Losing Aaron

Book excerpt: Losing Aaron is the story of the life and death of Aaron Hughes told by his mother, Ingrid Blaufarb Hughes. It describes the devastation of his mind by schizophrenia and the ways that his illness reverberated through the family altering everyone's life. In his teens Aaron was sensible, poised, and brilliantly able in his schoolwork and projects and a generous support to friends and family. Excerpts from his high school journals and medical records suggest that even in high school his illness was beginning its insidious attack. It progressed until, in his first year of graduate school at the age of twenty-four, he told his mother that people were making fun of him on the streets "in an organized and systematic way." She realized then that he was psychotic. His parents and sister visited Aaron at many critical points, first in Boston and later in Paris, where he lived a marginal existence for several years. They consulted with psychiatrists and supported him as well as they could, though feeling throughout that the real Aaron had been stolen away, leaving in his place a bitterly hostile young man who believed his parents were paid imposters. Though the years of his illness were a time of deep sorrow, frustration, and disruption for his family, they were grateful when he returned home to live with them. In the end he took his own life at thirty-one.