressure in your bladder is giving you the routine message that you need to relieve yourself.

Understand—and this might be difficult for you to take in at this point—you know you can’t trust your judgment. You seldom know whether your perceptions are real or hallucinatory. And yet you are intelligent enough to know that there’s a difference. From moment to moment, you don’t trust yourself. You don’t trust your judgment about whether you’re sane or ill.

You don’t even trust your decision to open a door.

But, in this case, it’s a real handle on a real door to your own bathroom. And you decide to open it.

And on the other side of the door, you see an undulating carpet of insects or a nest of writhing snakes or the face of someone you don’t recognize giving you a menacing look. It’s not a horror movie, and you can’t turn it off. It’s the way you live, all day every day you’re awake. Sometimes, you open the door and all you see is the commode full of feces you forgot to flush down. Other times, when you remember to take your meds, you’re in a fog and you grope your way to the porcelain receptacle and you do your business like everyone else in town.

You summon your courage and walk back through that door.

Some family members and caregivers—including certain medical professionals—assume that people with mental illness can’t know the difference between hallucinations and reality. That’s true part of the time. The difference isn’t always clear. There is that moment with your hand on the doorknob when all the boundaries of reality are blurred.

Nevertheless, some people who later present symptoms of mental illness may have had happy, clear-headed childhoods. My brother did. When things go wrong, these individuals know they have entered strange, dangerous territory. If they receive medication—and if it works—they may feel safer for a while. At those times, treatment plans might seem to succeed, but all too often the effects are not lasting. In certain cases, brain chemistry may change to shake off the drug-induced dullness, as if the once-overactive mind was desperate to outwit the boredom. The patient might just decide to help the process along by forgetting to take some pills.

Absent the medication and at other unpredictable times, the illness may have other effects—including extraordinary visions, insights, or abilities. These effects can seem superhuman, even traits of genius. Imagine the thrill of living at that level. The brain seeks to sustain that high, but the intensity is unbearable—with or without moderating drugs. Eventually, patients will lose that energy and perhaps fall into a depression because their mellowed state is not at all exciting.

They may wonder what they’ve done wrong to deserve such suffering.

We all wonder why misfortune strikes. Not necessarily what the afflicted person did wrong, but what flaw in us or in the scheme of things invites any manner of pain or suffering into our lives?

Call’s illness was just one facet of my family’s troubled history. Our mother, Mary Pennington Richmond, suffered from schizophrenia and committed suicide just before Call went missing. Our father, Call Richmond Sr., was a heroic World War II veteran who, to use the modern term for it, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although Dad was outwardly a fully functional, even respected member of the community, he abused my mother emotionally and physically. And he secretly abused me emotionally and sexually. Years later, I was to learn he’d also molested my oldest daughter Kim. No one in the family suspected it until, in her college years, Kim developed acute anorexia.

Eleven years after my mother’s suicide, my father killed himself. He’d been remarried briefly, but he said in a suicide note that he’d never been truly happy. And in that note, he hinted at his overwhelming sense of guilt for the bad things he’d done.

My coping with—and, yes, learning from—Call’s schizophrenia became intertwined with all these events and their decades-long impacts.

I’ve heard it said that mental illness can be accompanied by special gifts. I don’t know whether that’s always the case, but I’m still discovering the depth of Call’s spiritual sensitivity and insight.

I don’t mean to scare you, and my intention is not to preach. Given this brief glimpse of my family life, you may be strongly tempted not to read further.

I’m here to tell you—and perhaps this is the reason Call shared his life with us—that misfortune, heartache, gifts, and blessings come from unexpected—and often unlikely—directions. Yes, at one level this is a book about coping with mental illness, along with the stress in the family that inevitably surrounds it. But at its heart, this memoir is the outpouring of my belief in the enduring beauty of human existence and the loud, clear message that, no matter what your challenge or hardship, in finding your endurance, you may also find purpose and joy.

CHAPTER 1

Call Returns

IN THE MOVIES AS IN SO MANY ANCIENT STORIES, WE THINK about the call coming as a blinding flash of light or a thundering command. Yet sometimes it’s as soft as the purr of a ringing phone.

The call to me was indirect, not from my brother but from my mother-in-law Marge. She’d been the first to get it, hearing the call as the ringing of her doorbell.

One morning in 1997, she and her husband were cleaning out a large closet in their basement. She’d phoned the Haven of Rest, a local charity, to pick up their furniture donations. A crew came out, loaded up their truck, and drove off.

One of the men stayed behind, turned back, marched up to her front porch, and rang the bell.

“I’m Call” was all he said when she opened the door.

His tone was matter-of-fact. No malice, but also no joy. No embarrassed getting around to the point. No apology. And also no pleading. This man was simply stating a fact.

“Good grief, Call,” Marge said. “You know Rebecca’s been looking all over for you. Come on in, and we’re going to get her on the phone.” She tried to keep the emotion out of her voice. If somehow she upset him, maybe he’d turn around and disappear again.

“You know, it’s been twenty years,” she said cautiously.

After being missing for twenty years, one morning Call appeared on Marge’s front porch, rang the bell, and announced simply, “I’m Call.”

“Yes, I do know that,” he replied. Then came the hint of a chuckle, and his round face lit up with a smile. “So, don’t you think it’s about time?”

Why had he walked in on Marge? I was the one who’d been looking desperately for him—for years. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. But I was his sister, and everyone in my immediate and extended family knew that I had—with or without their blessing—made finding him my mission, to the point of obsession.

Maybe the answer is that he was finally ready to be found. And there was Marge. She was living near Greenville, South Carolina, our hometown. My husband Jim and I were with our teenage daughters Kim and Lauren over 130 miles away in suburban Atlanta. One day all those years ago, it had been in Greenville where Call walked off, never to be seen or heard from by anyone we knew—until two decades later when he announced himself to Marge.

“Good grief, Call,” Marge said. “You know Rebecca’s been looking all over for you. Come on in, and we’re going to get her on the phone.”

Her explanation was “I think maybe there was a plan Upstairs for that.”

She phoned me and put him on.

Me, I screamed. I bawled. But my screams were yelps of pure joy.

I drove up to Greenville from my home near Atlanta the very next day. Call and I hugged for a long time. Words didn’t come until later.

He was forty. His sandy hair was thinning. His face was puffy and red. His gray beard was all the way down to his waist. He weighed just 130 pounds. Call wasn’t starving, but he was surely undernourished. A lit cheroot was stuck in his mouth. He didn’t bother to remove it as he talked, which wasn’t all that much. Our Call was a man of few words, then as later.

He didn’t have to tell me in so many words that he’d been homeless, broken, and alone. After he came back, I made sure he had the basics—shelter, food, and medical care. But I wasn’t sure, at this point, whether he was capable of living on his own. When I visited him, I clipped his toenails, which were a half-inch too long and must have made it uncomfortable to wear shoes. Neglecting his personal hygiene was an issue we would come to deal with, more or less constantly.

It was like I was staring at this ghost, this faint, lifeless resemblance of someone I knew a long time ago. But that ghost was my beloved brother Call. Right then and there, I knew in my heart that I would do everything I possibly could to bring him back to life.

My husband and daughters later admitted that, on Call’s return, he’d scared them at first. But, like a wild animal that has stumbled onto a trail, Call was much more afraid of us—afraid of everyone, really—than we were of him. For my part, all I saw was the hurt in his soul.

It’s hard to explain what it feels like to have someone back in your life after so many years. All these questions were going through my head: Where have you been? Why didn’t you just pick up the phone and call us? You have a family, and we love you. It saddened me to think that he didn’t seem to know that.

When I say Call was gone for twenty years, that’s not strictly true. He’d be gone and out of touch for long stretches of time, but every now and then he’d make himself known. He might phone, for example. In those days, a person could call collect, asking a live operator to reverse the charges (which were relatively more expensive than now). The operator would come on the line first and announce the caller and his location, then ask if you’d be willing to pay for the call. Just two years after he’d left home, in 1979, Call phoned me collect when I was pregnant with Kim. He told me he knew how Mom died. When I asked how he was, he simply said he was okay and not to worry about him. Then he hung up.

It’s hard to explain what it’s like to have someone back in your life after so many years.

In 1985, Call paid a surprise visit when the family was together at Dad’s in Greenville for Christmas. That’s when my widowed father was living in the house where we kids grew up, on Chanticleer Drive. Call had a bitter argument with Dad (I’m not sure about what) and left in a fury.

Three years after that incident, Call phoned me collect from St. Louis to ask why Dad’s phone was disconnected. I had to tell him how Dad had died. I pleaded with him to return to us, and I bought him a bus ticket to Atlanta. Call did visit us for a short while, but then he abruptly disappeared again without saying where he was going.

By 1991 our younger brother David was married to Shari, and Call showed up at their house to see their new baby Amanda. Neither David nor I could guess how Call had found out about the birth or knew how to find them.

As I reflect on the years before Call and I were reunited, I realize that I had no idea then what the future would hold. I could not have imagined the hardships we’d go through together as we tried to get his condition stabilized. All the time he was gone, I just knew I had to keep searching for him. It became an all-consuming mission for me, even when others advised me to give up. After there were so many years with no word from him, some of Call’s old friends tried to convince me that he must surely be dead.

When I thought about my searching for him, year after year, I wondered where my inner strength and determination came from. I began to suspect that it was because of this communication, this presence, that bound us together.

After the seeming miracle of Call’s return to us, I began to believe that Marge was right—that, in some way, there was a plan for all of it. But I didn’t think that God was moving us around like pieces on a chessboard. I was sure that I’d played an active part, and so had Call.

And in recent years, after more than a decade of trying to support Call, I have come to believe that he and I had a kind of spiritual agreement—that on some deep level we had decided to enrich each other’s lives and to guide each other through significant life lessons. Eventually, I’d have a whole vocabulary for this faith I had in him, but it was an awareness that dawned slowly, and by a series of—what else would you call them?—lessons.

I’ll have much more to say about how, in many ways, Call became my caregiver.

CHAPTER 2

I Take Responsibility for Call’s Care

AFTER CALL RETURNED, I WANTED HIM TO HAVE THE CHANCE my parents never gave him. First, I had to see that he had a place to live, food on his table, and professional care.

I wanted to take him home with me, to install him someplace near where I lived with my husband Jim and our daughters in suburban Atlanta. I knew I’d want to be checking in on him all the time. I also knew that my family didn’t want him anywhere near them. In fact, Jim had formed his suspicions about Call’s mental-health condition years ago when he’d first met him, even before Call had left us. And after Call returned, Jim didn’t want him to be at our house because, well, who knew how he might act out?

“Call was pretty frightening from the perspective of just being on the edge,” Jim recalls. “I never really knew what we were going to get with him. And that was a big concern of mine. I didn’t want the kids around him alone. It just didn’t happen.”

No surprise, my daughters had their concerns, too. Like their father, they were suspicious before they’d even had a chance to see him after his return. (The last time Kim had met him, she was little, and Lauren had never seen him at all.) Who wants to invite an unstable person into their life? To me, he was the brother I’d always known, and I couldn’t imagine him hurting anyone. Kim remembers, “It was difficult for all of us. He was just very foreign. He was in a daze. But we knew how important this was for you, Mom.”

For his part, it turned out that Call wasn’t comfortable moving to Atlanta. When I tried to suggest it, he didn’t throw a fit, but he firmly said no.

Still, I wanted him back in our lives. I wanted him to have a chance to have a normal life. It was becoming apparent to me that he was seriously ill.

So, even if he couldn’t live with us, it was my goal for Call to live in something like a normal social setting in a way that felt safe and nonthreatening for him. Eventually, I hoped he’d be able to live alone, be able to care for himself. The doctors and even Jim thought this was unrealistic. Their opinion was that Call would be more stable—and safer—in a group setting. As for me, I had no plan other than whatever specific treatment protocol we were following. He’d eventually go in and out of treatment facilities and his own apartments. But he was never homeless again.

After he returned to us, Call didn’t share much information with me, but I did get a few facts from him about where he’d been. Then I did some phoning and some poking around to fill in the story—to get a sense of not only what treatment he might have received but also what we should try to do next for him.

When Call had shown up at Marge’s to pick up her furniture, he’d been living at the Haven of Rest, a homeless shelter in nearby Anderson, South Carolina. He’d been there on and off for the previous six years. Although the facility wasn’t set up to treat the mentally ill, the staff understood enough about his condition to have him seen by the psychiatric professionals at the local hospital. There, he received medication that they hoped would stabilize him enough to keep him living in the home.

Oddly, when I inquired at the shelter for him, at first they said they didn’t have anyone named Call Richmond. Someone asked around, and the answer came back, “Oh, you mean Montana.”

Call told me eventually that in his travels he’d lived for a time in Whitefish, Montana, which he seemed to think of as a second home. Eventually I guessed that he thought of Montana not only with fondness as a beautiful place where he once lived, but also as a kind of spiritual home, somewhere he’d been truly happy.

He wasn’t having an easy time of it at the shelter. He was telling people there to stay away from his cows (as any “cattleman” from Montana might do), and he would sometimes brandish knives to back up his threats. In the short term, right after I met up with him, I hoped he could stay at the Haven of Rest a while longer. I begged the staff to keep him for a couple of weeks until I could find a place for him. But they were adamant that, because of his threats, he’d have to leave.

Our brother David drove over and picked him up. Call insisted he wanted to live in Greenville. David took him there and got him a room at the Salvation Army. But Call refused to stay put. He roamed around town. When I learned he’d gone astray, I drove from Atlanta to Greenville one afternoon and found him sleeping in the public library. He confessed to me that, after-hours when they’d lock him out of the library, he would sleep by a tree just a few feet away on the lawn.

David helped me convince Call that he should apply for public assistance and took him to the local Social Security office. There he filled out forms for Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance payments for his food and shelter, along with Medicaid to help with his treatment plan.

Within a month, we had the Greenville Mental Health Clinic overseeing Call’s care. He didn’t yet qualify for residential care, so I told him to stay in a hotel I’d booked and not to go anywhere. “Please,” I told him, “just stay here.” I gave him some money, and I promised to stick by him and get him whatever help he needed, including a place to live where he could finally settle in.

Through this period, I was going back and forth to Atlanta to care for my own daughters, and my husband was traveling extensively on business. But even though Jim wasn’t always by my side, I talked through the details of every decision with him.

One momentous decision Jim helped me make was to videotape my visits with Call. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an eye for photography, and I had a video camera I’d use to record our family outings and celebrations. One of the earliest scenes I recorded of Call was right after he moved into an apartment we’d lined up for him in Greenville. That happened within a year of his return.

As you can see in the documentary, when I walked into Call’s apartment once he’d settled in, there on the bed frame was the new mattress I’d bought him. The price tag was still hanging from the corner. The sight brought me to tears. How long had it been since he’d slept on a clean—I mean, truly clean and all his own—bed?

During this time, while Call was living alone at the apartment, we had the support of Greenville Mental Health. We’d just come back from a consultation there. “Call, we had some good meetings this morning, didn’t we?” I asked him.

“We sure did, Rebecca. They’re going to teach me about my hygiene, teach me to cook, teach me to clean up my apartment, teach me to turn the water on, even, Rebecca.”

“And eventually you’ll be able to, hopefully, just do it all on your own, without any assistance. That’s right, Call?”

“Right, Rebecca.”

It was gratifying for me—and it always felt like we were making such progress—when I’d take him on errands to the grocery store or the barber shop. When we entered Regency Barbers, I told him, “Call, you’re going to look like a new person.” He hadn’t shaved his scraggly white beard in months. He looked like one of those drifters who make a few bucks during the holidays playing Santa Claus.

“I’ll be so glad,” he said, and I knew he meant it. He delighted in the attention.

As the barber ran the shears over his beard, she remarked, “You’re a hairy fellow.” And Call laughed.

“My eyebrows go every which way,” he said.

As she removed the barber’s cape, my brother turned to me with his close-cropped beard and neatly trimmed sideburns. “You look younger,” I said, and it pleased him.

Bringing the hospital’s social worker Cathy Gantt on board was a huge step in Call’s progress. Cathy asked him about his money. She said, “Tell us what you spend it on during the week, besides your groceries.” Call told us he’d walk to a restaurant near his apartment. And then there was also his favorite fast-food place, where he ordered what he called “lots of greasy stuff.”

Cathy told him he needed to shower every day, wash his hair, and use deodorant and mouthwash. We were surprised to learn he didn’t have a toothbrush or toothpaste. We got him those things. He said he remembered to trim his nails. Cathy checked his place to make sure he was keeping his things straight, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, and taking out the trash.

I’d take Call on trips to the grocery store. He learned to select his staple items and pay for them, and he managed his spending money.

At the grocery store, Call made his selections, then he pulled a couple of twenties from his wallet—some of his weekly allowance—to pay the clerk. He waited for his change, and he counted it. These small victories seemed huge.

As Cathy noted, Call wasn’t always careful about his personal hygiene—even after her instructions. But when he felt really good about himself, he would shower up. He’d always do that before Jim and I would take him to this steakhouse, his favorite spot to eat. You see, he had a crush on a waitress there. We were among her regular customers, and she made it a point to be kind to Call, treating him like any other customer.

It was 1999, and Call had been in his apartment almost a year. He was eating, taking his meds, and not wandering around aimlessly. He seemed respectful of Cathy’s visits and advice, even though he never complied a hundred percent. But just when I thought things might start working out, my oldest daughter Kim suffered a major crisis. At first, Jim and I thought her problems had little to do with either Call’s illness or my family’s troubled history. We did understand that she’d felt stressed over my having to divide my time between our homelife in Atlanta and traveling frequently to check in on Call in Greenville. But as it turned out, we hadn’t begun to appreciate how interconnected and snarled the events of the past, present, and future would become.

In her second year of college, Kim dropped in weight to seventy-five pounds. She looked emaciated.

Jim and I went to visit her at the University of Alabama. She bent over and her shirt rode up, and she was nothing but skin and bones. We thought she was going to die.

At the same time, I was dealing with my brother. I thought, “How do I make this work? I have to be there for both of them.”

Jim and I brought Kim home from school, and we got her into therapy. We informed the university that she’d be on medical leave, but she never went back. We enrolled her in a residential treatment program in Atlanta that specialized in eating disorders.

Her younger sister Lauren was in high school then, and Lauren seemed relatively unscathed by the family’s troubles. Like Kim, she often resented the times I was away from her while seeing Call and tending to the details of his care. A more immediate concern for Jim and for me was Lauren’s judgment of Kim. Lauren has always had a keen mind and a sharp wit, and she didn’t understand why Kim couldn’t get it together. Kim was naturally upset that her sister wasn’t more supportive. It was a dynamic that posed one more challenge for our family, but at the time Jim and I regarded it as fairly normal sibling rivalry. It was only later, when we learned the roots of Kim’s suffering, that we all had to embrace forgiveness at another level.

To say that Kim had become obsessed with fitness during this challenging time is an understatement. In many ways, this inclination had come to her naturally. We’re a sports-minded family. I’d been a bodybuilder in the 1980s. The physical training involved in bodybuilding was its own kind of therapy for me. I was proud of my body, and with the physical strength came reassurance and confidence. (Then I did one competition, and that was enough for me. I hated it!) Jim had been an Olympic-class runner in college. At his peak, he was ranked tenth in the world in the mile run and second in the 800-yard relay. So, when Kim took to running track and cross-country in high school, it was hardly a cause for concern. What we hadn’t recognized was that Kim was using her exercise program as a way of repressing anxiety, along with a perpetual feeling of emptiness, no matter what shape she was in.

For a long time, her weight had not stabilized. After her first year of college, she had been a little heavy, but I wasn’t particularly worried for her. Then, after that period of anorexia in her second year when we brought her home, she started binge eating. At her heaviest, she weighed 185 pounds.

It was during her therapy sessions that the truth began to come out. At first, it was disturbing. Then it was shocking.

Kim at her skinniest and at her heaviest.

With both Call and Kim in treatment facilities, I relied on Cathy to help take some of the responsibility for Call’s routine care. We worked up a budget, and she helped me manage his expenses—rent, meals, cleaning service, and some left over so he’d have spending money.