The Poison Fruit and the Honking Bus: How the White Lotus Finale Resurfaced My Family's 2008 Survival Story
Content Warning: Discussion of mental health struggles, suicide, and financial crisis. Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers for The White Lotus finale.
Last night, everyone sat and watched The White Lotus finale. And it wasn’t until the next morning when I was pouring over all the analysis of the episode that it occurred to me. The Ratliff family story hauntingly mirrors my own family’s story in 2008. Except my dad didn’t use a poison fruit. And he didn’t change his mind.
He tried to drive us into a bus.
My mom grabbed the wheel. Swerved us into a ditch just in time. I still remember the sound of the horn, one long angry beep like the driver was screaming at him.
When the market crashed in 2008, it unlocked a horror story for my family. As the banks spiraled, so did my dad and he became agitated, nervous and paranoid.
He’d been saying it on repeat for weeks: “We’re gonna lose the house. We’re gonna lose the house.” Over and over, like a broken record. There was no logic to this statement; we weren’t in foreclosure, didn’t have a predatory loan. We weren’t even in the demographic hit hardest by the crash.
But one day mom finally asked him, “Why do you think that?” That’s when everything fell apart.
She found her answer at the bank. Hundreds of thousands of dollars missing. College funds. Retirement. Some lost to the market, obviously. Most, gambled away. Given away to extremist religious groups. The panic hadn’t been about losing the house. It was about losing the lie. We would later learn these were signs of something bigger. The gambling, the pacing, the dooming were just clues to a bigger picture.
Bipolar II Disorder.
My mom saved all of our lives that day with the bus. After the car stopped moving she demanded he switch and let her drive. No one spoke. The only sound in the car was the recession pop core music everyone listened to in 2008 playing on the radio.
What I didn’t know until years later was that he tried again when we got home. My mom found him in the closet with a belt around his neck. I don’t remember what age I was when she told me that, but I remember feeling like it was too young to know about suicide at all. Except maybe I wasn’t too young because 11 year old kids are dying by suicide. Just look at the news.
It turns out she told me at exactly the right time, because she would die from cancer just a few years later. If she hadn’t saved him, we would’ve been orphans.
Both of my parents have an illness that can lead to death, but only one of those illnesses is normalized in society. And I’ve never talked about his Bipolar before, but I feel the call to do it now. Because if this is truly another 2008, someone needs to hear it. Someone needs to swerve. And I want to try to help.
To be clear, the 2008 crash didn’t cause his Bipolar disorder. It was the spark that ignited symptoms he’d been managing, hiding, or not even aware of at all.
And I know he is not the only one. So as much as I can remember, I am going to walk you through how we got through it.
Simply put, we got though it because my mom refused to let him go. She was the most stubborn person I knew and probably the only person I’ve ever known who strong enough to do what she did. And thank God what we all witnessed Sunday night was fiction because Victoria Ratliff could never.
She handled everything and became the head of the household, taking over the finances (obviously) and taking charge of his treatment. She found him a Psychiatrist who helped him get a diagnosis, medication and therapy set up with someone. At one point the care team recommend inpatient treatment, which he was very paranoid about and against. I don’t know if she made the right call or not, but she agreed to watch him 24/7 instead of that. I get that there are reasons why the traditional hospital system might traumatize people, especially vulnerable populations, but there are so many options and pathways for help, all I am asking is that if you are reading this and it resonates, you find one. Warm lines, community groups, someone.
Unfortunately, not everyone in his life was on board with his recovery.
His so-called "friends" were actively feeding the fire, fueling his delusions.
They told him he wasn’t "losing touch with reality,” but that my mom was the one making him feel that way. They convinced him that her pushing for a diagnosis was a scheme. That when she eventually left him, she’d use the diagnosis to claim he was an “unfit parent” and win the custody battle.
They told him to throw his medication away because it was “poisoning him."
And then they introduced him to an extreme religious leader in our community.
I won’t name the religion, because it could have been any extremist group. But this leader promised an "easy" solution to all his problems: donate money to his institution and everything will get better. This “leader” let a man who he knew was struggling with mental illness give away tens of thousands of dollars to his “cause.” For my mom, it probably felt like when we were watching The White Lotus, screaming at Belinda not to go into Gary’s house. Helplessly watching her do it anyway and screaming at the TV as if that would make a difference.
It took years and years, but through her sheer determination to not let him go, he found recovery. He has people in his life, people my mom trusted, who speak with him openly about his illness. Our housekeeper still comes to his house once a week, despite the fact that he lives alone and doesn’t need her, solely to count his pills and make sure the right number are there. His secretary watches him like a hawk. And now he knows the signs enough to help himself.
The biggest reason I know he’s going to be okay? He called me Friday. After, you know, the market crashed “bigly.” And he asked me straight up
Him: “Are you having thoughts of hurting yourself?”
Me: “Dad, what are you talking about?”
Him: “When this happened in 2008, it really really messed me up and I want to make sure you are okay.”
This caught me off guard. We had never ever talked about 2008. Not directly. Never about the bus or any of those scary nights. And yet, here we are at another market crash and this time he isn’t spiraling; he’s making sure his daughter isn’t.
That gives me hope, but it isn’t enough. Because I know that this current crash is going to destroy so many lives, just like the last one did. I’m sharing our story because I want everyone to be able to recognize the signs of someone (or even themselves) in distress during a financial crisis. Maybe by the next time we do this “unprecedented times,” someone who is staring down a bus will choose to swerve, or say that “the coconut milk is off.”
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