I feel for you, LW, and the situation you and your whole family are in. I want to offer you my compassionate heartfelt wishes that you find some ways to create wellness and emotional and spiritual help for yourself.

What is true is true and can never change. This is life for those who choose to accept it. Sometimes there is grace, accept it when it comes and feel all the gratitude you can. Other times it may feel so bad that you can't believe you will keep breathing. Accept this too if you can, and feel all the gratitude you are able to muster that you are here and that life still flows in your veins, as long as this is true, you will find a way to cope and more.

My son committed suicide 8 1/2 years ago, and for almost all of the years of his young life before that our whole family world and every waking moment was about how to try to cope with his mental illness. You can imagine that the burden of being the mother of someone who feels that his only way clear was to be dead has been a very large one. I am learning how to put this burden down sometimes and sometimes I cannot and must bear it anyway.

Is he better off now? Having self selected out of the gene pool? Some would say yes, one did right here in these posts. Perhaps this is true, I will never know. I do not have to live in fear anymore that he will knock at my door someday and kill me or his sister or dad, or confront one too many authority figures during an episode and have them have to use deadly force against him. No more daily fears, no more hiding my wallet, locking my bedroom, wondering what street he's wandering, where he sleeps, what he thinks, feels, eats. If he's hot or cold or in despair somewhere in a dingy ugly facility.

I will never know if he could have found a way to live and love and feel peace.

Yes, I guess one could say that he weeded himself out, but I really wish it hadn't been said quite this way, with such a callous and offhand disregard for the effect words tossed off in such a way can have on those of us who carry very heavy loads through this life.

I agree with and urge you to follow the practical and useful advice offered here to help you cope and heal and bear your grief, disconnections and guilt.

I just wanted to let you know that time has a way of bringing healing and succor. I trust that you will have moments, maybe hours and days where you will feel joy and optimism and be free from the overwhelming feelings that keep you so sad and burdened.

Thank you Cary for printing this letter and for your well reasoned response. I found your quoting of Terkelsen's 10 phases of coping with mental illness to have been especially valuable. Looking back at how my own mother's mental illness unfolded over the last 25+ years, it was downright eerie to see how closely it parallels the Terkelsen model.

As for the LW, "Hoping Against Hope", thank YOU for your story... your pen name describes my attitude for many years. Hoping that someone, somewhere, would find a way to help my mother out of her long dark journey into psychosis. And while many advancements have been made over the last 25 years they're all a bit too late to make much difference for my mother, who was like yours in that she didn't much care to take anything in the first place. (The fights between her and my father over her meds were epic and terrifying. My siblings and I lived in fear that the cops, when they arrived, would suspect our father was an abusive spouse and would haul him off to jail leaving us alone with Mom.)

All I can say is that gradually, over time, I came to accept that my mother was not going to get better. I can't pinpoint a particular moment... maybe it was a book I read, or another advice column like this one, or maybe even that statistics course in college that finally let me understand what the doctors were REALLY talking about when they said "long odds of recovery".

But if that moment never arrives for you like it did for me, and you find yourself still hoping against hope 10, 20 years from now, always remember that you are not living your mother's life (genetic similarities notwithstanding) but your own. I'm not a very spiritual person anymore but what little I have left is summed up nicely by the Serenity Prayer - accepting the things you cannot change and changing the things you can. Mental illness is one of those things you cannot change - so accept it and try to find your serenity any way you can... and when you do take every day's worth of it that's out there as a blessing from the deity of your choice.

One last thing: Don't let the haters (like "Ben Dover" or "you're welcome" here in the Letters, just for starters) get you down. We're stuck with living in a time where we're simultaneously learning to treat mental illness and trying to liberate ourselves from our old medieval superstitious attitudes about it. It's going to take a couple more generations for those troglodytes among us to "weed themselves out" the old fashioned way so in the meantime don't give them the satisfaction of seeing you get angry!

Here's hoping things get better for you -

Adam in Philly

My mom has no short-term memory (she's exactly like the guy in the film Memento, minus the body writing), as a result of a brain aneurysm when I was 17. She also was diagnosed in recent years as having been paranoid schizophrenic for longer than anyone knows, but likely since before me or my brother were born. Because of the short-term memory loss, she's unable to take care of herself (she can't remember if she showered or ate already) she lives in an assisted living facility where they administer her meds for the schizophrenia, which keep her from having delusions...

All the same, she's a mean lady. Hate to say it, since she's my mom, but she's mean--she was extremely emotionally abusive to my older brother from the time he was born, and kept me in some sort of fear-induced numbness and depression that I'm still trying to figure out in therapy. The paranoia has always made her feel justified in her meanness, and with no intellectual or social structure to rein her in (one can't have much of a life with no short-term memory), over the years she's grown to be the emotional equivalent of Jack the Ripper--but she can't remember what she said 5 minutes ago, so it doesn't help at all to confront her about it.

All of this makes her a nightmare to deal with on any level. We both oversee her care from afar (we live in New York, she's in Philadelphia where we're from), but my brother has long kept his distance to a large extent--and now due to a recent over-the-top comment from her, he's not planning to see her at all anymore. I've always felt I should visit her every few months or so, since I'm one of only two visitors she ever gets, so I do, but the older she gets, the worse she gets... Every visit is an endless litany of insults against and indictments of various people I care about, and now she's even started to turn on me. So there's a very good chance that i won't be seeing her much anymore, either.

Some of our relatives think we should see her more often, the we can't "hang her out to dry" at the assisted living place, so to speak. And believe me, I do feel the guilt. But every time I see her, I feel one piece of my heart break, and another piece of it turn to steel. And it takes me a week to recover. So my take on it is this, and it's echoed in some of the other letters:

It's YOUR time now. Do whatever you have to do to be okay, to be more than okay. Your mom had her youth and her chance to make her way in the world. That's over now, and would be even if she weren't ill. And I believe it's our parents' deep-down wish to have their kids to go out into the world and be happy, even if these wishes might be obscured by mental illness. And clearly, you cannot do this by keeping your mother close.

I have always thought that if my mother were in her right mind and somehow could see my dilemma with her from a distance, she'd tell me to save myself. To keep my distance, even from her, if that's what I needed to stay sane. Maybe this is an idea worth running past your sister... But whether she can see it this way or not, maybe there's some comfort in it for you.

And hang in there--as you may have found already, these situations tend to play themselves out in waves. A time of family crisis like yours that feels like it might never be over does, in time, subside.