Sudden Death

Mitch and Kathy Wright walked down the steps of Blue Ridge Nursing Home on November 5, 1999, carrying the few possessions left by Kathy's mother, Norma Jean Hunsucker. Mitch clutched a wadded up trash bag in one hand. An empty suitcase dangled from his other hand.

In the trash bag was a coat they had never seen Norma wear. Her watch. A plaque with a sentimental verse. The couple had collected these scant remnants after a nurse at the home pointed them toward Norma's belongings, crumpled in a corner.

"They just threw her stuff in a trash bag on the floor," recalls Kathy. Wedged into the cab of their pickup truck with her mother's last few possessions, Kathy wept silently and stared out at the blur of fast-food restaurants along Blue Ridge Boulevard.

Grieving for her mother was nothing new for Kathy. Disabled by schizophrenia, Norma Hunsucker had to give up custody of her children in 1976, when her daughter was only seven. Yet as an adult, Kathy never abandoned her mentally ill mother, visiting her regularly at care homes, group homes and nursing homes. Even so, despite her loving vigilance, Kathy didn't learn of her mother's death for nearly a month -- after Norma Hunsucker had already been cremated and nearly forgotten by those who knew her as just another "ward." When Kathy was three years old, her mom set the house on fire, prompting social workers to place Kathy and an older brother in foster care. The children spent the next few years in and out of foster homes, returning to their mother between Norma's "nervous breakdowns." There were also happy times, long periods of Kathy's childhood when Norma's mental illness seemed hardly to exist at all, at least to her young daughter.

Her mom would share popcorn with Kathy and her brothers on the floor in front of the television, watching old Western movies. She prepared dinners: pot roasts and fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy. At Christmas, Norma dragged out colorful ornaments and decorated a tree, singing along festively with carols spinning on the turntable. In the summer, she took the kids to swimming pools and to Swope Park for picnics.

Yet her mental illness, diagnosed initially as bipolar disorder and years later as schizophrenia, persisted.

Schizophrenia is a complex and chronic medical illness that afflicts about two million Americans. Schizophrenics may hear internal voices taunting them with a running commentary on their behavior. Simple background noises can become roaring distractions, and sufferers cannot escape barrages of hallucinations and delusions. Unpredictable behavior -- laughing wildly at a funeral or flying into a rage watching a sitcom -- adds to the stigma of the mental illness. If left untreated, people with schizophrenia may sink into an inner landscape of horrific visions and unfounded fears.

Whenever Norma's illness took over, her blue eyes stared vacantly. She argued angrily with people no one else could see. Relatives would take Norma to Western Missouri Mental Health Center for days or weeks until medications eased her symptoms. Kathy was too young to understand the diagnoses given Norma by psychiatrists at Western Missouri, but she was old enough to know that something was wrong.

Norma spent her days rocking in a chair by the living-room window, saying nothing, staring out the window or across the room. Night after night, Norma rocked, cigarette after glowing cigarette clenched between her fingers. If she slept, someone would sneak in and torture her children. She was sure of it.

Sometimes Kathy would slip into the living room and sit silently beside Norma, searching Mom's face for emotion, some glimmer of the woman who had been so attentive a few weeks earlier. Kathy's dad, Ray Hunsucker, an alcoholic whose physical and verbal abuse of his wife exacerbated her sickness, was in and out of their lives. Kathy's mom was all she had.

When Kathy was seven, she and two-year-old David were placed permanently in the custody of their father's parents in Higginsville, about an hour east of Kansas City. An older brother lived elsewhere. Kathy's grandfather died a year later, and her grandmother, an elderly, stoic woman, reluctantly raised her son's younger two children alone.

"Mom would always come down to visit us," says Kathy, whose memories were not entirely tainted by her parents' mental and marital troubles. "When we'd see her and Dad pull up on his motorcycle, we were jumping all over, excited," recalls Kathy. Norma played ball in the yard with her kids, listened with them to Quiet Riot records, played Scrabble at Grandma's kitchen table. "When she'd leave, I'd cry for hours, sobbing, heartbroken," Kathy says. "When you're a kid, your parents are everything."

"Say your prayers, go to church, and do good in school," Norma always told them when they hugged goodbye. "Mind grandmother."

"I always had this fantasy that Mom would get well," Kathy says. "That I'd go home to live with her, and Dave would get to come home, too. That somehow, Mom would take care of it."

That dream faded slowly. During one of Norma's hospital stays, Kathy rode with her grandparents to Norma's mobile home. Norma had smashed out every window, and shards of glass jutted from the frames. Inside, she had ripped clothes from closets and flung them about the rooms. Broken dishes littered the floors.