A few weeks ago, I got a letter from an old school chum. It's not the kind of letter most people expect. No news of upcoming reunions. No tales of old flames or memories of favorite teachers. No job changes, recent sightings of long-lost friends, no hometown gossip.

        Instead, and in the first paragraph, he tries to justify his attempt to eat human brains — his dead uncle's — because he has long believed that doing so will grant him immortality. The three-page letter rambles bizarrely, touching on foreign policy with China, the need to eliminate Johnson grass from the world, Biblical quotes, chaos theory, Eleanor Roosevelt, Yin and her boyfriend, Yang, the “ozone” elements 7, 8 and 9. And more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sue MacDonald is a writer and editor at PlanetFeedback, a market research company in Cincinnati. She spent 22 years as a reporter at the Enquirer, covering health and education, among other beats.

        “Well, I gotta go,” he signs off, as if he were just kickin' back at his computer. “I don't know what love is, but today you have my complete attention.”

        Frankly, I don't remotely want his complete attention. But it came, nonetheless, in a brown envelope addressed to me and mailed to my parents' house in the small town where this guy — I won't name him out of respect for his salt-of-the-earth family — was known for the last 25 years as “strange.”

        “I am not mentally ill . . .” he writes. “. . . It should be known that I am scientifically challenged.”

        He's sentenced to a state mental hospital in Toledo on an official charge of “abuse of a corpse.”

        Two summers ago, he talked his way into a funeral home early on the morning of his uncle's funeral, decapitated the body and took the head home. It was in his bedroom, in a bag, when police found him.

        For years before the “incident,” he stalked my younger sister, persistently but nonviolently. He'd send her long letters. Stop by to discuss his theories that linked brain-eating, teen-age virgins and immortality. Follow her to and from work, her kids to and from school. The police in the small town where we grew up have diligently enforced a protective order to ensure he kept his distance from her.

        Why he decided to write to me, I'll never know. For lack of a better word, the whole thing creeps me out. It is disconcerting to think that someone with a severe mental illness is sitting in a mental hospital, thinking about me and writing me. (As I sat through A Beautiful Mind, I kept wondering, “Is this what it's like for him? Are his phantoms this real, only more sinister?”)

        But I also feel sorry and sad, confused and a little angry. Sorry for his family, whom I've known since grade school. His older brothers and I were good friends, and our parents played bridge together. It's sad that he was a guy with so much potential, so much brilliance. I'll always have an image of him on the playground at Immaculate Conception Grade School, roasting wienies on the aluminum foil-covered solar hot-dog cooker he built as an eighth-grade science fair project.

        Today, I'mrelieved that he's locked up. I feel sorry for him, but I also hope he stays locked up for the rest of his life. If he could do what he did to a corpse, what else might he try? Who will decide if, or when, he gets “better?”

        And I'm confused, because I have no good answers, not even the right questions to ask . . . except why? I'm confused because we — as families, as communities, as cities, as a nation — have not yet come to terms with mental illness. But in each aftermath, whether it's a guy who opens fire at the Capitol or a mom who drowns her five kids in Texas or a an old school friend who beheads a corpse in Celina, Ohio, no one seems willing to champion a better system, a better way, a better something.

        I see the fallout daily when I head to work in Cincinnati. Outside my office, I encounter street people, many of them struggling with some sort of mental illness, addiction or loneliness. With state hospitals long closed and community mental health services overloaded, they are now the homeless, the scared, the panhandlers.

        I hear them mumbling nonsensical thoughts under their breath, talking to the air, ranting at strangers, sleeping in doorways, begging coins at the corner, staring into space.

        In small towns, where everyone knows everyone's business, people try to cope the best they can. In big cities, it's easy to look the other way or hope social agency will provide the safety net.

        In the back of my mind, I struggle with, “What if . . . ?”

        What if . . . in the interest of slashing state budgets, another mental hospital — the one that houses him — closes?

        What if . . . a judge decides he's fairly stable, and is free to go as long as he promises to take his medicine?

        What if . . . he quits taking his medicine? Who would know?

        What if . . . my sister or I look out the window one day and he's standing there?

        What if . . . ?

       Share recent moments in your life. Fax 768-8330; e-mail: mfuqua@enquirer.com. Columns submitted to the Enquirer may be published or distributed in print, electronic or other forms.

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