The funeral was held in the same cathedral where Grace had married Prince Rainier, where my mother had stood by her side as a bridesmaid all those years ago. The other members of Grace’s retinue were there to say good-bye, but my mother did not attend the service. By then, she had moved so many times that no one at the palace knew how to contact her to send her an invitation. Even if they had, my mother had neither the strength nor the means to travel.
* * *
GRACE’S DEATH, coming so soon after Robin’s, was more than my mother’s fragile health could withstand. She moved into yet another apartment in Philadelphia, this one in the projects, in a very bad area. I remember going to visit her there. It was winter, and even inside the temperature was frigid. There was no bedroom or separate kitchen in the apartment. I noticed that my mother had put a pack of American cheese on the window ledge. Why would she have put it there? Was it to keep it cool because she didn’t have power? Could she pay her bills? I didn’t ask. She was so gaunt—her hair was streaked with silver; she couldn’t afford to color it anymore.
That day, I kept my coat on throughout my visit.
I was four months pregnant and just starting to show. I didn’t want her to see, to know that I was going to be a mother. I felt such an intense need to protect my unborn child from her influence, to do things my own way. I stayed for about an hour. Then I left. Looking back, it breaks my heart that I could just leave her there. I was twenty-three. I didn’t know how to help her; I didn’t know what else to do.
* * *
MY DAUGHTER WAS BORN via C-section, just as I had been born. I promised her I was going to do whatever it took to give her the childhood I’d lacked. I read Nicole baby books, I played with her, I adored her.
David and I had moved to an apartment in the suburbs. I gave up working to devote myself to motherhood, to building my normal life.
It was here at the apartment that I got the call from a doctor at Kings County Psychiatric Hospital in Brooklyn.
“I am calling about your mother,” the doctor said.
What was my mother doing in New York? She was supposed to be in Philadelphia. I remember sitting down, preparing for the worst. Nicole was playing on the carpet in the living room, wearing a little pink dress, the light streaming in through the living room windows.
The doctor explained that my mother had been brought to the hospital babbling and incoherent. Somehow, she had managed to give the doctor my number.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked, terrified.
“You don’t know?” he asked, sounding surprised. “It seems to us that she has paranoid schizophrenia.”
I knew that my mother was in trouble. I knew that she was struggling. I knew there was something very wrong. But until now, no one had ever mentioned schizophrenia or a diagnosis of mental illness of any kind. I had no understanding of the disease; I just knew that I needed to do whatever I could to help her.
The doctor explained they weren’t going to be able to commit my mother. To keep her at the psychiatric hospital, she would have to be a danger to herself or someone else. Instead, they were going to send her to a place where she could be treated, where she would be safe. There was a shelter for mentally ill women age fifty-five and over on the Upper East Side. This would be a stepping-stone to housing, a temporary measure. The staff here would be able to get her the help, services, and treatment she needed.
This was how my mother found herself at the shelter at the old Park Avenue Armory on the Upper East Side.
At the shelter, my mother refused to take any medication. The staff tried to arrange for housing; she wouldn’t participate in the process. She felt she couldn’t trust them. In the coming months, everyone who knew her tried to persuade her to move. My grandmother in Ohio wanted her to come back to Steubenville and live with her there. There was a cousin in Steubenville who offered her a room. Another relative in Florida was going to lend her a condo rent-free until she got on her feet. I tried to persuade her to come to the suburbs near me, so we could be close. But she turned everyone down.
It was a devastating time for everyone who loved my mother. No one could understand why she wouldn’t comply with the staff and why she turned down our offers of help. It was never explained to us that this behavior was in keeping with her diagnosis; that those who are the most seriously mentally ill don’t realize that they are sick, so they often won’t accept help and treatment. It was only years later that I learned that her obstinacy was actually another symptom of her illness, that what my mother really needed was an advocate, someone to take charge of her life and intervene at every level. I was so completely uneducated about the causes and effects of mental illness. I simply didn’t have the tools I needed to be that person on her behalf.
I was also preoccupied. I was nearly thirty, the mother of two now; my son, Michael, had just been born. It was during this period that my daughter, Nicole, began to suffer with seizures. The first time it happened, she was two and a
