On September 13th, two weeks after Hurricane Ida tore through my neighborhood, I was sitting on the back patio trying to contact my suicidal daughter’s psychiatrist. Claire swore that she didn’t want to kill herself, but was having suicidal ideation, which is the inability to get the idea of hurting herself out of her head.
A few months before the pandemic she was living, working, and going to college in North Carolina. Then she started to call with more and more anxiety attacks. Sometimes she sat in her car staring into nothing. She couldn’t do school, eat, or talk to people. Claire has always had trouble with anxiety but this was exceptionally bad. The pandemic hit. Her mind deteriorated. She moved back home. After a few days in a mental hospital, she was diagnosed with Bipolar II. I helped her find a psychiatrist and therapist who listened to her. But this thing, which typically rears its head in a person’s early 20’s, is hard to learn how to live with. There’s finding the right meds at the right doses, the coping skills, the acceptance, the racing thoughts, and so forth. The feeling, as she told me, that she was going crazy and that the world was going crazy with her.
Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana on August 29th. Eerily, it was the sixteenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and all of us were nervous about what was going to happen. Our house was okay, but there’s more to surviving a hurricane than living through the storm itself. There’s the disruption to water and electricity, inaccessibility to streets, and downed cell phone towers. There’s the stress of not getting in touch with people who stayed for the storm because you can’t get anyone on the phone and no internet means no social media. The map is black. No lights, no sound. After a couple of days with no trash service or air conditioning the trash begins to stink. Houses and cars that took water begin to mold. The air smells like wet towels in a gym hamper and rotten meat. These storms happen late in the summer, when the humidity is already so bad that people try not to go outside between 8:00 in the morning and sundown.
After some time, the stink, the heat, and the nonperishable food you’re eating start to get to you. You’re hot and bloated. There’s no way to not smell like sweat. There’s a collective buzz of flies on the trash that you and your neighbors tossed out of your warm refrigerators.
How many times in one year can a person handle the world shutting down?
Fifteen days after the hurricane, the day that Claire sat chain smoking on my back patio, the trash still hadn’t been picked up. When she said she felt suicidal, I wasn’t surprised.
I wasn’t surprised that the ER was full either. At the time a lot of emergency rooms were filled with COVID patients, especially in the south. But being in it was different from seeing it on the news.
Gurneys of patients lined the walls of the emergency room. An older woman curled into a “C” reached out to me. She trembled. “I’m cold,” she said. I wanted to find her a blanket or call a nurse over, but Claire walked fast in front of me and there were so many people in the crowded hall I didn’t want to lose her. Some patients moaned in pain and some laid perfectly still staring at the ceiling. It was like being a plane crash survivor in a movie where you and the other passengers are being tended to by an overrun staff.
Someone in scrubs guided Claire to a seat across from the nurse’s station. I stood next to her and she tipped her head against my leg. A minute later one of the nurses told me that because of COVID protocol I couldn’t stay back there with her. If I would go back out to the waiting area they would let me know when they found a room for her.
I passed the trembling woman on the gurney. Someone had given her a blanket.
I’d brought a book. I always bring a book to the doctor’s office and the DMV. Basically, any situation where I have no control over the wait time. A competitive cooking show was on the TV above my head. I was wondering why competitive American cooking show people always argue with each other like they’re hangry when my phone rang. It was an ER doctor. She told me that I might as well go home. They were going to have to keep Claire until they could find her a mental hospital, which could have been anywhere in the state. It depended on which was the first bed to open up and at the moment, between COVID and the hurricane aftermath, the beds were full.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just the law.”
Did the person who wrote that law know how alone my daughter felt? How in pain she was? And WHAT hospital? Some were good and some were as good as an unemptied trash can – best not to lift the lid.
She’s twenty-two, I reminded myself as I drove away from her. As if any of us becomes old enough to be alone and frightened in a hospital.
She called at 1:00 in the morning to tell me they were sending her to a place called Community Care. Neither of us had heard of the place. The words “community” and “care” sounded general enough to be any place. But it was nearby, so we were grateful for that.
She hadn’t slept. As an infant she’d had a hard time sleeping. She was my first baby, and I had read magazines, talked to the pediatrician, and consulted other moms to get her to sleep through the night. Nothing worked. She was just up and if I wasn’t in the room she would cry. So I wasn’t sleeping. One of my aunts volunteered to take her for the night so I could get some rest.
“I’m doing this wrong,” I told her over the phone when I called later to check on things that night. “Why can’t I get her to sleep? And why am I so frustrated? She’s a baby, it’s my job to get her to sleep. It’s not her fault. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“You’re not sleeping enough,” Aunt Bethy told me. “Sleep deprivation is a form of torture in some countries. It’s that big of a deal. That’s why you feel like this.”
I still had a hard time sleeping that night. Even when I finally crashed, it was like something inside of my body stayed awake waiting for a cry. I had to remind myself someone I trusted was taking care of her.
Who was taking care of her now? She was in a hospital. I knew they had to keep her alive. But who were they? I slept, but there was a porchlight on inside of me, ever vigilant.
It turned out Community Care was a kind place for her to be. The psychiatrist she talked to there listened to her for more than fifteen minutes (something that doesn’t happen most of the time). They gave her melatonin to help her sleep and made sure that she ate. They tweaked her medication. She called every evening and sounded more like the Claire I knew with every passing day. Her suicidal thoughts vanished.
I took the dogs for walks in the rubble of my neighborhood in ninety-degree heat. There were streets I avoided because the smell was so bad, I had to hold my breath. Most businesses were still closed, and grocery stores were only open a few hours a day. Schools were closed, which meant that I wasn’t working either. The coffeeshop Claire worked at hadn’t reopened yet.
How would she feel when she got out? As an adjunct professor, I was still getting biweekly checks. Claire worked by the hour. She would come out of that place much poorer and in a city that was rebuilding itself for the second time in the last year. The first time it was COVID shutdown. This time it was wind and flood waters.
This is not the world I promised her when she came of age.
Claire is doing better since she’s gotten out of the hospital, but it’s a day-to-day struggle for her. Same goes for the city. A friend of mine who evacuated to Atlanta had a tree limb fall on their car, totaling it. It wasn’t storm related, just a random thing that happened. It took them a month to come back to New Orleans after that. I saw them a couple of weeks ago, smiling, looking happy to see everyone again. When I asked how they were they said, “Better than everyone else. Man, everyone who’s been in the city this whole time is bummed out.”
Hence the filled mental hospitals. Sometimes I worry that if I don’t get enough sleep, if I keep staring at my laptop and not writing anything, I’ll end up in an apocalyptic emergency room.
I try to tell myself the same thing that I tell my students when they ask if they can turn in their work past the due date. Some of them have had so much damage to their homes, they have to stay with loved ones. One of them has been living in his car. Some, out of work for weeks, have been evicted. Most of them are just one more natural disaster away from poverty. When they worry about their grades, I tell them that they get credit for coming to class and getting their work to me when they can. “You’re showing up,” I tell them. “That’s what counts.”
It counts that Claire showed up on our patio that day and asked for help. It counts that I show up to work and walk the dogs. The streets smell bad now, but some day they won’t. My displaced students are trying to find a place to live and find a place with wifi so they can attend online classes. Claire is struggling, but she wants to get better. All I can do is keep showing up. One day, maybe, I can turn the porch light off.