He just sits there, my 38-year-old son, looking down at his lap, his eyes tightly shut.  He just sits there, a can of diet coke in one hand — his sixth in the last three hours.  Occasionally he glances up at the TV, with his favorite channel MTV, playing a program about dating among twenty something's.  At night before going to bed, he drinks huge amounts of iced tea or some other caffenated drink, and then wonders why his sleep is interrupted.

He doesn't know how to use his electric shaver properly, and his beard is usually unsightly and spotty — unless his mother shaves him.  He doesn't know how to wear or care for his clothes.  Twice a year we buy him new clothes, but in a short time they look awful.  No matter how we try to make him look presentable, before long he is sloppy in appearance.

My son eats and sleeps, takes his daily shower, sometimes reads the paper, along with weekly-news magazines, and that's about it.  He is five feet, seven inches tall, and probably weighs 230 pounds.  When he is back home in Pennsylvania, he usually gets up around noon, eats at Burger King, and then goes back for supper at McDonald's.

When we are eating a meal with Mike he consumes the food like a maniac.  He shovels huge amounts of food into his mouth and then half chews it, before swallowing hard.  It is not a pleasant sight to see, but I guess he is so anxious that he can't help himself.  I can picture him sitting by himself at BK or McDonald's, the people around him gawking, even chuckling at the way he eats, how loud it is.

Mike has been noticeably mentally ill since he was fifteen.  He has been diagnosed as having a schizo-affective disorder, which is a combination of manic depression and schizophrenia.  For the last sixteen years he has been receiving both social-security supplemental and disability checks.  I should be used to it by now, but every so often I still can't help crying about it.

Even though I'm his father, I have only a superficial awareness of what it's like to be going through daily life chronically mentally ill.  It kills me to see him sitting there.  It bugs the daylights out of me to see how filthy and unkempt his clothes are.  When we go to his apartment, it is also filthy, very filthy.  Yet, when his apartment manager gives him a warning to clean his place or else face eviction, Mike honestly cannot understand what she is complaining about!

His two brothers are married, with children and a successful careers.  It really bothers Mike that he can't be like them.  After all these years he still does not accept his illness.  He still hopes someday he can become normal, find a girl to marry, and get a good job.  Yet, he can't handle the stress of volunteering just a few hours a week at the local hospital.  He stopped trying to work part-time years ago and couldn't hack it taking one course a semester at the local community college.  Oh my, what will the future bring, I cry to myself?

His brothers and their wives try to understand, and yet, they tell us they can't handle him around for too long a time.  They worry their sons will become mentally ill, as genetics are supposed to play a role.  They wonder if their sons will someday make fun of Mike, right in front of him.  Mom and Dad it is assumed will take care of Mike, our oldest son.  But Mom and Dad are in their early sixties and will not live forever.  What will become of Mike, when we are too old to supervise his life and care?

I'll never forget when he had his first breakdown, just a month short of his sixteenth birthday.  We were in Asheville, at the play, "The Miracle Worker," when Mike began to cry.  He said that some people in the balcony were talking about hurting him.  He cried all the way home, and in the middle of the night almost severely hurt his youngest brother when he came down the hall to use the bathroom.  The next morning in church he turned around and told a prominent attorney that he was the one who had been fooling with our home's electrical wiring that morning.

So began the long journey, which doesn't end until death:  Mike has tried suicide twice, the second time coming within a whisker of succeeding. Mental illness is not like taking a loved one to the doctor for the flu or broken arm.  There is no light at the end of the tunnel.  This is what is so depressing to the sick person and to his family.  I find myself sometimes wishing he would end it all, and then feel terrible.  Several times he has become toxic from taking too much of his medicine.

Last week we took Mike to the office of the mental health agency in the city of our new retirement home.  We needed to move him from his home 3,000 miles away.  He was the only one in our family east of the Mississippi.  In there sat men and women — looking just like Mike — staring either into space or at their laps, their clothes and persons wrinkled and dirty.  A few were reading books, while another few were constantly pacing back and forth.  The director of the county agency met with us for an hour.  She has been in this field for twenty-two years and understands.  What a relief to find a person who both cares and understands, who will be an advocate for Mike in his new home.

Next, we toured an old hotel used by the homeless and mentally ill.  They invited us to stay for lunch.  It was quite a place, a community of those afflicted with brain diseases.  Most of those on the staff are residents who have some disability.  Mike would not be responsible for "cleaning" his apartment, and that was a relief.  We arrived home and he headed upstairs for a two-hour nap.  He was exhausted and so were we.

A few days later, he flew back to his Pennsylvania home for a final three months before joining us in the Pacific Northwest.  Soon after getting to his apartment Mike called in a panic.  He had had a smooth flight but found a warning under his door from the landlord:  his apartment was considered a health hazard and must be cleaned or he faced eviction.

As we have many times during the last twenty-three years, we shared his anxieties, fears, and anger.  Why is the landlord picking on a mentally ill person?  Doesn't she understand?  Later after we'd calmed down, we recalled how filthy his apartment usually was, and we emailed him that he must get someone in there to clean the entire apartment, and we would pay them.

I pictured him sitting in his apartment, staring into space, his face red and twisted with rage.  I emailed him a second time, and "suggest" he not bad-mouth the apartment complex staff to other residents.  "Mike, please call your case-worker and ask her to tell the landlord you will be there only three more months."  So many times I have had to advise Mike as if he were still a ten year old.  I'm sick of it, but what else should I do, what else could I do?  I couldn't handle him for more than two weeks staying with us. He related to his mother like a little boy.  To see it made me sick to my stomach.  "Pretty momma," he called her, among other things.  She is sixty-one years old and quietly dignified.

He had to give his Momma a big hug and kiss on the cheek.  Sometimes he called her "squirrel face," and me, "potato head." We had asked him not to be so demeaning towards his parents.  We had asked him not to explicitly sexualize the women he saw during his walks around town.  It used to be every day he would email us with detailed descriptions of the body appearance of women he encountered at the bank and fast food restaurants.  He finally stopped that, saying only he had learned to do it from his dad, who was such a good teacher.

So much about Mike is bothersome, even obnoxious, yet I love him very much.  If only there were some cure for his illness.  I would do almost anything to see him well and happy.  Why, Lord, did you allow this to happen to our oldest, I have prayed many times?  He was such a beautiful, precious child.  It was only when he reached his teens that the drastic change in his behavior and appearance began.  

About three months later, I flew to Pennsylvania to help my oldest son with the sale of his furniture, along with packing the belongings he would take with him — our garage was filled with furniture we planned to give to him and his brothers.  Then we flew west together to Portland, towards a new chapter in both our lives.  Sitting next to him on the airplane, I noticed he had gained even more weight and had trouble being comfortable in the cramped quarters of his seat.  How much bigger will he get, I wondered?  What is his cholesterol?  I imagined it was sky high, along with other vital test results.  How long could he live like this, without taking better care of himself?  Could we do anything about it?  I did't think so.

He was very nervous about the move, even though he would be close to his family.  He had been in a small town in southeastern Pennsylvania for sixteen years.  Although he ended up with no close friends, he had numerous acquaintances.  Now, he would be living in a former hotel, about seven miles south of our home.  We had set definite boundaries so that he did not end up monopolizing our life.  We wanted our own life — I wanted mine.  Does this sound too harsh, then try going through twenty-three years with your child what we'd gone through!

After we got him settled in his two room small apartment, we dropped in one day to see how he was doing.  He was just sitting there, fast food scattered around him on the floor, watching MTV. "Mike, what are you doing spending the little money you have on fast food?  How much of your government checks goes toward paying for your meal here!" He giggled his silly, immature giggle, but the intense anger in his eyes betrayed how he really felt.

My wife and I had assumed that after all the time we had spent preparing our thirty-nine year old son for this beneficial move, that he would be more content.  It didn't work out that way, though.

One Monday morning we got a call from the resident manager telling us Mike had not been in his room or anywhere for three days!  Oh, my God, what has he done?  Has he hurt himself?  Has he hopped a bus and headed for nowhere, as he did years ago?  After another twenty-four hours, we reported him as a missing person.

The next day he called from the Canadian border.  He had tried, unsuccessfully, to cross over into western Canada.  When we told him to stay where he was until we could come get him, he told us he was confused and didn't know what he wanted.  His new home close to us had not brought him happiness.  He didn't think his future looked any brighter.  He hung up.

The next time we heard something was three days later, when the Seattle police called to tell us they had found his body washed ashore on Lake Washington.

At the memorial service at our nearby Episcopal church, I read several of Mike's poems, which we found in his belongings.  I could't make it through the third one I had chosen.  It's when I came to these lines that my emotions of all these years take over.  His handwriting had become almost a scribble, the paper stained and torn:

"Oh awful life, what have you given me but sadness and emptiness?  Like a stranger and outcast I have been since turning thirteen.  No one seems to love me.  I can't love deeply.  The pain of living is something that wouldn't go away. Will I ever know even a little bit of happiness?  I don't think so.  Sometimes the darkness of death seems better than the hell I know as life.  Oh God, why have you done this to me?  What sin did I do long ago that made the inside of my brain burn like the fires of hell."

"To my family, especially Mom and Dad, I say I'm sorry for what I've done to your life.  Most of the time I think you love me, for that I thank you."

The day after his memorial service, I sat by the window for hours, staring out at the fall rain, and praying to a God whose existence and love I doubt.  Will I ever get over this pain, this wound of grief?  Only time will tell.