After this, Granny directed me to the outer reaches of the graveyard and a galvanized metal link fence behind which were several unmarked graves of those women who had been forbidden burial in the cemetery as they had married non-Jews. She didn’t know these women personally but she “liked to visit them,” she told me, reaching through the diagonal holes of the galvanized fence to place stones on their solemn graves. I did not take kindly to the treatment of these women or the strict exclusion of non-Jews advocated by traditional Jewish religion. Matters were made worse when I learned that men and women were prohibited from sitting together inside the synagogue. Apparently Judaism did not award women the same privileges as men, providing me a clear window into my mother’s rejection of her father’s orthodoxy.
Radical politics / 1990
During the three months that I stayed with my grandmother, I came to know something more about my grandfather beyond his restless need to discuss his work and the palpable tension I had witnessed between he and my mother. At the Harare Hospital, I was greeted by the head nurse dressed in white, stiff garments.
“I hope you will come to love all of us, both black and white equally, the same way your grandfather did with no prejudice,” she remarked forthrightly as she took me between the various rooms of the two-story building. From her, I learned that my grandfather had pushed to desegregate the hospital so that those native to this country, and oppressed by colonial rule, could become versed in the practice of Western medicine.
The hospital was in a beleaguered state by American standards. Thin and drawn-looking patients, mostly male, lay upon stained mattresses insufficiently covered by torn, blood-soaked sheets. At 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, my grandmother volunteered along with a friend at the hospital, shuffling through the long corridors with heavy metal carts, distributing donated paperback books to the patients. I was intrigued to learn about this side of my grandparents.
I knew my grandfather was conservative from comments made by a radical activist friend, Hardy Desai, with whom I would become intimate. His father, Barney Desai, who had grown up Indian in South Africa but had been legally reclassified as a “Coloured person,” took on a prominent leadership role in The South African Coloured People’s Congress, an activist group fighting apartheid. He had been living in exile from the time of the anti-pass protests and Mandela’s imprisonment. First settling in England and becoming a barrister “specializing in the defense of blacks in criminal cases,” he moved to Zimbabwe in 1986, where he developed a stronger tie to the Pan Africanist Congress, for whom he would later serve as a publicity secretary and negotiator in the post-apartheid constitutional talks of the early 1990s.12
The first evening that we spent together, Hardy commented bluntly: “Your grandfather was quite conservative.”
I knew he was right. My grandfather did not think native Africans could successfully rule themselves. While he believed in their independence and had great respect for the Shona customs, their ethics, and cultural practices, he held a patronizing view of their ability to perform in a “white man’s world.” I also learned that my grandfather viewed the Shona people as unduly superstitious, despite his endless investigations into their traditions and customs. Had he lived through Mugabe’s dictatorship, he would have undoubtedly felt justified and equally as heartbroken. No one had anticipated that Mugabe, the tall, charismatic Oxford-educated emancipator, would become such an unerringly brutal and indomitable force, willfully starving his people, stoking tribal differences, and thereby squandering the potential of this fertile and dynamic region. Only weeks after my arrival in Zimbabwe, Nelson Mandela was freed and apartheid officially ended. Hardy and I then spent some time together in South Africa, where he would visit his father’s birthplace for the first time.
Family money
Having never spoken openly about my mother’s illness, I refrained from asking my grandmother about its onset. I never asked whether my mother’s illness might have caused her or my grandfather distress. I believed that concern for my mother, for the difficulties she faced living alone on a very limited income, never came up. Only upon rereading a hastily penned journal from my travels while writing this book was my memory jogged on this subject.
“Your father isn’t giving your mother enough alimony,” my grandmother complained to me one day as we sat outside in her garden. “You must press your father to pay more. She supported your father in his early years, and was there for him.”
I could appreciate her rationale. His career-making invention was conceived at Bell Labs. My mother had supported him in his decision to leave England to take a research post in America. Perhaps she deserved a more generous share of his earnings after twenty-five years of marriage. The topic for me, however, was a contentious one. I did not see how I could achieve any great sea change as the mediator of my parent’s divorce. My father made a living as an academic, which meant he was remunerated with consistency, but not lavishly. Now financially secure, married to someone new with whom he would start another family, he surely wouldn’t welcome additional expenses. My father’s professional interests circumvented the pursuit of money. His early experiments had been generously funded by the postwar investments of both corporate and government supported R&D in the sciences. Profit was not the goal. For my father, most investments outside of the lab were troublesome and suspect, although I imagine he took his stock investments seriously. In this case, perhaps he might have provided more generously for my mother.
I understood my grandmother’s torment on this subject. My mother worked hard to live within her means, and I often wondered why no one in my mother’s immediate family offered her any visible means of economic support. After independence, in order to protect the economy from “white flight,” it may not have been legal for my grandmother to transfer money out of the country. If it had been, might my mother have been granted a greater share of her mother’s invested income? I am not entirely sure.
March 1990
The closest my grandmother and I came to a considered exploration of my mother’s illness was when I found a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s heart-rending postcolonial novel reworking Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. My mother had insisted at perhaps too young an age that I read Bronte’s unsettling proto-feminist work. This book held a certain sway over me. Mr. Rochester’s “violently insane” former wife hidden away in the attic would soon become a stand-in for my mother, who after her divorce would become a former first-wife, and at certain times, a well-guarded secret.
Ironically, here in my grandparents’s library was the prequel to Bronte’s classic, one that exposed colonialism’s cruel legacy through the reimagined portrayal of Rochester’s first wife, a Creole woman of mixed race whose white husband slowly rejects her and locks her away, causing her to become paranoid and to disintegrate mentally. The harsh realities of power and inequality between the genders are exposed along with painful themes of racial assimilation and white privilege. The fragmented stream-of-consciousness tale, told from the point of view of Antoinette Cosway as she is driven “mad,” mirrored the profound agonies I had come to associate with my mother and her shifting cultural identity.
Sleeping in the very room my mother had occupied as a child, and where she had later spent time stabilizing after a difficult divorce and demanding treatment, I had many unanswered questions. How did my grandmother view my mother’s illness? Did she believe that it was hereditary? Did she consider what kind of psychological impacts on my mother’s condition came from factors such as the family’s impossible standards, or the distant schooling in England, ten thousand miles away? Did she believe that the Gelfands were somehow cursed because of the role we had played, however “humanitarian,” in colonializing Rhodesia? Did she feel that my mother, as the first woman in the family to pursue a career in a male professional world, suffered an intolerable strain?
Surely, I thought—handing this book over to my grandmother, whose rapt reading of this work took place over the course of a sing
le night—we will now have that conversation. However no dialogue transpired between us beyond the novel’s powerful literary appeal—no acknowledgment about the power distortions of colonialism that might endanger the psyche of the oppressed or the oppressor, much less the likelihood of my mother’s illness having a genetic factor, thereby endangering me or my descendants. We only spoke about the book for its lyrical language and unforgettable story, nothing more.
Record keeping
Later I tried my luck another way.
In a taped interview I conducted with my grandmother one afternoon, as we sat together on her veranda shortly after a burst of afternoon rain, I asked her, “If you had your life to live all over again what might you change?”
“Nothing,” she said self-assuredly.
“Nothing?” I tried another way. “What about work? Would you have chosen a different occupation?”
“No,” she said and lightly petted the smooth-coated dog curled in her lap. “I would do things exactly the same. I would help Mike with his career, and I would type up his things.”
No confession about her regret over my mother’s undiagnosed illness, or her middle daughter’s tragically botched suicide attempt, would be forthcoming. I was astounded. Wasn’t she grossly aware of the inequities women faced in her era? Didn’t she want to say something on the subject of my mother’s illness? Admit to the discomfort in having done nothing to help her daughter seek treatment for a several years’s long psychosis?
During these three months, as I traveled back and forth from her home in northern Zimbabwe to Johannesburg and Cape Town with my activist friend Hardy, and hitchhiked through rural portions of the two countries not yet electrified, Granny Esther worked almost daily on a memoir, one that she typed and retyped on a small travel typewriter, sending drafts to a relative in Johannesburg for review. More than a decade after my grandmother’s death, I tracked down a copy of the bulk share of this unpublished work. Again, I found no mention of my mother’s illness, nor as far as I could tell any other calamity that her family faced. The high points—her marriage to Mike, trips to the Lake Country in England, and her husband’s professional accolades—filled the typed pages, front and back. No recording whatsoever of her daughters’s many challenges.
10 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) is an experimental arts organization founded in 1978 with an activist, community-oriented vision for art as an agent of social change.
11 Farson, Negley. “The Sick African: A Clinical Study.” OUP Academic, Oxford University Press, Volume 45, Issue 178, 1 Jan. 1946. Web.
12 “Rissik Haribhai ‘Barney’ Desai.” Rissik Haribhai “Barney” Desai | South African History Online, South African History Online, 17 Feb. 2011. Web.
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relapse and recovery
Chasing an eternal spring
I moved several times over the next twelve years—first from Los Angeles in 1992 to New York for graduate school, where I had the opportunity to spend consistent time with my mother. When living on an adjunct’s part-time salary in Brooklyn became intolerable, in 1996 I went back to San Francisco, where I published a weird fantasy novella, Black Market Babies. Distributed by comics publisher Last Gasp, its subjects were triplet sisters separated at birth who unexpectedly reunite in college to embark on the nearly impossible task of finding their birth mother. Soon the high rents of San Francisco proved too difficult, and I found myself living in Los Angeles, where friends in the arts made finding a good bohemian apartment more likely.
By 2000, I was once again settled in Silver Lake, adjuncting wherever I could find work. Meanwhile, on the East Coast my mother was facing a difficult time after another psychiatrist had again reduced the amount of Haldol she was on, hoping that this would in turn decrease the harmful extrapyramidal side effects, most noticeably the tardive dyskinesia she suffered from. She had been taking her medication diligently for over ten years, faithfully combating those inner voices that insisted she was well enough to stop taking her pills. Each day, she would pour out the contents of her prescriptions onto her bed and count backwards from the purchase date with an eye to the calendar and the day of the drug’s purchase. In this way, she avoided double dosing herself or mistakenly going without her medication.
Her relapse was a great disappointment to everyone. After she had been admitted to a nearby hospital, her psychiatrist of thirteen years apologized to my brother for his mistake then fled, embarrassed, never to return a call or to be heard from again.
Deinstitutionalization
Unfortunately, the infamous push for deinstitutionalization that began with the 1965 passage of Medicaid through which states were “incentivized to move patients out of state mental hospitals and into nursing homes and general hospitals because the program [would now] exclude… coverage for people in ‘institutions for mental diseases,’”13 meant that obtaining appropriate help for our mother would be a constant, demoralizing battle.
After a month-long hospital stay, despite the fact that the severity of her psychosis had not ebbed, the hospital informed my brother—who held power of attorney—that they would not provide her further treatment, despite being insured. At that time, the grim reality was that hospitals had the right to refuse treatment with a doctor’s consent, positing that the mental health patient cannot readily be cured. John had no choice but to acquiesce. After she was admitted to a second hospital, it was suggested he have my mother transferred to long-term care; however, with its distressing costs and poor outcomes, this was a less than desirable option. Instead, he followed the advice of a social worker and had our mother admitted to an assisted living facility. At $4,000 a month, this was a costly solution that put our mother’s limited savings in jeopardy.
Automatically, she was placed on a heavy dose of Risperdal, an experimental antipsychotic infamous now for its many negative side effects. Still suffering from persistent delusions, hardly eating, and now embarrassingly incontinent, she began to waste away.
It was roughly then, in late spring 2001 that I came from Los Angeles to visit her in this clean and tidy, large multistory facility. For most of the day, she lay listless in bed; interaction was almost impossible. I returned after the first evening to a nearby hotel, hopeful that over the course of my short stay she might regain some of her previous composure so that we might join the other residents in the facility’s van for an excursion downtown to enjoy lunch and a movie together. This was not to be. She rarely left bed and was unable to hold a conversation of over two or three minutes long. One afternoon, she mysteriously rose from her stupor to take a seat on a stiff-looking upholstered chair in the quasi-elegant airy recreation room of the ground floor before a large television set to watch an international tennis tournament. In a near-somnambulant state, she clicked her fingers with excitement, remarking at the appropriate times on the skill level of the participants, after which she promptly returned to bed. During the tennis match, she was single focused. Her attention was on the tennis players; my presence was effectively ignored.
Disappointed, I spent the remainder of my visit in the third-story office with the head nurse hoping, through idle conversation, to affect a situation I was ill-equipped to change.
December 2001
Eventually our mother, famished and exceptionally thin, had a dramatic fall and was taken to a nearby hospital. The medical staff confirmed my brother’s suspicions: my mother’s troubling incontinence and dazed mental state were a direct effect of being placed on Risperdal. She was taken off the drug and placed back on Haldol. Immediately she stopped wetting herself and was no longer distant and unreachable. Not fully stabilized, she was released into my brother’s care in Princeton housing, where he was staying with his fiancée.
She suffered from several delusions at this time. One that would resurface over the course of the next two relapses was a delusion that her teeth were falling out. In this specific case, they were melting. She refused to eat anything she deemed too hard, like cereal or crusts of br
ead. Later, my brother determined that while she was staying at the assisted living facility, unable to care for her hygiene, a milky film from the nutritional drinks she had been encouraged to imbibe had built up on the surface of her teeth. In this sense her delusion, like most of her past disturbances, was rooted in reality.
At this time, I was struggling with a crisis of my own, having quit a poorly administrated job and being wholly unprepared for the insecurity of being a part-time academic in a post-9/11, dotcom-crash economy. Broke and on edge, I flew to the East Coast, this time in December, to visit.
In this small one bedroom dwelling set within a lightly forested knoll, where I stayed with my mother, brother, and his fiancée, I fulfilled the need of my mother’s paranoia for a suspicious actor. Constantly at loggerheads, my mother and I plunged back in time to those acrimonious years before she received treatment. She was agitated, hostile, and accusatory. Once again, I was her adversary. As it snowed outside, my brother’s fiancé attended classes at a local community college and my brother studied for arduous exams; meanwhile, my mother paced manically back and forth inside the six-hundred-square-foot abode, accusing me of inanities (You stole John’s money, I saw you. —Where are you going dressed like that?), before making demands on my brother for his attention regarding her latest delusions in which scandal ridden and recently bankrupted Enron Corporation figured strongly.
A Room with a Darker View Page 10