I'm working on a possible story for a volume on mental illness, with a theme "echoes." Well I have echoes all over the place. I have a little too much familiarity with mental illness.

Turns out the year I stopped in on my schizophrenic aunt was the same year my friend's son killed himself and his girlfriend, and a dog, thus upsetting everyone, all the survivors, all of Iowa, but particularly her, because he was her only child, and years later she'd die with dementia, and no id, and no one to care for her.

Is dementia like schizophrenia? My mom had a kind of dementia - in the end she didn't even know who we were. Here she'd raised me for many years, spent hour upon hour watching me, then what? Her mind just doesn't recognize? And then there was my aunt. She didn't recognize me either, but she'd never really seen me - but I could also tell, upon talking to her, that she just didn't do well with all real connections. Like knowing that I was her brother's son, or that my daughter wasn't my wife. She was in a good mood but pretty out of it, and it was scary.

I always thought that a killer - like the son in the above story - is almost mentally ill by definition. Like if you thought actually killing someone would be good for anyone ever for any reason, there must be something wrong with your thinking. In that case he seemed to take the life of a woman who had rejected him, so, my guess is that it wasn't a double suicide, it was a murder suicide. But on the other hand maybe people are making that part up about her rejecting him, or, maybe everyone has it wrong in general. I try to make up or find reasons why maybe he wasn't mentally ill. But things are looking bad for him, in my book, if her family says she'd rejected him. And her son - he left that son out in the truck, locked out of the house - when he did it. Who could do something like that? He must have known the kid was out there.

That year I visited my aunt was a flood year in Iowa. So, while this kid killing his ex-girlfriend, and leaving her son out in the truck, and I was visiting my aunt (I swear, not far apart in time, mid-May), it was raining, day after day, all through Iowa. As I left my aunt's house, I'll never forget - I didn't quite know my way out of town (Des Moines), but I passed over a bridge, and the water was rising very badly under it. It was scary. It was like it would envelop us all.

And it almost did, in many parts of Iowa. One friend of mine had to go way around every time she came from home to work, and I think this was a Cedar-Rapids-Iowa-City commute. One of those major roads was shut down all summer because of those endless rains.

To me, there's your echoes. They've had what, three hundred-year floods in ten years in Iowa? The water's rising under the bridge, and everyone up here on dry land is beginning to feel it.

I don't know about that story - not sure I can tie all this together. It may be a little too slippery, or even a little to real, and believe me these people I've mentioned are all real. It is quite scary being on that edge of sanity, and by the way my kids are suffering right now and I have no idea what to do to keep them from going over the cliff.

Some action is going to be required here. The wter is rising.