Morale & Safey

The day after Thanksgiving 1982, my dad tried to commit suicide by jumping off of Ohio's tallest bridge. I was born two years later. He had stopped taking his medication for Bipolar Disorder, a disease I didn't even know he had. Morale & Safety is his story – a story of surviving mental illness and the generational trauma that comes with it. Curtis Brenner, the middle child of three, is a teenage male with a love of poetry and music in a family where being male means things like playing football and joining the Army. His dad is a WWII vet, a house-flipper long before the era of HGTV, and a terminal cancer patient. He chooses to end his life before Leukemia ends it for him, passing on a legacy of suicide to his son. Curtis joins the Marines, in part to honor his father, and maybe also to prove something to himself. The stress of boot camp pushes him to the brink of his sanity, and he experiences a psychotic break. He is medically discharged with a schizophrenia code and given the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder, paired with lithium for treatment. Despite his illness, Curtis remains a spirited and affable person. He continues to pursue writing, though nothing much ever comes of it. He meets the love of his life, Amelia, at a bar, and wins her over with goofy poems and loving intensity. When she gets pregnant, the weight of becoming a father coincides with a lapse in his medication and culminates in a Thanksgiving fiasco over butter, of all things. His small failure on this night is the catalyst for suicide. He jumps off a bridge in the same way his father once jumped out a window. But Curtis survives. And in a strange turn of events, he ends up giving a speech at his workplace about morale and safety, revealing details of his suicide attempt and current condition. With Amelia's help, Curtis gets back on lithium and their life together progresses happily, so much so that they never reveal his illness to their two children - until they have to. Along with the relief that comes from sending children into adulthood comes the devastating news that Curtis's kidneys are on the verge of failure after 40 years of ingesting lithium. His doctor presents the impossible choice of continuing with lithium and ending up on dialysis or trying to find success with a different mood stabilizer, at the risk of his mental well-being. Curtis chooses anything but dialysis. No other medicine ever does work. His life unravels. He and Amelia divorce, and his adult children ultimately place him in a VA hospital after years of his refusal to care for himself. He withers away in the VA, persistently rejecting any advances from his children to interact. At the end of his life, his mind, perhaps preoccupied with dying, gives him a gift. His daughter comes to visit, and he forgets to turn her away. For the first time in a decade, they connect. With the help of poetry and music, his family is able to say goodbye, not to the man trapped in a hospital bed, but to their Dad as they knew him when he was free. While it might not seem like much to anyone else, this closure answers the question they've been asking the whole time: What did it mean for their father to keep living in the face of a lifelong battle between finding peace and ending things?