What he found in the army, which he wrote about in his letters, although he could not name it, was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. Henryk was then 23 years old. He went into the army a bit arrogant and healthy as a horse. It returned as a wreckage of a man.
Maria kneels by the grave. He instinctively sweeps the leaves off the plate with his hand.
“No, he didn’t kill himself,” he says. – He died simply of cancer. He was 58 years old.
The dark, cloudy eyes of a man in his prime look from the black and white, oval-shaped tombstone photograph.
“He was handsome,” explains Maria calmly. – When we went to play together, the girls begged me to whisper a word to him about them. Then we stopped walking, because he was turning tables, he started brawls. The girls were afraid of him. And he liked blondes …
Maria is 70 years old. She is the younger sister of Henryk from photography and the third of six children of Aniela and Ignacy. He has the same dark, serious eyes as his brother. Thick hair sprinkled with gray. He comes to Henio’s grave because his parents have died and it is harder for the younger sisters to get out of the city. Henio was her beloved brother. It was to her that he sent long letters from the army when the hell of the disease began. Later, at home, on sleepless nights, he told her that he heard voices, many voices, and rarely loomed in the empty room of figures who wanted to hurt him. He reported how deep, how monstrous, how indescribable his fear was then. She never laughed at him, judged him, made no comments or advice. – He is sick, so we must love him twice – she explained to her younger siblings.
What he found in the army, which he wrote about in his letters, although he could not name it, was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. Henryk was then 23 years old. He went into the army a bit arrogant and healthy as a horse. It returned as a wreckage of a man.
Maria: – It was the beginning of the 60s. My father got a telegram saying he was to come and pick up his son. He went straight to a mental hospital, because they had already placed him there. Nobody explained too much to my father, didn’t explain. Henio fell ill and that’s it. I remember seeing him getting out of the cart with my dad. I thought that Heniek disguised himself as grandfather and wanted to do a joke to his sisters. He was emaciated, had stubble of a few days, too loose a jacket.
– Henio, what are you? – I ran to say hi. But he had strange eyes. Some amount of sadness and suffering that I have never seen in them before. I realized that this was no joke – says Maria.
After Henio returned home in a small cottage among the meadows, a new chapter in her life began. For everyone.
– The father took the brunt of the burden of his son’s illness. He gave my mother sleeping pills in the evening so that she would not see night attacks. In the morning, my mother would get up around five, light the stove in the oven and cook milk soup for Henio. After six, my brother had his first breakfast. Then he went to sleep again. During the day he was rather docile as a lamb – says Maria.
The nights were much worse.
– Dad watched over Hen for hours. It happened that he had to knock him to the floor and force him to bed. He made sure that his son did not hurt himself in any way.
Mostly Henio “came to the voices”. They harassed him, threatened him, taught him. My brother – like a catatonist – walked from wall to wall and gestured lively. He argued with them, argued, sometimes asked for something like a child. There were times when he managed to slip out the window at night. He ran naked in the countryside. Dad found him, for example, under a roadside cross. The son prayed spasmodically. When he saw his father, he lamented; – Get me out of here, because I can’t bear my burden. He told me later that he knew the suffering of the Crucified because he hung with him on the cross …
Another time, the brother would lock himself in a shed and design “machines”. Pages with calculations and graphs were flying around the room. Just like in “Beautiful Mind”, but Henio was not as lucky as the film’s protagonist. He never started a family and did not work professionally. Yet there have been years of remission. He was lively then, maybe less volatile and chatty, but he could do simple work, earn his own money. Even for the cigarettes he smoked so much.
Maria thinks her parents made a mistake of spreading the protective umbrella too tightly over her brother. That it should have a range of daily tasks to do. He could even dig ditches. A schizophrenic is not doomed to be idle. He can be trusted. However, he adds immediately;
– But who would take him? Those were hard times. The mentally ill was sentenced to social death. His parents wanted to protect him from this pain of rejection. They surrounded him with a cordon of unimaginably caring love.
On the other hand, the sisters and neighbors dealt with Henio’s disease in different ways. Jadwiga and Zofia understood him best. The latter had a special bond with him. She was able to accept him completely and respected him.
– Henio loved Zosia very much. It was she, as the only one of the siblings, who was not afraid to visit him in the hospital. She was patient and selfless. Completely honest with him. And Henio immediately sensed when someone was false to him, he hid. With a single glance, he could see through a man. Human hypocrisy rejected him.
It was worse with neighbors, extended family and strangers.
– The people in the village took several years to get used to my brother’s illness. Many remembered him from childhood as a handsome and bright boy. It was difficult for them to comprehend such an unexpected change. But the worst remarks were made to the parents. That they should have done this and that, if they had been in their shoes… I couldn’t hear it! It happened that doctors also led us, our relatives, to a shoemaker’s passion. Henio did not tolerate some medications very well. We explained that they hurt him, that he sleeps too much after them, or that he loses his appetite. Has memory impairment. Constant buzz in my head. He is plagued by depressive states. It got my father’s mind that a simple peasant wanted to do for a doctor. Son has to take drugs and enough.
Henio’s day looked like this;
– Around six o’clock, brother woke up for breakfast. Then he went to sleep. He got up to eat again, and went to sleep again. Mom made sure that he took the medications. She did not leave him until he swallowed the pills. In the afternoon, the brother livened up. He wandered around the house in pajamas and a bathrobe, and found himself doing various activities. He liked reading the press and watching TV. He was a very intelligent interlocutor. He was famous in the family for making good tea. He had a great sense of humor.
In really good times, he would get up in the morning and put on his clothes. Mom was beaming then. Henio went outside and did farm work. He could work hard from morning to night. He helped his father. He was joyful. When we came to visit our parents with our sisters, my brother would sit with our children at the table and explain mathematics to them and make dictations. In his youth, he was exceptionally gifted in exact sciences. He passed his high school diploma with flying colors. He earned an index for a university …
Maria makes no secret that a schizophrenic in the family turns this family’s life upside down.
– Only I know how many tears my mother shed, how great remorse gnawed my father, who was wrongly blaming himself for the child’s illness. Dad reproached himself that he did not let his son go to study only to the army, and then it destroyed him so much … The doctor explained; – Disease and in college could attack. There is no rule here. Nothing can be foreseen here … But each of us, deeply, browsed through memories related to Henio and thought: Maybe then, and then what pain I did to him, I missed something, I did not notice that he needed help …
For example, my brother wrote to me from the barracks that he had persistent headaches, as if his skull was bursting, but we took the notch of a migraine. My mother suffered a lot from this disease, and she is harassing her son, we thought. Meanwhile, Henio was isolating himself from us during the passes. He was sad, he didn’t want to talk to anyone. Dad asked me and my sisters to take him out to people to play. But when those tables started to turn over, the socializing was over. Rumors were spreading around the village that he was hijacking him.
– In fact, I realized that Henio had schizophrenia when an ambulance in a straitjacket took him after one of the attacks – says Maria.
– It was a traumatic sight for me. I wanted to strangle the doctor, yell at my parents, shake each one of them to make them react somehow, not allow this terrible humiliation and humiliation of my own child. With time, I realized that the hospital was helping him. Dad took him to the ward from time to time, and he always came back after a few weeks. Henio had quite good periods of remission then, although I must honestly admit that his case was severe. After several years of illness, Henryk learned to recognize the symptoms of impending relapse. Slight nervousness and agitation, insomnia, mood swings. Then he said to his father: – Dad, it’s coming again. And his father went with him to the doctor or took him to the ward.
Hospital stays lasted six weeks. Henia was visited by her parents twice a week. They brought him food and cigarettes. The sick then stole it. It happened that they found Henio tied to bed. He moaned. He was electrocuted. Mum took a long time to shake off the sight.
Once Heniu returned from the ward with knocked out teeth, a broken and wired jaw. Something broke in my father then. He brought a case against the director of the facility for compensation. People tapped their foreheads. – Dude, don’t take your hoe into the sun. It is a state institution. One of the best in Poland … But my dad insisted. He lost two hearings. The last one, before the Supreme Court in Warsaw, he won. It was an unprecedented event. The trial was witnessed by mentally ill people. My father kept repeating and tears ran down his face like peas; My son was restored to human dignity …
My brother’s life was in his pajamas, from relapses to remissions. I can still see him asleep during the day, energized in the evening. I can still see his youthful vibrancy and temperament. And his beautiful, aging face with the stigma of illness is superimposed on this image. Once alien and very tired, but mostly cheerful and – in spite of everything – reconciled, with the expression of his eyes in which he was imprisoned inexpressible grief and suffering. I have asked myself a thousand times. “Was this the life you wanted for him, God?”
Henryk lived for 58 years with his parents. He died of lung cancer. In the bathroom, in her mother’s arms.
– Mom prayed to survive his death. She believed that no one would take care of him like her and her father. That without them he would be lonely and abandoned, even though he still had us sisters.
The woman leans over the grave. He lights a candle. The flame burns evenly.
– But you know, everyone lives their own lives, has their own problems, and for his mother, Henio was forever the first-born, beloved child. To the end a beautiful and always wise boy. It was a great heroism on her part, that she knew how to keep in her heart and mind the image of her son untainted by disease, and at the same time she was able to love him completely as he had become. She carried her cross so softly …
Text: Joanna Weyna Szczepańska
Schizophrenia is not a sentence – read an interview with a specialist