I feel as if I am sitting on a pivot point when I talk about Donald. I look in one direction and see a totally crazy person—a man who killed two women. But I can also look in the other direction and see Donald as the mental health community did: a person with an illness, a refugee of deinstitutionalization, a man worthy of rejoining society, and ultimately a person who suffered. I worked in human services for many years and know the devastation experienced by people who have been institutionalized in the past.
But then, I look at what is nearby, and I see something else that is troubling. While I see Donald struggling to fit in, suffering with stigma and his own history, I also see my mother marrying him.
As I have lived through and after Donald, this is what I come back to: Yes, he was both gentle and odd, mentally ill, damaged by trauma, and a murderer. But the bottom line is that my mother married him. So I keep asking, “Just who was crazy?”
Once, when Donald was still my mother’s boyfriend, I got to see the behavior my brothers talked about. We were out to dinner and halfway through the meal Donald began asking what time it was. Each time one of us tried to answer, my mother would shush us and tell Donald the wrong time. I knew my mother was lying, but I assumed it was because she wanted to stay out later and have more time with her kids.
But when the waitress came to the table with coffee, Donald abruptly demanded to know the time. She said it was almost five o’clock, and I saw panic cross Donald’s and my mother’s faces at the same time. I knew immediately this was not about how much time to spend at dinner.
Donald nearly toppled my brothers as he pushed his way out of the booth. He stood, looked around, and headed toward the bar at the far end of the restaurant.
My mother turned to Larry and said, “Let him go; he can watch his show in there.”
“What’s going on?” I asked my mother.
Her reply was noncommittal. “Donald doesn’t like to miss his television show.”
This, as I came to understand, was an understatement. When we finished eating, we found Donald sitting quietly at one end of the bar, drinking coffee. The bartender, busying himself at the other end of the bar, seemed relieved that we had come to collect this strange customer.
Donald’s show was the 1970s syndicated wartime drama Black Sheep Squadron. On one level it made sense that Donald liked a television show about bombers in the Pacific, but until Donald met my mother, he didn’t have a television. So how did this show get locked and loaded in his psyche?
Another peek into Donald’s strange interior came when I heard from my brother Larry about an incident he’d had with Donald at a local mall. Donald and Larry were sitting outside a store while my mother shopped; they were talking and sharing a newspaper. But then, Larry told me, they saw a young Asian family, with their toddler in a stroller, coming down the mall toward them.
Suddenly Donald jumped up and began to scream, “Baby killers, goddamn Jap baby killers.”
The young couple were stunned, Larry said. They spun around and sped in the other direction with their child. Larry was mortified.
Later, when he told me about that incident, Larry said, “Di, I don’t even think they were Japanese.”
Then, one day, my own life was in Donald’s hands.
On a fall weekend, I had gone to Pittsburgh to visit my mother and Donald, and we decided to take a drive to Ambridge, Pennsylvania, for shopping and lunch. On this trip, I was showing off my new car and wanted to drive. I knew Donald hated highways, and he refused to drive on them. When he and my mother took trips to Lake Erie or to West Virginia, they drove on back roads going thirty miles per hour—all the way. I chalked this up to Donald’s age. As with other elderly people, his diminishing eyesight made three lanes of traffic hard to negotiate. And I knew Donald’s reaction time was off; he had difficulty backing out of the driveway at their apartment complex. Larry and I laughed that Donald never heard other drivers honking at him. So, that day, I drove us along narrow back roads all the way to Ambridge, making a one-hour trip take three.
We had our lunch, but shopping took longer than expected. When it was time to go home, I didn’t want to drive the long way and suggested we take the highway. I was the driver, after all, so what was the big deal? We argued in the parking lot of a shopping center. Donald refused to get in the car if I was going to drive on the highway.
“He’s afraid I can’t drive just because he can’t,” I reasoned, so to get him in the car I said, “Okay, I’ll take back roads.”
I was sure he’d see that I could manage the highway traffic, and then he’d relax. My mother, with her bad knees, needed to sit up front, so Donald sat in the backseat behind me. And off we went.
One hundred yards up the road, I entered the highway ramp and heard Donald howl from the backseat. Again I assumed he was afraid of my driving, so I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get us home,” as I accelerated.
My merging speed was up to almost fifty miles per hour when Donald lurched over me from the backseat and grabbed the steering wheel. His body forced my head into my chest, and my field of vision was completely blocked. Suddenly I was wrestling Donald for control of the car. I didn’t know if I should brake or how to steer. I had no idea where other cars were. And I knew I was going to die.
I made a conscious decision to minimize the damage and blindly swerved to the right where I hoped there would be a guardrail or shoulder. I was howling and so was Donald. I steered right hard, braked, and hoped I was stopping on something safe and out of traffic. I heard horns blaring and brakes screeching all around me. When my car came to a stop, Donald instantly sat back in his seat as if he had just picked up his hat from the floor.
I was still screaming, flooded with adrenaline, terror coursing through me. My sobs began as I realized it was over. I got out of the car and began to run wildly up and down the shoulder of the road. My mother and Donald sat in the car. I came back and yanked open my mother’s door and began to scream at her.
“He’s nuts, do you know that? He’s insane, he’s crazy, he tried to kill us; do you get it? He’s nuts; he’s just nuts.”
And there I was, a raging, sobbing, hysterical woman, racing around in public and screaming at two elderly people who were calmly sitting in the car.
Later, I tried to imagine what being in the backseat had triggered for a man who had been in warlike conditions and then been restrained. Had I naively stepped in front of the train—of Donald’s past and pain? But that understanding didn’t remove my own rage and my absolute recognition that Donald would have killed—all of us—again.
Out of Order
I am telling you this story out of order, and that is because Donald was out of order, my mother was out of order, and yes, I’m out of order, too—most people with trauma are. But it’s also because I learned Donald’s story out of order: First I learned about the ending—the murder. And then I learned about the beginning, which was China. And then I learned some of the middle, and I had to back up and start all over to put the pieces of Donald together again.
Donald was sad and then heroic. He was scary but also admirable. He had been terribly violent, and terrible violence had happened to him as well.
What I did not know when I first met him was that Donald’s life was severely out of order. I ache when I think of all the ways he had been traumatized: childhood poverty, a foster home, the Marines, the