There are no flowers for Marc

This essay was written by Marc’s mother, Vera Beaudin Saeedpour, in the late 1980’s:

In my place of work for better than eight years, flowers are sent as a matter of courtesy to employees an to members of their families who are hospitalized.

My son Marc was hospitalized in the Payne Whitney Clinic at Cornell Medical Center for nearly two months. But there were no flowers for Marc. He was admitted on an emergency basis because he suffers from schizophrenia, a chronic illness that afflicts more than 1.1 million Americans. And counting their family members, whose lives are disrupted, even destroyed as they watch someone they love suffer, probably another five million are affected.

Marc’s illness is not physically discernable. He has no broken bones, no stitches – only a broken life and a broken heart. His injury is subtle. It resides in his biochemistry.

The decimation of Marc’s life struck him when he was nineteen. Before that he was filled with talents and hopes and dreams. He had friends. He was an A student through 9th grade. He was awarded a DAR medal. He played the piano and the guitar. He put The Child’s Garden of Verses to music when he was nine. He wrote poetry. He loved skin-diving. Marc was a first-rate son in a family of five children.

Marc graduated seventh in his high school class of more than one hundred. He earned five athletic letters. In his third year he was sent to Bennington College to participate in a program for “outstanding juniors” in Vermont high schools. He ran and won the 880. His skiing was something to see. What a dancer. What a decent human being.

But all that ended abruptly on a rainy Fall day when Marc’s chemistry turned around. He’s been hospitalized six times in the past twenty years. That’s half his life gone. No vacations. No holidays. No lovers. No more suits. Only shabby clothes and shabby treatment.

Maybe that’s because people don’t want to cope with a person who’s not “together,” who talks in riddles, who can’t sustain an idea for more than a few minutes when he’s psychotic, when he’s hallucinating and delusional.
A life-threatening illness? Sometimes schizophrenics have been known to take their own lives. “There’s always a possibility now or in the future that this may happen,” the doctors tell me. There are “serious side effects” to the medicine Marc is given to minimize his symptoms. “It’s a trade-off,” the doctors say. In Marc’s case, it’s medicine or no functioning at any level. But Marc doesn’t want medicine. “The research is still primitive,” the doctors say. Schizophrenics often speak of God. What but an abiding faith can keep them from slipping away?
Now no one remembers the Marc interred behind a strange and unfathomable façade. People don’t see, perhaps they don’t want to see Marc’s wounds. And there’s no cast to autograph.

Marc’s songs sing of his pain:
“Borderline existence has me rocking in my cage
The dreamer’s out in space now and I’ve not yet come of age
They’re turning every page in my mind, they’re turning every page
But I’m not worried. No … I’m not worried …

I suppose I can’t blame those who they turn away. But how does a mother stand by and watch her children suffer? Often I cry. Without reason some say. Maybe it’s because I can’t make my son well. Or maybe it’s because there are no flowers for Marc.