I Hope It Would Be Different Poem by Anne Marie V. Kennedy

I see more than I can bear in your silence
Hear more than I can take in your furrowed brow and broken smiles
Smell more than I want in your dizzying rituals and broken thoughts
Feel much more than I ever thought I would in your perpetual distance
And your mumbled confusion, and your scattered sentences, and those long-delayed responses,
And your disease within a disease of which no one feels allowed to speak…

Yet.

For the numbing of the self-administered anesthesias
(Of which there are many):
And the curse of generations of stigma and shame and secrecy
For the word schizophrenia

Has not faded with time, nor become a buzzword
Like cancer or heart disease; or even depression or addiction
These things people can’t help, the people say
And plus, it is not their fault! It’s a “disease”! ! ! !

The refusal comes when these same people
Look into the eyes of one with a disease
Of the mind, the body, and the senses
Which they do not understand in the slightest nor care to

Until it happens to them.

To their brother, to their son, to their comrade.

Then the misunderstanding becomes blatantly clear
And there is no longer any room for excuses, canned responses from “trained professionals”, or finger-pointing at the latest tragedy on the 10 o’clock news
Where yet another young person of promise suddenly goes on a shooting rampage
Only to be revealed that there were “warning signs” that went unheeded or were simply dismissed altogether

Usually no one person is held to blame for this “oversight”—
Not a doctor, not a family member, and not anyone else for that matter.

After all, bad things happen, they say, and, besides,
Everyone seems to love to watch the sordid details of people who “go bad”,
As if it happens in an instant. As if we are titillated by the “psychotic”, the “deranged”, “the freak”…

BUT…

If it was your brother
If it were your son
Or if it were to happen to your comrade…

I hope it would be different.