Opinion: What Elephant Seals Taught Me About Raising My Adult Son With Psychosis

The ranger sent me to New Year’s Creek Beach for my service as a naturalist instructor at Año Nuevo, a state park in Northern California. It was winter 2018 and an injured elephant seal had drifted in. He lay among the driftwood that lay on the sand after last night’s storm. A piece of silver-black skin on his back had been bitten clean by a thresher shark, with a deep pink wound that made me shiver.

I looked at my mobile. I had no bars. No one could reach me there. Año, as the Rangers call it, is off the grid. That was part of the reason why I went there to reinvent myself, learn a new language and, if there was a break between visitors or if I was placed in a remote part of the reserve, cry freely for my boy who is a has psychosis.

At the time, it was my job to make sure the park visitors gave the seal a wide berth and prayed for it to survive – although I made up the last part because, while I’m not religious, I didn’t want a marine mammal to do that’ I don’t have to die under my watch. The length of his torso allowed me to age him into an adolescent, and the opening of the penis just below his navel confirmed his gender. I knew this from my rigorous training, but what I wasn’t trained to do was accept that I couldn’t save him.

I sat on a log and watched the seal’s chest rise and fall like the waves. It was too big to move and I had no control over the tide, so over time it became more and more stranded.

I stepped closer and spoke to him, knowing it was risky. He was the size of an SUV and his wound made him unpredictable. He could also move faster than me in the sand. Largely I just had to be there and do nothing Other than sitting next to the animal and my own thoughts—which, as simple as it seemed, had been nearly impossible since Zach was first diagnosed in Los Angeles in 2009 at age 19.

In those early days, I was trying to find the right medication, the right therapist, the right treatment program. I believed that, like a Subway sandwich, I could make it better with the right ingredients. But every time he went to the hospital it seemed to get a little bit worse, and no matter how many different antipsychotics he tried, the side effects were terrible.

After nine years I agreed that I would no longer try so hard to prescribe his treatment and that I would no longer force him to go to the hospital. I moved north for five hours, left him with his girlfriend, and lived two years in this rugged and wild land of beauty. At times, the extraordinary natural splendor felt almost too much to bear.

Sitting alone in this Serengeti of the sea with this lone animal reminded me of the times I sat with my son because he was afraid of his own thoughts. “What will happen to me?” he would ask. “You should know.”

I pretended that I did. “All the best,” I told him. Maybe then I pretended to be a woman who didn’t care only about saving her son, who was fighting for his own life.

Would that ever feel like the kind of existence I could accept, an experience I could perhaps spin into gold from the dense threads of suffering I’ve witnessed? Was that what it took to find compassion?

The seagulls set in sync with the setting sun, teasing the elephant seals who fluttered and chirped around him. I wanted the animal back in the water, but I knew that even in the deep, wide ocean, where it could move more easily, it would still be vulnerable to further attack.

“Here, okay dude,” I said, my voice competing with the roar of the waves.

The wounded seal lifted its head and its tail fell into the sand. He did it over and over. And then he uttered his distinctive call and gained strength with the wind. He slid down to the water, and as the sun dipped below the horizon, he dove into the waves.

I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see him again or if he’d join the harem at North Point to be less alone and have more reason to fight and mate. Like the robo-elephant, I instinctively wanted to be less afraid. And like him, I will have to leave the country one day and embrace the mystery of what lies beyond to repel and say goodbye. I knew my son would have to manage without me. This is something that I and so many other parents of vulnerable adults have to live with, get through and stop resisting.

As I left the beach, I turned and looked at the dark shape of the seal in the water, thinking how big, clumsy and mysterious it was, just like my son’s altered state. I wondered how an elephant seal could teach me so much more than a textbook or lesson, maybe even everything I needed to know.

Tanya Frank is a writer based in London. Her new book is called Zig Zag Boy: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood. @TanFrankUK