Remembering Rosemarie

It’s been an interesting and busy two months since my book, Rambler: A Family Pushes Through the Fog of Mental Illness, was released.

Since then, there’s been:

• a book launch celebration
• radio interviews
• magazine articles
• newspaper stories
• guest-blog essays and Q&As
• Rambler presentations
• And too many Facebook & Twitter posts to count.

These don’t tell the real story, though. I’ll best remember this time in the people I met along the way.

After Rambler was published, my husband, Steve, and I began talking to various audiences about our family’s experience with his mental illness, when he was in his 40s and we had young children. We did a reading sponsored by the National Alliance on Mental Illness and spoke to college students studying to become teachers. We talked to seniors at a retirement center and met many people who have—or are living with someone who has—a mental illness at the library presentations.

I open these talks with details about our life during the acute stage of Steve’s illness and intersperse my comments with excerpts from Rambler. Then Steve, whose writings about his illness are included in the book, reads several passages he wrote.

On more than one occasion, either Steve or I had tears in our eyes as we talked about our experience; it’s difficult to share such intimate details from that challenging time. But we do so partially because, as Steve told a newspaper reporter covering the talk at my hometown library, if “it helps anyone else, it’s worth it.”

We also like doing these public presentations because they enrich us in many ways. The part I enjoy most are the question-and-answer sessions that follow our talks. People are curious and ask a variety of questions: From how Steve felt about no longer being able to work as an engineer to why I stayed with someone who, at times, didn’t seem to care about his family. From the effect on our children to the challenge of living with an illness no one talked openly about.

What touches me most about these events, though, is when those struggling with their own mental health problems share their stories. I especially remember Rose Marie, a woman who looked to be in her 80s at the retirement center. She sat in a wheelchair in the front row, listening intently throughout the program. During the Q&A, she shared how she lived with severe depression most of her life. Her eyes moistened as she spoke, and I wondered if this was the first time she openly gave voice to her illness.

I know how tough it is to talk about an illness that affects people’s personality. It took Steve and me years before we openly acknowledged his illness.

Today, through brain research, we have better understanding of mental illness than we did two decades ago, when our family was going through the experience. But research is slow to affect how we think about these illnesses. Eliminating stigma happens on a personal level; that’s why Steve and I want to share our story.