If you can find a date of death, you can usually find an obituary, especially in a small-town paper. Only I couldn’t. For the first hour of searching in the local library, I wondered if I’d screwed up a date somewhere and had the wrong reel of microfilm. This is exactly the sort of dunderheaded mistake that I make on a routine basis. While the fault was indeed mine, it was that I’d assumed her obit would be with the rest of the obits, buried on an interior page. Instead it was front-page news.
In the January 10, 1956, edition of the Parkersburg News, next to headlines like “Death Penalty Demanded for Dope Peddlers” and “Roads Glazed, Travel Risky, Area Shivers,” is an innocuous story titled “Death Here Investigated.” It reads:
Coroner Richard Corbitt was called to 1301/2 3d St., around 7 o’clock last night after City Police had been notified that Mrs. Elizabeth Flowers Cain, 59, had been found dead.
Dr. Corbitt after examination said the woman came to her death from natural causes.
She was removed to the Franklin funeral home.
She had been making her home with her sister, Mrs. Carrie Smart at 648 Columbia Av., and then left there and went to a friend’s home on Mary St., and then left there and went to the 3d St. address.
She told a friend there she was cold and was told to go get in bed and cover up, according to the police investigating. This was around 3:30 p.m. When found four hours later she was dead.
She is survived by two daughters: Mrs. W. M. Reese of Takoma Park, Md., and Mrs. W. C. Tebay of Grand Junction, Colo.; one son, Arthur Cain, Jr., of Parkersburg; the sister with shom [sic] she resided, seven grandchildren and several cousins.
Services…
My mother actually started crying when I gave her this rundown of what I’d been able to find. Her response illustrates how very little we know about her family’s past. Just this small packet of facts equates to five times more than anyone previously knew. It makes the phantom Elizabeth real. And the thought of that real woman dying alone and cold and alienated haunts me. That’s what happens to a stray dog, and even that would make me raise an eyebrow. I can’t ever know what really happened, but, no matter how difficult my own relationship with my mom has been, I can’t ever imagine letting her die like that. And, knowing my great-grandmother’s fate, I can’t help but dislike Nell and her siblings, just a little bit.
To them, Elizabeth was an unperson. In Nell’s engagement announcement, which merited a lengthy article in the pages of the local daily, she is described as the daughter of Mr. Arthur R. Cain of Wheeling and the niece of Mrs. James D. Cooper, the married name of the aunt who raised them. Nowhere is her mother even mentioned. My mom and the aunts were shocked to discover that the woman they knew as Aunt Carrie—the one who came over to clean the house when Nell was at her worst—was actually their real aunt, Elizabeth’s sister Carrie Smart. There are so many questions that could have been answered then, had they known and been old enough to care. It’s so hard for kids to winkle these sorts of things out of parents who are determined not to acknowledge them.
It angers me, frankly, this denial of a woman’s life. Times were different, I know, and I’m approaching this from a twenty-first-century perspective where better living through chemistry is possible. I know the temptations of denial, of wanting to push away everything that hurt you in the past in order to preserve yourself. The shame that must have washed over Nell when she discovered that her crazy mother’s death had made front-page news must have been debilitating. Still, I’m pissed that I never got the chance to know any of this, to have this decision made for me because someone else was scared. But, as my aunt said, shit is something you flush away.
Sadly, this particular poo floats.
Both in age and personality, my cousin Julie and I are probably the closest of all of my relatives. We’re nine months apart and, as the years have passed and pounds have been gained and lost by both parties, we look amazingly similar. At family gatherings, we’d always sneak off to create a “show,” which featured singing and comedy skits, talents that we’d honed from a shared love of Saturday Night Live. Our moms have the videotapes of these works of genius stashed in a box, ready to be unleashed on the unsuspecting at a moment’s notice.
There are differences between us, of course. I always had my head in a book while Julie was more outgoing, a former Miss Teen of Florida who placed in the top ten in the national competition. Our Aunt Donna, one of our grandfather’s many siblings, always labeled me the “smart” one and Julie the “pretty” one, which was unfair on a number of levels, but is convenient shorthand.
We’d probably be even closer if we’d grown up in the same place. Distance—with me in Pittsburgh and her outside of Orlando—got in the way. Then as we got older, our paths were different. I fell into college and dropped out of the family’s sight intentionally; Julie struggled with school but found her future family with a boy named Drew, who she married in her early twenties, shortly before giving birth to her first child. I have a picture of her at my wedding, which was three months after hers. She and a cousin are standing back-to-back, both with undeniable pregnant bellies and huge grins. There’s no way to warn her of what’s to come.
After the baby’s birth, Julie dropped out of sight. My mom would pass on scattered reports about psych wards but did not convey the severity of Julie’s situation. This was partly my fault. I was so focused on getting my own personal postcollege act together that I couldn’t quite care about anyone else’s problems. I want to blame this solely on the myopia of being in my early twenties, but, actually, I’ve always been like this. I do think it is all about me.
But Julie and her mother Linda were also good at playing the crazy cards close to their chests. The sheer fact that Julie was mentally ill came as a total shock to everyone. In hindsight, it should have been amazingly clear that this could happen. But Julie’s psychiatric adventure is what finally made everyone wake up to the family’s past and own it for what it is and what it has reaped. We weren’t there yet when Julie took ill—and we were ill equipped to talk about it at the time.
Now, however, we have the words. Rather than impose my own interpretation on the events, mostly because I wasn’t there, I will let Julie tell it herself. For the record, Julie and Drew and Hannah aren’t their real names. Currently, Julie is living in a small town in the South where she feels the perceptions of any mental illness, particularly a mother’s, are negative and closed-minded.
Julie’s story goes like this:
“My immediate family really protected me. They tried to guard me and let me tell my story and let me have some privacy for my sake. They tried to let me tell what I was comfortable telling. That’s why I think a lot of people—friends or family or anyone—didn’t know as much. My mom and Drew didn’t know if I wanted people to know or if I wanted it to be a secret. At the time, you don’t know if you want people to know.
“In hindsight, I had problems before but I didn’t really figure it out. Let’s see—Hannah was born on Monday morning, that would be Day One. Day Two, I left the hospital around noonish. They were trying to push me out the door. I hated it. You just watch this baby care video and you have to go through your discharge, you have to do this, you have to do that—you have to do all of these things to check out. I was like—I can’t get out as fast as you want me to. I took my time and still they got me out the door by 2 p.m.
“I have in my mind that my mother went home on Thursday. I remember holding Hannah and maybe vacuuming. I remember holding her in the kitchen and I felt like she had a fever and it scared me. Her head always feels hot—babies have a hot head. I had an anxiety attack—but I did not know what an anxiety attack was. To me, an anxiety attack can be like being scared of a bear but there’s no bear in the room. I started calling them episodes because I didn’t know what they were.
“Because of my faith, I always think of Scripture and how God doesn’t want us to fear. I’d say to myself ‘I shouldn’t fear’ but I was. I couldn’t help it.
Really, I’ve definitely seen through the course of time that my relationship with God and my faith have definitely been a plus. I’ve prayed my heart out and I’ve seen what I believe to be God’s blessings. It is one of the strengths that holds me together. But you cannot pray yourself out of a manic episode or an anxiety attack. You can’t.
“A lot of times when I get sick I say, ‘Is this who I am? Is this my character? Is this me? How can I be this way?’ You do things that are embarrassing or stupid or dumb. Things that you’re not proud of. But I have over time realized that it is your chemicals, like cancer or diabetes or a cold. It’s not something you can control. You’ve got to have medication. You’ve got to.
“I remember going to the pediatrician at the one-week checkup—that would have been Monday of the following week. I remember lying on the couch in the pediatrician’s office and drinking my water bottle, because I was having an episode and I was describing that to her. I remember what I was wearing and lying down on the couch in the office.
“Also, I was breastfeeding, so I was up all the time. There was one morning, shortly after my mom left, I was in the bathroom at night and I remember feeling like I was going crazy. I don’t know if I was having diarrhea, because that goes along with my anxiety attacks. It’s disgusting but that’s part of anxiety attacks, that and feeling like I’m going to throw up, but not throwing up.
“But I felt like I was going crazy. I thought of Uncle Bill. And I thought—I am going crazy. I can’t explain it, but I remember at the time I felt like I was going crazy and I wanted to call my mother. Drew did not want me to call. ‘It’s three in the morning,’ he said. ‘You can’t call your mom and wake her up. Now, that’s crazy.’
“I did eventually call her. She told me to have a bowl of cereal and read something positive. I remember sitting at the table and having a bowl of Raisin Bran and reading an article in Guideposts. Maybe that helped me calm down. And, of course, Hannah didn’t have a fever.
“Ever since that one time, throughout the last ten years, if my kids have a fever or if they start getting sick, I feel sick. It just kicks off anxiety immediately. I think I’ve gotten better over the years but, still, it’s an automatic response. I’m like—I know she’ll be fine, but my body goes into an anxiety attack. I know that, logically, everything’s okay.
“I knew I was going crazy that third or fourth night at home.”
Drew interjects. “You did not. You were barely coherent.”
“I was going a mile a minute,” Julie says. “I was in my own world. What else would you say about me?”
“You didn’t really know where we were going,” Drew says.
“I remember being in the doctor’s office. Didn’t I go behind his desk?”
“You didn’t realize why we were there,” Drew says.
“I remember the bag, the red canvas striped bag that I took with me with all of the pictures I had been taking. That was something that I had been doing with all of my busybody stuff and making a mess. In the car, I was constantly writing in my little notebooks, like I do whenever I get manic. I write passionately. I have to write everything down, even if it’s gibberish and random unconnected thoughts. They might make sense to me.”
“It’s English,” Drew adds. “The words do make sense.”
“What prompted us to go to the doctor?”
“Because my wife was crazy. It was obvious. Even somebody like me, who has never run into someone crazy before, knew that I had to take you to the doctor.”
“I do remember that I was a busybody, all over the house. I think I thought I was getting things done, but I wasn’t. I was just making a huge mess. And I was taping things to the wall. I had papers all over the floor, papers I was sorting out like how to take care of babies. They were at the foot of the bed and I must have had twenty stacks. I was sorting. I remember tacking stuff up on the wall, like instructions by the sink on washing hands and taking care of your breasts. And I wanted to put on a production and film it out in the front yard, like a Saturday Night Live skit. There was something about making someone dress in a trenchcoat. I was just busy, busy with pictures. I was posing Hannah with pictures and putting all of the flowers behind her. And I actually got a really cute picture. Doing pictures always goes along with my mania.
“So we went to my doctor. I want to say what he gave me was Nembutal. It should knock you out. It did not knock me out. I thought I slept, but Drew said I did not sleep. We’re back in his office the next day. Hannah was ten days old. He suggested that we go to the closest mental hospital. So we go over there and they’re interviewing me. And I remember telling them about Grandma Nell, and what everyone suspected about her. And that I had an uncle who went crazy and committed suicide. I was afraid—I didn’t have a suicidal thought, but I was afraid that I would feel that way, afraid that I would do what he did. I remember trying to lie on the floor and drink water. The admitting nurse is asking me things like ‘People with glass houses…’ and I was supposed to finish it with ‘…should not throw stones.’ Instead I said ‘…should not go around naked.’ It’s true!
“I was there eight days. They put me on Depakote and Risperdal. And the Risperdal would make my tongue lock up, like stiffen. So they gave me some beta-blocker so that side effect wouldn’t happen. I had really dry mouth, and I didn’t know what all was going on.
“They sent me to group therapy, which was a joke. They had people in there who had been sodomized, a woman whose father had incest with her, and people who were alcoholics. I had to hear all of that kind of therapy being discussed and be a part of that. I’m like, ‘No. I am a new mother. I just had a baby. This is not where I belong. This is not the way it should be.’ I asked the medical director. He said that they had maybe one case every three years. They rarely have a postpartum psychosis so they don’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t have Hannah—somebody else had to take care of Hannah. She could visit, but because I was taking the Depakote and whatever, I couldn’t breast-feed her. So I was pumping my breasts and throwing it out. A couple of the techs, I was showing them how to use the breast pump. I remember them just sitting there, because they had to sit with me if I used the breast pump, because it had a cord.
“The first night I was there—I didn’t know that you could go get your own towels. I didn’t know about that. The shower was level with the whole tile floor. There was no protection from the shower and the rest of the bathroom. The floor is all even. So I take a shower and there’s water all over the floor. I got my socks wet—and I only had the pair of socks that I had on. I remember complaining that ‘Y’all need to come clean this up.’ I called down to housekeeping, calling down there and calling down there. Then I get agitated and angry because I’m in my state. One of the techs, I said something to him, then he tells me that I can get towels and I can take care of it. Then he says ‘Well, you shouldn’t turn the water on so hard, so then it won’t spray all over.’ To this day, I don’t think I can turn on a water faucet without thinking about how mad that made me, that they wouldn’t come help me and that I had to figure it out for myself.
“All I had were the towels and I couldn’t dry my hair, so I went to bed with wet hair. Later, I got to use a hair dryer, but I had to use it in front of them. And I can remember wanting to go outside—they had this little outer area that was closed in—but I remember not being able to go outside. And not being able to get out the door. It was like being in jail.
“As for the family, I think it’s obvious that there’s a genetic predisposition to the illness, like if your uncle had heart disease or your sister had breast cancer. We have the gene, whatever the genes are, we have them. I don’t blame that on our family. I think part of it is genetics and part of it is environment and stress. We read, when this happened, that a lot of times bipolar disorder comes out around our age for women, around the twenties and a lot of times after childbirth or some very stressful experience. The childbirth was the thing that kicked it off for us. Your chemicals
are going nuts, it’s high stress and sleep deprivation. And the stress of the pain just overwhelmed everything. I think that with everything that goes along with having a baby, if you have the genetics for it, then it just comes out.
“I know granddad was a drinker, but I don’t know that he was mentally ill. I always thought granddad was pretty stable. He was well educated and successful, but Nell, I think, was scattered. Mom remembers—especially since she’s been coming to see me—Mom remembers they always had help. She remembers the house being a mess, memories of her childhood like that. That’s what makes it harder for her to come into my home—it’s like a tornado hit it and my mother’s a neat freak. She said to me—how are you going to teach the kids to pick up after themselves if you don’t pick up after yourself? And then I wanted to say—you set the example for me and it doesn’t seem to have worked.
“One of the lessons to learn from this, which is key, is that since you and I have children, when they get ready to have babies, we need to be there for them. It may or may not come out in our children.”
Seven years after Hannah’s monumental arrival, Julie discovered she was pregnant again.
“To me,” she says, “this is an incredible story. We had a couples’ group Bible study, which ended up in a large group. This was in August—I wish I had the date and I wish I had the church bulletin (and, knowing me, I did save it). The day’s sermon was ‘I’ll tell you whom to fear, fear the Lord.’ Which really means having reverence for the Lord but not fearing other things, not living in fear. Trusting in God.
“So the question, when we broke up into small groups, was ‘What do you fear that you’re not trusting God with?’ And I said, we would like to have other children, but I don’t want to have to be on medication because I’m afraid of what it will do to the baby. I’m afraid of having the postpartum psychosis again. Everyone had their own thing that was shared and was prayed for, but we couldn’t make the decision. We found out on October 23 that I was pregnant. The conception day was September 26. I was on the Pill, hadn’t taken antibiotics or anything. It would have been one cycle after that church meeting. I feel like God made that decision for me. He said, okay, it’s time. And you can trust me.
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