“A Different Kind of Home”

Creators of Justice Award 2020 | First Prize: Essay

Meg LeDuc served as a journalist, winning a 2014 Michigan Press Association Award, and her literary work has been published in American Writers Review and Brevity (upcoming). Today, she is writing a memoir while working in communications. Visit her website at www.megleduc.com 

On Christmas Eve Day 2015, McLaren Lapeer Regional Hospital discharges me to the care of my parents. I am not well—but behavioral health hospital stays in the United States in this era of the closing of long-term mental health facilities are three to five days on average, two weeks at most. From early November to Christmas Eve, I cycled through Metro Detroit hospitals, staying short periods at each, until, at Royal Oak Beaumont, I began to refuse medication. At that point, I was transferred by ambulance to McLaren Lapeer, the only hospital in the area that allows medication to be administered without a patient’s consent. 

By sheer luck, my psychiatrist and her husband have attending privileges at McLaren Lapeer. Dr. Linsk, my psychiatrist’s husband, immediately took me off one medication, which he believed was contributing to the mania and about which my psychiatrist had tried in vain to warn doctors at other hospitals. He prescribed injections of the antipsychotic Invega. Slowly, over time, it would take effect, dispersing the delusions and restoring me to sanity. 

On Christmas Eve, my parents, my twin brother Matt and I attend services at Messiah Church of Detroit, my childhood church. The candlelit service, the hymns, even “Silent Night,” the choir singing angelic arias, cannot rein my madly galloping brain. As I sing the words to “Silent Night,” I can feel my skin crawl.

I am convinced I am about to burst from the chrysalis, a new creation. At Havenwyck Hospital, in early November, I dreamed of my dead grandmother, and she called me by a different name: “Magid.” 

My roommate spoke French—or told me she did. 

“Teach me how to say, ‘My grandmother is dead. I am sad,’” I begged her, sitting cross-legged on the cot opposite, leaning forward, desperate. 

Marie, fat, with greasy brown hair, curled on her own cot, her pale, unshaven legs pulled up and into her body, clad in a blue-and-white polka-dot hospital gown. 

“Sure, I can do that.” She grinned.

“You’re nothin’ but a mess-cat, Marie,” said Amber, the dark-skinned, brass-curled mental health tech with a laugh, as she did rounds with her blood pressure cuff riding her hip. 

Marie sniggered. “Yeah, that’s me. A mess-cat messin’.” 

Later, I cried so hard that a nurse told me she was going to give me a sedative. I hyperventilated as she pushed the needle into my vein—there was something bad in this bite.  

As I drifted into sleep, icy silver waters threatened to engulf me. I heard my grandmother’s voice.

“Jump, Magid!”

I leaped, leaped clear of the deadly silver liquid before it could touch me. 

“Grand-mére!” I called. 

But there was no answer.

I woke to the hard mattress, the thin sheets, the multiple locked doors between me and freedom. 

But I was triumphant: I will not die—I will live.  

I lay awake on the cot with this knowledge welling up inside me. There was something inside me nothing can touch. My grandmother was protecting me. 

I pondered the name she gave me in my dream: “Magid.” Always, family members had called me “Meggie,” “Meg,” or “Margaret.” 

What was this “Magid?” Isn’t that—isn’t that—a man’s name?

Was it just my imagination, or are my muscles becoming more defined? My voice deepening?

Now, at Christmas Eve service, I hold my true identity within me like a talisman: Magid, French prince. Grandson to a queen. Ballet dancer extraordinaire. Spy. 

Matt leans over the pew and smiles at me gently. I give him a big grin. Soon, I will be free. Soon, I will join a CIA training center, so my legendary career can begin.  

Needless to say, I’m not safe to come home to stay. My parents search for a solution. My psychiatrist refers us to Aviva Mental Health Services. Aviva, she tells us, delivers residential services to people with severe mental illnesses from its center in the Metro Detroit suburb of Southfield and from an array of group homes. Aviva is a community-based solution for people who need long-term care outside the acute, emergency care of a hospital. Many of its residents live there permanently, three or four to a house, supervised by a house manager and staff. The only way I qualify for Aviva—the only way my parents can pay for it—is by drawing upon the Social Security Disability I was granted in 2010. Terminated when I married in 2019, the Medicare that was a piece of my Social Security paid for all of my lengthy hospitalizations, as well as for Aviva—everything but the ambulance rides—and essentially prevented my parents from being bankrupted. 

I have no choice in the move to Aviva: My parents have gone to court and sought guardianship. As I realize later, the guardianship would be my saving grace. Without it, my parents would have been unable to compel me to take my medication, unable to compel me to stay at Aviva. Aviva would keep me safe, keep me from becoming homeless and exploited—or dead—while I shook off the delusions, the injections of Invega beginning to slowly take effect.

But in the moment, I can appreciate none of this. The instant I glimpse Tiffany, my new house manager, with her trim, military, no-nonsense build, I am convinced: Aviva is a cover. And I will be tested by it.  

At the end of December, my mom moves me with some clothes, a few books, and my Kindle, to Kauffman House, a nondescript, two-story 1950s brick home on a cul-de-sac in Southfield.

“It’s going to be O.K., Meggie,” she reassures me, as she closes the door to the room that would be mine, leaving me sobbing on the bed, blankets covering my face. “I love you.”

Tiffany stands beside me, methodically tabulating my belongings for her records. I don’t respond to my mom. I don’t believe her this time. I feel hopeless and helpless, as if what little I have left were being taken. Normalcy is being ripped from me—even though I am not capable of leading an ordinary, healthy life at this time. I have no idea how long I will be at Aviva—for life? Some people did indeed spend their entire lives there. 

That first night, in the pink-and-black tiled bathroom, as I struggle to take out my contacts, my eyes burn. Someone switched my contact solution, I am convinced. I am trapped.

Enraged, I pick up the solution bottle and throw it at the mirror. 

“Goddamn fuckers! You can’t poison me!” I shriek. “Fuck you all!” 

Again and again, I hurl the bottle at the glass, screaming obscenities. I don’t know what is happening to me. I don’t recognize myself—I never act like this. But it feels so good. Fury, righteous fury, pumps through my blood. I am done with being tricked and coerced and locked up. I will break free.

“Motherfuckers! I am not crazy! You can’t do this to me!” 

Courtney, the nighttime aide, rushes to the doorway.

“You’ve gotta calm down right now, Miss Meg! If you keep this up, I’ll call the police.”

That stops me. My dad is a judge. I know the stories—of mentally ill people warehoused in jail. Of my dad’s powerlessness, even with his authority, to get mentally ill defendants proper treatment—often to do anything but send them back to jail when they appear before him for bond hearings. 

More than anything, I don’t want to spend the night behind bars. Better to be locked up, safe, in a group home. 

I quiet. I begin to cry. 

I retreat to my plain, nondescript bedroom—virtually nothing distinguishing it as mine—curl into a ball under the covers and weep.

“I am not crazy,” I repeat softly to myself. “I am not crazy.” 

I fall asleep to overwhelming grief—and wake at 4 a.m. to the sound of Dereka mopping the floors outside my bedroom door.

Shift change.

I have been institutionalized. 

Yet Aviva is a kinder institution than I first anticipate. Its mission inspired by Jewish values, many of its residents and employees are Jewish. And so, the Friday evening after I arrive, as snowflakes whirl down in the dusk, I find myself invited to light the Shabbat candles. The rabbi—a very young man with a scruffy brown beard, in yarmulke and black clothes—bows his head and recites a Hebrew prayer as he stands before the glowing white flames that I gingerly light in the basement of Aviva Center. 

“We are welcoming the Shabbat Queen,” someone whispers to me.  

I bend my head, too. I pray that my disastrously capsized world will right itself, offering my Christian prayer up with the Hebrew prayer. Maybe the Shabbat Queen is Mary, Mother of God, and she will intercede for me with her Son. In my confused brain, Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic ideas meld until I am not sure what I believe anymore—all I knew is that I need help from a power greater than myself. 

Help me, Holy Mother, you who stood at the foot of the cross and watched your Son die. You who know what it is to lose everything.  

As I raise my head to glance around the room, Lia, my housemate, flashes me a toothy grin. 

“Now, we recite kiddush, Meg!” She jams a piece of paper, filled with Hebrew letters and, below them, an English translation, into my hands. I can tell Lia relishes walking a newcomer through these rituals. Everybody around me smiles, the way people beam over a baby toddling and falling. 

For you chose us, and sanctified us, out of all nations, and with love and intent You invested us with your Holy Sabbath. 

I am invested with Shabbat tonight, part of this nation of the ragtag mentally ill, both chosen and saved. Lia, with her effervescent grin and her crown of wild, thatched black curls, her goddess heft most likely derived from an antipsychotic, fills the role of the Beloved Queen—her welcoming me, instead of the other way around.

I am something special—the Shabbat Queen says so.

_____

As December gives way to January, January to February, the delusions recede, but I become deeply depressed. I begin to despair: Will I ever leave Aviva? 

Everyday life at Kauffman House is rote and slow. At 7 a.m., Courtney wakes us. Pulling myself from the arms of dreams, I stumble into jeans and a sweatshirt, head straight for the coffee pot in the kitchen. 

Tiffany stands at the stove, frying eggs and bacon. 

“Easy there on the coffee, Miss Meg,” she said. “One cup. Can’t have you bouncing off walls.

There is no danger of that. I feel as if I am wearing cement shoes—the effect of the Invega. 

“I want bacon!” Lia screams, her mouth agape, her eyes saucers. She starts to blubber—and drool. “I hate this stupid diet! You can’t make me eat this food!”

“Just eat,” Jill says, having come in from her three morning cigarettes, her lank brown hair falling around her face as she wolfs bacon. Two words. 

Tiffany puts her hands on her hips and stares down Lia. 

“Now, Miss Lia! Your mother wants you to be on that diet. Try that avocado. It’s good food.”

Lia cries so hard she begins to hyperventilate. She shrieks, “It’s slimy and gross! You can’t make me eat it!”

I retreat upstairs, but not before I hear Tiffany say, “Now, do I need to give you a Trazadone this morning?

At the stroke of 9 o’clock, as we do most mornings, we leave and drive to Aviva Center for lunch, Lia riding shotgun, Jill and I in back. White minivans carting residents from other houses like Kauffman House, pull in and out of the center, a long, low, brown brick building on 12 Mile in Southfield. Outside the entrance, even in the cold, residents huddle, smoking. They range in age from early twenties to seventies and eighties, using walkers and canes. 

“Hi, Lia!” a woman calls. 

“Vernie!” Lia yells. “I haven’t seen you in, like, two days!”

A tall, good-looking, dark-skinned man walking into the center waves at me. “Hey, there, Meg.” 

“Hey, Antoine.”

For an instant, the cement shoes vanish. I float into the center on wings.   

Monique, golden-skinned, heart-faced, with a megawatt smile, reigns downstairs in the kitchen. Today, she is leading a gaggle of residents in making tuna salad sandwiches for sixty. 

She catches sight of me. “Meg, you’re here! Just in time! Christine over here needs help dicing celery.”

Helping prepare the simple daily lunches, supervised by always-upbeat Monique, forms one of the few bright spots of my routine at Aviva. In the kitchen, chopping, stirring, washing pots and pans, I am happy and work hard. And Monique trusts me—my mom’s lessons in how to make my way around a kitchen coming in handy.

Christine, a tiny, dark-haired girl, no more than twenty, looks bewildered, the chef’s knife dangling from her hand. 

“Dice? What does that mean?”

“It just means to chop into little pieces,” I say, rescuing the knife. “Here, let me do one stalk, and then you can try.” 

I glance up. Antoine is leaning in, stealing a piece of celery, smile dazzling. Monique swats at his hand. 

“There’ll be time to bother Meg after lunch! She’s busy right now.” 

Antoine just grins—then turns and saunters away. 

I pause in the midst of dicing celery to watch that tall, retreating back. 

“You be careful, Meg,” Monique says, scooping up the celery I finish dicing and adding it to the bowl of mayonnaise and tuna fish in front of her. “That Antoine is a heart stealer.”

I return to helping Christine dice celery. At lunch, I look for Antoine. But he is gone—and with him, it seems, the chance at romance. Am I supposed to just forget that I am a young woman aching to fall in love? Is that what crazy women do?

After lunch, Monique and a few residents move tables, so a space opens in the center of the basement floor. She designates Robert, a twenty-something year-old resident, to be our “house D.J.,” a role Robert relishes. 

Then Monique starts rousting residents from tables: “It’s time to move!

Some are enthusiastic; some need encouragement. Many are torpid, over-medicated. But Monique won’t take “no” for an answer. Soon enough, she has us in two lines on either side of the open space, and Robert is busting out tunes.  

“Play ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody,’” Kristen requests. 

“Only if you dance!” Monique says. 

Kristen, a chubby, blonde woman, groans, then laughs. She accepts the challenge.

Taking a few tentative steps down the line of residents, she twirls with a huge grin on her face. Everyone claps in time. When she gets to the end, we applaud. 

“Meg, you’re next!” Monique calls. 

“Play Pharell’s ‘Happy!’” I sing out. Entering the line, I stutter-step, rock my hips, and spin, clapping my hands to the beat. 

Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof.  

The afternoons are slower. Usually, we return from the center to Kauffman House, and I spend the time, alone, in bed, crying, ticking away the hours to dinnertime as I listen to the noise of the TV blaring downstairs. I may be living in a house that had some sense of normalcy, but the doors are locked and there are alarms. As time passed, and I recovered, Aviva’s clinical director encouraged me to start volunteering for a local autism advocacy nonprofit, doing simple work of filing and sorting paperwork every morning. But the afternoons remain empty, wastelands in which I became deeply depressed. I wonder if I will ever get my life back. I wonder if I will ever be like other people again. 

More and more, as the months passed, the answer seemed to be, “No.” 

But some afternoons, we run errands supervised by Tiffany—like today, picking up Ari from the hospital in the ancient white minivan. I have never seen Ari. Although technically he is a resident here, he has been hospitalized ever since I arrived at Kauffman House. Early this morning, I overheard Tiffany talking to Courtney in the hallway outside my room. 

“Ari isn’t doing too good,” she said. “I think they’ve messed his meds up.”

“Shit,” Courtney responded. “Why are they discharging him?”

“Insurance. And you know these doctors. Always ready to discharge.”

I heard the swish-swuck of Courtney wringing out the mop. 

“That boy is going to be one hot mess,” she said.

“He’s going to be scared is what he’s going to be.”

This afternoon, we are tooling east on 12 Mile, watching nail salons and Qwik Lube joints flick by. Lia commandeers shotgun beside Tiffany, as she always does. She demands to choose the music, so that she can sing along—Michael Jackson is her favorite pop star to karaoke. 

Jill and I sit in back, Jill clutching her purse so that she can scuttle out to buy cigarettes when Tiffany steers into the 7-Eleven parking lot. Jill stinks of stale smoke with a sweet undertow of raspberry-banana—her lip balm, which she keeps smearing on, over and over. 

As we merge onto southbound I-75, Lia grabs my wrist.  

“Who-a-a-a, Meg!” she exclaims. “Is that a Fossil watch? I totally love Fossil!”

Tiffany frowns into the rearview mirror, the warm brown of her face creasing. “No touching, Miss Lia! Keep your hands to yourself!” 

“No touching” is one of the many rules of living at Kauffman House. To this directive relates another rule: “No dating.” Another, cardinal rule is “Take your meds.” The choice is between obeying this tenet and being hospitalized.

“Oh, sorry,” Lia mumbles. Then she brightens. “Did that watch cost a lot of money?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I consider. “My uncle gave it to me for eighth grade graduation. I’ve had it for a long time.”

The watch with its simple silver face reminds me of the girl I once was, so full of dreams and potential. It also tells me that I am treasured, that that healthy young woman is remembered and cherished, that loved ones are cheering for her to return, the mature version of herself. I wear the watch as a talisman.   

Tiffany smiles. 

“That was very nice of your uncle,” she says. “You have a nice family, Meg.” 

I know I am fortunate—as Tiffany reminds me, I am fortunate in my family. But I don’t feel fortunate, like I should be grateful. Instead, I feel as if I have somehow offended God.    

The rhythm of “Beat It” vibrates through the speakers. 

“Yaaaaassss!” Lia screams. 

“Easy there, Miss Lia! Other people have to put up with your hollering.” 

Lia ignores Tiffany. She pipes up as confidently as a rooster crowing dawn in the land of the midnight sun: “Showin’ how funky and how strong is your fight… Just beat it! Beat it!”

The minivan pulses. 

“C’mon, Meg! Sing!” Lia pleads. “Puh-lease!”  

The lyrics throb along my palms’ heartline, as I sing along: “No one wants to be defeated… Just beat it!”

Tiffany turns the radio down, ignoring Lia’s protests. 

“It’s getting too loud in here. Can’t hear myself think.”

Tiffany doesn’t like freeway driving. 

Finally, we get there. After parking in front of a hospital I don’t recognize, Tiffany leads us upstairs to the lobby of the behavioral health unit. About twenty minutes later, Ari appears, dressed in green hospital scrubs—a tall, rangy, twenty-something year-old boy surmounted by a shock of wild blonde hair and a bushy red beard. He stinks. He can’t stop pacing, swinging his arms. He is grinding his teeth.  

“Ari, are you all right? Didn’t they give you a shower in here?” Tiffany asks. 

He says nothing, just grinds his teeth harder. 

Tiffany jams on the bell. A mental health tech appears. 

“I can’t take him like this!”

“He gets discharged today. Doctor’s orders.” The mental health tech glances over at Ari, who has paced to the far end of the room, then back at Tiffany. “Sorry, ma’am. You don’t have much of a choice. He gets discharged today.”

Back in the car, Tiffany is on her cell, talking to a superior at Aviva Center. “He’s in no shape to be discharged. But if we don’t take him, they would discharge him to the streets.”

In the backseat, Ari groans. Then he bangs his head, hard, against the back of Tiffany’s seat. 

Lia screams. 

“I gotta go.” 

Shoving her phone into the console, Tiffany speaks soothingly. “Stay with me, guy. Can you do that? Just breathe.”

Ari takes a gulp of air. Then another. He rocks. 

“We’ll be home soon, Ari. Breathe.”

The rest of us are very quiet, willing Ari into calm on the ride back to Kauffman House north on the freeway. Lia cries. Jill gnaws on her thumbnail. I pray beneath my breath, a mantra, the words Jesus spoke to the troubled waves: Peace, be still. Peace, be still.   

“Stay with me, guy,” Tiffany says. “It’s gonna be OK. We’re almost home.”

Ari groans again—a low, guttural sound, from his belly. I can smell Ari’s sweat, his fear, the rank odor of his unwashed body. I can almost taste it on my tongue. 

Ari gasps. And gasps again. 

“Breathe slower, guy,” Tiffany says. “Breathe in, one, two, three… Now out, one, two, three, four….” 

As we exit the freeway onto surface, tension leaves my body. We are close to Kauffman House now. We are going to make it, Tiffany counting a cadence as Ari inhales and exhales.

Peace, be still. Peace, be still.  

As we roll along 12 Mile, it is as if I am speaking these words over all of us in the white minivan. I am speaking these words over myself, too—a benediction, a sending for this journey that I am on. 

Peace, be still.  

I will Ari, Jill and Lia’s minds into peace, wholeness. I will my own mind into wholeness. 

Maybe, someday, we can all leave Kauffman House. Maybe, someday, we can all walk under blue skies without being watched. 

Next year in Jerusalem, as they say.  

But this place, at this time, is our only refuge.

We turn the final corner.     

“We’re home,” Tiffany says.

____

That evening, as Tiffany makes us dinner, Lia asks, “Is Ari going to be O.K.?”

For once, Lia is not complaining about her diet—we are all on our best behavior.  

“Of course, Lia,” Tiffany replies. “The doctor is going to see him first thing tomorrow. Right now, he’s sleeping.” 

She dishes up spaghetti with a side of meatballs for Jill and me. 

“Maybe he would like something to eat,” I suggest. “Maybe I could take him something.”  

“Maybe later,” Tiffany says, placing a plate in front of me. “That’s thoughtful of you, Meg.” 

“We’re worried,” Jill says, her face forlorn. That has to be the biggest word I have ever heard her say.

There’s a pause. 

“How could they have gotten his meds so messed up, Tiffany?” I finally ask. I haven’t touched my food yet. 

Tiffany speaks matter-of-factly, but also kindly: “Doctors make mistakes. We all make mistakes.” 

Tears—slow, real tears—trickle down Lia’s face. There are tears in Jill’s eyes, too. It is as if they are grieving. 

Doctors make mistakes. 

But I, I do not cry.

Ari is safe—safe here with us now, safe here at Kauffman House. And, a little later, I will bring him something to eat.