[Music]
EMCEE: Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Mark Lukach.
[Applause]
MARK LUKACH: I tend to not have that much of a problem with sharing honestly and so
I was pretty forthright about some of my life path and life decisions and stuff.
That's just kind of my personality.
MARK [On stage]: I came home from work one day and I found my wife sitting on the floor
in the guest room and she wouldn't look up at me.
And finally after a little while, I coaxed it out of her.
What's wrong?
And she said I've been thinking about what I'm gonna do with the Vespa key.
I didn't know what she was talking about.
We have a Vespa, but...
And so she said, when I go to the Golden Gate Bridge, I need to take the scooter to get
there and when I jump off the bridge, I don't know what I'm gonna do with the Vespa key.
I met and fell in love with my wife Julia when I was 18, and when you're 18 you don't
think about the future very much.
And when I thought about it, I thought it was going to be bright and shiny.
I didn't think that someday, this person that I love so much was going to get really sick
and that she was going to experience so much pain and that I was gonna spend so much time
afraid and worried about whether she would live or die.
MARK [Interview]: As for my specific Moth story, I actually didn't work with Julia on
it much at all.
We've talked about this so much.
She's very, I think, comfortable with my take on things.
I asked her, I said do you wanna hear it?
She's like, y'know I kinda just want to wait until the event because I know—I know you're
going to be respectful to how I would want it to be told.
MARK [On stage]: I was completely over my head, and so I took her to the hospital and
I had to literally grab her, but she was kicking and screaming and trying to grab onto door
knobs in order to get her into the car to take her to the hospital and once we got there,
they admitted her to the psych ward and let me just tell you the psych ward just as horrifying
as it looks in the movies.
With the blank white walls and the bars on the windows and the little cups with medicine.
And I visited her every day from 7 to 8:30 during visiting hours.
Sometimes she didn't want me to visit.
She was scared that if I came close to her, this thing that was inside her might get me
too.
So in this perverse way she was trying to protect me while I was trying to protect her
and I didn't know what to do so I did everything because I thought somehow maybe I could love
this thing out of her.
Maybe I could say the right thing to her or I could hold her close enough or I could ask
the right questions to the doctors and I could somehow make this go away.
MARK [Interview]: Mental illness is so stigmatized, but it's so prevalent.
Like, the statistic are really shocking about how many people actually deal with this and
how many families have to address it and yet when my wife was hospitalized, I thought I
was the only person in the world that had ever done this because I couldn't find anyone
out there talking about what it was like to have your wife locked up in a hospital.
So that really became my charge, was like I wanna be out there talking about this stuff
so that hopefully some guy either in the audience or watching on YouTube or whatever or child
or parent or whoever it might be says, hey, this is similar because my sister is going
through this or my son's going through this or whatever else it might be and I think it's
just gonna hopefully make them feel less alone.
MARK [On stage]: And when she was discharged, I took three months off work in order to stay
home and take care of her and I thought three months is gonna be plenty of time.
She'll be fine.
After three months I had to go back to work to keep up my insurance and she wasn't fine
at all.
She was, you could say worse because she was openly suicidal at that point and so I go
to work and basically panic all day and then I'd come home and pretend everything was fine
and dance around the house and be goofy and just try to keep life light for her and for
me and this was our life for months.
Y'know, for months I was her cheerleader and I was her watchman, but I was also terrified.
I was slowly falling apart inside.
MARK [Interview]: I've listened to a lot of The Moth stories and in my opinion, the best
stories I've heard couple humor with tragedy or emotion or whatever.
So I really was hoping that I could make it funny.
It's not funny.
Unfortunately.
I had to let that go.
I just really embraced that, yeah, it's a heartbreaking story, what we went through.
It was really hard.
That's okay.
I don't need to be the funny guy that somehow makes sadness funny.
MARK [On stage]: Finally, after 9 months, they sat me down and said we think it's time
we consider ECT.
ECT stands for electroconvulsive therapy.
And I know that a lot has changed since the 60s and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but
when they said to me they wanted to give my wife shock treatment, that's when I really—I
knew I was at the edge and I once again feared was Julia ever going to get better?
But they said we're gonna give it one last try.
We're gonna give one drug combination, another shot before we go that route and hope for
the best.
Two weeks later, we're in aerobics class and I look in one of the mirrors and I see Julia
and she's smiling.
You have to understand how rarely smiled and I smiled back and I stopped and I watched
her for a little bit and she was less slow.
She was more in control of her body.
She was coming back and I turned and I faced her and I looked in her eyes and for the first
time in 9 months, I saw life again.
I saw this spark of health that we all take for granted so much.
And I knew she was gonna make it.
And I turned back to that aerobics teacher and I kept going so hard, I thought my arms
were gonna fall out of their socket, I was so victorious.
MARK [Interview]: So the part that I don't mention in the story is that my wife has bipolar,
which does come back and in fact is back right now.
Like, my wife is currently sick.
She is currently heavily medicated.
She was in the hospital three months ago.
That means that this story once again feels very very raw to me, but what's gonna be good
for me is to get to talk about the past.
I'll get to use the past tense and get to drop the present tense for 10 minutes and
I think that's gonna be really important to to me because I thin it's gonna remind me,
y'know, I try to remind myself this all the time, but like we went through it once, we
can get through it again.
[Applause]
MARK: My name is Mark Lukach, I'm a first time Moth storyteller, please subscribe to
THNKR.