Carel Christiaan Antony Last:
Meisje met Tulband [Girl with turban]
(1835 - in or before 1839)

"Once we were empty nesters again … "

More than a year before we returned from Exile, well after we'd comfortably settled into Colorado, The Muse received an urgent message from her granddaughter, our GrandOtter. The Otter had struggled since graduating high school, and even achieving that success had proven extremely stressful. All drama aside, and there had been ample drama from The Otter over recent years; she suffered from a baffling collection of diagnoses. One suggested she exhibited symptoms of some borderline personality disorder that seemed to me to have been an over-the-border one. Whatever the context, when The Otter contacted us, we couldn't help but respond, for she was our GrandOtter, and we'd considered ourselves an implicate part of her childhood and life. If she were in trouble, we'd respond.

It was always difficult to separate the real from the imagined with her. I wonder if there was ever any meaningful difference between the two, for The Otter lived in a world incomprehensible to everyone else. Her living situation had become unbearable, but she had a solution. If she could move in with us, she was sure that her situation would quickly straighten itself back out again, as if it had ever been straight before. Moving in would require more than just a plane ticket, though, because she had stuff she couldn't leave behind. The Muse negotiated a tough deal. If she agreed, The Otter would also have to agree to certain conditions. This occupation would not be a vacation. She would have to work on whatever had been troubling her, and she would have to find some work to supplement our support. As she would, The Otter agreed to The Muse's conditions, though everyone understood that she would ultimately prove to be unable to live up to them.

We consulted with the husband of one of The Muse's co-workers. He was a professor of psychiatry at a local university. He listened patiently as we described The Otter's symptoms before asking if we'd just come into a large inheritance. We hadn't. Typically, he explained, someone exhibiting those symptoms would be treated by admission into a residential treatment program of not less than six months, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. With luck, forty percent of those enrolled would have shown some improvement by the end of their initial treatment. Few, if any, would ever fully recover. The chances that even well-intended grandparents might make a meaningful dent in her symptoms was clinically zero. Still, we could contribute by providing sanctuary as long as we could avoid taking personally the eventual failure. Let's say we entered into this adventure knowingly.

The Muse flew home, rented a van, and then drove back to Colorado with The Otter and her worldly possessions. Most of those possessions went into a storage unit since our Colorado house was small and already full of our stuff. We set up The Otter in the guest bedroom and then settled in for the healing to commence. We had seen her better and worse over the years, and she seemed better sometimes. She seemed genuinely grateful that we had taken her in and even helpful around the place after a fashion. We helped her find a therapist she could talk with over the phone, and we could afford. We transferred her multitude of prescriptions. On her good days, she was The old GrandOtter. On other days, she just seemed inconsolable. A few months in, the therapist resigned, reporting that she could not ethically continue consulting with TheOtter. She couldn't offer details, but we were experienced enough to understand that TheOtter had been playing games with her, probably, as she'd done before in therapy, preparing to discredit the therapist by accusing her of some indiscretion. It was a familiar pattern.

The Otter was never well enough to work. She was increasingly isolating herself, some days not leaving her room, which consisted of a bed and a television she'd bought over our protestations with some support money she'd somehow come into. Eventually, she'd violated all the conditions she'd agreed to as preconditions for moving into our place. What were we to do? We couldn't just evict her. Good fortune brought the younger brother of one of The Otter's high school friends traveling through on his way back to The Northwest. We agreed to him staying with us as he passed through, and The Otter was delighted at the prospect. Once he arrived, we were surprised when TheOtter invited him into her room. She, as if in response, suddenly became hypercritical of our hospitality. We recognized that she was vilifying us as a premise to leave, and we encouraged her premise, if not necessarily her criticism. It was as that co-worker's husband had predicted. This was clearly not our problem if only because we didn't seem to hold a solution for it.

The Otter left with her new friend and went incommunicado. His family agreed to take her in, and she moved in there until they also grew weary of caring for her. It's embarrassing to recall the story. In a better world, we would have inherited that fortune and could have placed her in some proper treatment facility. Her departure opened up more than our guest room again but cleared a final obligation remaining before we could comfortably depart Colorado and return home. Our GrandOtter, if not finally grown, had declared herself on her own. She would eventually meet members of a family that included someone who, a few years later, would become her husband. As of this writing, they've produced The Muse and my first great-granddaughter. This world continues spinning around. The Otter was holding down a job when she got pregnant, and her husband seems to be a responsible person capable of being a decent husband. He comes from an intact family, unlike TheOtter, who still speak with each other. These days that seems like a miracle.

Once we were empty nesters again, we were set to return from Exile.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz