Alex

"Mom," said Alex, "I would rather die than live like this."

A tall, broad, handsome 21 year old who loved basketball, on the outside he was the same old Alex. But he had become someone he did not want to be. And it was something he had no control over. It stemmed from some disorder deep in his mind that drove him into psychotic fits. "I feel like I’m in someone else’s body," he said once.

For the last couple of years, he had been undergoing psychiatric treatment. Maybe he had what is called bi-polar disorder. Maybe it was schizophrenia. Maybe manic depression. Whatever it was, Rita did everything in her power to get him treated for it -- pills, injections, hospitalisations. At first, he had fought it, not wanting to believe that this was happening to him. Eventually, he realised he had no choice. He knew there was mental illness on his father’s side. He knew that such diseases are often genetic. But because the illness was never effectively diagnosed, the medication didn’t really help.

After his parents’ divorce, he had lived with his father for a while, while his younger brother Caz stayed with Rita. When Alex got into trouble in his teenage years Rita took him away from the bad influences to live in Greensboro, North Carolina. He graduated from high school with honours. But once they came back to Cambridge, he seemed to get more difficult. He physically assaulted Caz for trying to protect Rita from one of Alex’s rages, and she had to call the police to subdue him.

"We don’t know if it was ’mad’ or ’bad’," says Rita. Looking back, the mental disorder may have been one of the factors behind the ’bad’ behaviour. Alex didn’t want to be bad. He tried hard to change his life. He tried working at various odd jobs. He tried living on his own. Nothing worked. The worse thing was that Alex, who could once have walked into any party and chatted up any girl, had lost his self-confidence.

After a year at a community college, he moved back home with Rita. They sometimes clashed over the usual things that adult children at home clash with parents about -- turn out the lights, don’t smoke in the house, take out the garbage. Alex complied with Rita’s rules. But he still had breakdowns. Visits to his father, whose acceptance he never stopped craving, and stepmother often triggered the incidents.

On his good days, he played with the children who came to Rita’s day-care centre at home. The children, toddlers to age four or five, loved him. They thought he was one of them, a gentle giant. They would chase him, climb on him, play with his things.

Older children, not in the day-care, had a tougher time with Alex. Rita’s friends’ daughters, like Miranda and Maha, got the rough end of his merciless teasing. But they still saw him as a friend. Miranda’s older sister Altaira, a high-school senior, sometimes babysat nine-year old Maha for Rita’s other friend. Sometimes Altaira got Alex to drive her over to pick Maha up from school.

Alex’s car was a mess. Maha cleaned it out once when he dropped her and her mother home from Rita’s, and filled a whole garbage bag of trash from it. And a pile of pennies and other small change that she gathered up for Alex. He gave her some of that change for helping out which thrilled her no end.

Caz, Alex’s younger brother who looks just like him, attends college at U. Mass. Amherst. He remembers when they played basketball, Alex would always beat him. The day Caz beat him, Alex congratulated him. "You beat your big brother," he said. He was proud of Caz, despite their rivalries.

He knew that Altaira liked him. He liked her too. They were close. But the voices in his head were getting worse. They were violent. He wouldn’t tell Rita what they said. "You don’t want to know," he said. "I’m never going to be [the] same person I was". He didn’t like the person he was becoming, pushed by forces outside his control. He abruptly cut off all contact with Altaira, told her never to call him again, refused to answer her phone calls.

Over the last two months he had become very passive, says Rita, very calm, peaceful, loving and quiet. He didn’t argue when told to turn out the lights or take out the garbage. He would either do it or tell his mother quietly that he had done it. No more yelling and shouting. No more threats of physical violence, of the kind that had once made her run out to a friend’s house to call the police because he was manic and wouldn’t let her near the phone.

But the voices were still in his head. They made him think that the CIA was out to get him. "I’ll get me before they get me," he told Rita. One day he called a couple of lawyers and left them voice mail messages, identifying himself and leaving his own cell number. "I’m in danger and I need help," he told the answering machines. Then he told his mother to turn on the local news at Channel 7. "You’ll see, they’re going to announce my death now," he said. Nothing Rita could say or do would make him budge from his position.

He developed fears about being alone. Last Saturday Rita went out with some friends. Alex asked to go with her. He didn’t want to be at home without her. "You’ll be okay, sweetie," she told him. "Cazzi’s home, you’re not alone. You’ll get bored where I’m going and end up taking a cab home." Alex saw the sense of that.

"Besides," Rita told him, trying to decrease his dependence on her and enable him to be independent again, "in a couple of weeks you’re going to be living away from me. You’re going to have to get used to it." Under a programme run by the Department of Mental Health, Alex was to share an apartment with three other young men. Rita had been with him to see the apartment, which wasn’t very far from her house.

"I’ll be back soon sweetie," she told him now, giving him a big hug. He squeezed her back tightly. "You’ll see, it’ll all be ok. You’ll be here when I get back, and nothing will have happened."

If she had known how wrong she was, she would never have stepped out of the house. Out with her friends, she kept worrying. Alex wasn’t answering his cell phone. Caz, prompted by her phone call to his cell, knocked on Alex’s door but received no answer. "He’s probably asleep, Mom," he said.

Still worried, prompted by her friend Rosemary, Altaira’s and Miranda’s mother, Rita rang again. "Go inside and check his body," said Rosemary. What a strange choice of words, Rita thought. Then they both heard Caz scream, and the line went dead.

By the time they reached home, the ambulance was already there. Caz had dialled 911. When he opened his older brother’s bedroom door, Alex was on the floor, dead. He had used a strong nylon rope he found in the basement. He had tried the back porch but it didn’t work. So he had gone back into his room, hooked the rope around the top drawer in a tall, heavy chest of drawers, and kneeling on the floor, leaned forward until he choked. He must have done it almost as soon as Rita left.

He could have put his hands down to the floor at any time to stop the pain, to start breathing again, but he didn’t. He left no note. He went quietly, with dignity, without harming anyone else.

Because he would rather die than live like that.



NOTE. I wrote this piece after coming home from Alex’s funeral. I met and became friends with his mother Rita D’Souza in October 2005, shortly after arriving in Cambridge, MA, on a journalism fellowship. She was from my hometown, Karachi, and we were introduced by Rita’s foster father, Arnold Zeitlin, who had set up the Associated Press offices in Pakistan during the 1960s. That was when Rita came to live with their family. They supported her studies and took her with them to Indonesia when Arnold was posted there. She still has family in Karachi although she eventually settled in the US, where she married and had two children, Alex and Cazimir. She and her husband divorced several years ago and she has since supported herself and her boys with the wonderful day care centre she runs from her home in Cambridge, close to the apartment I lived in with my daughter Maha last year.

I wrote this as a tribute not just to Rita’s elder son Alex, but also to Rita, a wonderful human being who has borne her terrible tragedy with her characteristic grace and strength, love and forgiveness. She agreed to let me print this article in the hope of creating greater understanding about mental disorders that are so often misunderstood, misdiagnosed and swept under the carpet.