Fractured Family: Growing Up with a Paranoid Schizophrenic Sister

This volume concludes Mark S. Cornwall's memoir trilogy. It follows Travels with D'Arcy "To Alaska and Back" and My Seven Summits "A Stroke is Upon Me." Fractured Family returns to the origin point of the story-the year the Cornwall household was torn apart by the stigma of sister Suzan's diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenic.

In 1969, when Suzan was twenty-three, she was committed to the notorious "Snake Pit" at Patton State Mental Hospital, in California. It was there that the deeper crack in the family bell could be heard. This memoir traces how each family member dealt with the stigma of mental health and why it was buried in silence for decades.

The "schizoid" is a special person that can only survive in the cracks of a broken society. In 1969 that meant they end up a fractured fissure living in the snake pit with 3,000 other patients. But they grow up in your family. They are your best friend, a hero of sorts, a person you trust, love and admire. Then, quite suddenly, they become strangers. They're deranged and write hodgepodge with their soul. They vex the family with the devil. It can be maddening.

At first, it's an enigma, until it's proven this special person can hurt you. Not physically, but mentally - they wear you down with their mental disease that no one can understand. It makes you feel they should be punished. Yes, punished. Suzan once wrote back in her defense, "My heart aches, and my sorrows hurt the one's I tell."

This last installment of the memoir trilogy tells the tale of raw insanity. A year of grit and long hair, with Vietnam on the horizon, and rock concerts flaring at night. A Christmas jailbreak from Psycho Ward 3B is executed. Brother Tod is hanging orange and black ornaments. Mother faces off with Nurse Ratchet over sterilization. Father sits on his throne in Germany, distant and unreachable. The family home is gone forever. Suzie can't help but fall in love with Marshal - who is already gone. They're all dead and gone.