Much Madness

Much Madness

           

            My mother loved literature even after she could no longer remember what paragraph she’d just read and read it again and again.  I know she loved Emily Dickinson.

            “Much madness is divinest sense to the discerning eye.”

            I grew up judging at least one person in our family as mad and it wasn’t my mother or my brother, whose neurological problems were diagnosed for the first time when he was four and began having seizures, sometimes status epilepticus, without stop.

            Sometimes I’m considered, by default, the “normal” one in the family.  But even I, chosen “rara avis” back in high school Latin class, have always been regarded as “different,” which means similar to the rest of the people in our family. 

            My mother, my older sister Dana, my younger sister Suzy, and I all used to have little outbursts that seemed to come when we were deep in thought and recalled something we couldn’t bear to recall. I discovered this commonality one person at a time.

            I hadn’t seen my sister Dana for two years when she arrived at our parents’ home after her graduation from college in 1966, and I heard her scream from another room.

              “No!”

            Being unusually solicitous because she was a “newly returned” member of the household, I ran to see what had happened.

            “What’s the matter?” I asked her.

            “Nothing.  Why?”

            “I heard you scream ‘No!’”

            “Oh,” she said.  “Just thinking.”

            “I do that too!”  I told her.  “Only I don’t say ‘No.’  I say ‘Death,’ as if that will kill the thought or maybe as if I would rather die than remember it.  Mother does it too, only she says ‘I didn’t say that.’  She thinks she talks too much and too undiplomatically at her book club.  The next day she calls up all the book club members and apologizes.”

            I thought our youngest sister Suzy was free of verbal tics until at dinner one evening, she shouted out, “I hate you!”

            The people who were having us to dinner were, like our father, psychologists.

            I blithely explained this phenomenon of shouting out as “practically a family tradition,” but my father didn’t look amused. 

            Yet he was the one I’d judged a madman when I was a child.  When he was angry, which he almost always was, he called us names like “Stupid Idiot” and “Sick Frog.”  I knew this was hyperbole and redundancy even before I learned those words.  Wasn’t “frog” insult enough without making it a sick one?  Wasn’t idiot strong enough without intensifying it with stupid?

            Could my father not restrain his verbal outbursts?

            I remember when my son was a toddler, and I’d cry out, “Am I the world’s greatest creep?” and my son would answer, “Yes!”

            One day it came out as “Am I the world’s greatest jerk?” and my son answered brightly, “No!  Cweep!”

            Were these little outbursts anything like “seizure activity”?

           

            Now both my mother and my brother were taking pills to still the storm in their brain.  My mother now sometimes spoke of going to a “facility,” and I think she was making a link between herself and my brother. 

            “David never questioned me when I said he had to go to Napa,” she said, speaking of the state hospital in California, where he was first self-admitted in 1968 at the age of nineteen.

            He never made her feel guilty although it was guilty she always felt.

            When she was calm, she didn’t want us to feel guilty in case we found a facility for her.  She would dutifully go where we wanted her to go.  But when her brain stormed, she begged us to find her a safe place to go, a place where Kathy couldn’t kill her. 

            Much madness.

            I always thought of us as being eccentric rather than mad until my son Jonathan clued me in one Christmas Day.  My brother David had just had a seizure, knocking his plate and a couple of glasses off the table before we could rush over to him.  After we had comforted David and helped Kathy clean up the mess, Jonathan portioned out Copenhagen so David could go out to the deck to chew.

            When we were alone I talked to Jonathan. 

            “I know you could have a more normal Christmas Day if you were with your dad or with Aunt Patty and Uncle Joe.    Do you ever wish you could spend Christmas Day with them instead of with us?”

            Jonathan said, “No.  I get to see them on Christmas Eve.  I like spending Christmas Day with all of you.”  I felt reassured until he added, “I just worry sometimes about my children when I get married.  If they’ll have mental problems.”

            Until then it hadn’t occurred to me that we carried a gene for “much madness,” but in case much madness isn’t divinest sense, I was determined to turn from Emily Dickinson to Henry James and beg to be “one of the people upon whom nothing is lost.”