By Elliott West
“I will always love you, no matter what”.
Marion West
Introduction
The car door slammed shut and my world came crashing down. The signs had been there, the irrational behaviour, the need to spend beyond our means and gin bottles being hidden in my bedroom wardrobe. Yet as I stood in the psychiatric hospital car park in 1986, I certainly wasn’t prepared for the psychological bomb that was about to hit me. This was a foreign territory, a phenomenon that few spoke about, a taboo subject known as mental illness. As I walked through the doors of the hospital, I was hit by the murmur of voices coming from a battered old television set in the corner of the room. In a row of blue armchairs, sat my mother with a vacant expression on her face, unable to recognise me or speak due to the cocktail of medication that had been administered to her. I wanted to run out the door and scream, why was this happening to me when I was only 14?
Approve and Send
This was would the first of many sectioned stays that my Mum would spend in this psychiatric hospital in Chichester, West Sussex but as the years rolled on, they would get longer and harder for me as the next of kin to sanction. This was the full raging force of manic depression or bipolar disorder as it is called today up close and personal. The episodes of delusional grandeur would get worse as time wore on with my Mum trying to buy a grand piano on higher purchase and asking me to forge a signature on the paperwork, believing she could buy a boat, going to my childhood house and sitting in the garden in her nightdress and bringing unknown men into my life that she had randomly met with one even painting her flat.
The Solace
My mum, Marion bought a flat that was tucked away in the Sussex countryside. It was her place of solace but quickly became her greatest enemy, opening the door to the demons that would flood her mind. Alcohol had been a weakness for her for many years and soon its woozy contents would be passing my mums’ lips on a regular basis with the empty bottles strewn across the kitchen worktop and bedroom floor. I remember I had to go to the flat when she was having an extremely bad low and a doctor had to be called to inject her with a sedative. I can still hear those screams in my head as things were thrown across the room and the air was filled with screams and expletive language.
Building Barriers
As my mum got older, her mental illness became progressively worse. I couldn’t cope with her raging telephone conversations and constantly asking me for money that I didn’t have. So I built up a mental brick wall, not answering her calls or letters and shutting her down to retain my own sanity. My love for her was trapped behind this invisible wall, screaming to come out but scared to. She was my flesh and blood but I turned my back on her, letting her fall deeper into the depths of despair, alone and petrified. Her desperation hit rock bottom as a result, she didn’t wash, stopped taking her medication, didn’t eat and lived off a diet of alcohol and cigarettes. External forces would persuade her this was the right course of action, to the point that she pawned and sold every valuable she had, leaving just her jewellery and watch on the kitchen table, the last of her valuables. She once told me that “when I die, there will be nothing”. It was a quote that would sadly become a reality.
The End
The end can’t far too quickly and it drove a metal stake through my heart. A tumour had developed on my mum’s stomach and caused her to eventually collapse. A worried neighbour, who couldn’t get in touch with her, took a ladder to the side of the house and looked into her bedroom window. My mum was lying on the floor with the telephone beside her, the phone off the hook. Rushed to the hospital, I only saw her three times.The first was when she was heavily sedated and I just whispered sorry to her. At that moment, tears rolled down her cheeks, she was weak but I knew that she could hear me.
The second time, she had a partial stroke, paralysing her down one side of her body. Even though she had a catheter fitted, she still tried to struggle out of bed, unaware of her disability. Her bedside cabinet was bare apart from a comb and an old hairbrush. From the evidence there, few had been to see her as she got moved from ward to ward. The most harrowing moment was when I was taken to a side room and told by a doctor that she had developed liver cancer too but was too weak to operate on. So I was given the stark prognosis that she would certainly die, it was just a matter of time.
Too Late
I received a devastating telephone call to say that my mum had gond into respiratory failure and that I should come immediately to the hospital. When I got there, I ran to the ward but a nurse was already putting fresh sheets on the bed. She told me that she had died several hours earlier and her body was in the Chapel of Rest. Taken through a door, I pulled back the curtain and saw my mum’s body on a bed in her nightdress. Her skin had turned grey and her hair the same colour. I started to cry and couldn’t stop. The love for her came flooding back like a dam had burst, filling my body with grief. A grief that wouldn’t leave my heart and mind for a further ten years. She had left me, passing away at only 54 years of age in 2002.
