Over three years, I took eight separate trips to Colorado to spend time with all the surviving Galvins. My first surprise came in my interviews with Margaret and Lindsay. I’d assumed that the two sisters banded together to help one another through their traumas, but I soon learned that while they needed one another, they clashed, too.
Each sister had different ways of processing everything that happened. Margaret set up boundaries while Lindsay erased all of hers. I was struck by how two sisters reacted so differently in the face of the same challenges. But by listening carefully to each of their perspectives, I soon found that I had a much more nuanced story to tell. We can all relate to this: No one experiences their family in precisely the same way as their siblings or parents.
Every new interview offered a new perspective. The four brothers who did not have schizophrenia each had his own view: Richard romanticized his parents; Mark still felt an inconsolable loss; Michael insisted the illness was made worse by a suppressive family atmosphere; John had moved away so long ago that much of what I was telling him came as a surprise.
The one thing all the children who did not have schizophrenia had in common was that they sometimes felt as if they were carrying an unstable element inside themselves. How much longer, they wondered, before it would get them, too?
I thought about all the clichéd mental illness narratives that fault the mothers and fathers and how easy a target Mimi once must have seemed.
The most stirring interview by far was with Mimi, the mother of all these troubled children, whom I met with a few times before her death in 2017. Frail physically but still sharp mentally, Mimi was stubbornly proud of the way she cared for her children and still wounded by the criticisms that had been leveled against her over the years — many therapists in mid-century America blamed schizophrenia on bad parenting, ignoring genetics altogether. In her nineties, she was still good at deflecting the most difficult questions. Only when her two daughters sat beside her and insisted that she go deeper did Mimi open up a little more, and all the shame she’d felt over the years shone through.
I thought about all the clichéd mental illness narratives that fault the mothers and fathers and how easy a target Mimi once must have seemed — and, in retrospect, how heroic she seemed now for keeping her family together.
I had many poignant visits with the surviving mentally ill sons. Donald had an air of peace about him as he talked about his family in fanciful terms, claiming to be descended from an octopus. Matt was grouchy and irascible but also lovable and grateful for all the help he receives. Peter was a natural performer, playing the recorder for everyone. Spending time with them helped me understand that mental illness is not a cookie-cutter condition; even people in the same family manifest it differently. That became yet another writing challenge: To make sure Hidden Valley Road presented the brothers with schizophrenia not just as patients but as people.
Through all of this, the medical mystery still loomed over everything. What was there to learn from this family’s perfect genetic storm? I spoke with two researchers, Lynn DeLisi and Robert Freedman, who had independently studied the Galvin family in the 1980s. Since then, the twists and turns of their research were not known to the family or to the broader public. But each of them found genetic clues into the illness that, while not offering a silver bullet, added significantly to our understanding of schizophrenia — how it functions and how, one day, it might be prevented from manifesting itself at all. This alone was a balm to the Galvins; they’d had little inkling of how their DNA had helped form the cornerstone of genetic research into schizophrenia that continues today.
The real revelations, however, came from the brothers’ medical records. It was in a sublevel of the main building of the Colorado State Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Pueblo, sifting through two shopping carts full of overstuffed accordion folders, that Lindsay and I first learned about the struggles of her oldest brother, Donald: how, during college, he’d tortured a cat and had no idea why; how he’d said he’d attempted suicide twice; how their parents had shopped aggressively for a doctor who would sign off on Donald returning to college despite these warning signs; and how, once he collapsed completely, Donald tried to kill himself and his wife, Jean, with cyanide and acid.
For all those years, Mimi had said merely that Donald became ill because his wife left him. The truth was something quite different: an attempted murder-suicide. This was something no one besides the parents had ever known. Until the day she died, Mimi had preserved some of the illusion — maintaining the “before” picture, until there was nothing left to protect.
Margaret couldn’t help but wonder what might have changed if her parents had been more forthcoming about Donald, if everyone had known what he’d tried to do. Would there have been more sensitivity about the other brothers’ states of mind? If her parents had been just a shade less secretive, could someone have prevented the family’s other tragedies? The secrecy felt like an insult to Margaret — another rejection.
Lindsay didn’t know how to react, except to muse yet again about the damage caused by all the family’s secrecy and to try to live her own life differently. Maybe, she thought, her family’s story was not just about the secrets, not just about a disease, but about how all of that experience, with the help of Drs. Freedman and DeLisi, might make life better for others.
The day — hopefully not too long from now — that all this research yields real rewards will be the day this family’s sacrifice will finally find its true meaning. Until then, I believe the Galvins’ story has even greater value. It’s a story about experiencing unbelievable and mysterious tragedy, and coming out the other side, and finding meaning in life when everything seems to be going against you.
Despite everything, it’s a story about the value of family.