When Ann and I got to our son's basement bedroom, we couldn't believe what our eyes saw! It was like a scene out of the movies. All dresser drawers were opened, some almost falling out. Clothes were thrown throughout the room, and some hung out of the drawers. Photos of Chuck and the family were randomly scattered throughout. The base board heater was so hot, that smoke was coming from socks that had been stuffed into the coils. The room looked like an explosion had just happened. We were in a state of shock, as we stood there looking helplessly at our wide-eyed 21 year old son.

Chuck had come upstairs from his room, and rather calmly asked us to come with him downstairs. Without saying it, we knew there was something important he wanted us to see. When we got to the bottom of the stairs, and entered the doorway, there it was!

It had been a trying two weeks, since he came home to us in the middle of the Spring Semester of his Sophomore Year. His North Carolina psychiatrist had asked him to pull out of college for awhile, after he had been hospitalized with severe depression. So home he came, looking very thin and tired. Home he came, writing his notes and poems; sometimes all day, at other times, all night. Home he came, only to wander off on long walks up and down the roads, in the Pennsylvania-New York border valley. He was an endless source of activity, not even stopping to eat. "I've got too much to get done," he would say, when we asked him to stop and grab a bite. "I don't need to eat, I don't need sleep." "I feel so good, so energized." "I've never felt better in all my life."

We knew something was wrong, and were afraid something was terribly wrong. When Chuck began running and hiding in fear from me, his father, it gave me a feeling of ominous doom. What did I ever do to him, to make him so afraid of me? But still, Ann and I did nothing. It was as if we were frozen in fear. Our two younger sons, also looked anxious and scared.

They were still in high school, and it was getting close to Summer. What would their friends think, if they knew it was their brother, who was wandering up and down roads; singing at the top of his voice, waving to strangers?

Chuck had had his first "break through" of mental illness when he was just shy of sixteen. We had been at the play, "Miracle Worker," when he began saying people in the balcony were talking about hurting him. On the thirty minute drive home, he cried and cried. During the middle of that night, we heard a large bump. He had just missed his youngest brother, with a heavy strengthening bar, when he thought he was coming after him. Jeff was just going to the bath room, in the middle of the night. The next morning in church, he had turned around and told the prominent attorney, sitting in back of us, that, "he knew it was him who had been trying to mess up our rectory electricity earlier that morning." We took him to a kindly local family doctor, who put him on Haldol.

That was four years ago, and now this! I picked up the phone and tried to call a local Psychiatrist, who was also an acquaintance. Not at home, at his son's Little League Game. Quickly I drove to the ball field, and found him sitting in the stands. Trying to look calm, although feeling very chaotic, I quickly told him what had happened. "I'll meet you in the emergency room, in half an hour." Somehow, we got Chuck to go. When the doctor came out, after just 15 minutes, he told us what we had already concluded, manic-depression, added on to the dreaded schizophrenia!

That was mid-week. The weekend found our doctor out of town. The weekend found a phone call from the doctor covering for him; "if YOU don't do something to calm your son down, we will have to send him to the state hospital!" We took turns, including his brothers, sitting with Chuck, until our "good and gentle" doctor returned on Monday.

Ann was a nurse at the same Medical Center and hospital, in which Chuck had been in emergency, and now was on the psych ward. I was the pastor of a prominent church, right across the street from the hospital. What would we do? What stories would people in this small town spread? How many fellow workers and parishioners had seen Chuck and the two of us in the emergency room? We were both very angry at what had happened. Although we felt pity for our son, we also were tired of the time and energy we had spent on him the past four years. And now this!

A couple of Sundays later, when Ann was at work, Steve, our middle son, had gone to the Psychiatry Ward and brought Chuck with him to church. He looked very sick and distraught. As I was preaching the sermon, he got up and went out, came back in; wandered up and down the aisles. Steve was powerless and so was I, but somehow I kept on preaching. Steve and I felt so many emotions, that we sadly shared later, after our brother and son was back safe in his hospital room.

God, why did you do this to our family? Why did you do this to our son? Seventeen years has passed, as I put down this painful memory in writing. Chuck is still sick, although relatively stable. He longs to be like his brothers, married, with children, with a regular job. He cannot take the stress of a job, even of volunteering.

Why did this happen? Why do millions of people suffer so much under the demon of mental illness? Why do their families also go through hell? Why does our God let this happen? Sometimes I wonder if there is a God, when the hell of mental illness doesn't go away, but keeps on putting a cloud over the life of our family.

To this day, I really don't have any answers. But, to this day, when I smell something burning, my mind most often goes back to that horrific day in the basement bedroom. I realize now that Chuck was telling his parents through symbols, what he couldn't verbalize. He knew something was terribly wrong. He felt like he was losing control of life, and of all that was inside him. He was! He still is not in control. Are we?