Back after Robin Williams passed on at his own hand, I wrote a piece about just how fragile our minds can be. And just how quickly things can go off the rails for even the more rational person. The mind can be our best friend and our worst enemy.
In that blog entry, I mentioned my mother's own mental conflicts. It started very simply. In one of her first weeks of retirement, she tried to hang some drapes. She fell and her sofa was the safety net. She didn't break anything but there was enough physical trauma that her slowly-simmering arthritis started to boil over. Within weeks, every bone in her body was sore every morning. And she didn't handle it well.
The body aches ramped up her thought process. Already grappling with a forced retirement, boredom made the arthritis worse. She started to become depressed and, at the same time, anxious every night as she anticipated the morning stiffness to come. Calling her on the phone every day was a crapshoot. I never knew what kind of mindset she would be in.
Ultimately, she sought the help and counsel of her family doctor. And he immediately hit the prescription pad.
Pain killer.
Anti-depressant.
Anti-anxiety.
A chemical cocktail that sent her spinning. And it wasn't long after that one of my daily phone calls to her sent me spinning.
"I think I want to kill myself."
My mother could have her goofy moments. But the tone of her voice told me she was dead serious. I also had a sense that, if she mentioned this out loud, the odds of her actually doing this was were low. Nevertheless, I hit the Yellow Pages and looked to see what was available from Westchester County in the way of mental health assistance.
Surprisingly, there were several agencies that anybody can reach out. My guess is that budget cuts have happened since and none of them exist now. But I was lucky twenty-five years ago.
In her anguish, my mother had taken to not getting out of bed. I finally did my own little intervention and paid a visit. I told her that I had called a county agency and they would assign a psychiatrist to her case.
"I'm not nuts."
You're also not bedridden, either. I pledged to disconnect her cable TV if she didn't at least see the guy once.
We negotiated a bit. Essentially I got her to agree for the price of five Lotto tickets a week. That was another weakness she had. Lottery scratchers. But I was willing to overlook that addiction for now.
As I have written most recently, my mom was not a person who shared her life's history. Ever. She had a sister and both had been orphaned in their early teens. Their parents, my maternal grandparents, apparently died at the same time. Likely from one of those killer influenza outbreaks. I knew their names, but never saw a picture or heard any stories. The motto in my house was like the military.
Don't ask. Don't tell.
So, the thought that my mother was going to open up to some stranger seemed to be a dicey prospect. And a huge waste of money if she simply went in there to discuss the weather or last night's edition of Jeopardy.
My mom's shrink was Dr. Frenkel and his big claim to fame were some studies he had developed with regard to lights and colors. His whole business model was constructed around the notion that everybody had a key positive color and a key negative color. The pro-color would trigger good sensations. The con-color would spike your pain. Naturally, you wanted to be awash in your good color and the way you do that is with tinted glasses. Dr. Frenkel obviously had cut a side deal with Lenscrafters.
After his testing, Dr. Frenkel declared that my mother's positive color was purple.
So now you understand today's title.
Of course, he had the direct connection to a pair of purple shades for $119.50, thank you very much. Even more importantly, he also concluded that there was a two-way tie for her bad colors. The ones that gave her intense pain.
Green and brown.
Holy shit.
The furniture in her apartment? Brown.
The wall-to-wall carpeting in her apartment? Green.
If Dr. Frenkel was correct, my mother was spending her days in several shades of Hell.
Of course, Mom needed more than just a new pair of sunglasses. Dr. Frenkel wanted to get to the bottom of her pain triggering colors. And that would be done via a one-hour appointment every Saturday afternoon.
A new routine began. I'd pick her up and drive up to the doctor's Scarsdale house. After dropping her off, I would venture to a White Plains mall for a time-killing lunch and then go pick her up when she was done. One Saturday, Dr. Frenkel was off his schedule and, when I came by to retrieve Mom, she was still inside his office.
I sat patiently and quietly in the waiting room which was certainly not insulated for sound. I could hear every word of Dr. Frenkel's session with my mother. I thought quickly about covering my ears. Maybe I'd hear something I didn't want to know. But, my attention was piqued.
Dr. Frenkel had closed in on why Mom hated the color brown.
She was talking about a brown teddy bear. She loved it so. And, when she was five years old, it was taken away from her by...
I walked quickly outside. I didn't want to know. Her pain and anguish needed to be private.
And I never did find out. I decided that splurging on Lotto tickets was probably the least of what my mother had dealt with in her life.
Dinner last night: Sausage pizza at Fabiolus Cafe.
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