My Mother Was Sick, In A Living Hell. Until 9-11.

Every day, there was that pile of steel, always on the T.V., seeming like it would never stop smoldering.

There were those surgical masks worn by too many, trapped by ash, and a smell of death and destruction. It was a stench that, for those of us there in the days just after Sept. 11, we wish we could stop remembering.

Fourteen years ago, there was a sense of tragedy in New York City, New Jersey and in so many other places nearby that we could never imagine seeing. How could get any worse? we thought.

Amid all that despair, those glaring open wounds, there was at least one family that found enough room in their lives to live a separate hell.

This hell wasn’t even remotely connected to the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. But, in some ways, the tragedy, the pain, the life-and-death consequences and the sorrow were just as real.

And somehow, seeing New York City in ruins, with all that destruction, this Point Pleasant, N.J. family - my family - found a way to heal.

Somehow, this family - my family - saw how others were suffering. As bad as things were for us, we thought, others had it worse.

A recurring tragedy

In the five years before the attacks, my mother was living in the absolute worst way my mother could ever live. And in this life of hell, my father was her caretaker, living the absolute worst life he ever could have.

My mother may have been happier in a jail cell, staring at a prisoner or a prison guard, eating whatever slop they plopped on her lunch tray. She probably would have rather had a terminal illness, getting forced into hospice care. Given her condition, her near-psychotic state, cancer may have been something she could accept.

For my mother, nothing could be worse, nothing made less sense, than a psychiatrist’s office.

There was nothing worse than an office in a drab-looking warehouse that housed mentally ill patients who had to write their names on the clothes, because everybody’s clothing was stolen at one time or another.

There was nothing worse than being told you’re crazy, with names like obsessive-compulsive disorder or bipolar disorder, being thrown at you.

There was nothing worse than having an ambulance bring you there, because of yet another incident where she put herself in harm’s way.

My father would be the one making the call that sent her back, yet another trip to the small, temporary facility in Lakewood that would force her to go the bigger psychiatric facility in South Jersey.

My father would be the one who had to then tail the ambulance that took her to Ancora Psychiatric Hospital in South Jersey, about an hour drive to the south. My father would be the one who had to sit with her in the waiting room, waiting for another set of hours, in the middle of the night, waiting forever for her to get care.

My father would be the one calling us up, ranting that he couldn’t take it anymore, that he was ready to give up, that he was ready for divorce, that somebody had to come and save him, too.

“If she would only take the damn medicine,” he would say. It was a refrain he would say repeatedly, and never seemed to get tired of saying it, no matter fruitless the whole idea was.

It was stuff he just couldn’t understand. She would wash her hands repeatedly, until the skin seemed like mere flakes on a bone. She would repeat words, phrases, questions, over and over, always looking for reassurance.

She spent so much time in the bathroom, so much that we often joked that she needed her own an address in there. She had a fear of germs that overwhelmed her, and compelled her to stock her pocketbook with small wet towel. At restraurants, she pulled so many of them out, there’d be a pile on the floor.

Her father, my grandfather, was personnel director at Greystone Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains for more than 30 years. They actually lived on the campus, as a way to save money. She grew up with this stuff.

The 1950s were no “Happy Days” for her. So many others lived that life as teens. Not my mother. When she was 16, 17 years old, she’d look out the window, and see the same behaviors that would later scare her to death, some 40 years later.

Some 40 years later, she was there, with them, because, for my mother, the sickness would no longer be separated by a window. This was last place my mother would ever want to be.

Now, it was unbearable

Eventually, the symptoms became so overwhelming that she had no choice.

For many years, for my father, all this was barely tolerable. But 1998, it was unbearable. Her symptoms intensified until they were no longer managable.

Thus began the odyssey that brought us to assisted living facilities that accepted, then rejected her; prescriptions that could help her, but would she never took. She never be opened the bottles.

There were 911 calls from my house in Point Pleasant, because the repeating, the obsessing, the fears became too much for anybody, any one human to tolerate.

Several times, my father tried to heal her himself, urging her to take the medicine, bringing her to those terrible psychiatric offices. Almost every time, they failed. Almost every time, the symptoms were so bad, she had to go back, again to some facility where they injected the medicine into her. She went back to spending weeks in Ancora, where they printed your name on your clothes, and scared the living daylights of her.

In the summer of 2001, he gave it one last try. I had spent much of the summer taking care of her myself, keeping her at a nursing home in New Brunswick. I could tell my father felt a sense a guilt over this; how could he, the caretaker, the husband, the one who took her for better or worse, just give up?

After , he took her back. He said things could be different this time. He said he wouldn’t call me or anybody, or feel so compelled to call 911 in a panic anymore. He could do this, he said.

Yet, soon after, the panic set in again. The calls to my house started coming. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m going to have to send her back.”

I went to bed that week, almost every night, hoping so hard that he wouldn’t do it again, that he wouldn’t call 911. That she didn’t have to back to Lakewood, or Ancora. She had lost so much weight. Her legs, one that was ruined 30-year-old knee injury, were no longer holding her up.

One more night at Ancora, I thought, and she could be dead.

Then everything changed

On Sept. 11, I watched the North Tower crumble into ash and rubble from my car on the New Jersey Turnpike. I didn’t have cell phone service for hours. I wanted to call my mother. But even if there was service, I didn’t have a lot of time to think about anything else.

I had friends in those towers that I thought were dead, only to learn later they survived. I was covering the story for The Record of Bergen County, and I found myself in the middle of a new tragedy.

For days, and then weeks, it went like this. Then months. Somewhere in the middle of that, it hit me.

The panicked calls from my father had stopped. The ambulance trips to the psychiatric hospitals, no more. Whatever calls were made to home were about the events of the day, the week. They were about tragedy, only another one.

“Isn’t it horrible,” my mother would say. Only for the first time in so long, she wasn’t talking about herself. She was talking about others.

In just one day, my mother’s fears, paranoia seemed to almost completely vanish. The obsessions, the stuff that nobody seemed to understand, were nearly gone.

So many others had it worse, my father admitted to me, years later. For him, and my mother, it was finally time to move on.

For the last 15 months of her 65-year life, amid all this war and tragedy, my mother, and my father, finally found peace.

Tom Davis, New Jersey editor for Patch, lost his mother to a heart attack on January 18, 2003. He covered the saga of his family’s experiences with mental illness in his book, “A Legacy of Madness.”