By Emily Belanger

I was barely in Kindergarten when my father went crazy. Certain he had assassinated Bobby Kennedy and was being trailed by helicopters only he could hear, he went into hiding. For weeks at a time he would camp deep in the New Hampshire forest, only emerging when he ran low on supplies. Weeks without news, and then his dusty orange truck would appear like a miracle and park in front of the garage. He’d work hurriedly, refilling the kerosene in his lamp and stove, scrounging some extra fishing line, emptying a whole cupboard of canned goods. During one of these fleeting visits, he crouched in front of me and promised he would take me with him if he could, “But you need to be in school.” Behind the calm voice, he was likely panicked, certain that his presence placed his family at risk as much as himself. And then he’d disappear. Without proof that his madness made him a danger to himself or others, my mother could do nothing but watch her husband drive away and wait for another visit from the forest.

As I look back on my childhood, my father’s madness surfaces in spits of memory, disconnected. I can’t say in what order anything occurred. But at the center of it all is one image: my father sitting at the kitchen table while two thin men in suits place their hands on his head, their voices droning softly. “To cast out demons,” my father said later, bitterly.

When I asked my older sister if she remembered the blessing, she said she couldn’t. If it did happen, she said, it wouldn’t bother her: she believes evil spirits need to be cast out of some mentally ill people—she even mentioned a friend who’s had them cast out four times.

So I asked my mother if this blessing had actually occurred. She acknowledged that it could have happened, but admitted that she didn’t have any memory of it. I remember her desperation as she watched her husband react to sounds only he could hear. If she had believed there were even a chance that a blessing would cure her husband, she would have tried it. I also remember one occasion when my mother wondered aloud if evil spirits were lurking, if not in my father, then in the house, invited by his behavior. If there was a chance the madness was caused by demons, she probably would have asked the home teachers to cast them out.

Though I don’t know what actually happened in that blessing, it raised an important question for me at an impressionable age: were spiritual forces at play behind my father’s madness? The question terrified me, especially when adults explained that schizophrenia often runs in families. Growing up, I knew two facts: madness and demons lurked in my DNA, and life was a powder keg of potential triggers.

My father was hardly the first schizophrenic in his family line, so the possibility that it would manifest in one of his four children felt certain. My siblings and I watched each other for signs: not hallucinations but the subtler symptoms, like noticing subtle background noises or struggling to focus on one conversation in a loud and crowded room. In a family full of introverts, it was easy to mistake our personalities for signs that danger was coming—what introvert doesn’t feel overwhelmed in a loud and crowded room? I remember a period when, if I drifted too gradually into sleep and found myself half-asleep but dreaming, I would wake with a start and struggle to reassure myself, as if I were a child who had just experienced a nightmare. “It’s okay. It was just a dream.” I wasn’t afraid the dream was real, though: I feared it was a hallucination.

But against this backdrop of fearing the unseen, unheard world in my father’s mind, I was also learning to seek the divine. My Primary teachers taught me that I should seek feelings, convictions, even words in my mind—so long as they came from God. And, strangely, I didn’t see any contradiction between these two worldviews, perhaps because my father’s delusions and hallucinations were never about God or religion but rather the temporal world, where killing a Kennedy when he was a child meant government forces would be hunting him down decades later.

From time to time, especially at fast and testimony meetings, I heard stories of visions. A woman whose unborn child appeared and spoke to her as a ball of light. A woman whose exasperated ancestor appeared in a vision demanding to know why no proxy temple work had been done for her yet. A man who saw a ball of light at the temple and knew it was his dead father thanking him for performing a proxy ordinance. A girl who went to the temple for the first time and felt invisible hands touching her back. A woman who had been beaten as a child because she told her father that angels appeared to her.

I accepted these miraculous accounts without question—invisible helicopters were a clear sign of madness, but an angry ancestor was another story. I was skeptical about only one of the visionary members of my childhood ward. Brother Brown (not his real name) once interrupted the youth Sunday School class to tell about a time the Angel Moroni appeared, promising that he and Moroni would serve an important mission together during the Millennium. I didn’t believe a word of it because his wife had told my mom about the abuse she suffered at his hands. As an adult, I’m less certain that I can dismiss his story without questioning the others. If my only method of discerning between hallucinations and miracles were how peaceful I felt listening to them, then my knowledge of Brother Brown’s abusive history alone would have determined my reaction. Could the others have been mistaken as well?

And then there’s the world outside of Mormonism, where what one person calls revelation another calls madness. When I was in high school, a classmate who had been reading about polygamous Mormon sects chose a day when I was out sick to tell our Advanced Writing class about how crazy Joseph Smith was—with his all visions and prophecies—and how crazy anyone would have to be to belong to his church. The whole class, even the teacher, participated in the conversation. One friend reported that she’d defended me by insisting, “Just because Joseph Smith was crazy doesn’t mean Emily is crazy,” a defense I didn’t find quite as satisfactory as she’d hoped.

Today I am thirty years old, past the age where schizophrenia surfaces: home free, as a therapist once told me. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that madness is etched into my marrow. After growing up with a parent who couldn’t even trust his five senses, I understand that my own are also fallible. I’d like to believe, therefore, that God’s perspective is the only one I can trust, but can I trust myself to understand this being? An atheist colleague once cheerfully called me a “not-crazy person of faith.” It’s a title I wear uncomfortably. Perhaps my colleague saw sanity in my desperation to remain open-minded and uncertain. The downside to my open mind is that my faith is like Schrodinger’s cat, valuable mainly for its potential. Anything could be inside that box. Life, death. Peace, madness. Angels, helicopters. It’s when I insist on opening it up—when I insist on relying on my senses, when I insist on certainty—that I risk stumbling into my own forests of New Hampshire.