For Dee

From the clear-eyed perspective of hindsight, we can usually look back on important events in our lives and discern a cause, or a series of causes, that logically and inexorably led to that event---a tipping point.

I don't know what the tipping point was that precipitated my mother's mental breakdown. I've thought about it. I hope it wasn't something I said or did. I don't think so.

I was in my early teens on that sunny spring day when I came into the back door of our house and found her sitting at our kitchen table, shaking and sobbing uncontrollably.

I know now that the demons that tormented her had been quietly and relentlessly doing their damage since her childhood. As a young girl she was sent to live with and help take care of her blind grandmother. Granny's house was far off the beaten path with few close neighbors. As is the norm in homes of the sight impaired, furniture and other household trappings had to be situated just so relative to each other and it was mother's job to keep that order. In my young life and that of my brother, we saw that regimented precision extended to our home. We didn't then know why, but we knew she had "a place for everything and everything in its place." I wonder how much of her conscious thought was concentrated on what she considered her duty to make sure our house could pass muster. I think maybe that was one of the demons.

The remote location of her grandparents' house was another factor to reckon with. With her impressionable years spent in partial isolation, especially from her peer age group, she didn't acquire the necessary social skills to make her comfortable in social gatherings. To complicate the distress, at age seventeen she went directly from the backwoods to St. Louis---culture shock to the extreme.

By today's definition, she was agoraphobic. She never drank, but on the occasion of my eighth-grade graduation, she bought a half-pint of whiskey and drank most of it in order to summon the courage to attend. I know she must have been terrified to sit there and mingle with those hundred or so people---but she did it for me. The demon of agoraphobia was a constant companion.

At some time during her sojourn with her blind grandmother my mother was molested by a member of her extended family. She carried that ugly and painful secret for the rest of her life. I cannot imagine how this trauma affected her ability to share intimacy with the loved ones in her life. It was a gnawing and voracious demon, for a certainty.

In the 1950's the medical community had been claiming to have great success in treating mental disorders with a new procedure called prefrontal lobotomy. The surgery would excise part of her brain, hopefully that part controlling and causing her fears and anxieties. The doctors would also subject her to electroshock therapy. If you saw Jack Nicholson in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", you get a pretty good idea of what she faced in the hospital. I remember being apprehensive. Maybe, I thought, she wouldn't be afraid to jump off a cliff or stab herself with a knife. Not to worry, it all went O.K.

I came home from school one day and saw her sitting in an easy chair in our living room. I can never forget how alone and scared she looked--the stubble on her head only beginning to replenish what was once her beautiful hair.

Despite its current bad reputation, the lobotomy, at least outwardly, seemed to have the intended result. She eventually obtained a driver's license, began attending church regularly, and came to acquire a small circle of friends with whom she often visited. The change was amazing. If the demons had not been exorcised, they had at least been fought to a draw.

The one demon she would never conquer was physical pain, with her in varying degrees almost her entire life. She suffered a stillbirth early in her marriage. She underwent a radical double mastectomy, appendicitis, and several back surgeries. After the brain surgery she sought relief in prescription drugs and became addicted. At age 56, while driving alone, her car left the road and hit a tree, killing her instantly.

She likely would not want me to write these words but, as her son, I am willing to risk her displeasure in my somewhat clumsy attempt to understand now what I could not then. Perhaps also, I may help explain her words and actions to others who were not aware of the intimate details of her many trials.

I loved her. She loved us. Of that I am certain. She never caught much of a break in life---I hope finally she has found eternal peace.