Category Archives: memory

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With the Edges of her Eyes


Today I’d like to share a poem I wrote about my maternal grandmother, who died in 1980, when I was only a senior in high school.

My grandmother was probably my favorite person on the planet.  I adored her and thought, as a teenager, that I could deal with just about any challenge, as long as it didn’t involve losing her.

Nana and I, two years before her death

My grandmother, born in 1903, was beautiful as a young girl:

However, when I was myself an adolescent, Nana fell and broke her hip.  She  was subsequently unable to reach her own feet, so when I visited her, my favorite place to stay in the summers, I often washed them for her–something I allude to in the poem that follows.

nana

(in memory of Martha Gilbert Kunkle)

we are oblique and
at odd angles:
     me at the feet
     i once washed
     on a regular basis
 
in the dream:
     she is getting older
                melting or
                shrinking
 
looking at me
only with the edges
     of her eyes.
 

Though often in my dreams my grandmother is still alive, I’m grateful in the mornings  to know Nana, in all the ways that matter,  has never really left–blessing enough–in my own now aging  eyes.

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A Sister Lost: a Twin Remembered


In honor of Memorial Day, I’m remembering my identical twin sister Martha, who died several days after we were born. 

Twins born a month premature had little chance of survival in 1962, a time before medical science knew how to save the tiniest of infants.  I weighed just over 3 pounds, Marty just over 2.  The doctors promised my parents neither of us would survive, but it seems even then I was determined to beat the odds.

This poem is written in the voice of my sister, who describes our experience in the womb:  the veins lining the inside of the placenta we shared, her efforts to recite poetry about our time together , the fact that I was growing more quickly than she.

Hope you appreciate this poem about a primal kind of bonding and the profound sadness of losing someone whose DNA was identical to mine, someone who mirrored me even before the beginning, when “I” was “we” and “we” were wombed as one.

 

 To my twin sister who lived to tell about it

 

The room, which was poorly lit

     and warmer than we wanted,

     curved around us

               like planetarium

                    ceiling

               like the rind

                    of cantaloupe

                    as seen from the inside

 

I remember how you traced

     the networking of veins

     with the stub that became

                  the index finger

                  of your left hand

              

While I recited garbled

     poems about

           the splitting

                  of space

          the fact that you were

                 gathering more

                 matter

  

 

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Writing Round the Vertigo


At the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Month, I posted a piece called “Leaving the Seclusion Room  (some not-so-crazy notes on recoverying from mental illness)” about my stay at an Oklahoma psychiatric facility.  In that post I wrote about the voices I heard—an echo of children’s chatter—a description that prompted a question from my friend Sarah, who asked if I had ever explored those voices poetically—exploited their poetic potential, so to speak.

It turns out, I had.

Sort of.

The poem I’ll share below is written in several voices that interrupt one another—echoing—overlapping—dizzying.  Though there’s only one child’s voice in the mix of layered sing-song, this poem reminds me of the voices I still sometimes hear during times of vertigo-inducing stress–a surreal “reality” that looks a bit like this:

(photo by John Drysdale, " High Living Crocodile," 1976)

So–I hope you’ll wind these stairs with me–

And take a listen—

 

Vertigo

 

My head is killing

     me and he is talking

     about the etiquette

          of date rape

 

     cassette in the player

     cassette in the player

 

          indigo

          girls

          indigo

 

Where have you been?

 

The staircase is winding

     off the edges of the lawn

     and I am here

                                  lavender

 

     lilies of the valley

     lilies

               of

                     the

                             valley

 

I’ve told you not to

     go there

 

     you

     you

 

There you

                     daughter in the photograph

                     age three in front

                     of an antique typewriter

Kathy--already a writer--age 3

Why can’t you be more like . . .

 

    lilies of the valley

     lilies

              of

                    the

                            valley

 

The world according to cats

     is not a crazy sphere

     of influence

                                 spinning

                                 spinning

 

          in my

 

     cassette in the player

     cassette in the player

 

          head

 

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Asylum Seekers (Another Chapter in the Chronicle of Crazy)


Note: This piece continues the story of my psychiatric hospitalization in the spring 1990 (begun two posts back).  To read part 1 of this sequence, “Another Chapter in the Chronicle of Crazy,” click here.  To read part 2, “Forgetting the Seclusion Room ,” click here.  Part 2 concludes with the following sentence:

But mostly I walked that hospital hall alone, alternately fighting and forgetting a psychosis that whiplashed between extremes of nothingness and nowhere . . . .

. . . . This whiplashing made me acutely aware of my own nothingness, the fact that at the center of myself a huge hole swallowed and indeed devoured all I thought I knew about myself and the world around me.

I was nothing.

The world around me a vacuum—nothing but emptiness sucking.

Suddenly my experience of myself shifted.  I was not who I thought I was.   

I was nobody.

I was nowhere.

I saw myself stripped of all seeming substance, of all that seemed solid and predictable in the face of free-fall.  I was naked and drowning—bare to the glare of what others called crazy.

If I was indeed, out of touch with reality, as the doctors told me, what did that mean?  And if I couldn’t trust my own mind, what could I trust? 

Inevitably, this possibility that I couldn’t or shouldn’t trust myself terrified me.  And my mind, though insane, was adaptive enough to not consciously fear itself.  Instead, I displaced this terror in all directions, becoming terrified of everything—terrified of nothing.   I couldn’t articulate at the time exactly what I feared.  I was only and always overcome with dread.  I knew something was terribly wrong.

As I look back on it now, I imagine I wanted out.  But not so much out of the hospital, as out my own mind, a mind that, if insane, was no longer an asylum in its own right.

As Anne Sexton said:

O mother of the womb
did I come here for blood alone?
O little mother,
I am in my own mind,
I am locked in the wrong house.  (“For the Year of the Insane”)
 

So in the end, it was terror that made me walk that hospital hall alone–alone in the most existential sense–exiled not only from the rest of the world by mental illness, but exiled by mental illness from myself.

This is the terror of mental illness–terror from which we seek the ultimate asylum–an asylum that ends stigma, increases awareness, guarantees hope for all who suffer.

Ultimately, this is what it means to “reinvent the event horizon”–to bring back from the brink all who suffer, all who are marginalized by any stigma, especially the stigma that is mental illness.

__________________________________________________

Since May 1st marks the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Month, I will republish this entire 3 post sequence as one on Monday, May 2nd, along with art that illustrates my journey.   In an effort to raise awareness and erase stigma, please share these posts with those you love sometime over the next month.

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Forgetting the Seclusion Room (Another Chapter in the Chronicle of Crazy)


(To read the post that precedes this, click here.)

I don’t remember arriving at Parkside Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma; neither do I recall anything about the admissions process.  I don’t remember how my Maltese Lizzy came to be kenneled at the vet’s office, who took me to the hospital or if it’s possible I even drove myself.

Indeed, it’s these gaps in memory that I remember most. And this fact of forgetting remains my ongoing issue with memoir.  How does one memoir without memory?  How does one write the empty space where the story should be?

These gaps complicate the writing process, and the effort to fill in the details, to flesh out the facts, force me to depend on journals I kept at the time.  For example, the night I so unceremoniously removed the carpet from my living room, the night before the hospital admission I allude to above, I described an intense sense of alienation and confusion:

I know that other people must not experience the world in the way I do, because if they did, the world would be a very different place and I wouldn’t feel so strange—so marginal—so near the edge and falling off.  I have a kind of hyper-consciousness that nearly drives me crazy.  I feel driven.  I feel haunted.  I feel so alone in my experience . . . . I feel out of control and at the mercy of my own mind . . . . I’m so alone and so afraid . . . . I feel like a bad human being—like I’m just not good at it.  I feel like a failure.

I can’t control my thoughts.  I think thoughts I don’t want to think.  I feel out of control.

I feel like I can’t be true to myself and live in this world, like I want to wear bones on my clothes—on the outside pinned to me.

I don’t remember anything about this bizarre urge to “wear bones,” but skeletal fashion statement aside, I also don’t recall the particulars of this admission to Parkside in March of 1990.  However, by the time I left Tulsa in 1995, I had been admitted to this same facility any number of times and do recall a few facts about the place.

The building had three floors, for example, and a basement—the first an intake unit and small lobby, the second a locked but moderately restricted unit, and the third a locked but highly restricted one.

I was admitted to the third floor.  I remember a day room at one end, 4 dormitory style rooms at the other, and a hallway connecting the two. The hall had a nurses’ station along one wall, an elevator on the other. 

With windows along two walls, the day room was large, filled with square wooden tables with white Formica tops, four chairs at each.  We patients spent most of our time in this open space: played games, watched television, ate meals. 

The patient rooms were bare and barrack-like.  With a partition down the middle, two beds on one side, two on the other, each room also contained two desks and four small wardrobes.  Bathrooms, one per room, boasted, a toilet and shower stall, not to mention a metal mirror above each sink—no glass allowed, lest patients break it and purposefully injure themselves.

Behind the nurse’s station was another hall that was locked and off-limits to patients.  Here were a number of seclusion rooms, each with a single bed bolted to the floor in the center of the space—each equipped with 4 point restraints—wide leather cuffs that strapped wrists and ankles to the bed.   I spent time alone in these rooms when I was particularly distressed, but only once in 4 point restraints. 

I walked the hall between these dorms and day room, repeatedly, regularly.  The antipsychotic medication made me restless, so I paced, feeling the walls with my palms, an effort to comfort myself, to calm the cacophony of crazy that worsened every evening. 

One nurse was kind and would sometimes walk with me, attempting to reassure me, to lessen the aloneness, to quiet the chatter in my head, the echo of children’s voices saying senseless, sing-song rhymes.

But mostly I walked that hall alone, alternately fighting and forgetting a psychosis that whiplashed between extremes of nothingness and nowhere.

(to be continued)