This is a cautionary tale unrelated to the usual music related themes I tend to favor. A younger family member has for nearly a decade been the caretaker for his now 91 year old mother. There have been the expected ups and downs with hospitalizations and rehab stints and frequent complaints of pain, boredom and lately of isolation due to our strictly adhered to social distancing. I confess I went three weeks without personally checking in on them. When I finally made the excursion to their shared space I found my young (58) friend was agitated, more paranoid than I’d ever seen him and talking about how this hurricane season (in FL) was gonna be devastating, the riots of justifiably angry people were gonna be knocking on the neighborhood doors, the crazy dictator in the White House was about to effect a coup and how the neighbors were talking shit about him and his mom. I could grant him the reality of the first three but no one ever talked shit about his lovely mom. He would not sit still and watch TV with us but kept up a routine of cleaning house, waxing cracked mangos (like we needed more than the 1000 good ones the tree produces yearly) and even bringing bags of mangos to some neighbors’ dad who he said he did like. I left after reminding him that putting shutters up without an active hurricane in the area was against HOA rules and he should collapse them. He said he would but (fortunately as it turns out) didn’t.
But something was off about this behavior and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. A couple days later I called his brother to see how they were all doing only to be told that there was a policeman with him right now asking for information about his brother. “Why,” I asked? It seems that the boy had gone berserk and was tearing up the house. “WTF?!” was all I could muster. Then the 25 (?) year old policeman got on the phone and told me they were negotiating through a locked door with someone nearby (couple miles away) who was not rational and had already destroyed a significant amount of property. Fast forward a bit and when I arrived on the scene, the drama was over, everyone was alive if not entirely well and a perpetrator had been hauled off to a hospital for treatment of cuts and bruises to feet and hands to be followed by a mental health evaluation. The scene inside the apartment reminded me off The Shining. He had taken an axe to the walls, furniture, refrigerator, picture window, stereo, china cabinet (destroying generations of antiques) and most of the tangible property his mother owns downstairs. The upstairs was untouched. Apparently, he had carried his mom downstairs, set her on the couch and made her witness the destruction of her things although never hurting her physically. When asked by a nurse at hospital why he had done it, after some verbal abuse he told her that “there were Trumpers in the walls” and he was gonna get them.”
Right.
I am the political one in the family, always railing about the latest Orange Treason-weasel disgrace. The rest all agree then turn back to watching the business news channels or the now frightening Weather Channel. But something pushed him off the rails despite no history of police arrests, violent behavior or the like. Is tRump, Covid-19, isolation, too long caring for an elderly relative that he had only on the job training for or some underlying undiagnosed mental health condition at work here? Yes and probably/maybe/who knows. You read about the stress this whole 2020 crisis has put on everyone and the resulting damage to relationships, lives and loves. Seeing a recently axed apartment puts a different hue on things. His mom is safe and being cared for elsewhere while we await recommendations and findings from the hospitals. Thoughts, prayers, wisdom and lets GOTV not kill each other.
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