Bipolar Disorder: Life Can Turn Tragic when Patients don't Take their Medicine

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"They always felt like hell, so why not?" Pardo says.

She suffered for them and for herself. She came down with severe headaches; she tried to ignore the weakness gnawing at her legs. So many bad things happened, in fact, that she no longer can accurately chart their chronology. "I remember times being horrific, but I couldn't tell you what happened in what succession," she says.

And what was she to do about protecting the boys' sister, her youngest child, her Lola, now 27? How to keep things as normal as possible for her? "I went to every PTA meeting," Pardo says. "I even had her in gymnastics." Pardo refused to accept that "I was the mother who couldn't fix it. When you're a counselor, and when it's your own blood, it's two different ball games."

So she tried and tried. She hoped and hoped that things would get better. They did not.

One day, around 1990, Eric phoned her from a motel to say he had overdosed on his mood stabilizing medication. Pardo called for emergency help and then 'started screaming, 'Hang on, Linda! Hang on, Linda!' . . . I felt my whole self disconnect. . . . The next day I was completely curling in a ball, screaming. 'Make me safe! Make me safe!' Couldn't stop sobbing. Went to the mirror, thought it was two-way, started ducking. I knew I was in a psychotic state. . . . My mind said, 'You had a breakdown.' " It was six months before Pardo would rouse herself enough to put on lipstick.

It took her even longer to rouse herself enough to leave, to realize that she could not determine what happened to her sons, to settle them into an apartment and head for the sprawling anonymity of South Dade. Within months, Aaron had burned the apartment down. Then he burned up maybe the only thing he had left: himself. "It never mattered how much you did or how much you tried," Pardo says.

After Aaron's death, Pardo returned to Miami, again alone.

Emotionally destroyed by the way her brother had died, Lola stayed behind with her father. Eric was living in a facility in Philadelphia.

"I couldn't bring Eric down," Pardo says. "I was in survival mode. . . . Everybody was in such pain."

The pain had not eased much two years later when Pardo checked Eric into a facility in Boca Raton. "I really knew it was not a good idea, nor was I ready," she says. Eric was not ready either. He "really never took to the therapy, was very defiant." Then he ran away. The police found him in Jacksonville. Pardo returned him to Philadelphia, sending him money and keeping in touch by phone.

"It was so painful to listen to him," she says ' . . . And he was always freezing. . . . I sent him a beautiful suede coat one time. Two days later he said, 'I don't want you to get mad. It was stolen.' "

In the fall of 2004, after Eric almost burned down the Philadelphia facility in which he was staying, his mother bought him a ticket to Miami and found a place that he would accept.

"To have him live with me, . . . it wouldn't work because it would end up being a yelling match over things he would want and I would want," she says. "He's 6-foot-3, about 275 pounds." In October, Pardo went back to Philadelphia to visit Lola, who is working through her pain.

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Pardo sees Eric every two or three weeks. They go out shopping and to the movies. For Christmas, she bought him a TV, a DVD player, movies and curtains for his room.

"It feels so much better having him here. He'll stand like this" -- legs spread, leaning from side to side -- "and do like this dance, going back and forth from one leg to the other," she says. She pays for his dental care, and "I give him $30, $40. Of course, it's gone in 10 minutes, but I feel like I'm trying." They call each other often, spending a lot of time on the phone. For years, after phone calls Pardo would hang up and sob for hours.

She doesn't do that anymore. "Now I just pray."

Last updated: 3/06

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