"My Jonny, My Edna" by Ms. Gharda

It’s so difficult to feel almost ashamed of someone you love so much, to not know if it’s safe to share something with others because of the judgment that people naturally attach to things like mental illness. “Ruthie’s Edna” is very important to me personally, because I have my own Edna. From what I can tell, Ruthie is schizophrenic, because she is very childlike, talking and laughing to herself, and she doesn’t seem able to live on her own. What you need to know about me is that I have three brothers, but only one is anything like the brothers I knew growing up. Chris, my older brother, is no longer living. After seven years of cancer treatment, he was diagnosed by doctors as being in remission, but with the promise that he would get another kind of cancer because of all of the radiation treatments he had had to have. Rather than face more of the same nightmare, my older brother Chris killed himself two weeks after I graduated from college. It was a peaceful death, but devastating for our family.

My second brother, the one just younger than me, Jonny, was the one who found him. Although schizophrenia is a genetic disease, it doesn’t manifest itself until you’re older, often prompted by a blow to the head or a traumatic loss. Jonny was always the brother in my family who always seemed to be genuinely happy and I remember envying his ability to make friends so easily. That’s why it seemed so confusing and it took me a long time to believe that of all of us, he was the one who had been driven crazy by the sadness of our lives. But he is and it is incredibly difficult. I used to see schizophrenics in the streets and assumed it was a disease that would never touch me, but you never know, especially since it comes on so much later in life than most mental illnesses.