Three months later, I returned to visit Mama. I'd been traveling on business and wasn't able to return as soon as I wanted. I didn't know what to expect, and what I found there broke my heart and deadened my soul.
June 8
Mama was in the locked ward with Anne.
Anne was 19. She'd been in the Pines Memorial Hospital for a month. She sat upright in a padded room, motionless, no expression on her face, catatonic. Every few days, she thrashed about and howled like a caged animal trying to escape invisible bondage, hurling herself at the padded walls as if to beat the numbness from her soul, the violence in stark contrast to her more usual catatonia. I was curious to discover what secrets lay trapped inside her subconscious, but I doubted I'd ever discover them. I resolved to try.
Anne was wealthy; her father was the Dean of Students at the University who'd insisted on her commitment at Pines Memorial. Her small frame betrayed a quiet force, the strength of which was evident only when she pounced around her room, yelling like a banshee or uttering a low, guttural noise - a primal scream. So much I didn't understand about Anne, so much I didn't understand about Mama and so little I knew about either of them. I knew that by understanding a fragment of one I'd understand most of the other. I resolved to learn what I could about each of them.
Each morning as I walked by Anne's room, I looked in through the small window in her door. Day after day, I did this. She sat, dead to the world, motionless. Not once did Anne show a glimmer of recognition of who I was - she didn't seem to be aware I was even at her door.
One morning, Anne sat upright and was reading from a book of poetry. I stopped, smiled, and gave a slight wave. She came to the door. Since I was a daily visitor to the locked ward, I was allowed free access to my mother's room. Apparently, no one saw me to stop me from entering Anne's room.
"I know you, " Anne had said. "You're Mrs. Willow's daughter. You've come every day to see me."
"How did you know?" I asked. "You never gave any hint that you even knew I was there."
"Oh, I knew," Anne said. "You came at 10:30 on the dot, every morning. I saw you with my eyes and heard you scream with your soul."
Her words hit me like a brick: "I saw you with my eyes and heard you scream with your soul."
Anne continued.
"The Doctors know nothing," Anne said. "They think I know nothing because most days I don't move. Some days I am locked within myself, other days I am free. They know nothing, yet they run this goddamn place. But I know this: You will change your mother's life."
Anne's words reverberated in my mind. I doubted they were completely true, but the Doctors knew less than they believed and more than Anne gave them credit for.
Anne understood my purpose at Pines Memorial -- which was simply to be with Mama. The staff saw me as a dutiful daughter, but they doubted I'd ever have any effect on my mother - they believed she was lost forever to mental illness - paranoid schizophrenia, in particular. Their recommendation was that we should get on with our lives.
Get on with our lives? Mama was my life.
I visited Mama because I'd lost her when I was 10, and I wanted - no, I needed, desperately needed, to reclaim her - for herself, for me, for my sisters, for all who suffered schizophrenia.
I remembered what Dr. Schifflen said. I gasped.
"She will take her medication, then she will stop and relapse. The disease progresses downward. With each psychotic break, her level of functionality will be lower than before. She may become homeless. There is nothing you can do to help her. Get on with your own life."
To me, that would be unconscionable. I swallowed the lump in my throat and opened the door to Mama's room.
June 15
Today was not a good day. Mama was in a semi stupor from the medication and she sat glassy-eyed, while drool pooled at the corners of her mouth. When they first started medication, the dose was too high and she had choked on her food. She had developed esophageal ataxia - muscle rigidity - and she couldn't swallow - the food was lodged in her throat. They gave her an antidote and lowered her dose, and she left the day room, half bent over and choking, returning to her room where she hid under covers. When I saw her, she was still quivering under the covers.
Mama's soul hid behind the illness that carried a babel of secrets whose language no one knew. Sometimes she made gestures or looked around the room, as if responding to the inner voices she often heard. Her eyes were narrow slits: she eyed me suspiciously, as if she didn't know me. She was still in the throes of the illness. I was hoping she might be better by this time.
I began to see Pines Memorial Hospital to be as much of a prison as Mama did. How false the pastel coloring, the cheery street clothes, the first name basis of the staff. I appreciated that the mental health system existed to help patients with mental illnesses. But between the failings of the bureaucracy and the lack of insight of some practitioners lay pain - real psychic pain that group therapy, individual therapy and medication did not address: patients didn't understand why the system treated them with little understanding or human caring, and family members didn't understand why the system offered so little hope.
The mental health system didn't seem to understand why nobody wanted to go along with what they were trying to get people to do: follow the system. That's what I regarded as the central problem - that the system existed to serve itself and was blind to real solutions.
Mama had wanted to see the flowers I'd brought her.
No, we can't let you do that," Marianne, the charge nurse had said, weeks earlier. "The patients are too sick, especially your mother. We need to keep a tight rein on things. No Jonquils for your mother, I'm sorry."
July 6
As Mama began to respond to the medication, seemingly getting better, they let her out on a weekend pass. I was in the car with Mama when I first began to realize the magnitude of the problem.
"Green light, Mama. Go." Recognition finally flashed across Mama's face and she stepped on the gas. She'd been off in space, again. It was a hint of how bad things were. Rarely was she fully aware. Either she was spaced out or it took her longer to think through basic tasks. The electroshock therapy of years before had mangled her brain and had torched her soul. She rarely smiled; she looked older, careworn. I sucked the juice out of an orange slice, smacking my lips.
I wanted to remember Mama when she was a young mother and I was a small child: she'd taught me how to whip cream in the Mixmaster and to flavor it with the juice from Maraschino cherries. She'd taught me everything I needed to know then and would ever need to know about cooking, baking and sewing - and of love and of life, in general. We sang songs together, painted oils together and told made up stories to each other. It was perfect. She was Mama.
All those skills were gone as Mama sat in the car and wondered whether to turn right or left.
"Left, back to the hospital," I said.
Mama turned left and we returned to the hospital. It would be another few weeks before they gave her a second weekend pass. I didn't want her to go out again; I'd rather she stay in the hospital where I could keep her close to me, with me holding her head in my lap, and, as a mother soothes her child, I would softly twirl her hair between my fingers. I cried at the thought.
July 10
Mama was wearing a pink housecoat. She smiled and pointed to her notebook.
Mama looked better today. Her eyes were clear. She had downed several cups of black coffee to beat back the sedation but she didn't hunch over her cup, drooling, as she had a few days earlier. On good days, she wrote poetry and drew sketches.
She showed me her latest sketch: It was in pencil, of a girl and a woman who stood side by side and held hands, looking into a reflective pond. Her draftsmanship had improved since I'd seen her artwork when I was a little girl - it was perfectly executed. I began to imagine myself as the girl, and she as the woman when I noticed that the figures in the reflective pool were reversed from the figures on shore - the girl was the woman - and the woman, the girl.
On good days, Mama spent all day in her room, writing and sketching. I saw nothing wrong with that. The nurses wrote in the hospital record that Mrs. Willow "engages in writing behavior."
I questioned them. "Engages in writing behavior? She is drawing and writing poetry - her soul is beginning to surface. You're questioning this?"
"We want her to be in the day room with the other patients," they had told me. I confronted them directly: "You want her to be in the day room when Tad, the Green Beret, may throw chairs, be put in restraints and injected with Valium, then locked in his room all day? I don't think of that as particularly safe for my mother."
I looked around at the patients in the dining room who were waiting for dinner: some were smiling but most looked straight on, a vacant expression on their faces. A few watched TV or played cards, and the younger men flirted with the young women, a no-no. I saw the nurse's station, where the ambulatory patients were lining up for their meds. The charge nurse smiled but as she looked over patients' heads, a vacant expression came over her face. She looked through the patients and beyond to the locked door -- her exit to the outside world, where she would make a beeline the minute her shift was over. A few nurses watched TV or filed papers. Neither group interacted much with the other.
July 13
Mama was smiling. I began to hope. I asked her to tell me stories of when I was small, of when I hid my pet frog in the pocket of my Annie Oakley vest, of when I wore Cowboy boots to Kindergarten and of when my friends and I tried to sell crab apples to neighbors. She remembered none of it. I'd show her photos from albums but her face remained blank and she shook her head as if to say, "no, I don't remember." She was a blank slate, a tabula rasa.
I'd have to teach her everything.
It was then I knew she'd never get better, just as my father had warned years before. I'd resisted the truth of that knowledge with all my will, insisting it might be true of others but it'd never be true of Mama.
I knew that the Mama I'd loved when I was a small girl had been lost forever when she set foot inside County Hospital, years before. She never completely returned from the month of electroshock therapy she'd had at the hands of the doctors there. Her childhood, her memories of life with Daddy, life with me, with all of us, had largely been erased. With that, so, too, went her soul.
Yet I wanted to reclaim her. I told her stories in the hope that it would jog her memory. I told her the stories she'd told me when I was little - stories that had made me smile and had brought me close to her.
I told of her great-grandmother who walked across the Rockies and who gave birth during a snowstorm - and of how, when her long hair was frozen to the ground, they had to shear her locks the next morning. I saw a faint smile peek from the corners of Mama's mouth. I don't know if she remembered the story or if she smiled only because it was a charming, human story.
I told her how many dozens of our ancestors had died on that nine-month journey West. I told her what they ate, and that when food was scarce they ate Sego Lillies, a tiny wild Lilly that grew in isolated pockets along the steep ravines of the Rocky Mountains. They did what they had to, to survive.
I knew and Mama knew that if her great-grandmother could cross the Rockies and survive on wildflowers, that she'd pull through this.
I wanted her come out on the sunny side of her illness. I wanted this desperately, but I didn't know how much time that would take, how much of a toll it would take on her health, nor that it might lead to an early death.
I knew only one thing: that by visiting her every day, she would get better.
My month of visiting Mama was over. It had been a wild ride. Some days she was better. Other days she was lost behind a porcelain veneer in which she spoke little -- but behind the narrow slits for eyes and an inner language no one understood --lay psychic torment of unimaginable pain. Those days were the blackest I ever felt. I was on an emotional roller coaster, trying to help Mama, who was lost to all. My hopes raised me up one day only to lash me down the next. I felt horsewhipped. I was drained. It was time to go home.
As I drove to the airport near the salt flats, I saw a lone seagull overhead, swooping down to pick up food scraps strewn along roadside picnic tables. He then swirled overhead, cawing one final song before he took flight and soared into the distance, home free.
I yearned to scoop Mama in my arms and carry her away from her inner prison so that she may be free to fly, free to be herself, free to be. It was this one simple freedom to be I wished most for Mama.
* * *
This is a WIP in progress, a fictionalized memoir. Previous stories in the series, so far. (chronologically):
Critique invited.
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Comments: 137
You've done an excellent job here. The story is heartbreaking and well told. Kudos.
I can feel what u felt when you wrote it.
Naturally, I've thought about the feeings for a long, long time.
Change can happen.
http://IndyChai.com
Great work. I will go back and read the one story I haven't checked out thus far.
Thank you for submitting work of such quality on our Gather blog.
I decided I needed to sit down and write, as if that's what I was put on this earth for. No more pussing footing around. Time's too short.
Ina is correct that there is so many problems with the mental health system right now. Much of it is due to a gross lack of funding and not enough people willing to, or trained to workin the field. The first thisn that gets cut in funding in the state budget is usually community mental health. while the patient population has increased almost tripple in the last 15 years, the funding has been cut almost in half here in Michigan. It is really sad how many people are walking the streets without proper treatment.
Thanks for helping bring this to light.
the pionts you raise are very good ones...she is psychotic, but doctors, as we know, tend to recite statistics or usual cases and don't necessarily look at an individual when reciting prognosis, Bob Woodruff is an excellent case in point for how someone exceeded the usual prognosis.
Sue S., thanks for the comment. The driving episode happened, but at a different stage, so I wondered, too, about exactly your point.
Deven, back then (1960) it was commonly used for schizophrenia and the ECT was much stronger then. My mother did receive ECT in 1960 and though it did not erase all her memories of her life, it did seem to erase quite a bit of my childhood, as well as seriously hampering her ability to get through her ADLs, activities of daily living, including driving.
Yes, as to walking the street. I remember, as a reporter in 1982, in Illinois, a woman came to speak about the necessity for the mentally ill to be returned to the community, that they could function very well without an institution. The truth, of course, is that states no longer wanted to spend the enormous sums necessary to keep patients. Many homeless are indeed mentally ill and/or drug addicted.
And community efforts are far short of what is necessary. Barbaric as before, but in different ways.
Deven ~ The way the old meds worked could very easily be responsible for memory loss as well as the ECT. It's hard to say which would be the main culprit, but I would guess the ECT. Even though ECT is done much differently and humanely today, many patients still come out of it with memory loss and neuro deficits. Sometimes these side effects go away, sometimes they don't. I've run into former patients who had intractable depression and they are sooo grateful they had the ECT. It was the only relief they've had in years. It's basically a crap shoot.
thanks....sorry so quick, and swamped reading..... cu
You'll here from me.
I had a boyfriend who was in and out of mental hospitals - some good, others not so good.
I understand.
But from the perspective of a family member, it must have been much more emotionally draining.
You've asked for a critique, but I can't see anything technical here that could be improved upon.
I like the way the nurses' comments are italicised, and how this adds to the remoteness of their answers. The diary format, probably necessary given the type of work it is, also works well.
I must admit this is the first chapter of this I have read, so I must go back and read them all. I pray for a wonderful ending. Good work.
"But between the failings of the bureaucracy and the lack of insight of some practitioners lay pain - real psychic pain that group therapy, individual therapy and medication did not address: patients didn't understand why the system treated them with little understanding or human caring, and family members didn't understand why the system offered so little hope."
Thanks, Kathryn! Tulips and lilies to you!
Lois
and I like your story very much.
I think you have the makings of a wonderful story. Some years ago, I asked my mother to read a WIP. After reading it, she told me not to make the story too sad. I would pass that advice on to you.
"We want her to be in the day room with the other patients," they had told me. I confronted them directly: "You want her to be in the day room when Tad, the Green Beret, may throw chairs, be put in restraints and injected with Valium, then locked in his room all day? I don't think of that as particularly safe for my mother."
It is difficult for nurses to assess the social skills of patients if they remain in isolation. Patients staring into space in a group tells more about the health of a patient than a patient staring into space alone: a small point that does not detract from the story, especially as you could add later how the daughter's perception of her mother's treatment changed.
I will look forward to reading more!
A wonderful story you have there... If nurses all over the world have the amount of patience expressed in this story, they will lead many dying patients to recover to health. I sense more than a mother and her child' relationship or love; it is unconditional love in action.
In Nigeria such a patient will die for neglect in hospital and even her relations. Most of our nurses don't have a heart of flesh. They destroy patients with bad words and discourage their parents and family members.
There is much passion here:
"I knew that the Mama I'd loved when I was a small girl had been lost forever when she set foot inside County Hospital, years before. She never completely returned from the month of electroshock therapy she'd had at the hands of the doctors there. Her childhood, her memories of life with Daddy, life with me, with all of us, had largely been erased. With that, so, too, went her soul".
It reminds me of the good relationship I had with my loving mother, she was ill for just three days before death took her.
Keep the good work and keep writing.
Your comments and constructive criticisms are very thoughtful and appreciated.
Mama reminds me of my grandmother who needed to be in a nursing home after having a stroke. When she was coherent, she didn't remember any of us, but in the last few years of her life, she was unable to talk or feed herself and depended on us (or nurses) for her care.
Also on a side note, I felt bad that the patients at the hospital aren't able to enjoy the beauty of flowers. Unless there was danger of eating them (why else wouldn't they allow flowers), flowers (esp. jonquils) are theraputic and help bring a cheery disposition to someone who is sad. When I receive flowers, no matter how depressed or how much of a bad day I'm having, it makes me feel good and brightens the rest of the day.
krista, i have met people other than my mom with schizophrenia, and even though i believe the system is probably better now than it was, i think life is very difficult for those afflicted, partly because of the voices that are difficult to remove and partly because of the way others treat those afflicted...did you see "a beautiful mind?"
pamela, if I do capture the experience, it is only through 40 or so years of thinking about it...i will think about other parts to write about, other sections, etc...
From my memoir writing class I have paid special attention to how the events in the story change the author (the daughter). In what ways did the daughter change is probably where your writing is going to go from here.
Another thought I had was the use of the word memoir. Our class got into mega discussion about if a memoir can be fiction and still be called a memoir. We discussed James Frey's book and the Oprah Show "scandal" about him passing off fiction as a memoir. About 90% of the class agreed that a memoir should be the most truth an author can produce and fiction should clearly be labeled fiction.
So take these comments for what they are, just my impressions from a beginner.
I loved your piece and have learned a lot of information from all the following comments. I appreciate that.
Darcey D.
Deb O., I'm thinking of describing this the way writers did in the past, "Novel, Based on a True Story." It starts as fact, as memoir, but then I change things a bit...I've written straight memoir and I'm just trying out this form...
Did see and read Cuckoo's Nest - and of course, Sylvia Plath's experience with ECT, back in that day, as well. About 30 years ago, I had read a lot about ECT and some of the early developers of it in the 30s remarked: This is horrible. We must never let this happen again. 70 years ago and counting.
Didn't know about Gene Tierney. I'll see if I can get that movie from Netflix.
My mother did have schizophrenia and ECT and was hospitalized several times.
The driving incident is real, this sort of thing happened many times, but at a different time. I will move this incident and rewrite it into a section not written yet, about the time AFTER her first breakdown (Gnarled Trees) but before Jonquils for Mama and Sego Lillies for Breakfast.
It was and is heartbreaking to see how devastating schizophrenia is. The WHO listed schizophrenia as one of the world's 10 most disabling conditions, with I'm sure AIDS as number one, leading to death.
Namaste.
Debra Cornelius: Thanks for enjoying this, thank you very much. I will be working on the next chapters in coming days and weeks.
Jen G: Thank you very much for enjoying my work. It is really appreciated...Am working on future chapters, hopefully a book in a year or so.
Adele G., thank you for enjoying this.
Lose the italics. As a reader, let me decide where the emphasis should go. In rare instances, they work; overuse of them deadens the reader's senses, and makes them less meaningful. Also, capitalizing 'Doctors' gives them more importance than they're worth.
In this sentence, "She had developed esophageal ataxia - muscle rigidity - and she couldn't swallow - the food was lodged in her throat. ", drop the dash after 'swallow'. Put in a period or semi-colon.
"Yet I wanted to reclaim her.". Put a comma after 'yet'. Read your work out loud, and every time you breath or pause, place a comma. The good reader (yes, there is such a thing), will also breath when your puncuation tells them to.
You've got a good story going here, and clearly, this story is burning to be told. I find the prose to be a bit purple at times, but if you can step back and gain some objectivity, you'll be able to get the story told. Write it through, then step away and come back to it, not as a daughter in pain, but as a writer telling a story. Catharisis first, creating a publishable story next. Let your characters speak for themselves.