Susan
works at Skelly Oil. I am the Southwest regional manager for Scovill Schrader,
traveling several states, and for 1 1/2 years we are the only family in the
third edition of that subdivision—or, When I am out of town, Susan
and “Young Man Gary,” as Susan called G2, are alone in a 12-acre
development.
She doesn’t bat an eye or make any complaint; she just does what she always does, and that is to “make the most of it” and enjoy the best parts . . . house, home, driveway, son, husband, dog. And then her mom relocates from England and her family is unified and reunited.
In
1977, tragedy strikes the Vance family in a most unusual and cruel way. Before
her 30th year, Susan is 
stricken with a pernicious
and vicious mental disease: paranoid schizophrenia, which for
brevity’s sake I’ll call PS.
I came to call it many other nasty names in my time, but today I’ll stick to . . . PS.
PS strikes the logic ability of its victims and makes it atrophy. It then promotes voices or head noise--and visions or specters, which persecute, grab at and taunt or, even sometimes, entertain the afflicted person.
Susan and I were 29. She had no idea what she was experiencing! Nor did I! All I knew was the wife of my youth was not the same. All she knew was that the closest person to her was me, and, in her state of paranoia, she concluded that I must have caused the voices and the phantoms.
She demanded that I stop doing to her whatever was causing the delusional torture.
I couldn’t even spell PS, much less cause or--even more so--cure it.
Susan packed up the moved to Tulsa, 20 miles eastward, with mother and son and sank deeper into the grips of PS.
Only G2 (Gary Vance, Jr.) and I are alive to recall those days. Except for my brother's widow, Aimee Wallace, who was there and here with us today. Another was Susan’s mother, Peggy, who on Dec. 7, 2003, drops dead--next to G2, his aunt Rita and two cousins—while walking into a restaurant in Albuquerque, N.M.
Another very important person there then was, Judy M. DuVall, who spent 16 years with me after Susan moved away, and was commended to the Lord, our God and Savior, in this very chapel on Friday, Nov. 28, 1998, the day after Thanksgiving.
Amongst the Sunbelt personnel,
only the longest serving citizen, Mr. Jerry Moore watched Susan struggle undr
the unmerciful tyranny of PS starting in the 1980's.
In a short time--Susan’s supervisor at Skelly Oil tells me in 1979--her error rate grew to in excess of 60 percent.
Skelly will terminate Susan, as unemployable.
Who among us could not see why Susan cried out that her “life was being stolen”? Have any of us ever lost everything, which is how Susan saw it? Just like before, with her father, and grandparents and brother gone!
Above Photo Shows: Mrs. and Mr Jerry Moore
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