The following essay, ‘The Book of Joe’, was written in the summer and fall of 2011, and presented at a conference on Suffering sponsored by Interdisciplinary.net in Prague on November 11, 2011. It is published here with a few minor edits. Copyright 2011. Donald Felipe. All Rights Reserved.
In Northern California, some sixty-four years ago, Joe was born to his father Joseph Sr. and mother Ruby. On the night of his birth the doctors and nurses at the local hospital were overwhelmed by the carnage of a horrific automobile accident. Ruby was told to hold her baby in, to wait for the next available doctor. She did so for a very long time in enormous discomfort. Joe came into the world amidst confusion, anxiety, suffering and sacrifice; these seemed to follow him for the next half century.
But Joe was not born into misfortune. He was blessed with the most loving of parents, with natural charm and good looks. He had a gentle face, an irreverent wit, and an infectious laugh that he keeps to this day.
I do not know much about Joe’s childhood, except that he caused our parents worry from early on. Joe was not unintelligent, but he sometimes had difficulty with school. Joe was not anti-social, but he often had trouble conforming to normal expectations, and he was prone to unpredictable behavior. Joe did not receive any formal religious education to my knowledge. The family would sometimes go to the Catholic Church for midnight mass, or on some odd Sunday, at the behest of Joseph Sr.. But religion itself was not a matter of great concern to the family, and Joe had no interest in it.
Joseph Sr. was a well-respected teacher and coach at the local high school. His teams won championship after championship, until he became something of a local legend.
In his childhood and teen years Joe got into trouble on occasion, mostly fistfights. He did not graduate from high school, and lived a somewhat rebellious life. He loved to flirt with danger; he had quick reflexes and a talent for driving. He took up drag racing and became quite a successful driver. Tall, shiny trophies, monuments to his many victories, filled the bookshelves of our home.
During the Vietnam War Joe avoided the draft by joining the California National Guard. The training and service were terribly taxing for him, but he struggled through it. Joseph Sr. left coaching and helped build a successful lumber company in the small town. The company provided Joe Jr. with employment as a salesman in the San Jose area after his term in the National Guard. The family prospered. At around the age of twenty-five Joe had a good job and made good money, living a bachelor’s life in California in the early 1970s. But something horrible was happening to him.
The family did not know that Joe had been hearing voices since his teens. His voices were a secret known only to him. He confessed this to me some years later. Somehow Joe had managed to live with his voices and function normally, albeit in his own unconventional ways. He had been quirky from his youth. No one was the wiser. But his behavior was becoming more erratic and paranoid with the frenetic pace and anxieties of his adult life. There were warnings from a roommate. Then it happened. Joe broke from reality as we know it. He stopped eating and barricaded himself in his apartment, filled with paranoid delusions. Our parents had to retrieve him from San Jose and bring him home. Joe was uncontrollable. He was suffering. And no one knew what was wrong with him.
Suffering begets more suffering. Suffering begets confusion. Suffering demands knowledge of reasons and causes, and the assignment of blame. Cries for justice rise in its wake. Someone or something must be responsible. Someone must have a solution.
No expense was spared for doctors, psychiatrists, and private mental health facilities.
Joe was eventually placed in lockdown at one of the most reputable and expensive institutions in the San Francisco bay area. He was given the primitive and powerful drugs of the time. It silenced him. His cheeks sank. His spirit left him. He wandered the halls listlessly with a blank stare, the walking dead.
Joseph Sr. and Ruby could not bear to see their son like that, so they brought him home. He came back to life without the drugs, but life tortured him. Our parents could have abandoned him to State custody, and he would be institutionalized. But the State institutions were even worse. They became his conservators, and Joe lived in their home for the next twenty years.
A top psychiatrist told Joseph Sr. and Ruby, with dry clinical certainty, that he could take Joe’s voices away, but it would destroy him.
The pride of the haughty will not suffer ignorance, as the hope of the loving will not suffer hopelessness.
The hunt for reasons never slept. Was it the trauma of his birth? He inhaled gas in a training exercise in the National Guard. Did that cause it? Was it the grandeur of his father? Impossible expectations? Social alienation? Or, did it just run in the family?
At least Joe was alive. He was with those who loved him. But his voices clawed and tore at him endlessly. His face contorted in distress from the relentless onslaught. The characters and personalities of his delusions would not give him a moment’s rest. He only slept when he collapsed from pure exhaustion.
Joseph Sr. and Ruby did not know what to do to relieve his pain, so they gave him freedom. Joe smoked incessantly, drank, took cabs to and from town, played loud music at all hours, paced up and down the hallway, and on rare occasions, if his voices were kind, he would laugh.
Joe’s moods were unpredictable. He would fly into agitated rage and scream. He pulled at his hair until he had bald spots. He cursed his voices. He would stare at the wall and mumble in eerie dialogue with himself. He threw a stereo through the window, drove off with the car and wrecked it, scratched himself until he bled. He threatened his voices with suicide, as if that mattered to them. And then one evening he came home drenched–he had thrown himself into the river to drown, but the water was too cold.
Fruitless effort sinks slowly and reluctantly into hopelessness, until effort itself speaks the only hope. Time fashions effort into routine. Suffering imperceptibly passes into life diminished. Years pass. Faces droop with age. Lines are the voices of truth.
But forgetfulness hides in suffering and slowly rubs away what it can. Dim light brightens the darkness, and moments of happiness shine like the brightest star, fixed in the heavens of memory forever.
Christmas lights sparkle, green, red, yellow and white, twisting around the tree, along the windowsill and over the rocky hearth, which glows with winter warmth. Joseph Sr. sits contentedly at one end of the couch in oversized sweats tearing wrapping from a gift, while Ruby smiles brightly, her face shining like a happy sun. Her family is home. And in the kitchen, Joe takes a drag of his cigarette and mumbles in a low voice, as Christmas carols blare from a boom box.
*************
Joe’s breakdown arrived suddenly, like an uncontrollable firestorm. His transformation emerged as slowly and subtly as a new epoch of history. But appearances deceive and reality remains unknown. Even now one must learn to listen to Joe to know something of him.
Twenty years after Joe’s breakdown our father was dying of cancer, and the family was preparing for his loss. Our mother would not be able to care for Joe on her own. She would have to give up the conservatorship. But having Joe as a ward of the State was unthinkable. A private conservator was found who knew the family, and funds set aside for his care.
A daughter-in-law (my wife) cared for Joseph Sr. while he was dying. She and her brother, who made a few supportive visits, occasionally prayed the rosary in the evening. Joe would sometimes listen and it seemed to sooth him. And Joe’s younger sister, who lived at home, had taken up religious studies in college. Joe enjoyed listening to her as well. God became a new topic in the home, and Joe now spoke about God in his ramblings. But it did not seem to matter. The family was accustomed to imaginary friends and strange topics coming and going. Here today, gone tomorrow, or in a month, or in a year, no one kept track.
There was also progress with Joe’s anti-psychotic medication; new drugs seemed to soften Joe’s delusions. But the shifts in behavior were not dramatic, and that, as well, did not seem to matter.
After our father’s death Joe moved out of the family home and into a halfway house in a small, peaceful community in the mountains. Joe started to walk. He loved to walk. His older sister gave him a tall, thick walking stick made of Sedona wood. He grew a beard, donned colorful, plastic rosary beads around his neck, and wandered the streets and paths of the town studded with tall pines. But, he continued to occasionally breakdown. Terrible squalls remained in calmer seas.
I did not visit Joe very often the first few years after our father’s death, but I do remember my surprise that Joe was doing so well. He spoke more and more of God and his colorful rosary beads seemed to define a new persona–he still wears them today. He would walk for hours with his walking stick in hand. He enjoyed visiting a local Catholic Church about a mile from where he stayed. I found him one afternoon sitting in the church in the back listening to a group of elderly saying the rosary. Joe waited patiently and silently until the prayers were over, and then he walked up to each member of the group, shook their hand and thanked them.
Joe smiled more. He constantly talked about God, and how he talked to God. There was gentleness in his voice, and graciousness in everything he did. When I took him to lunch he would softly and politely order his food, and he never failed to thank the waiter or waitress. He also seemed to be aware of his limits and would excuse himself and find a quiet place if he felt disturbed. Gradually, I became entirely confident being with Joe. I did not fear unexpected outbursts, and I cannot remember a visit in which I did not enjoy his company. I had stopped listening to Joe years before this, but Joe was becoming more coherent, at least it seemed that way. And how he could walk, for hours on end among the pines proudly trotting along with his staff, like Moses leading an imaginary tribe of friends on adventures of spirit.
I got a call in the late morning. Joe had been in an accident. He was run over by a truck. He was badly injured. His leg. Internal injuries. He had just gotten out of surgery. They put a metal rod in his lower leg. He had a colostomy bag. He may never walk again.
I called the surgeon immediately and I got through. I felt lucky to reach him. He said in a tired voiced, “I have been a surgeon for 25 years and I have never seen the bone of the leg crushed that bad.”
“But walking is his life,” I said. “He must be able to walk.”
“He should learn how to use a wheelchair,” he flatly replied.
“It’s impossible for him to walk again?” I pleaded.
“You can try physical therapy, good nutrition, healthy lifestyle,” he said, “but don’t get your hopes up.”
“But he’s schizophrenic! He smokes compulsively!”
“Then forget it,” he said emphatically.
In my future visits to Joe I tried to get him used to the idea that he would have to use a wheelchair and that he should not try to walk. “Don’t worry,” he said in a steady voice, “God will heal me.” The conversation always ended there, so I let it go. No heroic physical therapy was ever attempted, no therapy at all to my knowledge. Joe kept smoking cigarette after cigarette. And the accident did not change Joe’s demeanor and attitude. He was as gracious and kind-hearted as ever, and seemed almost happy, as he sat in his wheelchair.
“Don’t worry,” he repeated, “God will heal me. God will heal me.”
Joe was walking within a year. He limped, supported by the metal rod, and could not go far. But he walked. It was not long after that that the colostomy bag was removed. His body had healed to the extent it could.
But that was not the end of it. An infection developed around the rod in his leg a few years later. He had another surgery. The rod was removed. He healed again. And he walked again. He walks to this very day.
In the twelve years or so since the accident, and even for some time before, I have never heard Joe utter an unkind word. His conservator has told me that she does not dare give him any money, because if he is asked, he will give it away.
“I have learned so much from him,” his conservator told me, “I have never met a more compassionate and generous man.”
And he will never fail to thank you for any deed done on his behalf.
“God bless you Donnie, God bless you,” are his parting words to me.
And I will never forget the afternoon we were driving among the tall trees on a sunny day, and he told me, softly, without hesitation, that he had never suffered.
His graciousness and thoughtfulness extend to his delusional world; at lunch or dinner, after kindly asking for an extra plate, he will set food aside for his company, so that they are included in the meal. And he will not protest if the food is later claimed, given to someone else or taken home; he merely wants to acknowledge the presence of others.
Joe constantly mumbles to himself and laughs, and, if he is in a talkative mood, he will share what he sees and what God tells him. I usually do not listen. It’s an old habit. But some jewels cannot go unnoticed.
“You know Donnie,” he said in a wondering tone, “God just told me that the clouds are like glaciers. The clouds are my glaciers, he says. The clouds are glaciers.” And he chuckles.
“You know the power of God is something else, Donnie, something else,” he said. “You see that tree there?” He points to a towering Ponderosa pine. “God pulls the water from the ground all the way up to the top of that tree and that is the way the tree lives.”
His concern for others runs through his very depths and is unmistakable. I enjoy bragging about my beautiful, intelligent, athletic daughter, who is already in training for her black belt at the age of eleven. Joe reacted with intense concern. “Be careful Donnie. She could hurt someone. You tell her not to use that! You tell her never to use that! She could hurt someone. She could hurt someone.” He repeated his warnings until I acknowledged the danger and promised never to let it happen.
And finally, just a few weeks ago, I asked him again about what he had told me years before. “Joe,” I said, “you once told me that you have never suffered. Is that true?”
The question surprised him. It was unusual. There was silence for a moment as he studied me. And then he said, “I am fine Donnie. I live with God. I live with God. He keeps me busy. I don’t suffer.”
A period of silence stood between us, as he looked ahead. I knew what it meant. His suffering was not a concern, because he did not suffer; he was worried about me. He wondered why I had asked the question. He did not want me to suffer with concern for him.
Joe has suffered from severe schizophrenia for around forty years. He has taken powerful anti-psychotics for much of that time. His brain is diseased and damaged. He is delusional. He does not talk to God. Or does he? Could one imagine a more divine life in such circumstances?
Joe lives in a home for seniors with dementia and Alzheimer’s. [1] Iron bars surround the facility. Residents sitting on the couch, in wheelchairs, or in chairs against the back wall, stare painfully, quietly without recognition. Silence is seldom kindly broken. A scream, a complaint, a question, a proclamation directed at you comes out of the nowhere, and you don’t know how to reply. People deserve to be acknowledged. People deserve a reply. But what can you say?
I sometimes find Joe sitting in the kitchen area, well groomed, listening to music, smiling, looking off into the distance. He loves music, oldies rock, and will twist and shake his shoulders in a lively groove if the song is right.
Joe lives behind bars and is not free. But he flies freely in ways we cannot comprehend.
Joe has almost no property of his own. He has little or nothing to give. But what he does have he readily gives away.
Joe would be an outcast in the world beyond the bars of his current home, but he never fails to treat the people of that world with the purest graciousness and concern.
Joe is trapped in his own mind, a prisoner of delusions for almost a half-century. But his concern for others cannot be imprisoned—it lives, ever attentive, among the voices and visions only he knows.
Joe lives alone among strangers who can say little to him. But he is routinely engaged in the most sublime of conversation.
Joe has no occupation, nothing to do. But he is always busy.
Joe’s body is crippled. But he never complains.
Joe lives among the cries of the helpless. But he is forever hopeful.
Much has been taken from Joe in his life, but gratitude graces his lips.
Joe has suffered much in his life. I have witnessed it. But it is of no concern to him.
“I live with God,” he says. Who am I to say that he doesn’t?
[1] This essay was written in 2011. In 2012 the home in which Joe lived came under new management. Since that time Joe’s living conditions have dramatically improved. I would like to thank the management and staff of his current residence for all that they have done and for all that they are doing.
Songs for Joe 