How Mental Illness touches the lives of us all

 

St. Dymphna ...Pray for Us 

Patron of the Mentally Afflicted

I am the daughter of a talented wonderful woman, who suffered the cruelest of demons, schizophrenia, and postpartum depression, which led to manic depression.   She endured the medical community's answer to treatment - electric shock, and was never the same, or as she was meant to be, before I was born.   She lost everything that she had, a first husband, her firstborn, her second born, her 3rd (me) 4th and 5th child all removed in some way from her care.  Care that she could not adequately provide.

When I think about her life, and remember her when I last gazed upon her face, I realized that as she lay still in the casket, she was finally still, and in the hands of the Lord.  In His hands where she was truly protected, she could be still.   Finally no one could harm her.  Finally no one could take anything else from her.  She was still and she was safe.  I had never known her not to pace, or chain smoke.  It was a bittersweet moment as I saw her for the last time.

My mother's mental illness was all I had ever known, all my life.  I had difficulty understanding what had gone wrong.  Why did such a beautiful, talented woman suffer in so many ways?   Why her, and why my mother?   Divorce,  stripped of all that connected her to that marriage, including a child, inhumane treatment at the hands of the medical community, unwelcome when she returned home, gang rape, an illegitimate child, a son, Michael, as the result of that rape, and then her three girls.     She didn't just die from this world on August 28, 1988.  She died with the first electric shock treatment, she died when my father took my sisters and I to his parents' home to protect us from the Ohio State Child Welfare Agency.   I lost her not once, but multiple times, and finally the last time, on that day in August, when the Lord decided.  She was 54.

My Father's Mother, my Polish grandmother, suffered also from a cruel disease, Alzheimer's by which day by day, the guardian of my childhood, I also lost my grandmother.   The wonderful lady who taught me to cook, fixed my wonderful breakfast, day in and day out, tended a garden and wonderfully provided where my own mother could not, died a little each day to Alzheimer's.   When she left this world, I knew that she was also in the hands of the Lord.  Safe from what Alzheimer's had done to her.