‘I Promise You, You Have Your Soul.’

Mary Margaret Alvarado | The Atavist Magazine | January 2026 | 3,002 words (11 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 171, “’That’s Somebody’s Son.’”

---

1.

Tracy* was in her basement in Colorado Springs, getting ready to watch a Colorado Avalanche hockey game, when she called the coroner’s office in Dallas. It was a Sunday in June 2022, and her wife, Jen, was out, so Tracy was alone. The woman at the coroner’s office was kind, she remembers, and slow to confirm which unclaimed bodies were there. Something shifted in their conversation when Tracy described the triangular tattoo on her son’s left forearm. When the woman asked for his dental records, Tracy knew that he had died.

Ben’s body was found face up in a creek in a leafy residential neighborhood on March 9. The autopsy, as Tracy understands it, showed that he had used methamphetamine, which stopped his heart, and that he suffered from exposure. He died held by a tree overhanging the water.

As a child, Ben had been a gifted swimmer who made it to the state championships year after year “without even trying,” Tracy says. “His breaststroke was out of this world.” At meets, before the whistle blew, he’d do the Macarena on the block. It gave Tracy some peace to know that her child had been drawn to the water, that he had wanted to get high, not die; and that, though he did die, at the age of 23, it was in a tranquil place, near a footbridge, beneath trees.

Ben had been a precocious child, who learned to read at age four from old Dick and Jane books. Tracy’s photos show him beautiful and glad, in train-patterned jammies, in OshKosh overalls, in a Sea World wet suit. His childhood in the small riverside town of Salida, Colorado, was sweet and ordinary: elementary school and its birthday parties, even if he was never the first friend invited and was sometimes the last.

Were the signs of his future suffering there all along? Tracy doesn’t know. But Ben would “have a total meltdown,” she said, if Max, his younger brother, “slobbered on his toys.” Certain textures were a problem. He didn’t like to get his hands dirty. When he lost the science fair that “he’d kind of half-assed,” he wasn’t disappointed, he was undone.

In sixth grade, Ben befriended a girl named Emily. She was the first person who ever truly accepted him, he told his mother. Emily was in remission from cancer, but when it returned the next year, she died. Ben told his mom that he could sense his friend’s presence in his room. Then he sensed an evil spirit in his brother’s room.

Maybe he was a medium? He thought he was medium. He’d been watching a show about one in Long Island. Perhaps there were mediums and her child was one. “Heck if I know,” Tracy says.

Tracy is a Gen X athlete, white with a slender build, light-filled blue-green eyes, and a small diamond stud in her nose. She’s quick to see the beauty in other people’s lives. As Ben changed, Tracy did, too. She went back to college to become a probation officer, after being a full-time mother to Ben and Max. Though she was married to their father, Ted, “a good man,” she wasn’t happy. When they separated in 2012, she thought she might be gay. She soon met Jen, who lived in Colorado Springs, and the two fell in love.

Meanwhile, Ben struggled to leave the house. His grief for Emily only grew. In seventh grade, he “could not stay organized,” Tracy says. The changes that came with middle school, moving to different classrooms and teachers—they overwhelmed him. This child who had always been known as uncommonly intelligent, and who cherished that identity, began to get B’s, then C’s. By the end of the eighth grade, Ben—now out as gay—was flunking every class.

Tracy was coaching volleyball, working full-time, and going through a divorce. She was living check to check but felt too ashamed to ask for help.

In August 2013, she started working in Springs, as she calls it. Her two kids went back and forth between her place and their dad’s. On October 29, she got a call from her ex. Something was very wrong with Ben. Tracy drove midway to Cañon City, a town known for its rock climbing and supermax prison, to pick up her son. He looked sick to her: pale and too thin. “He was so dehydrated that his lip was split open and bleeding,” Tracy says. He had just turned fifteen.

Something was trying to get into Ben’s body. That’s what he’d woken his father in the middle of the night, in terror, to say.

Tracy drove Ben to the nearest emergency room, where doctors treated him as if he had anxiety. He was given Xanax—one of the most prescribed psychotropic medications in the United States—stabilized, and released, but they barely made it through the night. “And now it’s Halloween,” Tracy says, narrating what followed.

She remembers how her child was in the back of the car, holding his shirt up to his shoulders, showing her, begging her. What was trying to get inside of him? What was trying to take his soul?

Tracy took Ben to Cedar Springs, a private psychiatric hospital on a handsome, century-old campus, and he agreed to a stay that would last over a week. In addition to the Xanax, doctors gave him Risperdal, an anti-psychotic. Why would he need that if this was anxiety, Tracy wondered?

In 2012, Ben began taking photos and posting them online: the braided trunk of a money tree, the aquamarine lanes of an outdoor swimming pool, a skillful self-portrait in pencil, kayaks leaning against a wall. “Death is sweet. Death is Life,” one caption reads. “Celtic knot I invented. It never ends,” goes another. More often the descriptions are funny. A picture of a red Solo cup is captioned, “Red solo cup.” A bowl of edamame: “Nothing a little edamame can’t fix.”

Some of the photos are posted under the name Eden Sealwood, which Ben briefly used at school and online. Elsewhere he was Eleanor. At home he was Ben, and remained so all his life. For an Instagram account, showing its owner’s soft blue eyes and elegant Roman nose, he was Benedetto Scango, an Italian form of his given name. Then, in his first semester of college in Gunnison, Colorado, Ben took the unisex Arabic name Nasim, the last name Hefran, and she/her and they/them pronouns. There was not enough time of sustained mental health to know how she, he, or they would have flourished and made a life, whether as female and trans, male and gay, or genderqueer. Tracy would have welcomed any of those identities. She speaks of her beloved child as he was to family—as he, Ben, him. But she brightens to think of Ben as her daughter, someone she never had the chance to really know. Maybe Nasim was a “trailblazer,” Tracy says, early and brave.

“On our way to Mauii!” reads a caption on one of Ben’s pictures, from June 9, 2014. Tracy and Jen were wed on a beach in Hawaii. Photos show them beaming in white dresses, with Jen’s daughter between them, and Ben and Max on either side. But that trip “was a long ten days,” Tracy says. Ben locked himself in a bathroom, terrified of a tsunami and seeking what he always struggled to find: a place to feel safe.

Life at home in the years that followed was sometimes “chaos,” Tracy says, or “hell.”

She took two short phone videos in November 2020, desperate for someone to see what her child was enduring. The lens is close on Ben’s back. He’s dressed in a worn brown waffle shirt with holes along the neck, a talisman he wore often. He is very thin. His hands are raised up, fingers apart. His curly hair is long. He is making a rhythmic and muscular sound of exertion. It’s as if he’s pushing mightily against something, struggling ­­to repel it, to force it away. There is no solace in the sound. It is a sound of agony.

Then words, very quickly, with something like hope: “Jesus hears me.”

Tracy is not religious, and Ben was not raised in any church, but like many people who have experienced the crucible of profound mental illness, he called out for language and meaning older and more encompassing than what the medical models offer.

The bracing work begins again. Ben turns to his mother after another grievous bout and looks relieved. “I barely did it. I barely did it.”

“You did it,” Tracy says, her voice calm and encouraging.

Then, “Oh, my God!” Ben wails. “I touched my hands together.”

Ben is sure that if he touches his hands together, he will lose his soul. So in addition to all the other effort, there is this: He has to keep his hands apart.

“Well, don’t do that,” Tracy says, matter-of-fact. “Don’t touch your hands together.”

The quality of the footage is poor, and the camera is often pointed toward the ceiling—Tracy is filming with one hand, comforting her child tenderly with the other.

Ben says something that can’t be understood. You still have your soul, Tracy reassures him. He needs her to say it again, and in a specific way.

There is the sound of anguished crying, and words that are unclear under the burden of pain.

Then, “No!” he shouts. “I think I just lost my soul!”

“No, you didn’t,” Tracy says. “No, you didn’t.”

The pained sounds begin again, fiercer, louder, more awful.

There’s Tracy’s hand, in the next clip, holding up Ben’s lovely hair.

“Mama, say—” He is crying.

“I swear you have your soul.” Tracy’s voice is calm.

“Mom, promise me.”

“I promise you, you have your soul.”

The crying that follows is softer, like maybe what Tracy said is true.

2.

This is the story of three mothers of three children who were diagnosed in late adolescence or early adulthood with “a polygenetic … heterogenous spectrum of psychotic disorders that are neurodevelopmental and, when not optimally managed, neurodegenerative,” in the words of Dr. Robert Laitman. Or: schizophrenia. The mothers live in the largest city in the U.S. above 6,000 feet. That city is Colorado Springs. It is a place bedecked with blue skies. Sometimes those skies seem to sparkle, and there is a real song of a mountain looking out over the meager offerings of this civilization: strip malls; the Gas & Grass, a gas station chain that sells weed; and the wide roads that lead to them.

“I’m scared of him,” an old friend of Tracy’s said, referring to Ben. “I don’t want anything to do with him.” A colleague told her, “Some people just aren’t meant to be in this world.” Tracy can’t think of a friend she could confide in about her child’s illness, “until, like, Elisabeth.”

Elisabeth is my older sister, and older sister describes her way of being in the world, too. She and Tracy met in the spring of 2020, through a Zoom support meeting run by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) during the COVID shutdown. Tracy remembers that Elisabeth and her husband, Corey, were sitting on their bed. Corey kept getting up and moving around. Elisabeth was crying. Their 16-year-old son, Luc, had a shifting series of mental health diagnoses and a DUI for cannabis, and they needed help.

Tracy told Elisabeth that she was in the system, a probation officer. Elisabeth and Corey were in that system, too, the one that’s supposed to be a “net.” Corey works at a soup kitchen that serves the unhoused, many of them mentally ill. Elisabeth is a nurse practitioner and medical director at a health clinic that primarily serves refugees, and was formerly on a medical team that helped survivors of sexual assault, often in one of the city’s emergency rooms. From their work, Elisabeth and Tracy knew a great many people in common, and they began texting that night.

“He’s hard to reach,” Elisabeth remembers her sister-in-law saying, about Luc. That’s not what anyone would have said of him as a child, when he was an absorbed enthusiast: of hot-air balloons and dinosaurs and all things John Deere. He was a fast little runner and a riveting performer, with beautiful features on his beautiful face. But by early adolescence, Luc did often seem apart while present, “hard to reach.”

What might have been ordinary—a teenager adrift—became alarming. His sixteenth birthday party was just family, no friends. Elisabeth would watch Luc in the yard from the kitchen window, alone on the swing they’d hung for a much younger child. Who was he talking to? There was no one there. What was he laughing at? She couldn’t see.

One day, Luc told his parents that his camera was broken, the Sony a6300 he’d used to take exquisite photographs: of children’s faces at a party; of scenes in a village in Haiti, where his family once lived; of the sand dunes and skies of Colorado. It won’t focus, he said. They took it to a camera shop for him. No, the technician reported back, the camera worked just fine. Perhaps the lens could use a little cleaning?

It was his Mamaw’s birthday in March 2020 when Luc got arrested for the DUI. A few months later, Elisabeth and Corey asked Mamaw and Luc’s grandfather, my parents, for a meeting outside, the four of them in masks. Luc was spitting out or refusing any food Elisabeth cooked, sure that she was poisoning him. He was convinced that his parents were evil. He’d left a piece of paper on the kitchen counter, addressed to no one, to everyone. “Tell them I need to dye my brain pink,” he wrote, “and I need to do soul studying.”

“We’re in trouble,” Elisabeth told our parents. Our father got out a yellow legal pad and began taking notes.

Tracy helped expunge Luc’s record. When his probation officer told Elisabeth that she didn’t like a menacing look Luc had made, Tracy talked to her colleague. “You better be good to Luc,” she said.

Things would get better, and then they would get worse. One evening in the summer after his DUI arrest, Luc broke his wrist when he jumped his father, a gentle man who did not strike back. His mother called the police, like his father would a year later, when Luc was found at midnight starting fires in the driveway with a gas can and lighter fluid.

The door to Luc’s bedroom was removed. His parents installed a lock on theirs. His younger brother and sister got locks and alarms.

It was too painful to grieve. To survive, Elisabeth had to think like a nurse. What would she do if this beloved child, perfectly made, her firstborn, were her patient? She would chart—so that’s what she did, casting herself in the third person. She charted hospitalizations, providers, medications a.m., p.m., and p.r.n. (pro re nata, or as needed). She tracked “medications Luc has tried and failed”—the antipsychotics, SSRIs, non-SSRIs, and stimulants, some of which made him feel low, others as if he were “disassociated from his body.” She remembers being upstairs one day when she heard Luc repeatedly vomiting downstairs. She didn’t know what was wrong, then the next step came to her: When you’re stuck, “you refer, you refer out.” She took him to the ER, where he was diagnosed with lithium toxicity. Elisabeth’s charting practice both helped to save Luc’s life—here was documentation—and made his doctors and nurses uneasy. Why was “Mom” so clinical?

Some notes Elisabeth took:

6/10/21 Probation today. Slept moderate (do we do a scale?). Not angry with anyone, even me when talking to probation. But delayed responses, tangential thinking. Perseverating on breaking into the design industry—not swayed by practicality. Even after Mary at probation explained the importance of doing what is asked in therapy, he still thinks he can alter the plan—it’s not clicking. Not a lot of humor but have seen smiles—almost like responding to internal stimuli at times.…

6/25/21 After lack of sleep and a rougher week—emotionally draining for us, lots to think about for Luc—he seemed catatonic yesterday. You could ask him a question several times and he would just stare at you. Sat on the couch most of the day without moving or responding to everyone around him. 

7/7/21 Luc very agitated—began following Elisabeth around the house calling her “evil” and certain she is “going to hell”—refused to leave E and C’s bedroom and began opening and closing drawers. Corey got home and made Luc go outside—Luc forced his way back in. Called 911.

7/14/21 Worst day of the week for Luc. Suspicious of Mamaw and Dad. Luc reported Corey and Mamaw’s speech as “garbled.” Would not let Corey be within 10 feet of him—concern for manipulation of his mind if Corey got too close. 

There is a record, too, of all the ways Luc tried, while in psychosis, to get out of it. He meditated with an app, a cushion, a Tibetan singing bowl. He joined his Mamaw at breakfast and Mass. He joined his cousins at a swimming pool, even if he needed to stay in a lawn chair off to the side.

Luc attended high school over Zoom during the first year of COVID. His Mamaw and Grandpa Ray took turns helping him with it, as he could not complete the assignments on his own. His Mamaw recalls how they would break often to take a walk and Luc would talk about his plan to live in Iceland. It struck her as “another name for a place too far for his illness to reach.”

One day he told her that he couldn’t talk to her anymore, because she wasn’t his Mamaw. She looked like his Mamaw, he explained, but she had a different voice. “Some being who meant us ill had taken over my body,” she says. “He couldn’t trust it. He needed to go home.”