“Consider it a Gift From God”

Mama was fully aware of her terminal condition, but she accepted it calmly and with faith.  I would like to be able to face my last days on the earth with that kind of courage.  As things wound toward the ultimate end of her life, she had an experience that I am at a loss to explain.  Daddy and I were gone, so Murl was staying with her.  Murl said that suddenly she spoke, and he knew she wasn’t talking to him.  She said, “Go away angels.  It’s not time yet.”

Toward the last Ann and the children drove down from Cedar Rapids. On the last day of Mama’s life, Ann took care of her.  Ann noticed that certain hygiene matters had been neglected.  She asked for supplies and made the necessary corrections.  She asked the nurse if she could change Mama’s sheets.  They hadn’t been changed for several days.  Mama seemed to enjoy the cleaner environment.  She began talking to Ann about the two of us.  She said that she was glad that I had chosen Ann to be my wife, and what a blessing she had been to our family.  It was a great day for Ann.  At one point she told Ann, “I’m so tired. I wish I could go home.”   Ann said, “Mom you can go home anytime you want to.”  She said, “I think I’ll go home around sundown.”

That afternoon Daddy and Murl came to the hospital to relieve Ann.  Ann and I went back to Clyde to get supper ready for the children.  Ruby and Gary were at Daddy’s house.   Jim was in Abilene with Elliott.  Just as we were finishing supper, the phone rang.  It was Eula, Daddy’s sister.  She told me that I needed to come to the hospital immediately.  We decided Ruby and Gary would be all right by themselves for a few hours.  We knew the end had come.  As we headed the car toward Abilene, Ann said, “It’s almost sundown.”

When we arrived at the hospital room, Daddy told me what had happened.  The year was 1980.  The presidential election took place that day.  Mama never heard that Ronald Reagan was elected president.  Daddy turned on the television news at 6 o’clock, hoping to hear about returns from the east coast.  Mama asked him to turn the television set off.  He agreed.  He said, “We don’t really care who’s going to be elected president.”  He turned the television set off and mama left this world.

Dr. Calvo came a few minutes after we arrived and pronounced her dead.  Before leaving Dr. Calvo talked to me.  He said, “I have no explanation was to why she was rational these last three weeks. Consider it a gift from God.”  I did.

I asked Bob Connel to conduct the funeral.  Bob had known her for many years.  He seemed the logical choice.  Daddy said he wanted congregational singing.  I wanted the song leader to lead her favorite song, “There is a Habitation” but the song leader said he didn’t know it.  Instead, I chose “Where Could I Go but to the Lord.”  One of the verses includes the following lines.

“Living below in this old sinful world,

Hardly a comfort can afford,

Striving alone to face temptation sore,

Where could I go but to the Lord?”

The lyrics don’t fit most of us, but they did fit Mama.    

Mother/Son Talks

I started my discussion of my mother’s mental illness, when I got to the place in my story when I recalled the events of the last few days of her life on this earth.  When the doctor called to tell me that Mama was dying he said, “She’s rational right now, but it won’t stay that way.”  I determined to get to Abilene as quickly as possible.  I heard from the doctor on Friday night, and by Sunday afternoon I was on an airplane.

During the three weeks that followed, she and I spent a lot of time together – just the two of us.  We had the kinds of conversation that I would like to have had many years prior to that.  We talked about her early life.  She was anxious to talk about things that  had happened in her life prior to my birth. She told me about her experiences in Fort Worth where she atended Brantley-Draughon Business College, her work for what today would be called a “Savings and Loan” bank.  Then there was the disappointment losing that job during the Depression. She talked about keeping house for the wealthy Jewish family. Later Melba, her younger sister, told me that she got fired because she hung a brown sock and a blue sock together on the clothesline, and one faded onto the other.  

   

I talked to her about the troubles she had gone through, and explained that I had never understood why she had to go through these trials.  I had spent years in a frustrated relationship with my mother.  However, the last three weeks were joyful except for the fact that her body was ravaged with cancer.

As I reflect on her life, I’m convinced that she handled crises quite well.   It was normal living that she couldn’t handle.  There’s no way to explain the mysteries of the human mind, especially the inner workings of a mind that’s not functioning the way it ought to.  I’m deeply thankful that I had the privilege of spending quality time with her during those last three weeks of her life.

Our Visit to the Hospital in Wichita Falls

.   It was an unnerving experience for a 16 year old boy.  Mental health hospitals were pretty primitive in those days, and they were primarily there to protect the “sane” public from the “crazy” people.  That was not an altogether bad thing.  When we got there, we realized the water pump had malfunctioned on the car.  I managed to find some water to fill up the radiator.  While I was doing this, a resident was standing on the other side of the chain link fence yelling at me.  I was glad there was a fence between the two of us.

As a minister, I’ve had the experience of visiting maximum security prisons.  There’s really not a lot of difference in the way people are treated in today’s prisons and they way mentally ill people were treated in the fifties.  In today’s prisons, inmates are called “residents.”  I don’t remember what they called the patients in a mental hospital, but it all boiled down to a complete loss of freedom.  There were several doors that had to be unlocked for us to get through, and those same doors were locked behind us.  The only difference between that visit and a prison visit lay in the fact that visitors to a mental health facility weren’t frisked in the fifties.

When we finally got to my mother she was in good spirits, and rational except for some memory lapses caused by the fact that she was recovering from electric shock therapy.   She was terribly lonely and wanted to come home.   She believed there were people in the hospital who were completely sane, but had been committed by family members to get them out of their lives.

In the early fall, she was thought to be well enough to go home.  She was in good spirits, and she was extremely glad to be home.  She was aware of what she had gone through.  She said, “If I ever get that way again, just lock me in a room until I’m all right again.”  Of course we couldn’t honor that.   

From that point on her life satisfaction was often interrupted with periods of psychotic behavior.  These episodes tended to last longer with the passage of time.  Conversely the periods of rational thinking got shorter.  Mercifully, mental health science reached the point in which widespread use of electric shock therapy was used less and less.  Drug therapy became the treatment of choice.  It’s didn’t solve the problem, but it greatly reduced the severity of the attacks, and eventually made institutionalization unnecessary.  At least my father viewed it that way.

After college I moved away from home, so I did not have to deal with it on a daily basis.  To be quite honest, I don’t think I ever learned to manage that situation very well.  I didn’t know how to relate to her.  I didn’t know how to manage the situation in the public.  Her public behavior could be embarrassing at times, and my conscience bothered me because I was ashamed of what was happening.  On the one hand I knew she couldn’t help it, but I was also wishing we didn’t have to go through this.    That’s not a self-pity statement.  It’s just an honest assessment of the way things were.                      

THE MENTAL HOSPITAL IN WICHITA FALLS

Sometime within the next few weeks, events were set in motion to get her admitted to the mental hospital in Wichita Falls.  First, there had to be a court hearing.  I sat in the courtroom and witnessed the proceedings.  Six jurors were impaneled.  They were all males.  This was 1951 and women were still not considered peers in a court of law.  The jurors were being asked to rule on her sanity.  It took only a few minutes for the jury to declare her insane.  I don’t know that I can describe how it felt to have my mother declared insane by a court of law. I don’t even actually remember how I felt.  I think that’s probably the worst part…an absence of feeling.

Within the next day or so, the sheriff drove Mama and Daddy to Wichita Falls.  At that time electric shock was the treatment of choice, and that’s what they did.  She wrote letters to us, and we could tell that her mental state was improving, although it was obvious that she had certain memory lapses.

Daddy, Murl, his son,  Charles, and I contracted to build a turkey shed for Roy Griffith.  It was huge – probably a third of a football field long.  Our job was to put a metal roof on the shed.  It was July, and well over a hundred.  The corrugated roof we were putting on made is much hotter than that, but we built a good shed.  It was still standing as recently as ten years ago.  However, the last time I made a trip to Abilene, I noticed that it had been torn down.

Roy always had a hired man who worked regularly for him.  Roy had employed a man had only one arm, but he was a jolly sort of fellow who worked hard.  He had an uncanny way of getting his nails started, and he stayed up with the rest of us on that roofing project.  During this time Daddy decided we needed to go see Mama.  We told the hired man that we would be gone for the next day because we would be making a trip to Wichita Falls.  He said, “Well, you’d better be careful.  They might keep you.  That’s where they’ve got the crazy house.”

Daddy said, “That’s where I’m going.”

The next day Murl brought him up to speed on our situation, and the man felt terrible about it.  I think he apologized to Daddy when we got back.  We learned that you couldn’t allow yourself to be offended by the “crazy” jokes.  People were going to do it, and they usually didn’t mean to offend you.  They just didn’t know your situation.  It has made me a lot more sensitive to that kind conversation.  We need to be a lot more sensitive to everybody.   Most people are dealing with some kind of burden, and if you make light of it, it just adds more pounds to the load.

DEALING WITH THE REOCCURENCE OF MENTAL ILLNESS

I was about fifteen years old, and scared to death.  I had no idea what to do.  I made a decision.  I told Mama that I was going to walk to town.  Somehow I scrounged up about 75 cents. At that point I had never talked on a telephone more than two or three times in my life.   The only way I knew to make a call was to go to the telephone office in Clyde. When I got there I found the office locked.  There was an operator on duty inside, but she was locked in for security purposes.  However, there was a pay phone in the foyer.  I called the operator on the pay phone and told her that I wanted to speak with Burl Bales at the Park Hotel in Odessa, Texas.   She told me to put money in the slot.  I think I put everything I had, and she put the call through to Odessa.  I told Daddy what was going on, and I suggested that he come home as quick as possible.   I walked back home and went to bed.  About 6 o’clock the next morning he and Murl drove up in the yard.

We got past that crisis, but the time would come when we had to make some difficult decisions. We drove to Hico, and members of Mama’s family gathered in an attempt to persuade her to go to Galveston.  Even though she was irrational, she understood that part of the plan, and she was adamantly opposed to it.  Neither Daddy, her siblings nor her parents could persuade her differently.  I remember sitting on the porch and trying my best to explain to her why she ought to do it.  To my great surprise she agreed.

The next day Daddy, her brother Durward, and I’m thinking her sister, Melba went to Galveston with her.  They refused to take her.  They said “John Sealy hospital serves the entire population of the state of Texas.  We can’t take anyone the second time.”  He went on to explain that he felt her condition required hospitalization, which meant that she would need to be sent to a regional mental health facility.  For us that meant Wichita Falls.

Galveston

Sometime after that, Mama’s family apparently decided that Daddy wasn’t doing enough for her, so they became proactive in trying to help her.  They arranged for her to go to Galveston.  She was admitted as a patient at John Sealy Hospital which is a teaching hospital  for the University of Texas.  As I recall, I think she probably stayed about a couple of months.

Actually, that was a very good time for her.  She was being seen for psychiatric help, but they also were very thorough in diagnosing any medical symptoms.  They discovered that she was anemic.   By the time she came home, her physical health had great improved.  She had gained weight, and I believe she was probably the happiest that I have ever seen her.   The care of the physicians in residence was enormously personal.

She entered the longest period of rational thought that she would ever again have in her life.  She talked about walking along the sea wall at Galveston.  She loved the doctor who treated her.   She was in good spirits, although she was quite homesick.  We were glad to see her come home.  Daddy’s cooking had not improved.  I don’t know why it never occurred to me that I wasn’t too old to learn how to cook.  I do a pretty good job of it, but I really had an opportunity to learn when I much younger.

I was approaching the eighth grade about this time.  In those days we had 8 “grammar school” grades (I never know why they called it that. Maybe it was because we had to diagram sentences, but then on the other hand we had to learn long division).  Once you graduated from grammar school, you entered high school as a freshman, and four years later you expected you formal education to end. 

Those were pretty happy years, and I had come to believe that the mental illness battle was behind us.  I heard the adults talking about women going through a “change of life.”   We thought that was the cause of her mental illness. When she came home I figured she had successfully navigated the change.

Three years later any illusion of being “healed” of mental illness was completely shattered.  By this time Daddy had come to the conclusion that he was not going to be able to make a living by farming alone.  He took out a union card, and began working as a carpenter.  Work was slow in Abilene, so he and Murl found work in Odessa. That left Mama and me to take care of the place in Clyde, but conditions deteriorated at home.  I called Daddy and he drove all night to get home.  That story’s next.