On an early summer night in 1944, on the wooded shoulder of a rural Massachusetts highway, a man in a rumpled brown suit wandered in the shadows. Whenever a car passed, he dropped to the ground and lay flat. His hair was matted, his face smeared with mud. He was a respectable Boston doctor on the lam, hungry, lost and ill.
He was Mimi Baird’s father, Dr. Perry Baird, a Texas-born, Harvard-trained physician whose severe bipolar disease ultimately destroyed his life and scarred his family with the usual wide-ranging cruelties of mental illness.
Dr. Baird vanished from Ms. Baird’s life when she was a little girl. She saw him once, briefly, when she was a teenager, then never again. He died in his mid-50s, in 1959. More than 30 years later, when Ms. Baird herself was in her 50s, a large package arrived on her doorstep and her father re-entered her world.
[For more of this story, written by Abigail Zuger, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02...bipolar-disease.html]
Comments (0)