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Second Life
When Christine Janumala was nine years old, her mother, Mary, said, “Come here. I want to tell you a secret.” They sat together on a brown couch in their living room, in Santa Ana, California. Mary, who was forty-three, said that a man she had known in medical school, a professor, was sending her messages about a plan to take her away and live in a mansion. “I remember feeling really excited, because that fit with my sense of what should be happening,” Christine said. “I was really into
Harry Potter and the idea that, if you are part of the select, you can see a bigger story happening out there.”
Mary leaned over and began separating strands of Christine’s hair, as if searching for lice. “Does he put listening devices in your hair?” Mary asked, about the professor. “Does he ever ask you to say things to me?”
Christine, the older of two sisters, believed everything about the professor until her mother suggested that Christine was part of his scheme. Mary had always been tender and doting and practical. Christine saw her as a “magical, glowing figure.” She said, “I just had this feeling in my body that she was not the same.”
Her sister, Angie, who was seven years younger, learned to follow their mother’s instructions, whether or not they made sense. She came to view her mother’s stories about the professor, and about friends who were part of his mission, as akin to tales in the Bible. “It’s kind of like, OK, some of these people are real, and some of these people aren’t real,” Angie said.
Christine was often cast in the role of the villain. Her mother would yell at her for poisoning her pizza or hiding her keys or other menacing deeds, even as Christine tried to explain that she hadn’t done them. Sometimes Mary smacked her. (Mary doesn’t remember this.) Christine began to mistrust her own memory, too. “My mom would accuse me of things, and then I’d be, like, Maybe I did do these things,” she said. In fifth grade, she asked Santa Claus for a polygraph machine. “I just had this baseline sense of: I could be doubted at any time.”
She felt that people might help her mother if she could just find the right language to describe her transformation. By high school, Christine was spending so much time studying the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that she texted a friend that she had actually “married the dsm-iv.” She explained that her mother suffered from the “fregoli delusion,” a belief that strangers were disguised as doubles of people she knew. In her journal, Christine wrote, “My mom has erotomanic delusion disorder with a splash of persecutory delusions.” She asked for help from teachers and a school counselor, but, she said, the “message I got was, basically, Everybody has their shit, and you have to just deal with it and keep getting good grades.”
Mary, who was from India and had worked as a physician there for a decade, spoke so much about the professor that her husband, Chris, eventually found the professor’s number and called him. “He said, ‘I am not in contact with her,’ ” Chris recalled. “ ‘I didn’t even know your wife came to America.’ ” At the professor’s suggestion, Chris, who worked at the California Department of Motor Vehicles, scheduled a psychiatry appointment for Mary. Christine sat in the waiting room, hoping that this would be the beginning of getting back the mother of her early childhood. But when Mary finished the appointment, she said that the psychiatrist thought she was fine. Not long afterward, Mary kicked her husband out of the apartment and barricaded the door with a desk and two heavy suitcases. Christine and Angie allotted extra time to get to school each morning so that they could remove the obstacles.
Karl Jaspers, the German psychiatrist and philosopher, has described what he calls the “delusional atmosphere,” a profound alteration in the way people experience the world. “There is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light,” he wrote. People in this state search for a story that explains why everything suddenly feels uncanny and ominous. The “vagueness of content must be unbearable,” he wrote. “To reach some definite idea at last is like being relieved from some enormous burden.”
Mary had landed on a story that overwrote the reality of her daughters’ lives, but they also recognized in it a kind of emotional logic. Mary had been pressured to marry Chris, in an arranged match, and when they settled in America, he had traditional ideas about a woman’s role and restricted her freedom to pursue her career. Christine and Angie came to feel that their mother’s delusions—that her former colleague would free her from marriage and she’d be restored to her place in the medical community—were “a way of explaining how she ended up trapped in this position,” Christine said. “We theorized that psychosis was almost a reasonable response.”
Christine moved to New York after high school, because her favorite book,
Underworld, by Don DeLillo, was set there, and because it seemed like the city where people went to escape their homes. She lived in the Bronx, near her father’s brother, and got a job at Planet Hollywood. She wanted to be a novelist and obsessively reread
Underworld, covering the pages with determined annotations: “integrated dialogue”; “meta commentary”; “sensation of young immediacy.”
Angie and her mother would text Christine asking for groceries or pizza, and she would order
the food for them from across the country. Mary was still barricading the door. Chris slept in his car. (Eventually, he moved in with a girlfriend.) Christine worried that Angie, who was eleven, was growing up in a kind of folie à deux, a delusional system that structures two lives. Angie said of her mother, “I could never figure out why she was doing these things to me, and I had this kind of emotional explanation: Other things are just more important to her. I’m only there as a vessel for the magical thinking.” After about a year, Christine arranged for her mother and Angie to move to New York so she could look after them.
Mary moved into an apartment in the Bronx, in the same building as her brother-in-law, and plastered the walls with tape, to prevent reality TV shows from recording her and Angie through the cracks. Angie tried to bathe while her mother was asleep, because Mary believed there was a camera in the showerhead and had covered it with a sock. Angie felt as if she were living in a kind of urban version of
Grey Gardens, a formative movie for her. The documentary chronicles the lives of a mother and daughter, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who live together for years, piles of trash accumulating around them, social conventions becoming remote. “I am afraid the marks of my childhood will set me apart from the rest of the ‘normal’ world,” Angie wrote in an essay in high school. “I am also afraid that I am disrespecting my mother’s sacrifices . . . by recording the painful truths I have lived.”
After two years in New York, Mary seemed increasingly unable to care for herself, so Christine, who had enrolled at Columbia University, called the city’s mobile crisis unit, a team that assesses people in psychiatric distress. The crisis unit knocked on Mary’s door, and after a conversation in which she described receiving electric transmissions through a filling in her tooth, she was admitted to Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital, in Manhattan.
Psychiatrists there petitioned a judge for permission to hospitalize her for a month and treat her with antipsychotics, over her objections. On an evaluation form, a psychiatrist initially wrote that Mary had an “unspecified psychotic disorder.” Then, perhaps uncomfortable with such a vague diagnosis, she crossed out the phrase and wrote, “Schizophrenia.” Mary was fifty-five years old, and her symptoms had begun in her early forties, an unusual age of onset for schizophrenia. Most people are diagnosed in their twenties or early thirties.
Christine moved into her mother’s apartment and filed a petition for joint custody of Angie. Their father, who was living in California, did not contest the petition. “I make breakfast in the morning,” Christine wrote in her journal, describing her new routine with Angie. “I wash the dishes. I lock the door at night. I have established, kicking and screaming, my own rightful place as an active agent in the universe.”
Mary’s admission to Beth Israel was the beginning of a nine-year cycle in which she was sent to psychiatric hospitals for weeks at a time before being released, unchanged. Mary said that each time she was admitted to a hospital, the staff “kept asking the same questions, and it never made anybody have a different outlook on the situation. Everyone stayed with the same thing. It was schizophrenia.” For about a third of people with schizophrenia, antipsychotics do not work. “I wish my mother’s delusions and paranoia were treatable,” Angie wrote, in an application essay for college. “However, she has lived with them for 12 years, and her institutionalization . . . had no effect.”
Christine had one memory of her mother losing her temper when she was young, and for a long time it had felt important to her to figure out if the incident—Christine remembered being forced to eat a box of popsicles while kneeling—had occurred before or after her mother became ill. She wanted to preserve her early memories of her mother as gentle and compassionate. But when it became clear that the treatment wasn’t working, Christine began to wonder if she had misremembered and her mother had always been angry.
After five hospitalizations, Mary was transferred to the Bronx Psychiatric Center, a state facility that provides long-term care. She observed that when patients refused medications, staff would sometimes call security, and the patients would be injected with drugs, a prospect that terrified her. “I would take the medication without any question, because I’m not risking fighting with security,” she told me. “These people are very sensitive to what they call ‘challenging authority.’ ” She spent her days dreading the moment when she’d be forced to swallow her pills.
Mary sometimes imagined that God had a reason for keeping her in the hospital, but, she said, “I did not even want to go there, because the reasoning mind makes you feel very nervous and uncertain.” Her daily life became so narrow that she stopped noticing the weather. “They don’t remind you about the changing season—that spring is coming into summer or the winter is coming into spring,” she said. “You just pass the days as quickly as possible.”
Christine, who spoke to her mother every week, said that Mary never articulated her sorrow at the time. “I would have wanted to engage on the level of ‘I’m sorry you’re there; do you feel sad?’ And I’m sure she was having those emotions, but she wasn’t able to express them. It was always ‘I’m being attacked. I’m being held like a prisoner here.’ ” Christine felt that her mother was safer at the Bronx Psychiatric Center than she would be anywhere else, but she felt guilty for hoping that Mary would stay there for the rest of her life.
Mary was discharged in September 2023, after a year. A week later, she collapsed in her bathroom. She was taken to a hospital in Brooklyn, where the doctors told her to stop taking antipsychotics, because they thought the drugs may have caused a movement disorder. Then they discovered that she actually had lymphoma, a sometimes fatal form of cancer. She began seven cycles of a treatment that combined chemotherapy with rituximab, a medication that targets antibodies involved in the body’s immune response.
When Christine and Angie visited her at the hospital, Mary responded to their questions with one-word answers. Her face had a vacant expression. Christine and Angie thought she was dying. Mary did, too. She dreamed about being a child, playing with her sister and four brothers, in Kolkata, where she grew up. “I told myself, ‘This must be the end of it,’ ” Mary said.
Angie, who was now twenty-two and had recently graduated from Dartmouth, prepared in therapy for her mother’s death. She said, “I had multiple sessions where I was just crying about the fundamental things I wish she had given me, like ‘I wish she could have told me what was going on in her head,’ or ‘I wish she could have told me she was sorry for what she did.’ ”
By Christmas, two months after beginning chemotherapy, Mary was moving a little more freely, and she had begun to carry on conversations. Christine and Angie noticed that her personality seemed different: She was calm, outgoing, and polite, and she often expressed gratitude. Angie texted Christine that Mary seemed peaceful, as if maybe she was “getting some post-life or death clarity?”
Christine, who was twenty-nine and had settled in London, having moved there for a master’s degree in psychology, was struck by her mother’s ability to watch the news and absorb the information on its own terms. For years, the television had been a source of agitation; Mary had said that people were using her ideas and repeating her lines.
One day, when Christine was visiting the hospital, Mary asked for a phone. “I sort of teased her, ‘Now you’re asking for a phone?’ ” Christine said. “I wasn’t really making much of it, but then afterward I thought, Why has she asked for a phone? That’s quite unusual.” Mary already had a phone, but it was in storage because she said it contained spyware.
Angie gave her a flip phone and, to be safe, covered the camera with a piece of tape. “She seemed fine using it, which was odd,” Angie said.
In May, a month after Mary finished chemotherapy, Christine and Angie asked a psychiatrist at the hospital to examine her. Christine said, “The psychiatrist was, like, ‘Why have you called me here? I don’t understand. She has no symptoms.’ And we were, like, ‘Yeah, that’s the reason we’ve called you here.’ ”
Christine had the same feeling in her body that she’d had when her mother first became ill—the sense that something at Mary’s core had changed. She tried to get the doctors to grasp the scale of her mother’s recovery. By the summer, her cancer was in remission. She hadn’t taken antipsychotics for months, and yet “her psychotic symptoms are gone,” a doctor wrote. Christine told the doctors, “She had a twenty-year psychiatric history. Have you heard of this? Could any of her medications have caused this?” She spoke with a neurologist at the hospital, but he didn’t have an answer. Omid Heravi, one of Mary’s oncologists, didn’t understand what had happened, either. “Medicine is very specialized—we don’t get involved in other fields,” he said. He guessed only that one of the cancer drugs she’d been given had had collateral benefits. “In medicine, all side effects are not bad,” he offered.
When a person recovers from an illness, it is usually seen as the end of the story. But becoming sane also causes a kind of narrative collapse, a confrontation with a personal history that is no longer recognizable. Christine encouraged her mother’s friends and siblings, whom she’d been estranged from for years, to get back in touch. She wanted to restore her mother’s sense of connection, but, she said, “I also wanted them to be able to tell me—outside of my childhood memories—if this is the person she used to be.”
Copyright © 2026 by Rachel Aviv. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
