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| Creigh Deeds (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) |
HE WAKES UP, and even before he opens his eyes, he can see his beautiful, delusional son.
He lies in bed a few minutes more, trying to conjure specific images. Gus dancing. Gus playing the banjo. Gus with the puppies. Any images of Gus other than the final ones he has of his 24-year-old, mentally ill son attacking him and then walking away to kill himself, images that intrude on his days and nights along with the questions that he will begin asking himself soon, but not yet. A few minutes more. Gus fishing. Gus looking at him. Gus smiling at him. Time to start the day.
He gets out of bed, where a piece of the shotgun he had taken apart in those last days of his son’s life is still hidden under the mattress. He goes outside to feed the animals, first the chickens in the yard and then the horses in the red-sided barn. He leads the blind thoroughbred outside with a bucket of feed, the same bucket he was holding when he saw Gus walking toward him — “Morning, Bud,” he said; “Morning,” Gus said, and began stabbing him — and then he goes back inside.
Breakfast, shower, shave, mirror. Almost a year. He is 56 now. He looks at the scars across his face, around his ear, along his upper chest and right arm. He gets dressed and goes outside to his truck, and there’s the fence that he somehow managed to climb even though he was bleeding, and there’s the field he staggered across to a rutted road where he was found.
This is how most days begin for Creigh Deeds, a father who had a son with mental illness, who struggled to understand him, tried to get help for him, and was ultimately left alone to deal with him, and who now looks over at the barn where he had so suddenly dropped the feed bucket.
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A father’s scars: For Va.’s Creigh Deeds, tragedy brings unending questions
Mental illness is an important and growing issue this country can no longer sweep under the rug.
ReplyDeletePraying for Sen. Deeds and his family...........
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this important story.
ReplyDeleteThe way Gus was treated by the Community Services Board is not an aberration. It is common practice in Virginia.
Our "system" kicks the most difficult cases to the curb, dumping the seriously mentally ill, even those with generous insurance and well-connected family members. All the while, the very same system lavishes hundreds of thousands of dollars on misguided, dishonest, illegal, and ultimately futile attempts to control more highly functioning individuals, like Jenny Hatch.
It is time to stop this waste of millions and millions of dollars and, more importantly, this waste of human potential.
Cases should be prioritized in order of need, and the case-dumping penalized by LAWSUITS. Private resources including health insurance should be used for the benefit of the individual. Seems like common sense, but that's a radical, controversial concept in backward, callous, bureaucratic, authoritarian Virginia, which is far more likely to imprison the mentally ill than to help them. Meanwhile, well-paid bureaucrats, attorneys, and guardians ad litem cash their unearned paychecks and laugh at the disabled and elderly they are supposed to help. Shameful.