Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,68

son and the oldest of the four hockey boys, moved to Denver to work for an airline as soon as he graduated high school. Mark, the next in line, graduated a year later and headed off to CU Boulder.

After a brief furlough for his brother’s funeral, Donald returned to Pueblo—“quite intense about his religion,” the staff reported that year, “extremely controlled” in affect, again with an “underlying hostility close to the surface.” He stayed for more than five months, returning home in February 1974 with some new medications: Prolixin, an antipsychotic alternative to Thorazine; and Kemadrin, a Parkinson’s drug often prescribed to temper the side effects of neuroleptic drugs. Not counting Donald, Don and Mimi had just their four youngest children left at home: Matt, Peter, Margaret, and Mary.

DON

MIMI

DONALD

JIM

JOHN

MICHAEL

RICHARD

JOE

MARK

MATT

PETER

MARGARET

MARY

CHAPTER 17

Don had spent years building distance between himself and his children. Even once they started getting sick, he kept working, out of necessity but also in such a way that it removed him from the day-to-day dramas, just as he’d always been. Two months after Brian’s death, he acquired an additional professional title, beyond his role at the Federation: president of the newly formed Rocky Mountain Arts and Humanities Foundation.

But what had happened to Brian proved impossible for any of them to move past, and while Mimi searched for ways to keep busy with the children who remained at home, Don internalized it all. Early one morning in June 1975, Don was getting ready to leave the house to take Peter to an early morning hockey practice when he collapsed to the floor.

The stroke hospitalized Don for six months. He was paralyzed on the right side of his body and seemed completely without short-term memory. As he regained control over his body, he still couldn’t remember anyone’s names, or much of what had happened in his life after World War II.

Don reluctantly announced his retirement. The farewell letter from the Federation was courteous, if a little cool. “In light of your recent stroke,” wrote the governor in charge, for whom Don had done all the grunt work, “I think your decision to seek a job which gives you greater control over time, travel, and responsibility, is a wise and sound decision.”

After years of leaving his wife to take care of the children, Don now needed Mimi to take care of him. Don had always thought that the sick boys ought to leave and get treatment outside the home. “God helps those who help themselves,” he would say; if the boys were unwilling, there was nothing else anyone could do. But now Mimi had her way with no protest from Don—in part because Don, in his weakened condition, had lost the authority to make decisions; and in part because they had let Brian go, and look what had happened to him.

All of Don’s old arguments—that Mimi had been babying the boys; that he believed in the school of hard knocks; that those self-help books he gave the boys were all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—would never work again. Now that the worst had happened, Mimi would never give up on another one of her sick children.

* * *

As the youngest of ten brothers, fourteen-year-old Peter seemed to have so much authority weighing over him that he chose to disregard it all, starting arguments and defying orders every chance he could. He was so rebellious—oppositional defiant disorder might have been his diagnosis, a generation or two later—that Mimi got into the habit of calling him a “punk,” picking apart anything he did that was out of step with what was expected. If this seemed a little harsh, Mimi felt justified: Just when it seemed as if things couldn’t get any harder for the family, Peter seemed to be going out of his way to make things even worse. But what bothered her most, of course, was the feeling that if Peter veered too