Author Archives: Mary Margaret Alvarado

“That’s
Somebody’s
SoN”

Three mothers, one struggle: saving their children with schizophrenia.

_{By Mary Margaret Alvarado}

---

1.

Tracy* was in her basement in Colorado Springs, getting ready to watch a Colorado Avalanche hockey game on a Sunday in June 2022, when she called the coroner’s office in Dallas. Her wife, Jen, was out, so Tracy was alone. The woman at the coroner’s office was kind, Tracy remembers, and slow to confirm which unclaimed bodies were there. Something shifted in their conversation when Tracy described the triangular tattoo on her son’s left forearm. When the woman asked for his dental records, Tracy knew that he had died.

*To protect their privacy, some individuals in this story are identified by their first name only.

Ben’s body had been found face up in a creek in a leafy residential neighborhood on March 9. The autopsy, as Tracy understood it, showed that he had used methamphetamine, which stopped his heart, and that he suffered from exposure. He died held by a tree overhanging the water.

As a child, Ben had been a gifted swimmer who made it to the state championships year after year “without even trying,” Tracy says. “His breaststroke was out of this world.” At meets, before the whistle blew, he’d do the Macarena on the block. It gave Tracy some peace to know that her child had been drawn to the water, that he had wanted to get high, not die; and that, though he did die, at the age of 23, it was in a tranquil place, near a footbridge, beneath trees.

Ben had been a precocious child, who learned to read at age four from old Dick and Jane books. Tracy’s photos show him beautiful and glad, in train-patterned jammies, in OshKosh overalls, in a Sea World wet suit. His childhood in the small riverside town of Salida, Colorado, was sweet and ordinary: elementary school and its birthday parties, even if he was never the first friend invited and was sometimes the last.

Were the signs of his future suffering there all along? Tracy doesn’t know. But Ben would “have a total meltdown,” she said, if Max, his younger brother, “slobbered on his toys.” Certain textures were a problem. He didn’t like to get his hands dirty. When he lost the science fair that “he’d kind of half-assed,” he wasn’t disappointed, he was undone.

In sixth grade, Ben befriended a girl named Emily. She was the first person who ever truly accepted him, he told his mother. Emily was in remission from cancer, but when it returned the next year, she died. Ben told his mom that he could sense his friend’s presence in his room. Then he sensed an evil spirit in his brother’s room.

Maybe he was a medium? He thought he was medium. He’d been watching a show about one in Long Island. Perhaps there were mediums and her child was one. “Heck if I know,” Tracy says.

Tracy is a Gen X athlete, white with a slender build, light-filled blue-green eyes, and a small diamond stud in her nose. She’s quick to see the beauty in other people’s lives. As Ben changed, Tracy did, too. She went back to college to become a probation officer, after being a full-time mother to Ben and Max. Though she was married to their father, Ted, “a good man,” she wasn’t happy. When they separated in 2012, she thought she might be gay. She soon met Jen, who lived in Colorado Springs, and the two fell in love.

Meanwhile, Ben struggled to leave the house. His grief for Emily only grew. In seventh grade, he “could not stay organized,” Tracy says. The changes that came with middle school, moving to different classrooms and teachers—they overwhelmed him. This child who had always been known as uncommonly intelligent, and who cherished that identity, began to get B’s, then C’s. By the end of the eighth grade, Ben—now out as gay—was flunking every class.

Tracy was coaching volleyball, working full-time, and going through a divorce. She was living check to check but felt too ashamed to ask for help.

In August 2013, she started working in Springs, as she calls it. Her two kids went back and forth between her place and their dad’s. On October 29, she got a call from her ex in Salida. Something was very wrong with Ben. Tracy drove midway to Cañon City, a town known for its rock climbing and supermax prison, to pick up her son. He looked sick to her: pale and too thin. “He was so dehydrated that his lip was split open and bleeding,” Tracy says. He had just turned fifteen.

Something was trying to get into Ben’s body. That’s what he’d woken his father in the middle of the night, in terror, to say.

Tracy drove Ben to the nearest emergency room, where he was treated for anxiety. He was given Xanax—one of the most prescribed psychotropic medications in the United States—stabilized, and released, but they barely made it through the night. “And now it’s Halloween,” Tracy says, narrating what followed.

She remembers how her child was in the back of the car, holding his shirt up to his shoulders, showing her, begging her. What was trying to get inside of him? What was trying to take his soul?

Tracy took Ben to Cedar Springs, a private psychiatric hospital on a handsome, century-old campus, and he agreed to a stay that would last over a week. In addition to the Xanax, doctors gave him Risperdal, an anti-psychotic. Why would he need that if this was anxiety, Tracy wondered?

In 2012, Ben began taking photos and posting them online: the braided trunk of a money tree, the aquamarine lanes of an outdoor swimming pool, a skillful self-portrait in pencil, kayaks leaning against a wall. “Death is sweet. Death is Life,” one caption reads. “Celtic knot I invented. It never ends,” goes another. More often the descriptions are funny. A picture of a red Solo cup is captioned, “Red solo cup.” A bowl of edamame: “Nothing a little edamame can’t fix.”

Some of the photos are posted under the name Eden Sealwood, which Ben briefly used at school and online. Elsewhere he was Eleanor. At home he was Ben, and remained so all his life. For an Instagram account, showing its owner’s soft blue eyes and elegant Roman nose, he was Benedetto Scango, an Italian form of his given name. Then, in his first semester of college in Gunnison, Colorado, Ben took the unisex Arabic name Nasim, the last name Hefran, and she/her and they/them pronouns.

Ben knew he was queer. There was not enough time of sustained mental health to see how she, he, or they would have flourished and made a life, whether as female and trans, male and gay, or nonbinary. Tracy would have welcomed any of those identities. She speaks of her beloved child as he was to family—as he, Ben, him. But she brightens to think of Ben as her daughter, someone she never had the chance to really know. Maybe Nasim was a “trailblazer,” Tracy says, early and brave.

“On our way to Mauii!” reads a caption on one of Ben’s pictures, from June 9, 2014. Tracy and Jen were wed on a beach in Hawaii. Photos show them beaming in white dresses, with Jen’s daughter between them, and Ben and Max on either side. But that trip “was a long ten days,” Tracy says. Ben locked himself in a bathroom, terrified of a tsunami and seeking what he always struggled to find: a place to feel safe.

Life at home in the years that followed was sometimes “chaos,” Tracy says, or “hell.”

She took two short phone videos in November 2020, desperate for someone to see what her child was enduring. The lens is close on Ben’s back. He’s dressed in a worn brown waffle shirt with holes along the neck, a talisman he wore often. He is very thin. His hands are raised up, fingers apart. His curly hair is long. He is making a rhythmic and muscular sound of exertion. It’s as if he’s pushing mightily against something, struggling ­­to repel it, to force it away. There is no solace in the sound. It is a sound of agony.

Then words, very quickly, with something like hope: “Jesus hears me.”

Tracy is not religious, and Ben was not raised in any church, but like many people who have experienced the crucible of profound mental illness, he called out for language and meaning older and more encompassing than what the medical models offer.

The bracing work begins again. Ben turns to his mother after another grievous bout and looks relieved. “I barely did it. I barely did it.”

“You did it,” Tracy says, her voice calm and encouraging.

Then, “Oh, my God!” Ben wails. “I touched my hands together.”

Ben is sure that if he touches his hands together, he will lose his soul. So in addition to all the other effort, there is this: He has to keep his hands apart.

“Well, don’t do that,” Tracy says, matter-of-fact. “Don’t touch your hands together.”

The quality of the footage is poor, and the camera is often pointed toward the ceiling—Tracy is filming with one hand, comforting her child tenderly with the other.

Ben says something that can’t be understood. You still have your soul, Tracy reassures him. He needs her to say it again, and in a specific way.

There is the sound of anguished crying, and words that are unclear under the burden of pain.

Then, “No!” he shouts. “I think I just lost my soul!”

“No, you didn’t,” Tracy says. “No, you didn’t.”

The pained sounds begin again, fiercer, louder, more awful.

There’s Tracy’s hand, in the next clip, holding up Ben’s lovely hair.

“Mama, say—” He is crying.

“I swear you have your soul.” Tracy’s voice is calm.

“Mom, promise me.”

“I promise you, you have your soul.”

The crying that follows is softer, like maybe what Tracy said is true.

2.

This is the story of three mothers of three children who were diagnosed in late adolescence or early adulthood with “a polygenetic … heterogenous spectrum of psychotic disorders that are neurodevelopmental and, when not optimally managed, neurodegenerative,” in the words of Dr. Robert Laitman. Or: schizophrenia. The mothers live in the largest city in the U.S. above 6,000 feet. That city is Colorado Springs. It is a place bedecked with blue skies. Sometimes those skies seem to sparkle, and there is a real song of a mountain looking out over the meager offerings of this civilization: strip malls; the Gas & Grass, a gas station chain that sells weed; and the wide roads that lead to them.

“I’m scared of him,” an old friend of Tracy’s said of Ben. “I don’t want anything to do with him.” A colleague told her, “Some people just aren’t meant to be in this world.” Tracy can’t think of a friend she could confide in about her child’s illness, “until, like, Elisabeth.”

Elisabeth is my older sister, and older sister describes her way of being in the world, too. She and Tracy met in the spring of 2020, through a Zoom support meeting run by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) during the COVID shutdown. Tracy remembers that Elisabeth and her husband, Corey, were sitting on their bed. Corey kept getting up and moving around. Elisabeth was crying. Their 16-year-old son, Luc, had a shifting series of mental health diagnoses and a DUI for cannabis, and they needed help.

Tracy told Elisabeth that she was in the system, a probation officer. Elisabeth and Corey were in that system, too, the one that’s supposed to be a “net.” Corey works at a soup kitchen that serves the unhoused, many of them mentally ill. Elisabeth is a nurse practitioner and medical director at a health clinic that primarily serves refugees, and was formerly on a medical team that helped survivors of sexual assault, often in one of the city’s emergency rooms. From their work, Elisabeth and Tracy knew a great many people in common, and they began texting that night.

“He’s hard to reach,” Elisabeth remembers her sister-in-law saying, about Luc. That’s not what anyone would have said of him as a child, when he was an absorbed enthusiast: of hot-air balloons and dinosaurs and all things John Deere. He was a fast little runner and a riveting performer, with beautiful features on his beautiful face. But by early adolescence, Luc did often seem apart while present, “hard to reach.”

What might have been ordinary—a teenager adrift—became alarming. His sixteenth birthday party was just family, no friends. Elisabeth would watch Luc in the yard from the kitchen window, alone on the swing they’d hung for a much younger child. Who was he talking to? There was no one there. What was he laughing at? She couldn’t see.

One day, Luc told his parents that his camera was broken, the Sony a6300 he’d used to take exquisite photographs: of children’s faces at a party; of scenes in a village in Haiti, where his family once lived; of the sand dunes and skies of Colorado. It won’t focus, he said. They took it to a camera shop for him. No, the technician reported back, the camera worked just fine. Perhaps the lens could use a little cleaning?

It was his Mamaw’s birthday in March 2020 when Luc got arrested for the DUI. A few months later, Elisabeth and Corey asked Luc’s grandparents, my parents, for a meeting outside, the four of them in masks. Luc was spitting out or refusing any food Elisabeth cooked, sure that she was poisoning him. He was convinced that his parents were evil. He’d left a piece of paper on the kitchen counter, addressed to no one, to everyone. “Tell them I need to dye my brain pink,” he wrote, “and I need to do soul studying.”

“We’re in trouble,” Elisabeth told our parents. Our father got out a yellow legal pad and began taking notes.

Tracy helped expunge Luc’s record. When his probation officer told Elisabeth that she didn’t like a menacing look Luc had made, Tracy talked to her colleague. “You better be good to Luc,” she said.

Things would get better, and then they would get worse. One evening in the summer after his DUI arrest, Luc broke his wrist when he jumped his father, a gentle man who did not strike back. His mother called the police, like his father would a year later, when Luc was found at midnight starting fires in the driveway with a gas can and lighter fluid.

The door to Luc’s bedroom was removed. His parents installed a lock on theirs. His younger brother and sister got locks and alarms.

It was too painful to grieve. To survive, Elisabeth had to think like a nurse. What would she do if this beloved child, perfectly made, her firstborn, were her patient? She would chart—so that’s what she did, casting herself in the third person. She charted hospitalizations, providers, medications a.m., p.m., and p.r.n. (pro re nata, or as needed). She tracked “medications Luc has tried and failed”—the antipsychotics, SSRIs, non-SSRIs, and stimulants, some of which made him feel low, others as if he were “disassociated from his body.” She remembers being upstairs one day when she heard Luc repeatedly vomiting downstairs. She didn’t know what was wrong, then the next step came to her: When you’re stuck, “you refer, you refer out.” She took him to the ER, where he was diagnosed with lithium toxicity. Elisabeth’s charting practice both helped to save Luc’s life—here was documentation—and made his doctors and nurses uneasy. Why was “Mom” so clinical?

Some notes Elisabeth took:

6/10/21 Probation today. Slept moderate (do we do a scale?). Not angry with anyone, even me when talking to probation. But delayed responses, tangential thinking. Perseverating on breaking into the design industry—not swayed by practicality. Even after Mary at probation explained the importance of doing what is asked in therapy, he still thinks he can alter the plan—it’s not clicking. Not a lot of humor but have seen smiles—almost like responding to internal stimuli at times.…

6/25/21 After lack of sleep and a rougher week—emotionally draining for us, lots to think about for Luc—he seemed catatonic yesterday. You could ask him a question several times and he would just stare at you. Sat on the couch most of the day without moving or responding to everyone around him. 

7/7/21 Luc very agitated—began following Elisabeth around the house calling her “evil” and certain she is “going to hell”—refused to leave E and C’s bedroom and began opening and closing drawers. Corey got home and made Luc go outside—Luc forced his way back in. Called 911.

7/14/21 Worst day of the week for Luc. Suspicious of Mamaw and Dad. Luc reported Corey and Mamaw’s speech as “garbled.” Would not let Corey be within 10 feet of him—concern for manipulation of his mind if Corey got too close. 

There is a record, too, of all the ways Luc tried, while in psychosis, to get out of it. He meditated with an app, a cushion, a Tibetan singing bowl. He joined his Mamaw at breakfast and Mass. He joined his cousins at a swimming pool, even if he needed to stay in a lawn chair off to the side.

Luc attended high school over Zoom during the first year of COVID. His Mamaw and Grandpa Ray took turns helping him with it, as he could not complete the assignments on his own. His Mamaw recalls how they would break often to take a walk and Luc would talk about his plan to live in Iceland. It struck her as “another name for a place too far for his illness to reach.”

One day he told her that he couldn’t talk to her anymore, because she wasn’t his Mamaw. She looked like his Mamaw, he explained, but she had a different voice. “Some being who meant us ill had taken over my body,” she says. “He couldn’t trust it. He needed to go home.”

Imagine this: While you are showering, or making your coffee, or listening to music, a voice or several, known or new to you, quiet or very loud, are saying things so vile that you do not want to disturb anyone else with what you are hearing. Those voices are more insistent than the music playing, the coffee brewing, or the water running in the shower. They seem to know you. Now try to think while you’re hearing those voices. Now try to act.

The first time this happened to Luc, he was at his paternal grandparents’ house, playing a video game. He told no one. A year later, when the voices instructed him to strangle his cat, he asked to be committed rather than risk harming the animal in his care. At the hospital, he was prescribed lithium. He got out on Christmas Eve. The next day, at dinner, he could not eat the food on his plate because his hands were shaking, a side effect of the drug.

Elisabeth calls the voices “auditory hallucinations,” language that is medical, accurate, and deprives the symptom of the significance that makes people unkind to those who suffer it, when any of us would buckle under its burden. Sometimes the auditory hallucinations Luc experienced were encouraging, if outsize. Fame was promised; celebrities spoke. He was Jesus. He was going to be bigger than Elon Musk. There would be great and exceptional triumphs. Sometimes the voices were accompanied by a mania that shimmered in Luc, like a house at night with all the lights on. Mostly, though, the auditory hallucinations were wicked, fixated on sexual violence, racist lies, and elaborate and repeated instructions of how to kill oneself.

At Luc’s graduation from an alternative high school, he was one of two students given the Phoenix Award, for rising; the other was homeless. Luc summoned great courage to give a brief speech that day. The whole time he was at the podium, a hallucination was telling him to say the N-word. With great effort, he fought back against what he knew to be evil, and did not say it.

Hallucinations are a characteristic symptom of schizophrenia, but doctors were hesitant to diagnose Luc with the illness—even medical professionals are subject to its stigma. His parents were told that he had drug-induced psychosis, depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, and bipolar II. “This is not bipolar,” Elisabeth told one psychiatrist. When a different therapist asked Elisabeth and Corey if they had a family history of schizophrenia, they felt a surprising thing: relief.

Elisabeth’s notes about Luc for July 21, 2021, begin “took to the hospital.” She and Corey had spent that morning looking for Luc. He would sometimes wander on foot or set out on his bike and get lost, because “he was responding to internal stimulation.” He wasn’t at the grocery store. He wasn’t at the park. He wasn’t at the shop where he sometimes stole film. He wasn’t at the library, and the guard there refused to say if he’d seen him.

Desperate, Elisabeth reached out to a friend who worked in an emergency room. The friend told Elisabeth that if they could get Luc to the hospital, she’d put him on an M-1 hold, the term in Colorado for an involuntary seventy-two-hour mental health evaluation, which can only be ordered by law enforcement or a health care professional, usually a doctor. When Luc was lighting fires in the driveway, his father had asked the police for an M-1 hold, but Luc was not an “imminent danger to self or others,” the police said, because they hadn’t seen him light those fires.

Elisabeth smoked one cigarette, then another, a habit she’d given up years before but needed now. Luc finally came home. To get her sick child to the hospital, she came up with a lie.

“Your probation officer called,” she said. “You missed a drug test.”

On the walk to the car, Luc photographed his mother and father repeatedly with a camera that had no film in it. He was suffering from paranoia that day, and he wanted to document what they were doing to him.

The guards at the hospital did not like this guy taking pictures. Luc said that he would not allow his vitals to be taken unless he could photograph it. Security took his camera anyway.

Think of what this family had going for it: two married parents, both educated, with insurance and two incomes, who knew how the medical system worked; a large and helpful extended family, including an uncle who was a psychiatrist; whiteness; social capital in the form of friends like the behavioral-health clinician who agreed to issue the M-1. Crucially, their son was seventeen, still a minor, so they could act on his behalf. Now imagine trying to get care for a child with serious mental illness if you have a job with no paid time off; if you’re intimidated by doctors, live in your car, don’t speak English; or if you’re just too damn tired.

Before Luc entered Care Unit Four, the locked ward, the staff took everything from him, a disorienting experience that would happen each time he was hospitalized. There was a whiteboard and dry-erase marker in the exam room where Luc waited. He called the diagnosis before his doctors did. On the board he wrote:

Christ

Schizophrenia

Why won’t you listen to me

3.

On a Friday night in April 2017, Felicia got a text from her son Quentin. She’d just had a great date with her husband, Will. “It’s eleven o’clock, we’re hanging out, and Quentin sends me this real long text,” she recalls. It was about what he was learning in college, Felicia says, and how “he should be dead or in jail and that he knows that he beat the system.”

Quentin is a Black man who was then a sophomore at Colorado State University Pueblo, where he played defensive end on the football team. His insights in the text were not wrong, Felicia says, but “just the whole vibe of it was weird. I messaged him back, he didn’t answer. I tried to call, he didn’t pick up.” She showed the message to Will. She reached out to her daughters. “Oh yeah, Mom, he’s having some kind of spiritual thing and he’s woke,” Qiana, her firstborn, told her.

Early the next morning, Quentin called Felicia back. “He went on a whole ramble,” Felicia says. He claimed that he’d been abused by his uncle as a child. “He said, ‘Mom I’ve had this vision, these vivid images.’ ” Felicia called Quentin’s father and stepmother, who lived in Connecticut. They were worried, too. She decided to drive south from her home in Colorado Springs to Quentin’s campus.

She found him on the quad. “Quentin is sitting in the middle of the field, no shirt on, just like staring into the sun,” Felicia says. He ran over to her, and she noticed that he smelled awful. “I pulled all my money out of the bank,” he said. “Mom, the end of the world is happening.” Felicia wondered if he’d taken something.

Quentin’s family brought him home to Colorado Springs. They tried to get him to eat, to shower, but he wouldn’t. Felicia knew that he needed to be in a hospital, but when they drove near one he freaked out. She understood why: There was a deep, family-wide stigma around mental illness.

Quentin was crying, Felicia recalls, “thinking we were going to lose all these people” when the world ended on Monday. He grew inconsolable, then delirious. Finally, on Sunday night, after getting him to shower, Felicia gave him sleeping pills. They fell asleep on the floor, as she was too scared to leave his side.

Felicia is in her early fifties, with a bright, easy laugh and a soft voice that moves quickly between registers. “We wake up Monday morning, he looks around, and I’m like, ‘We’re still here!’ ” she singsongs. This was good news, she tried to assure her son, but he wasn’t having it. He went to the bathroom. When he came back, he said, “Mom, don’t be upset with me, but I just killed Will.”

For a second, Felicia didn’t know what to think. Maybe he had.

Will peeked his head into the room and caught her eye. Alive, he mouthed to her.

Then Quentin was moving around, manic. He was determined to jump off the second-story balcony that morning, and he did, several times. “My husband went around the side of the house to try to catch him, and Quentin, like, beat him up.” Felicia’s voice gets quiet. “He punched my husband so hard.” She was finally able to get Quentin to stay in the house. For his own safety, she locked Will out.

Quentin has an uncle who is mentally ill and “in and out of jail,” Felicia says. A cousin is “touched.” Another uncle has a diagnosis of schizophrenia, but he manages. He doesn’t drive; he rides a bicycle. When things get bad for him, and too loud, he “just goes to the woods.” For Felicia, that uncle’s name is a kind of comforting shorthand for: wacky, but OK.  He’d say things that were “off the wall” when Felicia was growing up, things that made the family laugh because they were funny.

But Quentin? He said traumatizing things. “My son is just—he’s a beautiful soul,” Felicia says. “He’s a good human. He’s always just a pleasant…” She starts to cry. “It’s just been such a loss,” she says once, then twice: “It’s been such a loss.”

That day in 2017, with Quentin jumping off the balcony and the world just going on, Felicia realized she had to call the cops to get her son to a hospital. On the phone with law enforcement, she emphasized Quentin’s sweetness, his goodness, and tried to tell his story. It must have helped, because “the two best cops showed up,” Felicia says, her relief still real. They asked the family to stay inside while they talked with Quentin outside. When Felicia rejoined her son, she could tell from the way his arms were moving that he was sure he was flying.

“We talked to Khalil,” one of the cops told Felicia.

“Who’s Khalil?” she asked.

Her son, the cop said. He’d told the officers how his family had moved from Africa.

Recalling this, Felicia laughs. “I’ve never been to Africa,” she says.

Then the ambulance came. As soon as Quentin saw it, he lost it. Felicia was terrified. Her daughters were there with their boyfriends, and somehow they got Quentin to step into the ambulance. But after the doors were shut, he “turned into the Hulk,” Felicia says. He busted the closed doors open and stepped out, naked. Will jumped in front of Quentin, to try to save or stop or catch him, tragically aware of what police have done to other Black men in crisis. But Quentin ran down the street as an officer chased after him. Another followed him in a squad car. “Quentin started beating on the cop car,” Felicia says. He said he was going to kill the officer. But the cop did not retaliate; he remained calm.

Qiana’s boyfriend spoke to Quentin forcefully, in a way he could hear. “Quentin, sit down, sit down,” he said, and Quentin did. Felicia has kind, sloping eyes that are full of emotion. She looks deeply pained when she recalls how Quentin was handcuffed to a gurney. Her son was ill, is ill. He is not a criminal.

Quentin ended up in Peak View, a psychiatric hospital in Colorado Springs, where he stayed for fourteen days. That was in April. In June he was hospitalized again. Because he was 19, a legal adult, it was hard for Felicia to know what kind of care he received, but it often seemed inferior. During one visit to an ER, Quentin was near a small, drunk white girl whom staff were gently encouraging to take a seventy-two-hour hold, Felicia remembers. They treated her as if she was vulnerable and they wanted to keep her safe. Then there was Quentin, six-foot-something, a Black man with a strong build, “gravely ill,” she says with air quotes, and she couldn’t get him that same help because he was seen as a threat.

Quentin’s stepmother is a social worker, and she found a program at Yale for people newly diagnosed with psychosis. Quentin started getting shots of Invega there, a long-acting antipsychotic that’s easier for many patients to stick with than a daily pill. It worked. Initially he’d resisted participating in the program, but he left with a clearer mind. He’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia, he said, and he wanted to learn how to manage it.

“But then his dad decided that he should go back to college,” Felicia says, her peace disturbed. Quentin reenrolled in college, this time in Connecticut. When he and Felicia spoke, he was distraught, then suicidal. “Mom, get me out,” he’d say. The stress was too much.

Before the semester was over, Quentin returned to Colorado. He lived at home, got a job at a convenience store, and went to the doctor for his Invega shots. Felicia didn’t like that he was smoking pot, but at least he was happy, and the pot calmed him down.

“Then I fell apart,” she says.

Felicia was breaking under the strain. Quentin wouldn’t consent to be hospitalized, or he would consent, only to sign himself out and leave.

Felicia ran her own business for medical billing and coding, but caring for a chronically ill family member is a job. “I couldn’t work and take care of him,” she says. She drank to keep from thinking. She became suicidal from exhaustion. “I just needed a minute,” she says. She wound up admitting herself to Cedar Springs, the private psychiatric hospital, in September 2019, and she stayed for twenty-eight days.

Quentin visited his mother every day. He coached and encouraged her. Felicia did equine and group therapy and eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). She got steady and sober and learned new coping skills. Above all: She rested. She was permitted rest.

But her own mother was mad. Why was Felicia telling people her business? Felicia’s mother had once received a bipolar diagnosis, which she thought was bullshit. And anyway, she told Felicia, she already had medicine that worked, and that was E&J brandy.

The next time they talked on the phone, Felicia’s mother said that it must have been Will who made Felicia check into the hospital. Felicia was just back from EMDR and feeling tender. No, she said, I checked myself in. Then she told her mother something she never had before: that a relative had raped her when she was a child, and later she was raped again. In reply her mother said exactly the wrong thing, a mean thing.

When Felicia left Cedar Springs, she kept doing her outpatient work, a rebellion of sorts.

In December 2019, Felicia’s stepfather died, and she and Quentin flew to New Jersey for the funeral. Quentin stayed behind on the East Coast when his mother went home. His father was angry that his son was smoking pot, so Quentin gave that up and started drinking instead. He left the stove on after cooking. He stopped washing and caring for himself. In February, Felicia went to get her son. He was “chimney-smoking,” a pack of cigarettes in no time. He thought that his relatives were cyborgs and that there were terrifying figures in the trees. His family thought it was the drinking. Felicia had to say: This is an illness of the brain. He’s sick.

One day, Quentin’s cousin told Felicia that he was going to drive Quentin, then manic and in psychosis, from Colorado to Connecticut. He thought that a change of scenery would help. They made it to New Jersey, where Quentin’s grandmother called the police for help. He was hospitalized for more than sixty days.

When he returned to Colorado, Felicia started fighting with Diversus, a mental- and behavioral-health provider that treated her son. “They had him on Depakote, all this other stuff,” she says. “I was like, ‘This is not working. It’s making things worse.’ ” Quentin thought Felicia was not his mom and was sure a woman named Lois was. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a blue man. The blue man was terrifying and needed to be destroyed. Quentin cut off the blue man’s eyebrow, his own eyebrow. He cut his forehead trying to get rid of the blue man’s hair. He pulled out the blue man’s teeth. He would turn out the lights to hide.

Quentin hitchhiked. He wandered the streets. One day a nurse found him on the outskirts of Pueblo. Another time a kind man gave him a ride in Colorado Springs and called Felicia afterward. “I just picked up your son,” he said. “I don’t know if he’s well.”

Felicia was breaking under the strain. Quentin wouldn’t consent to be hospitalized, or he would consent, only to sign himself out and leave. Felicia wanted him involuntarily committed but couldn’t persuade anyone to issue an M-1. “I’m sitting in this hospital, with a guy with a missing eyebrow” who was “debating on hurting my husband,” but somehow that was not sufficient.

Desperate, Felicia cold-called an acquaintance to ask for help. “That was a God thing,” Deb Walker says. Deb is a left-leaning nonprofit leader who doesn’t usually speak like that. She says it again, emphatic. “That was a God thing.” Deb thought to call Elisabeth, whom she knew from community work, and Elisabeth picked up.

Quentin would become paranoid if his mother took a phone call, so Elisabeth and Felicia began texting. It was April 28, 2022. Elisabeth and Corey remembered what they’d had to do to get an M-1 hold for Luc less than a year prior. They’d tried and failed to time the “imminent danger” with calls to the police. Corey had taken six weeks off work to help his son. They’d called Luc’s psychiatrist uncle, who recommended that he receive Invega, the long-acting injectable. They were coached by a counselor to not retrieve Luc at the end of the seventy-two-hour hold, so that he could get further treatment. When they followed that advice, they had to foot a $40,000 bill for an extra three days’ stay at the hospital. Then there was the hostility of the behavioral-health worker the night Luc was committed. He was trying to find a reason to not hold Luc, to give him meds and send him on his way—“treat and street” is the shorthand for this problematic cycle. Why should your son get a bed, he asked Corey, when so many people need them? “Because my son is right here,” Corey said.

Bring Quentin in, Elisabeth told Felicia. Bring him in.

Felicia took Quentin to Elisabeth’s clinic. He was in “active psychosis,” Elisabeth recalls. He was pacing around, sure that Will was a cyborg, Felicia was a voodoo priestess, and Elisabeth was going to put him in jail. Elisabeth called 911 to get a transport to the hospital. An older paramedic and his young team showed up. While Elisabeth spoke with the lead, his charges ducked into Quentin’s room, got a pulse-oximeter reading, and took his vitals. “He’s alert and oriented,” one of them said. “He doesn’t qualify for an M-1 hold.”

Elisabeth thought that the EMT’s assessment was bullshit. Anosognosia, or not knowing that you’re sick, is common with profound mental illness, and Quentin had it. The term comes from the Greek: a (without), nosos (disease), gnosis (knowledge). One of the EMTs took out his phone to google whether or not a nurse practitioner can order an M-1 hold. (They can.)

Cops arrived, and by then Quentin was combative. The M-1 hold was placed.

As of this writing, Quentin has been hospitalized more than twenty times. To get to the hospital where he lived from January 2023 until August 2024, his mother and I take a highway for most of an hour, drive through some exurbs, and arrive in what looks like a little village. From 1887 until 1946, Fort Logan, one of two state-run mental hospitals in Colorado, was an Army base.

Felicia says that the first thing she wants to know about a place is if it’s clean. Fort Logan’s main building, built in the 1960s, is clean and sunlit. Its hallways and greeting areas have an open, airy feel. The floors are covered in small, pretty square tiles; the walls are blond brick. “It’s the total opposite of what I believe a state facility to be,” Felicia says. “In New Jersey, it does not look like that. The odor as soon as you walk in, it’s like, ‘I do not want my family here.’ ”

We walk to a wing behind a locked door to meet Quentin. He is wearing track pants, Nautica slippers, and a loose gray shirt. We sit down at a round table in a common room, not far from a guard. Quentin immediately gives his mother a gift, a stack of socks he bought at the hospital’s gift shop. One pair says: “Best Mom.” Another: “Running late is my cardio.” Felicia laughs. It is clear how much they adore each other, and how relieved they are to be together. Yesterday he and some other patients built gingerbread houses, Quentin says. Today is bingo.

Quentin has a young, handsome face, but his movements are slow, like those of an older man. He’s brought his journal with him, a perfect-bound composition book, as wire spirals aren’t allowed at Fort Logan. He’s crossed out many words and circled others. He shows his mother a list of healthy foods—cucumbers, orange juice, prune juice—beside his fitness goals. On another page he’s drawn a vision board, divided into the categories of work, nutrition, and clothes. He hopes that he and his mom will go to an outlet mall soon, and he has a list of places where he wants to shop: Adidas, North Face, Nike, Ralph Lauren.

Mostly he just wants to moon over Felicia, and she wants to hear about his days. He goes outside for walks, Quentin says. He goes to the gift shop and the vending machine. Patients get kudos points for showering, for relapse-prevention work, for participating in groups. There is music and karaoke.

“Karaoke?” Felicia says, thrilled.

“One time I did ‘Regulators,’ ” Quentin says. “One time Whitney Houston, ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody.’ ” Another time it was “Ben,” his favorite Michael Jackson song.

“I play pool a little bit too, but I get my tail whipped,” he says, smiling.

“Quentin, I’m proud of you,” Felicia says.

He reads to us from his journal: “My nieces are changing my life.”

“They love you,” his mother says.

“You’re the best mom,” Quentin replies. He high-fives her, and she tears up.

That high-five is hard-earned. When Quentin first came to Fort Logan, the voices in his head were mean. “They were mean,” Felicia says. They told Quentin that he had molested his younger cousins, though he had not. The thought made him scared to go near the girls. The voices also told him that the family dog was a shapeshifter, so then he could not go near the dog. They said nobody likes you, over and over, to this likable, lovable man.

Like Luc and Ben, Quentin has tried many different medications. Felicia says that when he was first admitted to Fort Logan, he was on fifteen different kinds: “Abilify, Latuda, Depakote, lithium.” Haldol, a first-generation antipsychotic, made him too tired to do much of anything.

On her visits, Felicia usually brings a gift of food from the outside world. Today it is a sausage and egg muffin from Burger King and a mini Snickers bar. Quentin’s arms and hands shake while he eats, and it’s clear this worries his mother.

When he gets out of Fort Logan, Quentin wants to work the overnight shift, 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., at Safeway or Walmart. He has a little money saved, and he wants to save more, “to get a vehicle.” He moves his hand along his shirt while he talks and his tattoos become visible, traces of another life, when he was “Mr. Lova Lova,” in Felicia’s words—some gorgeous girl’s boyfriend, a football star with good grades.

She still wonders if something triggered his first psychotic break, LSD perhaps—he tried one of those little squares two or three weeks before he became convinced that the world was ending and that he had killed Will. But Felicia’s brothers think maybe Quentin was always different. When he was little, they called him Cave, short for Captain Caveman, to describe his energy: He wanted to put a fork in a socket, to run fast into a wall.

Quentin goes back to the room where he no longer punches the wall until it cracks and his knuckles bleed, the room he now shares with another patient. He returns with a green folder full of pictures he’s drawn. The lines forming a bear, a shoe, a lion, a shooting star are bright and strong, though the tremor in his hand has made them waver.

The guard tells us the visit is over. We are past time, actually, so we stand to go.

One day, Quentin will be told to go that abruptly. When it happens, and one of the people on the hospital’s waiting list gets his bed, Felicia will receive twenty-four hours’ notice, hardly enough time to pack up his room, let alone plan a new life. “He’s way more resilient than I am,” Felicia says. Still, could he handle working the night shift at Safeway or Walmart while chronically ill?

On the drive back, we pass a group home with gardens and a gracious porch. It makes Felicia happy. She’s grateful for Quentin’s survival, but she wants beauty for him too, wellness, something more. “I want his life to look like what he wants it to look like, and I don’t want to put my fear into it,” she says.

4.

I first met Tracy at Elisabeth’s kitchen table when they were arranging Ben’s memorial. We talked about what poems to read, an order for the service, where to place the heart-shaped rocks, who might speak. Tracy was curled up like a teenager in her chair, and Jen was next to her, giving her the gentlest touches on her legs and hands and feet and head—like strong, light anchors, so that she might not float off forever.

Jen never knew Ben in health, and it had been hard, in their home, to feel like he wasn’t contributing, wasn’t helping. For a while, as a kind of shield, he only wore blue. He ate very quickly. He couldn’t keep track of a conversation. He found it difficult to walk through doorways and had to perform certain rituals to do so. Even as he became more interested in the possibilities of makeup and fashion, he wasn’t able to shower regularly or brush his teeth.

Ben’s weekly therapy was not covered by insurance and cost $150 for thirty minutes. When he was prescribed an antipsychotic that had not yet been issued as a generic, it cost $700 a month. Again insurance would not cover it. His parents got samples. They scrambled. One psychiatrist seemed especially determined and “really gave him a run for his money,” Tracy says. He put Ben on an anti-seizure drug that seemed to help, but he was given so many different medications for so many different diagnoses—Risperdal, Abilify, Luvox, and Lamictal for anxiety, OCD, autism, and borderline personality disorder—that Tracy lost track of what worked when.

There were respites. Tracy describes Ben’s alternative arts high school as “the land of the misfits,” where all kinds of “quirky kids” flourished, and for five good weeks Ben did, too. The administrator at the front desk chose him for an aide. The principal told Ben that if he was having panic attacks, he could weather them in his office. “They were unconditional with him,” Tracy says. “They were like, ‘He’s the most popular kid here!’ ”

Ben loved it. Then he didn’t.

At his favorite coffee shop, he met Nikita, a foreign exchange student from Russia. There was the thrill of his first real boyfriend, the crush and the lust, but also the thrill of the world. Nikita spoke three languages. Ben began to teach himself Russian and German, then Italian, Spanish, French, and Japanese. He wanted the door fluency gave, the entrance and the exit.

College at Western Colorado University repeated what was now a pattern: It was good, and then it wasn’t. By Thanksgiving of 2016, Ben had dropped out and moved back home.

He was hired twice, a triumph, at McDonald’s. He got a job one year at Current, a greeting card factory, during its busy season around the holidays, but would vomit from stress when it was time to go to work, and ended up getting fired. He enrolled at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, then had “a total nervous breakdown,” Tracy says. He was unable to eat or leave his room, and he dropped out after two weeks.

Tracy and Jen and Ben’s dad, Ted, were forever trying one thing and then another. There were small problems to deal with (where was Ben’s passport?) and larger problems, too (who were the older men on his Tinder, and had he been sold for sex?). At one point, after Tracy met Elisabeth, the plan was for Ben and Luc to live together—to save money and become friends—but Luc went to a wilderness treatment center in Utah instead, and Ben got an apartment alone. Tracy remembers visiting Ben’s place. Stunned by what she saw, she took photos. They show kitchen and bathroom sinks that are unusable, filled with clothes and cans of Great Value food, matted papers, open bottles of soap, a glove, a coffee mug, a toy fish. Something is growing on the open toilet lid, and the bowl brims with black liquid and more papers. There are McDonald’s takeout bags in the bed. The stove is caked with dried batter. On the carpeted floor in the bedroom there’s loose toilet paper and a full gallon jug of milk and an upturned colander and a clothing iron and more takeout bags and piles of clothes and cardboard boxes and Fla-Vor-Ice sleeves and some half-eaten food.

He couldn’t do it, Tracy understands now. Couldn’t take care of himself, much less help around the house. Couldn’t. Jen knows this now, too.

Tracy wishes that her child had received permission to just be—from herself and from a culture that confuses productivity with worth. “A good day for him was a day with the cat,” she says. “That’s frowned upon.” Sometimes when he was living at home, he’d ask her to watch a movie with him, and she’d say, “Babe, I’m tired.” Now she realizes, “He was reaching out for help in any way that he could.”

Tracy has a stack of forty-five bills that double as a travelogue. Thirty-five are unopened when she hands them to me. About half are addressed to Ben, half to Nasim. The return addresses are from Oklahoma City, for medical services in Seattle; Birmingham and South Bend, for charges from Boulder; LaPorte, Indiana; Wethersfield, Connecticut; Troy, Michigan; Oaks, Pennsylvania; Broomfield, Colorado; Coral Springs, Florida; the Woodlands, Texas; Akron, Ohio; Concord, California; Las Vegas, Nevada. The businesses seeking payment include Computer Credit Inc.; One Advantage; Certified Ambulance Group; Virginia Mason Franciscan Health; Radia Inc. P.S.; Dept. 233; Dr. Eric France, Chief Medical Officer, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment; and, repeatedly, American Medical Response.

A bill dated 6/30/21, less than one month from the provision of service, says that the minimum amount due is the full amount: $13,570. A ride in an ambulance, with a “ground mileage” of “Qty: 5,” and one $23.94 injection of Droperidol, an antipsychotic that blocks dopamine receptors, cost $1,238.31. Bay Area Credit Service sent a bill for $18,847.77 for ten ambulance rides. A “urinalysis auto w/ scope” cost $6.97. There are offers for EZ Ways to Pay, including a “New & Improved Online Experience” and a “Live Agent Chat.” You can “Go Green” at MyDocBill.com. One bill asks its recipient to “rate the comfort of the waiting room.”

Ben often moved with an urgency that suggested he was seeking something he never found. He spent six months in Austria, until his parents said, “You have to come home.” Back in the States, he met a girl and they drove to Texas, then crossed the border into Mexico, where Ben ended up in Cancún, “working on a boat or something like that.” He left his passport at a hostel as collateral for an unpaid bill, Tracy says, and lived on the streets until the U.S. Embassy called her. In the five years leading up to March 2022, her child would disappear and reappear. He made it to Vatican City around Easter once. Ted called the police one day when Ben broke into his Salida home through the dog door, looking for food.       

Ben fell in love with a man named Parker, and they lived together in Seattle for six months. Parker became increasingly scared for his partner, whom he knew as Nasim, and broke it off. Ben came home. For a while, he worked at Olive Garden, which he called “the O.G.” “ ‘Minimum wage, minimum effort!’ ” Tracy remembers him saying. “He was always kind of funny in that way.”

In December 2020, their family signed a contract with a case manager, who treated Ben’s challenges as behavioral. “We (family) will no longer support your addiction; we will not tolerate your abusive and aggressive language. As you are an adult now you are responsible for your care and life choices,” the contract reads. Tracy’s greatest fear was that Ben would end up homeless, and then, for a year, he did. He had to be independent, the case manager said, and his family needed to say no. So they did. His grandmother said no when he asked to live with her. Tracy told Max no when he asked if he could put his sibling up in a hotel for the night. It was heartbreaking, and Tracy bitterly regrets it. When she and Jen would pass a person warming themselves on a heating vent on the street, panhandling from a traffic median, or conversing with presences no one else could see, Tracy would say, “That’s somebody’s son.”

So much was lost when Ben lived on the streets, including a great many of the objects that help to tell the story of a life. Tracy has a woman’s coat he wore then, a pair of his shoes, but that’s it. What she has from before are treasures now: sweet notes he wrote as a child, his signature, a green watercolor bird he painted, photographs of his singular face, his blue-gray eyes and steady gaze.

Tracy held her child after giving birth and knew what mothers know:

I heard the stranger & my brain, without looking, vowed
a love-him vow. His struggling, merely, to be.

That’s from “The Black Maria,” a poem by Aracelis Girmay. And the following language is from Ben’s neuropsychological report, generated after a daylong test meant to measure the full spectrum of a person’s brain functions, which he took after a period of homelessness: The reason for the referral was an “inability to engage in activities of daily living.” Ben had reported having daily panic attacks since the age of 15, along with “perfectionistic” tendencies. He needed to move certain objects from one place to another because they held negativity. He spoke of patenting a wearable EEG technology to predict and prevent panic attacks, of having an “eidetic memory” and the ability to speak twelve languages. He took pain pills, sedatives, hallucinogens. He thought that his mother worked for the FBI. He reported hearing her in the lobby of the testing facility when she was not there. He was troubled by obsessive thoughts between three and eight hours a day.

The report’s author described the patient as suffering from “marked elevations of persecutory beliefs” and “grandiose and bizarre delusions.” The patient had both avolition—a medical inability to engage in goal-directed activities—and anosognosia. Those two terms are in the paragraph where Ben finally received a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

The report was issued late in the fall of 2021. Babe, you need to read your neuropsych report, Tracy would say. If you couldn’t see, you would wear glasses, right? If I had diabetes, I would take diabetes medicine.

But anosognosia, that not-knowing, is one of the reasons profound mental illness is too often fatal. Ben never accepted his diagnosis. The last picture Tracy ever saw of him was a missing person sketch from the Dallas Police Department.

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Tracy’s child was memorialized in a ceremony at a ranch in the violet foothills of Salida. Friends and family showed up in force. Elisabeth couldn’t stop crying. The guests reverenced Ben Nasim Michael’s ashes and placed heart-shaped rocks near them, on a quilt Tracy had made as a gift, one her child never got to use.

“Ben has been out too long in the elements,” the presider said. “Too long in the cold, too long in the dark. We are gathered here in the gentle shadow of the mountains where he found joy and peace, in this warm circle and kind light, to welcome him home.”

There was a strong, clean wind, the sort that whips anything untethered up, and it felt like we all might catch flight.

5.

Elisabeth has never liked Luc’s cat shirt, the trippy one he used to want to wear all the time. But Tracy is a fan. If he loves it, it’s perfect, she says. She remembers with admiration a family she met through NAMI, and how calm they were about their son’s connection to a particular tree stump. It meant something to him, so he kept the car he lived in near the stump, no big deal.

Tracy returns again and again to social solutions: We all need to change. The mostly well must become more hospitable, radically so, to those among us who have what Susan Sontag calls a “more onerous citizenship.”

Felicia can’t shake the conviction that her son is being spiritually tested, and she wants deliverance for him. Like people in many times and places, she sees how schizophrenia attacks one’s spirit, too. To live well, these days, “I keep busy,” she says, “and I get baptized.”

For Elisabeth, a nurse practitioner, this is a medical problem, in need of medical solutions.

They’re all right, of course.

Elisabeth found the work of Drs. Ann Mandel Laitman and Robert Laitman, who developed a protocol for treating schizophrenia after their son Daniel was diagnosed with it at 15. Schizophrenia is an illness of “gating,” Laitman notes. “Gating is the ability of the individual to be able to focus attention and at the same time tune out extraneous stimuli internal and external,” he writes. “Without gating people are continuously flooded by stimuli.” Those for whom this culminates in a break with reality are predisposed from birth by their genes and have “unquiet minds” in childhood. At some point between in utero and early adulthood, they usually experience a stressor, “trauma, infection, drugs,” that activates their genetic predisposition. The Laitmans recommend choline supplements during pregnancy, fish oil supplements for children in families with a history of serious mental illness, and clozapine as the first-line medication for those suffering from psychosis.

The Laitman Protocol, or EASE as it’s sometimes called, is intense. You begin with 12.5 milligrams of clozapine and build up from there. Because of the side effects of the medication, a patient will also take, as needed, Zofran (for nausea), sublingual atropine drops (for excess saliva), pantoprazole (for acid reflux), beta blockers (for tachycardia and anxiety), desmopressin (for nocturnal incontinence), and Klonopin, if a patient has catatonia that does not respond to the clozapine. Patients following this regimen take Colace (to prevent constipation), metformin (to prevent the dramatic weight gain that accompanies antipsychotics), and, for those with a high risk of seizures, lamotrigine.

When Elisabeth committed to following this protocol with Luc in March 2022, she was very much alone. Clozapine was regulated by an intense risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (or REMS) through the FDA, based on a small set of data from a population of the elderly. That REMS (which the FDA no longer requires) involved weekly blood draws, which made getting a prescription impractical, if not impossible, for most people. After being turned down by two other doctors, Elisabeth found one who knew the protocol and agreed to put Luc on it. Then she called pharmacy after pharmacy until one finally said that it could fill a clozapine prescription. She worked hard to cultivate a relationship with a pharmacist there. She would call every Tuesday, as the drug could only be released one dose at a time. She used a private insurance plan plus Medicaid to cover the costs. One week a different pharmacist refused to fill the prescription; he said it wasn’t safe. Luc’s psychiatrist called. There was a two-day lapse in treatment during which Luc grew increasingly symptomatic and afraid.

Because that’s the thing: This protocol works for Luc. He is well more days than not, and so lovely. At his twenty-first birthday party, to celebrate how far he’d come, his Mamaw smoked a cigar.

If asked, Elisabeth says, “My son is disabled”—language that gives grace for a different life, a slower life, which is not to say a lesser life. Luc has kept his sobriety, a triumph of three years now. He moved into a tiny home that feels large, next door to his parents, where he is a loving caregiver to his cat. One Friday last fall, at his favorite kava bar, he displayed some of his photographs for the first time. He works a few hours every week as an assistant at his uncle’s office downtown, and to do so he gets nicely dressed. Sometimes he takes an e-scooter there, and sometimes he gets a ride. I walk with him on a one-mile route that he favors, and he is kind and funny company. He still calls his mother many times a day when she’s at work. Evenings are out for socializing, as are large crowds, and change is unwelcome, but in what matters most—love—Luc is rich. We’re scheming on finding him a girlfriend, and she will be lucky indeed.

Still, sometimes Elisabeth gets terrified. At night she’ll go downstairs to check on her younger son while he’s sleeping, and she’ll call Luc to make sure he’s alive and OK.

“I think Tracy’s in a special hell of isolation,” Elisabeth says. “Yeah,” Tracy immediately agrees. “I think that’s right.” We’re at a park together, walking.

What Elisabeth means is that other parents can’t go near their worst fear—the loss of a child—even within the community of people affected by serious mental illness, so Tracy feels like a burden to them with her grief. In the summer, it helps to garden. In the winter, in the evening, she likes to walk and walk, just looking at the Christmas lights. She tries to be there for Felicia and Elisabeth—at NAMI events, at fundraisers—but sometimes it’s too hard. When that happens, they carry her story with them.

Tracy had never heard of a neuropsych report until her child got one. Now, as a probation officer for juvenile offenders, she orders more of them than anyone on her team. “I don’t wait,” she says. She’s determined to get the help for other families that hers never received.

It was good for her and Jen to go together to the place where Ben died, such a pretty place, in a pretty neighborhood. They found a fuzzy brown caterpillar, its coat the color of Ben’s favorite waffle shirt. Climbing up the steep banks of the creek, they both slipped and fell, and the tree that caught and held Ben’s body in the water’s cold current caught and held them, too. That was a gift.

But so much still hurts. Tracy’s child’s ashes were sent through the mail: That hurts. She tries and fails and tries again to forgive the tough-love caseworker, to forgive herself. She still sends messages to the number Ben last used to text her: I miss you. I love you. Where are you? Now she and Jen are among the primary caregivers for Tracy’s niece, who was otherwise headed to a foster home. Ben’s old bedroom is this glad little girl’s, and after so much suffering, her joy is a balm. At the same time, Tracy says, “It’s like, when do I get to rest?”

Sometimes everything feels possible for Felicia. “I’ve worked really hard to be able to speak at these tables,” she says, and there are many. She was on her city’s Law Enforcement Transparency and Advisory Commission; she was awarded a mayor’s fellowship and a governor’s fellowship; she’s the secretary of the local Black Chamber of Commerce. When she met Elisabeth, she felt like God was saying, “This is your partner—you’re gonna do some things.” And they have. They went to the state capitol in the spring of 2025, with a group called Colorado Mad Moms, and held up poster-size photos of their sons printed with the words, “Severe mental illness is not a crime.” They are working to get some of the legal language around M-1 holds changed: what “gravely disabled” means, what “psychiatric deterioration” means. But then another week, the car breaks down; Felicia’s dog dies; she misses her mother, who passed away in 2022 and “could throw down in the kitchen like no one else.”

On a rough night last fall, she asked Will to take the keys so she couldn’t go get a drink. “My issue is I start to extra, extra, extra rely on the bottle,” Felicia says. Because here she is, trying to hold up her adult son, who has to stick to the Weather Channel after the TV started talking to him while he was watching Rocky—a breakthrough symptom. At home she needs to care for her autistic stepson, get him “pancakes every Saturday”; her husband, a veteran, sometimes leaps out of bed when the night terrors from his PTSD get bad; and, not long ago, one of her sweet grandbabies said things that made Felicia worry about schizophrenia all over again. Then there’s work, and the whole country, and who wouldn’t want something to take the edge off all that?

Jen had a nightmare, Tracy says: She had headphones on, they were loud, and she couldn’t take them off. The dream was about Ben’s illness—Jen was feeling what he felt.

Quentin has been at an assisted-living facility in Colorado Springs ever since he lost his bed at Fort Logan in August 2024. It feels like a certain sort of old folks’ home: quiet, dark, and carpeted, with lots of TVs on low. Felicia goes to see him often. When Quentin said that the sun god comes around and bothers him when he puts his Pumas on, his mom’s advice was sound. “Don’t put the Pumas on,” she instructed. “Put the church shoes on!”

Elisabeth went with Felicia to a recent meeting with the facility manager, who was trying to push Quentin out. He needs skilled nursing, the manager said, because he is sometimes incontinent, and the facility can’t do all that laundry, even though doing laundry is one of its advertised services. The manager said this in front of Quentin, which to Felicia felt shaming. It’s the meds, Elisabeth told her. If Quentin’s meds were managed correctly, this would not be happening. Elisabeth offered to find a nurse who would do that. The manager said no.

At least Quentin has a doctor Felicia trusts. “He listens,” she says. “He makes time.” Dr. Ash has been trying to sort out Quentin’s many and complicated medications to find out what’s working, what’s not. Felicia and Elisabeth learned that the assisted-living facility uses qualified medication administration personnel, or QMAPs, to give residents their meds. Instead of adjusting the dose when a change was prescribed, the QMAPs were just adding the old dose to the new one. Ten milligrams of Abilify after fifteen, for instance, when the order was to increase a dose from ten to fifteen. That explained the incontinence, Elisabeth says, and why Quentin was telling Felicia that there was a spaceship at his window.

Who would do that with someone’s meds for cancer? Or cystic fibrosis? You could die from that, Elisabeth says.

Lately, Quentin’s uncle has blocked phone calls from him. He loves his nephew, but he doesn’t want to have another conversation in which Quentin claims he hurt his cousins. Even Dr. Ash has pushed Quentin on that, asking “What’s the evidence?” for such a thing. Felicia loves that.

Healing comes, goes. Jen had a nightmare, Tracy says: She had headphones on, they were loud, and she couldn’t take them off. The dream was about Ben’s illness—Jen was feeling what he felt. To her clients dealing with addiction, Tracy now asks: What does it do for you? She wants to get to the root of their behaviors.

Elisabeth keeps taking more patients who suffer from psychosis into her practice. “I’m very comfortable with them,” she says. She recently won an award for her advocacy, after Felicia nominated her. “She makes the system move fast,” the presenter said of Elisabeth. “She conveys concern and compassion. She sees the person, not the illness.”

Felicia’s heart is broken right open by the story of a woman in her support group whose son is in prison, and by Rob and Michele Reiner’s deaths, and by their son, who must be so unwell. Her burdens get lighter around her granddaughters. She has kept some precious gifts from her own great-grandmother, totems of the fiercest and least complicated love she’s ever known, love like a shield, like shade. Sometimes she goes and sits near them, quietly, to remember. One day at dinner, Felicia tells me, Tracy, and Elisabeth that she’s thinking of running for office, and we all say: Do.

Early in all this, Felicia says, God gave her a vision. Quentin is standing in a tuxedo on a long red carpet, well and so handsome, before a gathered crowd. This is the word she got then: “People are gonna listen.”

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