DOING THE RIGHT THING

Let me say a little bit more about Andrew wanting to do the right thing. He was always motivated. He always set out with the highest expectations of himself. He was often saying, “ I just do not know what is wrong with me, each school year I am determined to really do well and something just gets in my way”. I wonder if this was the early symptoms of what was to come.

I believe one of Andrew’s biggest frustrations was that he was unable to actualize his own expectations of himself. As he got older and had more and more cognitive setbacks, he was less and less satisfied with his life. I believe the delusions he suffered, while painful, may not have been the worst part of the disease for Andrew. I think his real anguish was his realization that his cognitive abilities would not be getting better and were worsening.

Let me get back to Andrew’s college application process. He requested applications to several colleges but really focused on his application to the Citadel. The essay question asked the applicant to discuss a personal challenge and how they had handled it. Andrew told us he would write about his experience of being afraid to go to school when he was in elementary school.

Of course, we had no idea that this was an early episode of the painful paranoid delusions that would haunt him all of his adult life, and how little control Andrew really had over his neurochemistry.  When he was talking with us about this incident from the fifth grade, I felt anguish over his still present pain when recalling this event. I felt proud though that he was bringing it up and dealing with it. This seemed to me to be a sign of Andrew’s maturity and insight. The hardest part of this to me was that this disease defeated a very motivated, well-intentioned person who up to the very end of his life was trying to figure things out and do the right thing.