The good life, in Florida (the story of my grandfather, part III)

At 63, Dick Winans finally got the fraternity party he always wanted.

Away from the office at Greystone Psychiatric Hospital, free from a troubled marriage just months after his wife's 1975 death, he let it go.

Instead of wearing his ever-present necktie and suit, the same he kind his father made him wear when he attended an exclusive private high school in Hightstown, N.J., Dick spent much of the Florida trip he took with us wearing black swimming trunks and showing his hairy chest.

Normally lean, he started to show a belly that hung over the waist band of the trunks.

He dated, and the more he dated, the more he drank. He missed Dorothy, his wife, and he cried at the mention of her name.

But in another breath, he'd call her "bitch" and moan that she left him nothing in inheritance.

We took him on this April 1976 as an act of mercy. We were afraid that, if we left him home, he'd get smashed, hop in the car again, drive the hour drive from Morristown to Asbury Park, N.J. and drink some more.

Just a few years before, he disappeared for a whole day, until he was found in his car in Ocean Grove, plastered.

Another time, he drank all morning before he and Dorothy went out for a drive. They ended up in Asbury Park, where Dick pulled out his camera, and snapped beautiful women.

My sister and I fretted. "What if he goes blind?" we thought. What we should have worried about was Dick pitching back Budweisers and getting behind the wheel.

On a warm day in April, Dick arrived at our house, in Point Pleasant, N.J., wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a bag packed with a storefull of underwear, socks and Vick's VapoRub that he rubbed on the lining of his nose to clear his aching sinuses.

I talked to him at night as he slept on a mattress on the floor of our living room. He tickled me and laughed, and traded knock-knock jokes with me.

I remember feeling surprised. I had heard about him, and always saw him as a straight arrows. I saw him in the photos with the thick eyebrows, and thin grin.

But then I also saw him in photos with my mother, pulling on her pigtails, and smiling. He was devoting the kind of attention that my mother used to give me. In Point Pleasant, I saw that man that I had heard about, but thought was a legend.

We borrowed a station wagon from one of my father’s friends, just so we could fit him. My brother and I switched sitting in the wagon, while my grandfather and Carolyn sat in the back seat.

The man who tickled me at home fell silent. He struggled to engage in even simple chit-chat. When he did try to join in on conversations between my parents, he often got a stare, if not a leer from my mother.

One time she got so upset by his interjection that she pulled off her sunglasses and slammed them in between the seats. Dick leaned back, and returned to saying nothing.

Much like the California trips, the ride was too long. Interstate 95 wasn’t fully built yet, so we found ourselves taking alternate routes in North Carolina and Georgia. Signs for steakhouses would get my mother going. “Please, dear, can we go out to eat?” “Please?”

At every stop, my grandfather drank, sucking down beer after beer. By the end of the meal, he’d be sloshed, and his breath would smell like rubbing alcohol.

Then he would want dessert, so he’d take his knife and bang an empty glass like a bell. “Waitress!” he’d shout. We all wanted to slump in our seats and disappear.

At first, he was like a walking comedy act, quite the reverse of what we once thought about him. By the time we reached Miami Beach, however, he was draining us.

We also knew all the words to the song. Arriving at the LaGorce hotel, finally, we had the same thoughts we had in Los Angeles the previous year. Should we turn back?

Once there, Dick put on a display, unleashing and revealing himself in a way that even surprised his daughter. He traded in his well-pressed-suit look for that of a 63-year-old man trying to reliving his frat-boy years.

He drank all day, and into the night, and by the time we ate with him at dinner, he was sloshed, banging glasses and angrily demanding waitress service.

At night, he’d disappear again; one time, he was supposed to babysit me in his room. He didn’t show up until 2 a.m., slumping into his room where he confront my mother, who was sitting on the bed next to me, waiting, “Where have you been?” she said. “I was out on a date,” he said.

Another night, he recaptured the Greystone look, wearing a jacket and tie. Only he decided to go for a jog – with the suit on.

I remember my brother and I going to a neighboring park to look for him, looking behind the trees that were spread out in a grassy field near the beach. He was found, but I’m not sure how.

Several days later, we went to pick him up for dinner and, again, couldn’t find him. We sat in the car while my mother went in to investigate. She walked out of the lobby, looking steamed. “He was passed out on the couch!” she said. “He woke up and he said, ‘Where am I?’”

When he walked out to the parking lot, he looked like he could barely stand, and his shirt was pulled out of his pants.

The afternoon before we left, he drank nearly a case of beer while babysitting my brother and me. He gave us a watch to look at while he made repeated trips into the kitchen. Every 15 minutes or so, he reached into the refrigerator and pulled out cans of “Ale.” With each can, he chugged the contents down his throat and then slammed the empties into the trash can.

By the end of the trip, my parents had had it with him. My mother confronted him one day about his behavior. “I’m 62 and you’re 38 but that doesn’t give you the right to talk to me that way,” he said.

My mother stormed away from him, cursing and yelling out loud to my father. She never looked so angry.

The next day, we went home, and the car was largely silent the whole way. Occasionally, Dick would launch into his “Off we go” song, but his look was pained as we hustled back to New Jersey, only stopping once along the way.

I said a few things to him, but he mumbled back. The boyish enthusiasm was gone. I wanted to reignite the spark we had at the beginning of the trip, but Dick seemed to be intimidated by my mother, and too embarrassed about his behavior to respond.

Dick never went on another trip with the whole family again.

In search of John Clear

About a year ago, I got a call from a man with a deep, husky voice.

"Tom!" he said. "This is John Clear!"

I thought it was a joke, but not a fake joke. I thought it was John just being funny again.

"Everything's different for me now," he said. "I'm turning things around."

I remembered this small kid with beach-blonde hair whose speech didn't match this trucker voice. I remembered this kid who couldn't utter a sentence without telling a joke - and every time, he was funny.

I remembered a kid whose voice was like his name - clear, not the throaty kind you get when spend a lot of time gaining street cred in a state prison cell block.

I remembered him as the funniest person I knew. I think everything I learned about being funny, I learned from John Clear. At dinner with the family, I'd repeat things he said or did, and even my straight-as-an-arrow father would laugh. "I think John Clear is my kind of guy," he'd say.

It wasn't always what he said that was funny. It was the goofy context. "Hey Tom, did you ever shave your face with a lawnmower?"

I would laugh; he wouldn't. He said it as a straight, serious statement, even if it was utterly ridiculous. If he laughed at it, he'd cheapen it, as if he was trying too sell it, and beg for affirmation. He was too smart to ruin it.

John never had to beg for affection. It came naturally. But life has ironies: Of all the people from my 1985 graduating class at Point Pleasant Borough High School in New Jersey, few have had it harder.

He fell into a world of drugs and hardship that can destroy a life, and destroy the soul. In that world, the person you knew long ago often disappears. The person who was always funny was now a straight man on the street talking about recovery but showing his pain.

The man who called me last year was, in a way, begging. He was as desperate as he was hopeful. He wanted me to write about him, and tell his story about how he was trying to win custody of his kids. He wanted me to write about people who spent time in state prison with him, and how they were getting screwed and mistreated by the state.

I wanted to do what he wanted. But I got busy, and I let it go. I'm sorry, John.

I'm finally writing about him now, but not because of what happened to him. He just seems to have disappeared, at least from my life. I called his cell; it was disconnected. I called his dad - no answer, no reply. I emailed; it bounced back.

Hopefully, somebody who knows where he is can see this, and can let me know how he's doing.

I want to write about John because he could have been any one of us. And, because of hardships in my own family, I could have been him. If possible, I want to help him find the person he was. He doesn't have to be funny. I'd just like to see him return to being the kind of guy who made everybody who knew him better.

John had fallen into heroin addiction. He was nailed for impersonating a police officer, or something like that. He was in state prison, and he was photographed. His mug was on the Internet; the big white smile with the small fangs was gone. The blonde hair was reduced to a receding hairline and stubble. His look was dark, and his frown was deep.

John had married right out of school, and had kids. Family strife, drugs and God knows what else brought the marriage down, and him with it.

A support system, one rooted in family, didn't exist: His mother died; his father long was estranged from him.

After graduation, he called me a few times, and actually wanted to hang out. But his drug-addled life was too hardcore for me.

I roomed with him and another buddy, Ken Winne, on the senior trip. That's when I first noticed the funny guy I knew slipping away. John was more interested in scoring something than he was entertaining others.

I used to hang out with these guys, and do stupid but small stuff for kicks. There was no Wii, not even Atari at the time, so you had to make your own fun.

I was with John the day the Jamesway department store opened in Point Pleasant in the spring of 1980 (it closed in 1995). John was pulling Hot Wheels cars out of their packages and running them under the clothing racks. I was his nerdy alter-ego, so my nervous reaction was probably funnier than his.

I kept trying to stop them with my feet, but John had me beat. He unwrapped nearly ever car that was hanging in the racks, each packaged neatly. Then he turned the floor into LeMans, and turned me into a dancing monkey.

One car made it all the way to the cash register. I leaned down, picked up the car and looked up. My Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Gilbert, was standing there, glaring at me and shaking her head. "Oh, shit!" I said, right in front of her. Then I took off and hid in the clothing racks, peeping through a rack of blouses until she walked away.

At school, we drove Miss Mason crazy, the Point Pleasant Boro employee posing as a music teacher. We always had some quick answer for her erratic behavior. It was a coming-out moment for me, compelled by John's humor and his daring to make you go over the edge.

Once, he and I pretended to be John Travolta when we were supposed to be square-dancing. "Stay-in alive! Stay-in alive!" we sang while Miss Mason played country-western. She got so fed up, she grabbed my hair and threw me out in the hallway. I turned quickly toward John, who flashed his white-as-nails smile.

That was back when John was good at getting out of trouble. After he left high school, his support system was gone, and so was John.

On that day, in January 2008, hearing him was the surprise. Hearing from him was not. John had been trying to reach me for years. He heard I was visiting prisons, and writing about people who do drugs to self-medicate from mental illness. I was trying to explore the history of my family, and how mental illness was pervasive with every generation.

He knew my mother, because my mother sold Avon to his mother. He knew my mother died after she was overwhelmed by the effects of obsessive compulsive disorder.

In 2005, he was in state prison. At the time, I was writing stories on the prison system, and I knew my way around. I sent him a picture of our 20-year class reunion in 1985, as well as a story I wrote on my mother. "That made my year," John told me over the telephone.

When he returned to life after his prison stint more than a year ago, he called me to reminisce about the Mets, about being a Republican (my card-carrying membership for that party expired about 1992). He then sent me court documents related to custody cases with his children.

John was taking responsibility for himself. I felt good. Maybe what I sent him in prison helped bring him back. If you give a man rope, 10 times out of 10, he's going to grab it.

Now I'm trying again.

The desperate village

By LAUREN HALE
Featured blogger

A sobbing woman walks into her obstetrician's office with a newborn baby. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, right? Well, for some unfortunate women, the joke is on them and it's a dangerous joke indeed. The women I am referring to are new mothers who have been courageous enough to seek treatment for a Postpartum Mood Disorder yet find themselves either denied assessment, dismissed, or inappropriately medicated and sent on their way with no additional therapy prescription, left wading fearfully and silently through dark waters.

In the spring of 2004, I found myself joining the ranks of women turned away by the very people they trusted the most – their physicians. For three months after the birth of my first daughter, I often struggled with sleep, snapped at my husband for no reason, yelled at the dogs for glancing my way , and constantly battled horrific fleeting thoughts filling my head. I finally garnered enough courage to call my doctor's office. I hesitantly admitted things weren't the way they were supposed to be. I was promised glow. Where was my glow? Where was this mythic calm? Where was my Vaseline lens of cheer, my soap opera happy mama moment? Why couldn't I enjoy my daughter instead of thinking she judged me every step of the way?

Armed with a 72-count questionnaire, answering yes to thoughts of harming myself or my infant, my doctor sat grinning across from me and told me I didn't have Postpartum Depression. What was his reasoning? At six weeks, a woman's hormones magically realign and all is right within the new mom psyche, according to him. (Never mind that Postpartum Mood Disorders can occur at anytime within the first year and most common onset is between two and four months, two weeks beyond his six week limit1) He then asked how important I considered breastfeeding my child, apparently ignoring my screaming infant in her car seat, the mini-elephant in the room. Medication refused, my diagnosis thrown out the window due to his belief in a very outdated time frame for onset and my apparent ability to dress myself and put on bare minimum make-up, I wanted to scream. He did offer an appointment with the in-house therapist. I never went. They kept calling to reschedule. Enough games waltzed through my own head on an hourly basis. I didn't need any of theirs added to the mix. I smiled and grinned my way out of the appointment and went home to weep.

When our daughter was five months old, we moved back to Georgia. I began to heal slowly. Or I thought I did. My depression never lifted and continued through my second pregnancy only to blow up a month after our second daughter came home after twenty-eight days in the NICU. I awoke that morning with one thought on my mind – how bad would it get if I let go? I didn't have the strength to hold on anymore. My tenacity flew the coop. Insecurity and Insanity soon took its place, landing me in a psychiatric ward before midnight. Never had I felt so alone, abandoned and scared.

My new doctor had prescribed one drug which worked until we increased the dosage. I believe this is what landed me in the hospital. Once there, my medication was changed. Slowly, I found myself able to function again. Smiles became more frequent, the fighting and accusations of deceit less so. I began to find other women to speak with about my journey, including Jane Honikman, the founder of Postpartum Support International. As I continued on my road, I founded a local peer support organization for moms and volunteered with Postpartum Support International. Not all new moms are as fortunate as I have been. This is why the Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHER'S Act is an absolute necessity for American families.

Based on New Jersey's legislation spearheaded by New Jersey's former First Lady Mary Jo Codey. and including legislation put forth by Representative Bobby Rush, D-Ill., with tireless advocacy by Carole Blocker, mother of Melanie Blocker Stokes, the MOTHER'S Act or Melanie Blocker-Stokes MOTHER'S Act (H.R. 20) in the House and S 324 in the Senate, provides for essential research into the mental health of women resolving a pregnancy and encourages education of medical professionals as well as new and expecting parents. And contrary to belief passionately held by critics of the bill, the current version does not mandate screening of all new mothers. Instead a proposed two-year study of effective screening is to be completed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The MSB MOTHER'S Act also does not encourage increased medicating of America's mothers. Through it's provisions to encourage increased community support, development of community-based support programs, and education of medical professionals already working with this population. In my opinion, the increased education measures provisioned by the MSB MOTHER'S Act may reduce the amount of Mothers who are medicated or at the very least assure they are medicated properly, thereby avoiding unnecessary negative side-effects some people experience with anti-depressant usage.

Increased education including the public awareness campaign should also aid in removing the stigma and fear that has so long surrounded Postpartum Mood Disorders. This stigma has allowed Mothers to be ignored or mistreated when they admit their unexpected feelings of failure, guilty, and sometimes even insanity after giving birth for too long. In addition, many new alternative methods and correlations are being discovered and if funding were to be provided, more research into the alternative treatment field could be performed, encouraging doctors to allow more Mothers to use natural and holistic treatments to battle mild cases of Postpartum Mood Disorders instead of turning to the almighty anti-depressant, a treatment that is more often than not misused and misunderstood by general doctors. Up to 90 percent of new moms struggling with Postpartum Mood Disorders may be nutritionally deficient. For instance, some Mothers finding themselves struggling with a Postpartum Mood Disorder may find relief in supplementing with Magnesium or Calcium as deficiencies of both have been shown to manifest as depression or other mood disorder symptoms. Research has also shown Omega 3 to be effective in managing mood.

Mothers and children are the beating hearts of our future. We owe them all the support we can give them, especially now. With the net worth of families declining nine percent in the last quarter, more mothers are finding themselves having to join the workforce earlier than planned. Why is this significant? It's significant because working mothers are more likely to experience depression. A recent survey by Working Mother found that 91 percent of respondents had signs of depression. Take into consideration that one in five working women will experience depression in their lifetime, add a healthy dose of the Postpartum statistic of one in 10 new moms experience a Postpartum Mood Disorder, and you have quite a depressed population on your hands. Then add in a decrease in growth of the Psychiatric profession and you've almost got a pandemic on your hands inadequately handled by physicians not well-trained to handle the primary complaint. Would you trust your cancer care to a General Practitioner? No. You'd see an oncologist. Why should it be any different for a mental health illness?

According to an article in the St. Cloud Times, there is a five month wait to see a psychiatrist at a local clinic, even with the three staffed doctors seeing patients every twenty minutes. Angela Broska-Smith of St. Cloud did not receive the best support from her Primary Care Physician and ended up addicted to her medication. Why didn't she see a Psychiatrist? It's possible the five month wait played a major role in her decision. She hopes more primary care physicians are able to receive training in Depression & Anxiety conditions so others won't face a similar situation.

Carole Blocker, insatiable crusader, has led the charge in getting legislation introduced to prevent the tragedy of her daughter, Melanie Stokes, from happening again. Again, at the heart of the situation lies physician ignorance of Postpartum Mood Disorders. In her search for recovery, Melanie found herself hospitalized three times in seven weeks, given several different medications and still ended up jumping to her death from the 12th floor of a Chicago building. What if her physicians understood the disorders that occur so often to new mothers? Would Melanie still be here today?

So many studies have already been done regarding medical professionals and screening. One such study in 2005 by Seehusen, Baldwin, Runkle, and Clarke asked “Are Family Physicians Appropriately Screening for Postpartum Depression?” The respondents had some formal training in Postpartum Mood Disorders and recognized it as a real, serious, and treatable illness. Nearly one third of them always screened for PPD, with thirty percent of them using a validated screening tool. Only six percent of the respondents never screened. In contrast, a recent UK study revealed medical professionals worded questions to prevent a diagnosis or admission of Postpartum Mood Disorder from being given. The reason? No referral network and no knowledge of how to treat a woman with a PMD. It was not noted if the respondents in the UK study had received formal training regarding Postpartum Mood Disorders. Yet another recent study states that professionals in an academic setting feel comfortable and responsible for screening yet aren't charting their screens, counseling, or results. A precedence needs to be set to ensure all Mothers receive the same information and care during the postpartum period.

The MSB MOTHER'S Act will save lives. It will increase knowledge of Mood Disorders, enabling mothers and families to seek help sooner, encourage increased education of both medical professionals and parents alike. The world around the Mother has changed. She no longer has her extended family nearby to help with daily mothering tasks. No one to mentor her through pregnancy, labor, breastfeeding, spiraling moods after birth, diaper changes, diaper rashes, solid foods, sleep problems, ear infections, potty training, or handling more than one child. It truly does take a village to raise a Mother and the Mother's Act will help to create a solid village around America's Mothers, a village we all deserve and so desperately need.