My sweet boy, is tormented by mental illness and, really, I could never accurately convey to you just what that means or how it affects the rest of us. It's so hard to relay something so painfully abstract. Those well known physical illnesses? Yeah, they aren't alone in how grave and horrific they are. We might not hear about mental illness often, besides in jokes and glorified tragedies on the evening news, but mental illness symptoms, though often invisible, are just as real and agonizing. Oh, how many days and nights I've wished I could somehow join my sweet boy in the nightmare he endures, battles, in his mind. I wish I could cover him... hide him from all that taunts him. I wish I could undo the devastation of the symptoms of both Intractable Epilepsy and Juvenile Mental Illness.
Undo the devastation. Psychosis, depression, anxiety, paranoia, aggression and the like are legit symptoms that have filled and changed the rooms in our home, and in our beings. They are completely and utterly ugly - but they do not define our son. Our sweet boy is not ugly, weird, or a freak. He is sick with [mental] illness(es), secondary to severe Intractable Epilepsy and other abnormalities on his brain. This isn't his fault, and I cannot deny that some days I fear other's ignorance and hatred for things they simply do not understand.
I can't lie, it feels like mental illness has done a drive by robbery; leaving us stunned, violated, and trying to do an assessment of what's left of us. I still ache for what once was as I never got to properly say "goodbye". I never could have imagined what it's like to stay up with my son, night after night, because visual and audible hallucinations fill and frighten his little world. I don't think I somehow could have prepared myself for those moments he's unable to recognize our voices or our faces as his parents or to watch him frantically smacking the blankets and his body because "spiders are everywhere". Until you've experienced, first or second hand, psychosis disorders - you can't fully "get it". Trust me, I know. I never could have imagined this. I never could have grasped that such things existed in "normal families". You see, this isn't mere imagination gone wild or night terrors keeping him awake. This is sickness, in ways... at its worst. This isn't something I can make stop. Oh, how I wish I could.
I can't make it stop, but I know God is able. Yes, God and His Word can comfort and even heal our son completely. But let me just say this - we might be talking about mental illness here, and many consider it to be purely spiritual in nature, neglecting to acknowledge the legitimacy of brain/mental illnesses and labeling them as "lack of faith", "selfishness", or "sinful" without even taking a closer look into the reality of the situation. And, that's just foolish. I do believe that there is a spiritual side to everything, but there is also a physical - even when it comes to mental illness. You know, what makes our brain so different than our gut and heart or even our blood and lungs when it comes to illnesses? It's so easy to quickly clump disorders of the brain into its own freakishly strange and ultimately misunderstood category. It's easy to forget that God can heal our every headache, aunt who is dying of cancer, or the neighbor who has lupus - but He doesn't heal in every instance that we faithfully cry out for Him to. Yes, God can, but that doesn't mean that He will when we say He should - regardless of the type of illness we are facing. And, you know what? Just because God hasn't healed Evod of these sadly taboo illnesses, doesn't say anything negative about him; his life, his faith, his journey, his hope, his spirituality. And, neither does it say anything negative about others who battle, not only mental illness, but the stigmas around it.
Our son, just barely seven years young, sometimes finds it hard to want to be here... on this earth, anymore. I can't explain that. It's so searing, literally torturous for my heart to take in. In those sobering moments when I hear him utter such things, I am quickly thrust into remembering just how terrifying and truly threatening mental illness can be. I cannot say it enough... this is real. And, Evod isn't the only child facing all that he is. Children suffering and battling like Evod might be hard to spot, because they often look so "normal". So, as I am writing this I am praying that these vulnerable details would be used to shed light on this painful subject and spur us on to walk in love, grace, and compassion - regardless of the behaviors, symptoms, secrets we see or don't see in those around us.
When we find out that someone is mentally ill, or has sadly committed suicide after battling various forms of mental illnesses, we tend to quickly allow those things to define them; their life, their legacy. And, forget about them, as being a fellow human. Yes, this is terrifyingly real, and even scary at times, but our sweet boy is very much still here in the midst of it all. His tender heart and creative mind absolutely still exist. He, the beautiful, bright, and brave boy that God created, should never be forgotten or minimized under any label. I am not embarrassed of Evod's illnesses, none of them, but this truth will always stand; they [his illnesses] do not define him. God does.
When it comes to each of our lives and our deaths - we all have mysteries, sins, illnesses, stories that desperately need God's grace and mercy. That truth ties us all together, even with the ones who seem so different and far away from us, the ones who suffer in the often elusive, invisible, complex, piercingly painful, shocking, isolating ways of mental illness.
We all have parts of our lives, our stories, that are dreadful and likely a bit of darkness looms around them. And if those parts of us could speak they would more than whisper our pure need for Jesus. The darkness, regardless of the shade, reveals the truth that we all have more in common than the hearts beating inside of our chests. The truth is, not one of us is better or less in need of grace and mercy than the other in spite of the details that seem to polarize us on this earth.
"...when his lamp shone upon my head, and by his light I walked through darkness..." - Job 29:3
"He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy." - Colossians 1:17-18
