Return to index

“Breakdown” 

Christmas 1987

By Charles Moon

     Just when everything is going so right, it can go wrong. Again.

      I was on the fast track to the American dream in 1987. Elizabeth and I had just passed our second anniversary and we already had all the symbols of success that our parents worked years to acquire. I had settled into my job with Lee and Stephens Engineering and I had even been assigned the prestigious duty of supervising the internship program with the local university. I had passed my annual review with flying colors and received a substantial salary increase. Elizabeth had found permanent employment as an administrative assistant to the divisional chairman of McQuay International. Our cars were paid for and our house was furnished. I had just completed renovating the attic of our small but very livable house in the suburbs into additional living space. We had even managed to save a few dollars for the future. The future looked bright for David and Elizabeth Branch.

      In mid-November we were assigned a new intern. Barbara Dwight was shy and withdrawn. Had she been any more soft-spoken she would have been silent. My first task with a new intern was to assess their abilities so that I could properly assign projects to them. Barbara was barely competent and lacked any kind of initiative. If she ran into a problem, she would sit at her drafting table until someone came by who could help her. She never sought the help directly. This required a great deal of supervision or she would have wasted an entire day waiting for an answer to the most basic of questions. She was scheduled to work Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for six weeks at which time I was supposed to submit my evaluation to the university along with samples of her work.

      On the second day of Barbara’s internship I was waiting for a messenger from Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania who was supposed to deliver the technical specifications for I-beams we needed to order for a large bread bakery we were designing. The project was for Lee and Stephens’s most important client, Midline Bakeries, and was our biggest assignment to date. We had already delayed the meeting with Midline once because we didn’t get the specs on time. Barry Emerson, my sales rep, promised we would have them by noon today. I was beginning to get nervous around 11:00 when they hadn’t shown up yet.

      Barbara was sitting on her stool looking at me like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck, about to become a hood ornament. I had no idea if anything I was saying was penetrating into her brain. The receptionist paged me and I took the call at the phone next to Barbara’s table.

      “Hello, this is David Branch.”

      “Mr. Branch? This is Mary from Bethlehem Steel returning your call.”

      “Hi Mary, I was trying to get in touch with Barry Emerson. He is supposed to be dropping off the specs on those structural beams.”

      There was dead air on the other end of the line.

      “Mary? Are you still there?”

      “Mr. Branch, Barry is in New Jersey. He’s not scheduled to see you today.”

      “He told me we’d have the specs by noon today. Is somebody else bringing them?”

      “I don’t know. Barry might have asked somebody else to take them.”

      “Can you get in touch with him and have him call me as soon as possible? I’ve got clients coming this afternoon to review the project.”

      “I’ll page him right away, Mr. Branch.”

      “Thanks, Mary.”

      I hung up and returned my focus to Barbara, who hadn’t moved an inch while I was on the phone.

      “Sorry Barbara, where were we?”

      She looked at me with a glassy-eyed stare. I wasn’t sure anybody was home and it was beginning to annoy me. I had assigned her a simple task of redrawing window details with slightly altered dimensions. A first year student should have been able to finish it without any direction at all, but I had to demonstrate the technique for Barbara. Twice. The receptionist paged me a second time and I took the call.

      “Barry, where are my specs?”

      “I’m sorry David. They weren’t ready this morning.”

      “What do you mean they weren’t ready this morning? You promised me last week when they were already late that I’d have them by noon today.”

      My teeth clenched tightly and my fist gripped the phone receiver until my knuckles turned white.

      “Sorry, David.”

      “Sorry David? That’s it? Damn it Barry, I need those figures. I’m going to look like a complete idiot.”

      “I don’t have them, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

      “You didn’t even fucking call me. I need those figures TODAY!”

      I was yelling into the phone at this point.

      “Now I have to tell Doug Stephens again that we won’t be ready for the meeting today , because of you. I am going to look like the world’s biggest asshole because of you, Barry. If you can’t get me those specs today, don’t bother to get them to me at all.”

      “I’ll see what I can do, Dave.”

      Barry hung up and I walked up to the front office to see Doug Stephens. He was as angry as I was but he directed his rage at the messenger, not the culprit. He called me names and accused me of incompetence. At the moment, I believed everything he was saying. Later in the day he apologized for his outburst towards me and told me to give the steel order to a competitor in Pittsburgh. Barbara Dwight was left on her own for the rest of the day. She got very little accomplished.

      Friday morning Barbara was supposed to be at the firm by 9:00 a.m. but by 10:00 a.m. she hadn’t arrived. I called the university to see if there was a problem. Her faculty advisor picked up the phone.

      “Hi. This is David Branch at Lee and Stephens. Barbara Dwight didn’t come in this morning. Was she told that this is a professional office and if she is going to miss the day she must call?”

      “Barbara has requested to be transferred to a different internship location. She won’t be going there any more.”

      “Why?”

      “To be honest, she said you were mean to her.”

      “WHAT?”

      “That’s what she told me. She was very upset so I thought it best to relocate her.”

      I wracked my brain, trying to remember what I said or did that could have been misconstrued for meanness. The only thing I could think of was the phone call from Barry Emerson.

      “I had to ream out a vendor on the phone and it was right in front of her. He missed his second consecutive deadline and I needed to deal with him. But I never said anything directly to Barbara.”

      “She didn’t give me any details. She was far too agitated to talk about it.”

      “I’m sorry if it upset her. Please pass along my apologies to Barbara. But it is something that happens in business and probably more frequently than it should. If she can’t handle it, she might want to consider changing her career path.”

      That was how it all started.

      Friday night I had trouble sleeping. I woke up in a cold sweat almost every hour. At 4:00 a.m. I moved to the couch to keep from waking up Elizabeth. When she did finally wake up, I was sitting on the sofa under two blankets shaking uncontrollably. I was pale and scared. I didn’t know what was happening to me. Every muscle in my body had reached its maximum tension and they were tossing me around as if the earth was quaking under me. Elizabeth was terrified at the sight of me like that. She brought me another blanket and held on to me. I was shaking so hard she could feel it through three blankets.

      The tremors would ease for a few minutes and then return with their original fury. Gradually as the morning passed, they subsided. Elizabeth called our Doctor as soon as her office opened. They took me right away.

      I felt better at the Doctor’s office. The shaking had ended and I had stopped sweating. The doctor ran some general tests and asked me a long list of questions. Finally after she had eliminated all of the physiological reasons for my symptoms, she suggested I should see another doctor – someone who specializes in this sort of thing. On my way out of her office the nurse gave me a referral slip to see a psychiatrist.

      I took a little comfort in knowing I wasn’t having a seizure or was physically ill, but I knew that mental illness can be hereditary and my father’s long struggle with what was ultimately diagnosed as manic depressive disorder terrified me. I was afraid I was going to lose my mind and my wife in the process.

      Saturday night was uneventful. I went to bed with Elizabeth holding me, which provided a great deal of comfort. A few times during the early hours I felt my muscles tense, but I was able to focus and relax long enough to let the spasms pass. Sunday morning I fell apart again. The shaking lasted for an hour.

      I was exhausted by noon, and still the attacks continued into the evening. Monday I was in no condition to go into work so Elizabeth called for me to let them know I was home sick. She did not tell them the details of the illness. The referral card the doctor gave me was stuck to the refrigerator. I had no intention of using it if I could beat this thing myself.

      I battled the symptoms all day long and was feeling pretty good by the time Elizabeth got home from work. She was relieved to find me relatively happy and calm, watching television.

      Tuesday I felt well enough to attempt to go to work. It was a big mistake. Tuesday mornings we held weekly staff meetings to review all active projects and discuss future work. I arrived on time and assumed my usual place at the conference table. Doug Stephens started the meeting with a review of the Midline project.

      I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach. My biceps tightened and became numb, radiating the tingling down through my forearms to the tips of my fingers. My shoulders hunched and I felt like I was about to start shaking uncontrollably again. I got up from the table and excused myself from the meeting.

      I thought I could control it. I thought it would get better on it’s own but there I was with my arms crossed so tightly across my chest that I found it difficult to breathe. I was pacing rapidly around a table in the drafting department when Doug Stephens poked his head around the door.

      “Are you all right David?”

      “I don’t think so, Doug. I have to go.”

      That was all I said. I ran out the back door and jumped in my car. It took me only five minutes to drive home. Within seconds of walking in the door I had ripped the card from the refrigerator and was dialing the psychiatrist.

      Elizabeth was terrified and I didn’t blame her. She had not bargained for a husband with psychological problems severe enough to require medication and possible hospitalization. I was beyond scared for myself and my wife. I had seen this sort of thing rip my own family apart. It was out of my control to do anything about it when my father’s antics sent everyone around him into an emotional tailspin. It seemed to me that I was as out of control now as I was then only I was no longer ten years old and it was me who was doing it. The shaking got worse.

      The first thing the psychiatrist did was to write a prescription for mood leveling narcotics. I don’t remember anymore what the exact drug was, but they were small white pills about the size of a plump sesame seed. And, for their diminutive size, they were potent. I felt the effects of the medication almost immediately and it wasn’t pleasant. It was as if I had been placed in a constant state of semi-consciousness. The shaking was reduced to sporadic tremors and the anxiety had dissipated into mild depression. Those were the benefits. The problem was that the drugs also removed the positive feelings as well. There was no joy or excitement, no anticipation or hopefulness. The world had turned flat and gray and I was stuck in the middle of it.

      Drugs were only prescribed to allow me to function without the need for hospitalization. The therapeutic aspect of my treatment was bi-weekly analysis. I met with Dr. Mohler every Monday and Thursday for an hour. There were a few pointed questions and a standardized test or two to evaluate my personality type, but mostly I talked and he listened. Therapy made things worse before it made them better. Before I could deal with all the feelings I had been repressing for so many years, I had to bring them to the surface, no matter how painful or debilitating.

      The first few weeks were not easy for me and I fear, were even harder on my wife. The worst part was I didn’t seem to be able to care about the effect my disorder was having on Elizabeth. The medication had seen to that. It was a very disturbing to feel guilty and not care.

      The incident at work with Barbara Dwight and Barry Emerson had been the trigger, but they weren’t the cause. To this day, I don’t know why that particular series of events forced feelings I never knew I had to come bubbling to the surface, but they did and now I had to deal with it.

      Ultimately a name was given to my condition. “Acute Anxiety Attacks” or “Severe Panic Disorder.”  Whatever the clinical designation, it meant that I was prone to uncontrollable feelings of panic and anxiety that manifested in physical symptoms like seizure-like shaking fits. The “acute” and “severe” parts meant it affected me to the point of not being able to function.

      We did not seek the support of Elizabeth’s family. I didn’t think they’d understand and Elizabeth didn’t know how to explain it. The stigma attached to seeking psychiatric treatment didn’t help. We also didn’t seek out the support of my family for the simple reason that, for the most part, they were the cause of my condition. It would have been like throwing gasoline on an open fire at that point. Eventually we had become isolated from almost everybody in our lives by the time the holiday season descended upon us.

      Christmas in 1987 was tolerable only through the help of modern chemistry. The drugs kept me functional but lacking in any emotions whatsoever. At the Christmas Eve gathering at Elizabeth’s parents, my lethargy was explained as a touch of the flu combined with nondescript troubles at work. We blamed a good deal of our absences from family functions on the stresses of my managing Midline the Bakery project even though it had been successfully completed weeks earlier. If anybody suspected otherwise no one said anything.

      Christmas day was another matter. We decided not to visit anyone, opting for a quiet day alone. My family had already been informed of my condition and was understanding if not sympathetic. Mom worried about me as was to be expected. She was worried for Elizabeth, too. She had watched her own family disintegrate with the help of mental illness and it looked like history was about to repeat itself. She knew from years of dealing with it in my father, there was very little anybody could do except hope. She was good at that.

      Andy was away at graduate school completely immersed in academia and Terry sent his greetings from the tropics. Mom was alone, too so Elizabeth suggested it would be nice to ask her to come to our house. It was acceptable to me. The drugs had seen to that.

      Mom arrived with a shopping bag full of trinkets. She barely had her coat off before she started passing out bags of candies and little finger puzzles. Elizabeth was still young enough to feel a lot of that childlike exhilaration when presented with playful little tokens. I was young enough as well, but I wasn’t feeling anything. The drugs had seen to that, too.

      Mid-morning Elizabeth disappeared into the bedroom and returned with a large box in her hands. It was wrapped in red paper with a white ribbon and appeared to be on the heavy side, demonstrated by the way she was struggling to get it through the door.

      She put the box on the floor in front of me. It had my name on it. I pulled at the wrappings until it tore at one side to reveal a corrugated cardboard box held together with large copper staples. The rest of the paper peeled off easily. The printing on the box said it contained a state-of-the-art compact disc player that matched my component stereo system exactly. If there was any real excitement and gratitude welling inside me to thank my wife for such a generous and thoughtful gift, it couldn’t make it past the medication.

      Elizabeth had a satisfied smile on smile on her face anyway.

      “Your mom and I pitched in together to get it for you. I hope you like it.”

      “I love it. This is the best gift ever. Thanks Beth. Thanks mom.”

      I hugged them both and forced a smile. Then I wadded up the shredded wrappings and stuffed them in the garbage can. I knew Elizabeth must have invested a lot of time and effort, not to mention money, in purchasing this gift. I knew she must have recruited the help of my mother and had been saving for this long before November. I also knew that she was expecting her gift to be received with the same amount of enthusiasm that she presented it with. Today that was not possible.

      Whatever expected reaction I was able to fake, it was because I knew how to pretend at Christmas from years of experience. The truth was, I didn’t feel anything at all.

      Elizabeth accepted my artificial emotions as genuine, perhaps because she needed to believe they were genuine. I knew otherwise. Of all the feelings that were suppressed by Dr. Mohler’s little white pills, one made it through on Christmas day. Guilt.

Years ago I had watched my mother reach the saturation point with my father’s behavior in a shower of glass, gold and lemons. I didn’t blame her then for hating him and I didn’t blame her now either, even though I had a better idea of the kind of torment my father must have experienced. He had been the cause of many disappointments in our lives and it came out in therapy that I blamed him for a good deal of it, including poisoning my ability to enjoy Christmas, and cause me inadvertently, year after year, to ruin it for myself. I had ruined Christmas one more time for myself and my wife, and I didn’t blame Elizabeth if she hated me for it.

      I was weaned off the drugs and the therapy over the next six months. Elizabeth had managed to survive my crisis and stay with me regardless of the consequences. My position at Lee and Stephens was still secure and life once again seemed livable.

# # # # #

NEXT | HOME