Some nights, when I’m brushing my teeth, my eye catches on one of the small splotches of glitter nail polish that I haven’t managed to scrub from the bathroom countertop. I don’t always notice it, because the countertop is speckled, but every time I do, my stomach twists a bit.

Details are funny things. So small, but everything seems to hang on them. There are a thousand details I could name about that time when our lives ran entirely off the rails, and this glitter nail polish is one of many that present themselves as evidence that indeed it all happened.

Afterwards, when life hadn’t settled down but I had a bit of breathing room to try to make some sense of things, I read an article about bipolar disorder in the New York Times, and it helped illuminate a bit of what we had experienced. The writer, who was describing her experience when she went off lithium, talked about her “trademark manic style,” and mentioned painting her face with green-and-gold eyeshadow. Aaah. Now I see.

I don’t think I will ever tease out the interplay of heartbreak and bipolar disorder and substance abuse that converged to make our days in the late winter of 2015 so frightening. Nor do I know if frightening is even the right word. Our days were at a tilt, and we simply couldn’t get our bearings because we never knew what was coming next.

But on one February night, my husband demanded that I call the paramedics. He was vomiting repeatedly, and he was at once angry and domineering and needy. At the time I didn’t understand the vomiting indicated he was drinking again. Somehow I had missed the cues. Me, endlessly naive.

The paramedics arrived, and one of them said, “Sir, do you know you have glitter on your eyebrow?” In the moment I felt the strangest mixture of outrage and shame, and even now that shame still burns a little. Are people ashamed when they have cancer? Are their loved ones ashamed? Of course not. So why have we not managed (or maybe it’s just me) to forego the shame that surrounds mental illness?…  I still wish I could have that paramedic disciplined for being a full-on idiot, and send her off for a bit of training on mental health.

At one point that day—the day that followed the night when we once and for all declared our marriage over—my husband had painted his nails and then one of his eyebrows with multicolored glitter nail polish. This, I would say now, was the first concrete evidence of his breaking away from reality. At the time, it just seemed like something he would do. My husband, not squared, but to the tenth power.

Here’s the thing about mental illness: Quite possibly the people in your family aren’t equipped to handle it, or not well anyway, and not quickly enough. For years my boys and I had been struggling to keep our bearings on the changing tides of this man’s moods, but this was something altogether different. I had years of experience in holding down the fort and pretending everything was okay, so I tried my best to maintain course while steering my boys and I out of harm’s way. If I could just hold steady, I thought, we might all escape unscathed.