Mother, A Memoir

By Harvey Havel

“A brutally honest book about growing up with – and around – mental illness. This should be required reading for anyone who seeks to understand its impact on families.”

---- Rone Shavers, Co-Editor, Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System

“Havel rips the blinds off of family destiny, a memoir of thwarted love and tragedy. He writes as he walks, strolling, back through layers of time to the conclusive moment at the core of everything. Smoke from an ever-present fire leaks from page to page. The reader will never see – or smoke – cigarettes in quite the same way again.”

----- Allen Parmenter, Freelance Writer

“A well-written and very honest story of the relationship between mother and son. He puts you into the story, explaining the emotions and the struggles of mental illness.”

---- Patti Mutterer, Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner, Albany County Mental Health

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvey Havel
• Release date: Dec 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781629074092

Harvey Havel

HARVEY HAVELAuthorHarvey Havel is a short-story writer and novelist. His first novel, Noble McCloud, A Novel, was published in November of 1999. His second novel, The Imam, A Novel, was published in 2000.Over the years of being a professional writer, Havel has published his third novel, Freedom of Association. He worked on several other books and published his eighth novel, Charlie Zero's Last-Ditch Attempt, and his ninth, The Orphan of Mecca, Book One, which was released last year. His new novel, Mr. Big, is his latest work about a Black-American football player who deals with injury and institutionalized racism. It’s his fifteenth book He has just released his sixteenth book, a novel titled The Wild Gypsy of Arbor Hill, and his seventeenth will be a non-fiction political essay about America’s current political crisis, written in 2019.Havel is formerly a writing instructor at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey. He also taught writing and literature at the College of St. Rose in Albany as well as SUNY Albany.Copies of his books and short stories, both new and used, may be purchased at all online retailers and by special order at other fine bookstores.

Book preview

Chapter One

June 2013

In the second bedroom of my apartment, where I keep my writing desk and computer, a small photograph within a brown, chocolate frame hangs on the wall. It’s an old photograph taken long ago and features my mother with myself sitting on her lap. The photograph had been taken at a portrait studio in the Staten Island Mall, and the photograph is so old that its sepia-tainted color has been coated in a pinkish-tan sheen. Such a color lends some vulnerability and honesty to the both of us.

My mother’s face is slim, and her eyes do not look directly into the camera but far away as though she’s lost in a dream and looking for something different from the life she already has.

I, however, look directly into the camera and wear a sweatshirt that was a personal favorite of mine in kindergarten. Both of us are not smiling. There is a tension there that the camera doesn’t attempt to expose but does, and yet it cannot grasp it. Why we’re both not smiling remains a mystery to me, simply because I cannot recall the chain of events that brought us to the portrait studio that afternoon. But as a whole, I still believe the photograph is one of the best ones that I have of my mother and certainly deserves a special place on my wall.

At times I look at it and tears well-up, especially due to my mother’s illness at the time of the portrait. We were both mentally sick, and one can make out that we’re sicker of each other than happy together. I was a rotten child to my mother, as I always made it tough for her to discipline me. I refused to learn Arabic, to pick up my many toys after I played with them, and told her on many occasions that she was a bad cook and that I’d never eat anything she made. These are just a sample of the ways I was a rotten son to her all through my days as a youngster and also my days as a young adult and college graduate. And yet I will never know what she truly wanted out of life, mostly due to those dreamy eyes of hers that wanted something else and stare off into the distance as though the world had already befuddled her. After all, she had dreams as well, and one of them was to be a published and widely known microbiologist, as she had been trained in that profession. She had a doctorate in her field and really thought that she’d make her mark, only if someone would give her a chance. But mental illness, schizophrenia specifically, took both of our lives and led us down cruel paths that never seemed to end.

These days I think of her as a survivalist. She moved around the country quite a bit and never really settled down.

She and my father divorced a couple of years after I was adopted by them, and so she spent her time alone without many friends to call her own. Those deep brown eyes of hers also exude a certain brand of loneliness tailored just for her.

Most of my family thought that I alone was the sane one in the pair, but this is far from the truth. I look back on my life with my mother and know full-well that I too was sick to the core with the same disease that manifested itself in my college years. My mother never had her mental condition treated, as the medicine back then was coarse, untested, and laden with debilitating side effects that would have sent a person begging for mercy just to be away from them. When I reached college-age, I gladly took the medicine for the condition, because it was determined that shock treatment for schizophrenia was no longer effective. One just simply had to take the newer medication to placate the crowd of voices in my head. Where the illness is left untreated only makes the sufferer delusional as he or she confuses fantasy with reality. This is what I can tell from those mysterious dark brown eyes that wander off from staring directly into the camera and fixating instead on a grandiose dream and fantastic vision that compensated for the realities that we both faced at this time.

My mother and I, without my father to guide us, were doomed from the moment the two of us ever heard the starting gun, and so we lived awkward lives of paranoia, grandiose personas, and ludicrous dreams that had bled into our pragmatism and sense of reality.

My mother passed away in 2005 from cancer for which she also refused treatment. She had grown stern and extremely religious. She sat at home for most of her life, and as a result of some bad decision-making, she lost her life’s savings.

The last time I saw her, she received disability checks and lived in a housing project in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She moved farther and farther away, but she still expected me to visit her at least once a month, which I did. After she died, my uncle and I traveled to the Detroit suburb and went through all of her belongings, some of which were quite expensive. But she did leave several photo albums that captured our life-long journey together.

There are many of those photographs that are black and white and stem all the way back to her childhood in Pakistan. Many of my relatives say that she should have never left Pakistan, and I agree with their assessment wholeheartedly. She just wasn’t ready for the American way of life, or basically put, she didn’t understand the system of things and how they worked in this country. Her happiest days were lived in Pakistan after all, because back then the family had lived together, and she had a stellar personality back in her college days that attracted many people to her – both family and friends alike. But once the family had been split-up, her smiles faded.

She even wanted her two brothers to come to America with her, but they died early due to their schizophrenia and how the disease and archaic treatment options in Pakistan forced them into the streets of Karachi paranoid and penniless.

For now, the photo that I have on my wall is all that I have of her, while the other photo albums gather dust in my closet. I haven’t had the wherewithal to sit down with these albums and take a good look at the many family pictures that they store. The photograph that I do prominently display in my spare room will have to suffice as a reminder of all of the mad fighting and all of the suffering she went through – all of that pain and angst of not being a published microbiologist, of losing job after job, and of her inability to make sense of anything real. When I look at her on the wall, she is a constant reminder of how beautiful and yet how terribly naïve she was, as though her journey had always been replete with suffering and forever incomplete when she made it to the United States.

With regard to the end of her life, I traveled to Detroit the day after my mother told me on the phone not to worry so much, her voice growing fainter the longer she assured me that nothing was wrong.

I’m coming right up to see you I said instead.

Don’t worry, she said.

I’m leaving this afternoon. I’ll be there by tomorrow morning.

But all she could do was say not to worry a number of times over.

I boarded a Greyhound bus from New York’s Port Authority for the overnight trip to Detroit shortly after I spoke with her on the telephone. I could hardly sleep on the bus, even though most of the passengers did. I managed to sleep, however, during the early morning part of the trip, but my sleep was short-lived considering that the light from a powerful sun had already streaked the sky with shades of light pink, yellow, and crimson.

When I arrived after a bumpy ride to the Detroit Bus Station, I called my mother from there hoping that she’d pick me up, assuming she had enough strength to drive the car. But after waiting a little while and absorbing the fact that the terminal was filled with the hopeless homeless, the unemployed, and other bleary-eyed passengers, she did not pick up the phone at all. And then I knew it, even before I arrived at the low- income project in Ypsilanti where she lived, that my mother must have died right after I spoke with her. I wanted this to be just another visit to her place and not to admit to myself, as I walked along the green linoleum and among the brown brick-face walls of the project, that my mother had actually passed away, and no one but I knew of this or sensed this.

The two women at the security desk even used the downstairs buzzers to try and get her, but once again there was no response. One of the women at the security desk, wearing a polo shirt with the name of the project stitched to the chest, let me into my mother’s apartment on the second floor. And we found that my mother had indeed passed away, her frail, bloodless body shriveled up and curled into a fetal position, as though the child in her had also died and now confronted a stunning afterlife in some far-off dimension where she could be purely happy.

I was sure that she would be canonized for the sacrifices she had made on my behalf, as I had finally understood how her own life was incredibly tragic and doomed to failure the moment she stepped onto American soil from our native Pakistan.

The police soon came and ruled out forcible entry, even though it did look as if someone in the building had tried to break in, but as I sat in front of the officer while we both waited for the ambulance to come, we both knew that there was very little to steal, considering how my mother had become very frugal towards the end of her life. We sat facing each other, this policeman and I after he arrived, and for some reason he wanted to know what religion my mother was, to which I replied that she was a hardcore Muslim from Pakistan, and how we moved to the US in the early 1970s.

He smiled a little at this, especially because my mother’s lifeless