This recounts my feelings growing up with a father with schizophrenia. Before he went to the Korean War, he had been perfectly normal - beyond normal. He was a handsome football player and also the valedictorian at his high school. My mother met him in the Navy and married him. She always tells us how beautiful his soul was. However, his illness showed itself during the war. He came back a broken man whom I loved dearly, but in those times, there was really nothing to treat his symptoms - not anything that worked very well. My mother made the difficult decision to leave Washington State and head back to Iowa, where she gave birth to her fourth daughter about the time I turned five (I was the eldest). 

My father married several times and was on meds that made him always sleepy. He often returned to the VA hospital for treatments, and he stayed married only to his fourth wife until the day he died at the age of 88, after a shot for shingles and the flu put him in the hospital. I was fortunate to visit him there before his passing, but it was as if I was visiting the shell of a man because he was hardly communicative. I know that he is himself now and in God's hands once more. 

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