The Missing Key to an Unlikely Door

I waded in an ocean of bewildering thoughts about what plagued my fifty-eight-year-old sister. She became brittle, then, cracked. In a frantic race against time, I watched a loving vibrant woman transform into a grotesque, odorous, illogical, frail, homeless person. 

Always a character that moved to her own beat, years of resistance shrouded in secrecy to signs of life’s hiccups left questions for mysterious changes unanswered. After Beryl found her husband dead on the living room floor, the unsteadiness of her grief took on a darker pathological hue. With no family nearby, life alone in Chicago gave Beryl distance to hide what she didn’t want anyone who knew her to see. Although signs of problems were evident, she tried to mask them with plausible excuses. I worried being alone helped conceal the profound changes in her life. It saddened me to think of my sister in bed all day drifting further into isolation. I didn’t understand what she was hiding at the risk of becoming homeless, or dead.

That all changed when Beryl met a stranger in a city corner coffee shop. Conversations about grief over the death of loved ones brought these two characters together. An important pivot in the timeline of Beryl’s deterioration happened when this kind person entered her life, and consequentially, mine. For different reasons, we were all gasping for air when this stranger unknowingly buoyed our sisterhood in a storm no one saw coming.

At first, Gregory had no idea what he’d taken on in this new friendship. It didn’t take long to get tangled up in Beryl’s foolhardiness. As her appearance morphed into a creepy cartoonish version of herself, a cascade of problems poured out of every crevice of her world. Beryl’s fierce denial sabotaged my desperate efforts to help her. With the uncertainty of my sister’s path to personal destruction, a jittery pulse of fear thumped against every fiber of my being. I could only imagine what this man thought. After all, it was like he just showed-up in the middle of a sentence with no context for all the chapters that led to this place on the page.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this odd Harold and Maude kind of relationship. Born several decades apart, the older Jewish white woman from the burbs and the younger black man from Chicago’s inner-city seemed an unlikely pairing. She enjoyed the security of a loving stable home. He had the experience of a loving single mother faced with hardship and the protection of a shelter during his youth. Somehow, this duo forged a meaningful relationship that included a craving for fun and a good story.

Even though I was suspicious of his intentions, I desperately needed to change the soundtrack playing in my head. How could he tolerate that rancid smell and fluid draining from her nose and mouth? Did he ignore the grossness because of a desire to take of advantage my sister’s reckless vulnerability? I decided to follow my gut and a prayer for a ripple effect of Gregory’s “boots on the ground” presence. With the first mention of this strange encounter, I felt the endless worry triggered by the thought of losing contact with my fragile sister begin to fade. And, with a need for an explanation and fix to this baffling mess, Gregory could be instrumental in getting my sister to walk through the doors of an emergency room.

 Given what was happening to my sister’s life, the circumstances around this friendship seemed to fit like a missing key to an unlikely door. Although, I didn’t trust or understand this person, I trusted a stranger more than my sister. The lift in her voice when relaying stories about her new friend was a relief too. With a baseline of needs leaning towards shelter and food, knowing someone had an eye on Beryl gave me a reprieve to catch my breath before the next crisis.  

While my sister’s tattered appearance bordered on freakish, the last vestiges of her curated sexy vibe bolstered by a well-coifed hairdo, manicured nails, and ahead of the trend vintage finds, left Gregory with no idea how far his new friend had drifted from her brand of normal. I suspected Beryl tried to control the narrative, hoping he’d help her stay Chicago.

Their friendship grew from invitations to dinner with Gregory’s friends to living together to help with money problems. Slivers of familiar sounds of joy punctuated in the upbeat pitch of her voice were a welcome change to the tick of the clock pulling her farther away. Unknown to Gregory, his help also bought my sister more time to prolong dealing with a move to Columbus. His presence gave space for some hope when reality felt like the constant hum of a stereo needle stuck in the groove of a scratch on the vinyl.

As Gregory waded deeper into the muck of my sister’s life, despite her challenges, he tried to help her fulfill an impossible dream finding a job and housing. According to Beryl, Gregory agreed this was all she needed to happen to hold on to the threads of her life in Chicago. I worried about this guy enabling her without understanding the big picture. Did he naively expect logic to emerge from the illogical? How would he know her family was worried, and trying to get her through the doors of an emergency room and back to Columbus where they could better help?

It took a long time to realize maybe my sister wouldn’t do the right thing because she couldn’t. Crazy produced crazier. Depression slammed hope. Sluggishness limited work. Confusion buffered the truth. Paranoia masked reality. Mental illness made it all so deceptive.

Because Beryl put so much trust in this man, it was a matter of urgency that we connect and work together. The challenge was finding Gregory. Beryl refused to share any personal information, except his name. But there were too many Gregory Wilson’s in Chicago to narrow it down to the right guy.

It took months before I finally linked with Gregory. The day our father died, when I called Beryl to break the news, she put him on the phone. Knowing Beryl’s mindset could suddenly shift, I couldn’t lose precious seconds and risk she’d pull the phone away. I talked to him like our lives depended on it. In a hurried voice, I asked him to quickly whisper his phone number. And the person he knew was not her normal self.

From that day on, Gregory and I stayed in constant communication. Although he started to feel the load of dealing with the crazy with the dial turned up, he didn’t walk away. Instead, Gregory Wilson stepped-up with a promise to keep Beryl safe and get her to Columbus, because, as a boy, his mother taught him right. Later I learned his family didn’t understand his relationship with Beryl either.

Eventually, he packed her PT cruiser with the remains of her life. A few months after he watched her return to the bosom of her family, the day came that I packed a suitcase with a black dress to wear to my sister’s funeral. When I walked into the hospital room, I found an odd sense of comfort buried in the sadness of seeing my sister lying in a quiet stupor with tubes pumping life into her damaged body. Clean, white, bandaged hands restrained her to the bed rails for her protection, and mine. I remembered a similar feeling of comfort when an unknown man appeared, like an angel.

Gregory became a lifeline to my sister’s survival. He helped pull back the curtain on a frightening reality. Avoidance of healthcare, a fake-it-till-you-make it attitude and masking excuses for symptoms of a medical condition, unexpectedly landed her at death’s door with a diagnosis of myxedema coma crisis, a very rare life-threatening form of an untreated hypothyroid that caused her body to decompensate.

In the end, treating the hypothyroid allowed her mind and body to regenerate in a healthy way. In the year following Beryl’s recovery, I met Gregory for the first time, at Beryl’s neighborhood hipster coffee shop in Columbus, Ohio, on a day off from her caregiving job. We spoke about her illness and the future. I thanked him for showing up when my sister’s life hung on the raw edges of psychosis. What attracted him to the woman with the sad soul became a huge gesture of his humanity. He gave her quality of life. This stranger’s kindness and help disrupted her in way that filled our lungs with hope when everything seemed so hopeless.