Gilda Trillim, by the power of being a woman and mother, and by the authority granted me of God, I lay my hands upon your head to give you a mother’s blessing. Gilda, you have wandered far and wide in this world and seen things that are terrifying and full of beauty. Our Heavenly Father and Mother know you. They feel the depth of your soul and even though you do not know them as you once did, still they watch over you. They love you.
Your heart is troubled by the things you have heard. Fear not. God is working wonders in this world and you have assisted in drawing forth the beauty and wonder that is to be. Again, I say unto you, fear not. Look again into the teachings that your mother and father have taught you. Gilda they love you.
You must go and see the things that have troubled you. Be brave. Angels are with you. They will bear you up in these times of need. And need them you will, for your Mother cannot always be with you. I bless you with the health you will need to complete your life’s work. I bless you that your mind and heart will be strengthened for the tasks ahead. I call upon you to be a savior on Mount Zion—to be a redeemer of things great and small. I seal these blessings upon you in the Holy and Sacred Name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
She is gone now. Three days later Babs and I had morning coffee, but my mother did not appear as she usually does for her cup of Postum. We did not worry because sometimes any of us might sleep a little longer if we had stayed up watching the stars or stayed up late reading. But at 10 am, I wanted to check because sleeping this late was highly unusual.
I peeked into the room. The sun was coming in from the south-facing window. The pane was open a crack and the air seemed virginal—that invigorating freshness I always imagined came fresh-breathed from the Ponderosa pines and Gambel oaks that pressed close around the cabin. My mother was tucked into her covers, a patchwork quilt she had made many decades ago of red gingham and light blue patches. Her eyes were closed and her white hair as perfect as when she went to bed. Her face was relaxed giving her a weighty seriousness rather than the smile that usually played about her lips. She was perfect. Completed. I collapsed in tears in the face of such holiness.
Vignette 22. Babs Lake’s November 3, 1996, Letter to Her Mother
The last entry of this thesis will be a look at Gilda’s death. More has been written on this event than any other aspect of her life. The controversy is fierce, with different factions taking multiple sides, launching volleys at their enemies and erecting towers to defend their particular theories. I cannot do justice to the many divergent views on her demise. I am convinced that dissertations will be written for centuries to come about her end.
We have spent some time in this thesis examining her life from different sides and I will now try to outline the two main schools of thought that interpret her life from opposite poles. Of course there are branches, nuances, and forks off of these two threads, but most fall into one of the two camps.
In the first, call it A, Gilda was mentally ill. Psychotic and profoundly disturbed. A few speculate she was bipolar.1 In Vietnam she was a camp whore. The rat story was cover for deep psychological trauma, or an outright lie. Her death was nothing but an orchestrated Christ-complex. Researchers of this persuasion see her death as a manic episode in a life that demanded constant construction from the ground up of a narrative that began in her imprisonment and continued to grow and develop in the years after. To them the surrounding detailed story was largely a mythology perpetuated by Lake’s refusal to face the truth of Gilda’s madness. In other versions, Lake was an actual accomplice in Trillim’s deceptions. This faction also tends to discount Trillim’s creative work. Although this is not universal. A preponderance of the A school does not recognize the literary worth of her strange minimalist novels. They see them as mere “word lists,” as critic Melvin Steward claims, “with no more meaning than what my wife intends when she hands me a note detailing what groceries I should pick up on my way back from the university.”2 Margery Tobkin says, “Whatever meaning people take from her novels, is nothing more than what they put into her work. Trillim is like a funhouse mirror that distorts and returns again what is put into it. It reflects nothing that was not there in the first place.”3 This group is the most dominant faction in American and Western European Trillim studies. This perspective is overtly naturalistic. Its advocates do not hold with any of the mystical elements that Gilda’s story demands if taken at face value. This group has also produced a number of psychoanalytic interpretations of Gilda’s writings, casting them with a Freudian or Lacanian spin to try to offer interpretations on what she was doing in her outrageous claims and stories (for examples see Sandra Lightfoot’s excellent review4). I have read many of these and find them fascinating and in some ways compelling. Their views are constructed carefully. They pay attention to intriguing details in her life that seem to make a strong case for a troubled and unstable personality disorder that, after Vietnam, descended to a clearly manifest mental illness. They are all grounded in thoroughly naturalistic interpretations of the events in her life.
The second faction, B, believes that Gilda must be taken on her own terms. Her words are those of a sincere seeker, neither mentally ill nor a charlatan creating an elaborate hoax. I must admit that I am of this persuasion. Having spent a great deal of time poring over her journals, reading her letters, and seeking to understand her views, I find a deep sincerity in her voice. She never shies away from painting herself as imperfect or off kilter, and seems to expose her deepest questions with curiosity and with an authenticity that strikes me as genuine. She was troubled. That is clear. But did it lead to the kind of psychosis that the A group promotes? I don’t think so. Indeed, I think the A machine exists solely because her account has no place in their Umwelt. It is a kind of naturalistic heresy that brokers no explanation in the tick-tock world of matter in motion. A rat choir breaks all the rules of parsimony. It tramples on Popperian science. It bulldozes over materialistic regularities like so many sandcastles before a rising tide. What do we make of Gilda and her rats? Those who look for alternative explanations jump through a maze of hoops to ignore the simplicity of her story and construe madness as the best explanation for what she relates. With no other corroboration for this view in any other aspect of her life, they must assume madness from the story itself. They then spend much time spinning why it manifests itself in no other way, while those who believe her story get to have a consistent and compelling Gilda at every stage.
I must admit accepting her story requires a bit of creative framing. And there’s the rub. One can keep naturalism, but then one loses the parsimony and is required to construct a shaky house around the multiple events in which she is acting more or less as any of us would. Yet by accepting her ‘as is’ one enters into a strange Twilight Zone-like world where the foundation of one’s understanding about how the universe works requires a new framework. Neither option is appealing. I suppose that’s why the two groups continue to contend—either way the evidence is just not there to render a verdict. One requires a complete rewriting of naturalistic metaphysics, the other a complete contextualization of the reported events and the addition of multiple ad hoc hypotheses: madness, bouts of sanity, conspiracies among actors, e.g., Babs Lake, Gilda, travel magazines accounts of praying rats that one must argue correlate only loosely with Gilda’s story, the creation of a rat music, and in the end, explaining her novels as meaningless lists, while at the same time sensing a profound artistic ability in her paintings, poetry, and other written works. Both groups are forced to give up precious things.
Neither option seems like a good one. Perhaps someone will offer a tertian quid, but for now I find it easier to swallow the Trillim I know from her texts and paintings than the one constructed by those who don’t want to believe her own narrative.
Now on to her death.
Trillim’s Death
In March of 1996, it appears Gilda may have been diagnosed with a serious disease. She had been spending summers in the La Sals; however, after her
mother died in 1989, she started spending winters in Wisconsin with Babs’s family. These years are poorly documented. Gilda became less interested in keeping a detailed journal and focused on her books. Whatever the disease was, there is no direct reference to it in her writings. My interviews with Babs’s aged parents suggest it may have been a type of cancer. We do know she went to Grand Junction, Colorado for two days. This was unusual. The hospital there had a fire that destroyed most of the records in 1999, so we don’t have direct evidence once again that she was there, but there is enough circumstantial evidence that it appears likely. This evidence has been carefully examined in Karen Franks’s 2008 study on this issue.5 It was during this time that Trillim wrote her starkest and darkest works.
While most scholars buy the story that Trillim had some form of cancer or degenerative disease, I will offer my interpretation after examining Babs’s description of her last days. That spring Gilda began to sell off many of the things she loved: her home in Moab and many of her possessions. She also deeded her cabin near Buckeye to Babs. Following this, she and Babs flew to Thailand with apparent intentions for it to be an extended visit. Some speculate it might have been some sort of treatment with alternative medicine not available in the US.
Now, as most of the details have been hashed over and over again, I’ll let the full tale of Gilda’s demise be told through Babs Lake’s letter from Bangkok to her mother, dated November 3, 1996.
Dear Mom,
My heart is breaking into so many pieces. When I called you last week with the horrible news of Gilda’s death, you offered to fly out here to be with me. I told you I was OK. I’m not. Please don’t come, though, I’m coming home soon—I’ve put the details at the end of this. I feel so lost in this foreign land. And without Gilda I’m not coping well. I should come home sooner but it will be a few days—I need to understand what happened. I need to watch to see if the rats come back. I need to understand their song. To hear what Gilda heard. To understand how they remember her. I know this sounds crazy. It sounds crazy to me too.
The day before she left she seemed more chipper and lighthearted than I’d seen her in ages. She made jokes and appeared almost giddy with excitement. She was like a little girl. Of course, she wanted to come here ever since she read about the singing rats many years ago, but her excitement seemed beyond even this. I should have realized something was up, but I was just so pleased with her mood I didn’t want anything to spoil it, especially with some ill-founded suspicion that she was masking what she really was going through.
Mom we don’t drink a lot, but that night Gilda kept plying me with Lao-Lao a local Saki. She was making toasts and tossing them down. I now suspect she was not drinking at all, but knocking me out so she could make a clean getaway. It worked.
It was almost noon before I could crawl out of bed. My head felt like someone had split it open with an oak beam and filled it with cotton. Even the smallest noises sounded like a jackhammer going off in the room. I sat on a chair trying to gather my wits, asking for Gilda, but getting no reply. When I realized she was not in the hotel room I didn’t think anything of it—I just assumed that she had gone out for some supplies, or for a quick snack. About three o’clock, I started to get a little worried. I took a long hot shower and dressed. It was now nearly four. I was just looking for the room keycard to go out and see if I could find her when I noticed that she had left a note on the writing desk. This is what she said,
Dearest Babs,
You are on the bed snoring. You look lovely.
I must go see the rats myself. I can’t explain, but this is something I must do alone. Please don’t take offense. It’s not that I don’t want you there, it’s just that … I can’t explain. Just trust me. I’ll be back in three days. Just go to the Chatuchak Market and shop to your heart’s content. I’m fine. Really. I feel better than I have in months. I have to do this alone.
Love,
Gilda
I called the concierge and he confirmed that Gilda had arranged for a 6 am flight to Sakon Nakhon and had taken the shuttle to the airport very early that morning. The next flight was not until the same time the next day. I hung up not knowing what to do. Gilda has traveled the world. I knew she could handle herself. I felt hurt that she wanted to do this alone, but I understood. But I was overwhelmed with terror for her because I was afraid that seeing the rats again would trigger some terrible anxiety or flashback to the awful things she suffered, and that would send her over the edge. If that happened she would need me there. I had to be with her. But what if I flew out there and could not find her? I didn’t know where she was staying. I paced back and forth in indecision for a long time. When I finally made up my mind it was nearly time to go to the airport. I left a quick note in case Gilda returned before I did and fled the hotel.
It was the longest flight of my life. Every minute was agony. When I arrived I did not know what to do. I’d brought nothing but my small book bag filled with some necessities. I stared at the wall of taxi drivers, hawkers, and pickpockets (I supposed) waiting outside the barrier separating the small baggage claim area from the outside world and burst into tears. I sat on the ground and just bawled. A kind Thai gentleman in an extremely expensive business suit who had just picked up his bag off of a luggage cart stopped and squatted beside me and said in nearly flawless English, “Can I be of any help?”
I don’t remember what I said, but I know I spilled my guts, fears, and terror out in one very, very long sentence. He listened patiently then said, “Here is what you will do. I will share a taxi with you to the Dusit Hotel. It is very nice and they speak English very well. You will check in there. There I will arrange for a driver to take you to the Wat where you think your friend may be. He will wait all day until you are ready to return.”
He helped me up and I waied and cried and he waied back with a big smile. He was as good as his word. I soon found myself riding in the back of a taxi to the Wat Phra That Choeng Chum where Gilda believed the singing rats would be found. I was so anxious I could not enjoy the ride. The forested landscape only reminded me that this must be very similar to the place Gilda had been held captive for so many years and left me wondering what effect this might have had on Gilda when she arrived.
We pulled up to the Wat and oh, Mom, there she was like a miracle shining in the sun, her floral dress catching the breeze. I walked over hesitantly, afraid I was in for a lecture or worse for having followed her, but when she saw me her eyes lit up and she hugged me and said strangely, “I knew you would find me.”
All I could answer was, “Of course. I’ll always find you.”
“I know. That’s why I called you here. I needed you to be with me for this.”
“You did not call me here. You tried to run away from me!”
“No. I called you to me by running away.”
“I never understand you.”
“Come. See this.”
She took me by the hand and led me into the Wat.
It was filled with large rats. They were everywhere. Gilda told me the stories of her experience with rats in Vietnam, but the raw reality was beyond anything I expected or that I can even now describe.
Involuntarily, I let out a scream and backed out of the ruin saying, “Eww!”
I have known Gilda for many years and I would have bet my vinyl record collection against a jellyroll that I had seen every face she could muster, but the amalgamation of horror and reproach that contorted her face made me step back in fright.
However her anger quickly faded and she said, “Oh Babs. These are my friends.”
We went back into the temple together and we watched the rats scurrying about, eating grain provided by the monks, getting into occasional tussles over some scrap or some favored position in some hierarchy visible only to them. Every once in a while they would sing, which would delight the visitors thereby. But it was not like Gilda’s or the travel magazine’s version. They did not take up special positions. Instead a few woul
d start squeaking, and this would spread like a wave to the others, who would offer a few chirps and it would ripple through the rats and it would die down again. It all seemed rather accidental, despite how unusual and otherworldly. When it had gone quiet again, whatever people remained would clap with delight. Every time this happened, I looked at Gilda. She would frown and seem confused as she watched this display. Tourists were passing in and out, but we remained. As the afternoon stretched into evening and these visitors thinned then finally abated, Gilda suddenly raised her arms in dramatic fashion like a conductor calling an orchestra to attention, her eyes fixed on the rats milling about the temple, and her posture full of intent. Yet they did not so much as look at her. She made the same motions again, then again. She looked at me and in a panic said, “I don’t understand. Yesterday they let me lead them in song just like I used to.” She tried again several times, but to no avail.
“Perhaps it’s me?” I said.
She did not answer but a look of hope graced her brow for a second.
Forgive me, mother, but for the first time I wondered if there was something wrong with her mind. I worried that she may be slipping into madness, but then if it was madness it must have been a long one because she often told of her time with the rats. She seemed so normal in every respect. And now so broken in retrospect.
We took a cab back to her hotel and picked up her things and then came back to mine, which had a much larger room. She seemed so strange and withdrawn. Her face was white and pale. I was frightened and I suggested we get something to eat, but she said she wasn’t hungry.
She got a strange look on her face and said almost in a whisper, “I’m dying.” I chided her and told her she had a long time yet. That she was just sad the rats had not sung and that I was sure they would sing tomorrow.
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