I’m certain my father would have ended up on the streets or in prison if my mom hadn’t taken on the emotional burden and financial cost of his care. And still, having a family member manage his care wasn’t enough to prevent tragedy.

My father had always seemed immortal to me, like a Norse god.

Tall and broad, he had a thick close-cropped copper beard, shoulder length hair, and was frighteningly charismatic, in an off-kilter sort of way. He inexplicably, never having lived in the country, insisted on wearing battered cowboy boots and a thick leather belt, on which hung, a large hunting knife, a brass Norton buckle, and the (mostly) empty threat of violence for children who stepped out of line.

Despite his many threats that he’d tan our hides with the leather strap of his belt, he was only very occasionally physical with us children. He seemed to be aware that he was capable of extreme violence, and so worked hard at suppressing this aspect of his nature.

The few instances my father did lose control during my childhood, the result was terrifying. In the aftermath, he’d apologize for the physical damage and admit that he’d been wrong to blow up. I’d inevitably forgive him. Not because I lacked a sense of the wrongness of the violence, but because I could see that he felt deep shame and sadness at having hurt me and would take it back, if only he could.

***

He was the product of a deeply religious mother and an abusive and harsh authoritarian father.

His father, he told me, would beat him and his siblings brutally—one backhand for every year of their miserable lives. School photos were painful to look at, a catalogue of livid cheeks and split lips.

He recounted stories of horrific violence. If one child misbehaved, his father, a war vet and police sergeant, would line the rest of the children up in a row to watch while he beat their sibling. He’d often be forced to kneel on concrete for hours on end. One time, he said when his father was really angry, he stuffed his head in the dryer and slammed the door on it repeatedly.

When he’d been drinking, he would talk of the abuse, how his siblings would implore him to give in and cry, but how he’d instead laugh, never giving his old man the satisfaction of watching him break. This was a salient aspect of his nature. His inability to simply give. He would say of the abuse that he experienced, that he knew that if his father exhausted his anger on him, there’d be less left over for his siblings. But I think it also galled him to cede to his father, a man he saw as a bully, and as punishment for this stubbornness he endured the worst of his wrath.

I often wonder if my father’s childhood hadn’t been so brutal, if he would have ended up as sick as he did.

How much of his personality and eventual illness was due to biology and how much could be put down to abuse and a simple lack of nurturing. The risk for developing Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but having all the genetic components isn’t a guarantee that a person will go on to develop the illness. Something else within the environment seems to be required to tip the scales.

It’s possible that his own father had been abusive because he’d struggled to manage his own mental illness.

He’d been in the war and witnessed terrible things, even received a Purple Heart after being shot in battle. His Canadian comrades had sent him off, wounded, to paddle back to their boat on a piece of flotsam in an attempt to save him from capture by the Germans. They knew the fate that awaited a Polish man who failed to escape German capture. He survived the sea, and his injuries, but many from his platoon died that day.

I never met my grandfather, he passed before I was born from heart failure, but I can’t imagine someone experiencing the horrors of war and not bringing back some small kernel of darkness seeded within the recesses of their heart.

Something else that may help explain my grandfather's legendary violence, is that he was a diabetic. It’s not uncommon for diabetics to experience fits of rage due to wild fluctuations in blood sugar.

Could his father’s fits of brutality be due to an unfortunate confluence of biology and medication side effects? Or was there something else, a history of abuse, or a deeply ingrained genetic trait that he simply couldn’t override?

I try to tease these things out, to understand cause and effect. It’s never been enough for me to simply accept a fact; I need to know the why and the how of it. But the truth is, I don’t think anyone can really know where nature ends and nurture begins. When looking at my dad’s upbringing, and his own parent’s personal issues, I can’t help but think these two things are inextricably entwined.

Like the Ouroboros, nature and nurture are the snake that eats its own tail. There can be no divide, because there is no clear beginning, no absolute ending.

***

My father suffered two major accidents over his lifetime.

His first accident was described by family as a near fatal run-in with the front end of a Ford. Around the age of five, he had run out into the street after a ball and was hit by a car. His religious mother refused to take him for medical care. She instead prayed for his recovery, believing God would take care of him.

His second major accident happened while driving long-haul truck through the mountains in northern British Columbia. After swerving to miss a deer, his rig busted through the side rails and plummeted down the mountainside, landing tail up at the bottom of a 100-foot embankment.

Two crushed vertebrae, a broken sternum, and a skull fracture. Somehow, he willed himself to crawl back up the embankment to the road and flag a car for help. He’d been driving long-haul in shifts with another driver—I can’t recall which of the two was driving. My father’s determination to get up from the ditch that day saved them both from a rocky grave.

He received no real follow up or rehabilitation treatment for the skull fracture, which surely caused some degree of brain injury. He was given bandages for the broken bones and sent on his way with pain meds.

Is it possible these accidents, or lack of medical treatments, resulted in some permanent damage? Maybe mental illness is like a Jenga tower, where the effects are cumulative. Each successive trauma and illness precipitates a small weakening of our core strength until we finally just fall apart.

It’s possible he could have endured all this, but for an inherited defect. A predisposition towards insanity.

My grandmother, too, was mentally ill.

***

Outcomes for people with mental illness are often dependent on having some support system, but even the best support system isn’t enough to navigate an ineffective and labyrinthine mental healthcare system where the treatments are often as bad as the illness.

I can remember at maybe fourteen going to the family doctor, just my mom and me, without my father, and pleading with our family doctor to help us.

My father’s psychosis was out of control. The doctor, who my dad had to see regularly to get his pain meds, was well aware my dad was ill thanks to his incoherent rambling about conspiracies and implants during his appointments. He held his hands up and said that he couldn’t offer any help beyond prescribing psych meds.

We ambushed my dad and coerced him into the doctor's office. Surprisingly, we were able to convince him to take antipsychotics for a short while, but I’m not even sure they helped, and the medications caused such terrible side effects that he quickly abandoned them.

I’m certain that he had always suffered from some form of mental illness, turning to drugs and alcohol to self-medicate, but as the years progressed, so too did his paranoia. After the head and back injuries he’d sustained during his accident made it increasingly difficult for him to work due to chronic pain, his paranoid delusions became all consuming.

He would sit at the table with his guns for hours on end, mumbling to the walls, talking to some unseen spectre. Sometimes he would stare off blankly, mute and immobile for long periods, or cautiously peer out through the tobacco-stained lace curtains of our kitchen window, scanning for some unknown threat.

He believed he was being tormented by the police, that because he was the son of a cop, they were surveilling him and had implanted a chip into his shoulder to monitor him. On one occasion, I watched horrified as he tried to dig the imagined chip from the flesh of his shoulder with his hunting knife. 

Sometimes he’d interrogate us, trying to parse out if we, too, were in on the conspiracy to monitor him and his thoughts.

Haunted by unimaginable abuse (there had always been whispers of my grandfather’s “interference” with the children) wild eyed and fearful, he once confided to me that men in the cars that rode beside us on the highway were taunting him with their mouths open suggestively. I sat terrified in the passenger seat as he ran one of these imagined provocateurs off the road and attacked his vehicle with the polished oak Louisville Slugger he always kept in the trunk of our rusted-out Topaz for “protection.”

I remained in the car, helpless, screaming at him to stop. He would often have lucid moments in the middle of chaos and must have come to his senses at some point, because just as quickly as he’d begun, he stopped, got back in the Topaz, and sped off before the poor driver could make heads or tails of what had just happened.

We became fearful of his behaviour and reasoned that if medication couldn’t help, maybe something more drastic was in order.

He needed to be hospitalized.

My mom and I went together to the family doctor on our own again and demanded a solution. The doctor explained that the only options available to us were to convince him to admit himself, or to have him involuntarily committed.

The first option, voluntary commitment, would mean we’d have to get him to acknowledge that he was sick.

An impossible feat.

The second, an involuntary commitment, required an intent to harm himself or someone else. Our only option was to convince the police to commit him by force.

He believed the police were tormenting him—I suspect projecting his anger at his father, who’d been a cop—and had vocalized his intention to commit violence if they continued to torment him. We were able to persuade the police that he was indeed a threat. But we knew we would have to face him and answer for our treachery after his eventual release.

When people are delusional, the focus is usually on how frightening it is to be around them, but few people can understand what it must be like to believe that the world is against you, or the absolute terror someone suffering from a delusion feels at the horrifying thoughts and hallucinations that plague them.

I was allowed to visit him once at the hospital. I’m still haunted by the look of betrayal on his face during the brief visitation. Even during the worst of it, I think he had mostly believed we were still on his side, so he couldn’t understand why we’d turned on him. How could we, his family, deliver him into the arms of his tormentors?

Hospitalization lasted, I think, a little over a month. He learned to hide his thoughts from the doctors and was able to convince them to release him without much difficulty. Once home, he seemed pleased at having outsmarted them and quickly stopped taking his medications, happy to be rid of their debilitating side effects and free of their “mind control.”

We, his family, were once again left to manage his increasingly erratic behaviour and paranoia.

During the worst of my father’s illness, his friends had grown impatient and annoyed by his disturbed ramblings and had dropped off one by one. Even his siblings had stopped calling. What could they do? They weren’t professionals and certainly weren’t equipped to deal with a man in the grip of paranoid delusions.

This scenario is all too common for those with mentally ill family members. The shift to pharmaceutical treatments effectively brought about the end to costly institutional care. This was a boon for cash strapped governments, so they encouraged it full scale. But the shift from institutional to drug-based treatment turned out to be a double-edged sword for the mentally ill and a plague to the communities who were left to manage the sick with inadequate supports.

Deinstitutionalization was supposed to end inhumane forced confinement, and I suppose it succeeded in that goal if you don’t count the people with mental illness who ended up incarcerated instead, but it provided no viable alternative, save a patchwork system of grossly inadequate and ineffective community-based supports.

The idea that mental illness can be effectively managed with drugs is a relatively new one, with not nearly as much empirical evidence to support its efficacy as should be needed to justify the use of drugs that cause such terrible side effects, morbidity, and in some cases, even increase mortality. The history of psychiatry is rooted in unproven theories, eugenics, misogyny, and some of the most unethical and inhumane practices of any medical profession. Things such as lobotomies, forced internment, and compulsory sterilization, were not long-ago common practice within the field, and ridiculous theories about hysteria and Freudian psychobabble about penis envy and Oedipus complexes abounded.

So, if pharmaceuticals aren’t the solution to deinstitutionalization or the panacea once promised, and there’s nowhere to house people who’ve lost the ability to care for themselves or function in society, where does that leave the patients and their families?

As a teen struggling with my own mental illness, I wasn’t equipped to deal with the demands of a mentally ill family member. I left home early and eventually took off across the country; moved as far away from the chaos as I could get.

***

I think I half expected the call, but it was still a visceral shock when it came. He had shot at an empty vehicle in the neighbour’s drive that he thought was surveilling him. His delusions of persecution had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The cops were finally there to take him down. 

My mom, seeing the police cars pull up and realizing how dire the situation was, slipped out the door in the middle of February in just a T-shirt. My father made no attempt to stop her.

He holed up with his guns and refused to surrender. The police called the home phone. He picked up and said he was tired of being harassed and surveilled. He said that if he was going down, they’d all have to go down with him. At some point he seems to have had a lucid moment, or possibly changed his mind on this, because he told the officer on the phone that he just wanted to leave peacefully. All he wanted was to be left alone.

After six hours, he got in his truck and attempted to leave. A police officer rammed his truck. The impact caused massive trauma, crushing multiple bones on the left side of his body. Around that point the police tape recording somehow ran out.

Most officers insist he shot first. One witness thinks maybe that’s wrong and suggested one of the bullets meant for my father might have accidentally hit the officer who rammed him. 

The toxicology report of the fallen officer revealed that there was cocaine in his system. A later inquiry into his death called into question the decision made to ram my dad’s truck and showed the officer was doing a specialized tactical job he wasn’t even trained or properly equipped for.

The details don’t seem to matter much anymore. The result is that an officer died, and my father was shot repeatedly. Far more than was necessary to subdue. Miraculously, he was still alive, but was deemed unworthy of medical attention and he was left to bleed out in the snow. He would die at the hospital from what might have been a preventable loss of blood, had he not been neglected so long and received prompt medical attention at the scene.

When my brother received the call, he was told my father was still alive. He was the first to reach the hospital and he asked the officer in the hallway which room our dad was in. The officer just smirked and pointed him to my father’s room. He didn’t even bother to warn him he’d already passed.

The headlines read, “Cop Killer.”

They called him a monster. There was an outpouring of support for the family of the officer. I too, mourned for the family of the police officer, but wondered if it was ok to mourn for my father and my own family. How do you reconcile the memory of someone you love with the knowledge of something horrible they’ve done?

There was little mention of his illness, or that the police were made aware of his mental state that day and had no one at the scene during the lengthy standoff with any mental health crises training. There was also scarce acknowledgment of the mental health support we had sought for him for years in vain.

The day he died, it had been a full two years since I’d spoken to him. Later, after I’d flown home and we were allowed to collect a few family photos for his funeral, under police supervision, my mom passed me a note I’d written to him. It had been in his nightstand drawer amongst a few family photos and empty bottles of pain pills.

I don’t remember what prompted me to scrawl the note on the scrap of loose-leaf paper—I don’t even remember giving it to him—but in it I had told him that I loved him, and that I had forgiven him for his inability to be the father I needed. Like he’d ever had any choice. My mom said he’d kept it there beside him the entire time I’d been away.

A surprising number of people came to the funeral to pay their respects. A few recalled how he’d taken them in when they’d been jobless and needed a place to stay (we always had someone staying on our couch, “just until they were on their feet,” he would tell my mother). People talked about how he’d fixed their cars for nothing more than a thank you when they couldn’t afford to take it to a mechanic, or how he’d never pass a broken-down vehicle without stopping to help. A neighbour said they’d recently seen him give a coat to a child wandering outside in the cold without one.

My maternal grandmother said that even at his sickest, he’d make sure to shovel her walks for her. He’d been by to shovel only days before the shooting.

The staff at the funeral home covered the multiple bullet wounds in his head and neck the best they could, but there’s only so much makeup can hide. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to erase that final chilling image of the father I’d always thought so indestructible lying in that coffin.

He was not, as I had once imagined, immortal, and it seemed impossible to me that he should be there like that, his once strong body, broken and lifeless.