You Are Here

by Kelly Garriott Waite

The picture, taken before color photography was ubiquitous, is gradations of light and dark, bright and shadow. In it, my father straddles a three-foot log, a jagged vertical crack down its center like a lightning strike. The bark is rough and covered in places with moss. The grass surrounding it is mostly short and neat, as if the log had been dragged to this space specifically to make a seat for my father. But it can't be comfortable: Dad's right leg bends back, the toe of his shoe dug into the ground as if for purchase. His left leg is forward, his heel pressed into the grass. His pants—the seventies equivalent of Dockers–are sharply creased down the center. He wears a button-up shirt, untucked, and Converse tennis shoes, their dark laces loosely tied. Dad holds a five-string resonator banjo, its round drum resting on one leg. His smiling face is in profile, that characteristic dimple in his cheek as he looks at the middle finger of his left hand, pressed behind the D string's third fret.

* * *

Fret:

1. To worry excessively and without cease.

2. Music: One of several thin silver strips separating the fingerboard of various stringed instruments into sections. Pressing just behind a fret will divide a string in two, causing its lower half to vibrate faster, thus producing a higher-pitched note. Each fret will raise a string's tone a half-step or 1/12 of an octave.

* * *

Between certain frets, the fingerboard of Dad's banjo was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the smooth white inside of the shell of certain mollusks: oysters, mussels, and abalones. I remember swaying from side to side, studying the shimmer of the inlay, watching the colors change from violet and pink to gold and green. Looking at the photograph, I am reminded of the abalone shell that belonged to Dad's mother, a woman who fretted so often that my grandfather sometimes snapped at her, stop buying trouble, as she peered through the dashboard of the passenger seat, giving voice to her worries about weather or traffic.

Why steal the mollusk's rainbow to settle it upon the neck of the banjo? More than mere adornment, it served as position markers, grounding my father to keep him from getting lost inside the music. This is where you are, the inlay murmured to Dad. Remember, you are here.

* * *

Octave:

Used in Western music, an octave is composed of eight notes and their four half steps. The beginning and ending notes of an octave match in pitch but differ in frequency.

* * *

A mere handful of notes, a single octave is insufficient to express musically the range of human emotion. And so, using the fret-string combination, the octave is repeated three times on Dad's banjo.

* * *

A can of Budweiser rests before Dad, its label gazing off camera. A music book is open, its soft cover folded back. I hold my magnifying glass over the book and try to discern the title of the song. But all I can make out is a smattering of notes, fat circles with wings, except for the whole note, which is entirely too heavy to fly and thus has no need of wings.

* * *

Note value:

Used in music to show how long to play (or hold) each note. Commonly, a whole note is held for four beats, a half note for two. On it goes, with each previous note value halving itself all the way down to the smallest, rarest note, the 256^th, a note with six fast fluttering wings, a note so light it barely makes a sound as it briefly alights before flitting away. 

* * *

Dad often played "Cripple Creek" and "Dueling Banjos" from the movie Deliverance. Sometimes he played "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," a song featured on an album of the same name by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Dad bought this album and stored it beside the seventeen-volume collection of Beethoven's works, eighty-five records in all, which he largely ignored, but which my sister played loudly when she cleaned the bedroom we shared: sonatas, symphonies, and string quartets. I remember the scratch of the needle upon a record. The momentary silence before the room was flooded with sound. I remember, after the room was clean, my sister returning the records haphazardly to the shelves until the cabinet was so messy, Dad could no longer stand it and made us sort out the records and put them into their correct volume. Dad's life was a series of attempts to impose order on a disordered brain.

* * *

When he wasn't playing, the banjo hung on the wall next to Dad's recliner. Beside it was the four-string he'd also acquired. When he got the notion to play one or the other, Dad sat up in one swift motion, his back lifting and his legs folding down simultaneously while he reached toward the wall.

* * * 

Ängstlich:

1. German: anxious.

2. Music: anxiously.

* * *

Here's what Dad never told us: He took a prescription medication to alleviate the symptoms of Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder (OCD), a disease rooted in anxiety.

Here's what took me years to tell my children: I also suffer from OCD.

Here's what I hope my children tell my grandchildren: They have anxiety. They have learned how to manage it. There is no shame in mental illness.

* * *

Leitmotif:

A phrase or theme that recurs throughout a musical or literary piece.

* * *

I believe that the leitmotif of Dad's life was anxiety and finding a way to alleviate it. He never spoke of anxiety, perhaps because he didn't want to buy trouble. Instead, I believe he sought relief through his hobbies: photography or sailing or playing the banjo, dropping one project and taking up another, sometimes circling back to an earlier one, repeating the pattern throughout his life.

* * *

As expected, Dad gave up playing the banjo. The instruments remained on the wall for longer and longer stretches of time until they became more decoration than entertainment. With every hobby, Dad discarded its accouterments, in this case, the music books, the silver picks, the pitch pipe. Eventually even the banjos disappeared.

But I don't think Dad was a quitter. Rather, I believe that when a hobby had lost the power to distract his mind–-when, for instance, he could play a song without having to concentrate–-he dropped it for something new upon which to focus. Every new project had the potential to quiet his mind. Something to tell him: You are not lost. Remember you are here.

* * *

My younger daughter, like her grandfather, flits from thing to thing, as if searching for something to quiet her brain, something to ground her, too. She tells me she doesn't want to have children: she's afraid they'll inherit the anxiety.

Can I guarantee her this circle of anxiety will eventually be broken? No. But I try to explain the positives that accompany it: the compassion for others, the creativity, the way of finding beauty in the world where others might not. I'm not sure she believes me. I'm not sure she believes it's worth it.

But perhaps mental illness isn't so much illness than the normal about which we do not speak. Perhaps each of our brains are gradations of lightness and darkness, brightness and shadow. Perhaps if we spoke our truths rather than hiding them, we would feel less alone, braver, not as strange as we perceive ourselves to be. Perhaps the heaviness of our hearts and our minds would evaporate. Perhaps if we said, this is where I am, someone might reply, me, too. I am here, too.

Kelly Garriott Waite writes from Ohio. Her work has appeared in the Hopper, Allegro Poetry, and the Fourth River: Tributaries.

The Quilter

by Joanne Passet

My great grandmother spent forty-six years in the Toledo State Hospital. In the only picture I have of her, Elizabeth Ross Frank stands in a grove of pine trees on the hospital grounds. Taken in the 1930s, it shows her wearing a slightly rumpled long-sleeved dress sewn from dotted fabric, a few wisps of silver hair escaping a pragmatic bun at the nape of her neck. Despite being institutionalized for over four decades, she stands erect and dignified, hands relaxed at her sides and dark eyes gazing into the camera’s lens. She does not look insane.

I first learned about my great grandmother the year I turned thirteen. One warm Saturday in the late 1960s, the pastor drove a station wagon full of teens across northwest Ohio to tour the state hospital. Eager to spread good cheer, we crafted fluffy flowers from colored tissue paper and fastened them to green pipe cleaner stems. Clutching bouquets in our hands, we entered the ward, but came to an abrupt stop when we encountered a long hallway lined with wheelchair-bound patients. Heads lolled on chests, muttering filled the air, and the smell of urine stung our noses. An elderly woman reached out to me, but I recoiled at the sight of cloth ties binding her body to the chair. Forcing an awkward smile, I thrust my flowers into her gnarled hands and retreated outside.

All the way home I kept thinking about the horrors I had seen. How could anyone live like that? After dinner as I dried dishes, I poured out my concerns to my mother. I couldn’t imagine anyone regaining their mental health in such an environment. The kitchen grew silent, except for the sound of dishes being rinsed, then I heard Mom inhale. “Your Dad’s grandmother was a patient there.”

“What?” I had researched our family tree for a school project, and had never heard such a story. “Why was she there?”

Mom glanced at Dad, engrossed in the sports page of the daily newspaper. “Childbirth injuries.” Mom shook her head. “Such a shame.”    

I knew better than to ask Mom to elaborate. As much as she loved to gossip, she was a bit of a prude when it came to discussing “female complaints.” Only years later did I realize she attributed my great grandmother’s hospitalization to postpartum depression. 

          “I have one of her quilts. Would you like to see it?”

Nodding, I followed Mom into the bedroom and watched as she positioned a metal step stool in front of her closet. Steadying herself, she reached to the top shelf and tugged at the corner of a rectangular box. Dust floated through the air as she removed it from the shelf. Reaching up, I let the box slide into my arms and carried it to the bed. An aroma of mothballs filled the air when I opened it and parted acidic tissue paper.

I was disappointed when we spread the quilt on top of the bed. Quilters today sew with colorful wrinkle-free fabric, but my great grandmother had made do with scraps of old dresses and shirts—blue and brown plaid, lavender and white checks, black and white gingham, a yellow floral print, and a field of red dotted with tiny flowers. Bits of yarn bound the pieced top to a striped flannel backing. I had expected to see intricate applique or a familiar pieced pattern like Grandmother’s Flower Garden or the Double Wedding Ring. Yet when I took a closer look at the quilt, I discovered amazing precision. My great grandmother had sewn forty-two pieced squares in orderly rows, six across and seven down. I admired her even stitches, twelve to the inch, and the precise way the corner of each piece met the next, yet I was puzzled. How could this quilt be the product of an unsettled mind?

Eager to learn more, I dug through a box of family portraits in search of her picture but came up empty handed. Instead, I found a solitary image of my great-grandfather at midlife and a portrait of Elizabeth’s children taken shortly before she left home. In it, her firstborn, Will, wears high-buttoned boots with short pants and a neatly pressed dark suit jacket, a handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket. He is seated, a self-satisfied look on his face, while his pudgy sister Alma stands to one side in a pleated winter dress, relieved only by a bit of white lace at her neck. Unbeknownst to the photographer, his image unwittingly captured the waning days of Alma’s childhood. Only nine when her mother was hospitalized, she had not yet mastered the secrets of whitening sheets, sewing a fine seam, or baking an apple pie.

Sadness washed over me as I pictured my preadolescent grandmother, denied a mother’s love and forced to exchange her childhood and schooling for a lifetime of cooking, canning, baking, mopping, scrubbing, ironing, washing, darning, mending, and gardening. Dead by the age of seventy-two, people at the funeral said she had worked herself to death.

One day a few years later, a padded envelope arrived in the mail. “I thought you’d like to have this picture of your great grandmother,” an elderly cousin had scrawled on a yellow Post-it note. Pulling out a manila folder, I opened it and found myself staring into my great grandmother’s eyes. If only the picture could speak. I waited until after dinner to show it to my father, and was stunned when he pronounced it a good likeness.

“How could you possibly know?”   

“Once Mom and Dad took us boys on the train to visit her.”

          This was news to me. “What do you remember about that visit? About her?”

          “She was much like any other old person. She commented on how much we had grown, then sat next to Mom talking in low tones.” Whatever they discussed, nothing seemed out of the ordinary to my father, not even the hospital grounds, where he and his brothers played until it was time to return home.

Haunted by my great grandmother’s story, I set out to discover more about her life and the real reason for her commitment. Elizabeth Frank’s tombstone provided a death date and led me to the local newspaper archives for a copy of her obituary. Born in the spring of 1856, she grew up in a northwest Ohio county named for the Wyandot Indians who, like her, experienced forced removal and life in confinement. Her German-born father focused on material success, mining gold in California until he earned enough money to buy farmland in Ohio. Unfortunately, success did not guarantee happiness. A bolt of lightning killed his namesake in 1871, and his weary wife died four years later. As the oldest girl among five surviving children, nineteen-year-old Elizabeth assumed responsibility for the household and her younger siblings.

No portrait survives to commemorate the day in August 1879 when my great grandmother married George Frank, the son of a neighboring German Lutheran farmer. Sporting a Van Dyke beard, her husband was a hardworking first-generation American, determined to establish himself by putting in long hours. Five decades later he was still clearing trees from his land with an axe when a stroke took his life.  

Like other farm wives of her generation, Elizabeth filled daylight hours with work, sewing clothing, baking bread, cooking meals, and canning fruits and vegetables on a wood stove in the summer kitchen. In 1881 she gave birth to a son, followed by a daughter three years later. While her husband cleared 160 acres of oak and maple trees, Elizabeth planted nearly two dozen eastern white pines along the bend in the road at the front of their property. Each day she carried two-gallon buckets of hand-pumped water to the saplings, coaxing them to grow. Today a half dozen remain as her legacy to us, having survived years of drunk drivers and high winds.

          Tragedy struck the family in 1885 when the failure of the Central Bank and the loss of an eight-hundred dollar investment led Elizabeth’s father to suffer a “dethronement of reason.” Eluding his family, he entered his workshop, climbed up on a barrel, tied a rope to a rafter, slipped a noose around his neck, and jumped. I initially dismissed his suicide as situational, but after reading studies about suicide, I began to question if the family had a history of mental illness.

          No documents survive to shed light on my great grandmother’s life from her father’s death until the day in March, 1894, when my great grandfather petitioned the county probate court to declare his wife insane. Under Ohio law at the time, a husband could commit his spouse to a state hospital upon the recommendation of a judge, a physician, and two witnesses. More than 120 years have passed since that day, yet her commitment papers remain sealed under the HIPPA Privacy Rule, making it impossible for me to discover why she lost her freedom.

          Approaching the question from another angle, I contacted the Ohio Historical Society, which houses the Toledo State Hospital’s records. Upon learning that her oldest living descendant, my father, could petition for access to some information, I assisted him with the paperwork. Six weeks later he received an official letter in the mail, a single sheet of paper containing three short paragraphs.

Scanning the page, I devoured the few snippets of information: the date of her committal, the person accompanying her to the asylum, and her diagnosis: chronic mania. Immediately I pictured a fastidious German-American housewife scrubbing floors and windows over and over again. Then I noticed two more words: homicidal behavior. I couldn’t believe it. Not in my family! When I told my father the shocking news, he nodded, then shared another piece of our family’s unspoken history: my great grandmother believed her husband wanted to harm her, and attacked him with a butcher knife. Saddened by this discovery, I filed the letter away in a folder bearing her name, convinced I would learn no more.

          Years passed. My father entered a nursing home, and our farmhouse grew too much for my mother to manage. While sorting through dishes, correspondence, pictures, clothing, furniture, and papers accumulated during sixty years of marriage, we once again removed the quilt from its shelf in the closet. “Would you like to have it?” she asked, eager to see a family heirloom passed on to the next generation.

A chill filled the air the October evening I took my Elizabeth’s quilt home and spread it on my Civil War-era bed with its carved walnut headboard. It looked brighter than I remembered. Exhausted from days spent emptying Mom’s farmhouse, I crawled between the sheets and pulled the quilt up to my chest, fingering its coarse Depression-era cotton and the lumpy batting inside. Tears came to my eyes as I thought about my great grandmother’s life. I would never know what she thought or felt, but I vowed to renew my effort to piece together as much of her story as I possibly could from scraps of information preserved by the hospital and others incarcerated there.

Turning to annual reports, I reconstructed the day my great grandmother arrived at the Toledo State Hospital. She and my great grandfather traveled by train because the trip would have taken two days by buggy. The county sheriff or a trusted friend may have accompanied them on the journey. It was not unusual for the patient to wear a straitjacket. 

          Upon her arrival, an attendant would have taken Elizabeth to an Admission Room and examined her for scars, bruises, and vermin. She stood five feet seven inches and weighed 135 pounds, a sturdy farm wife who kept herself neat and tidy. Donning hospital clothing until her own could be marked, she was then escorted to the ward, where she learned about hospital routines and met her housemates, other women suffering from mania, melancholia, menopause, menstrual disorders, overwork, pregnancy, and religious excitement.

A frugal man, my great grandfather must have taken some comfort in knowing the state covered the cost of his wife’s care (until 1910, when the hospital began charging four dollars per week). But what was he thinking as he sat in the administrative building speaking with the hospital’s superintendent? Was he numb? Or was it a relief to turn his wife’s care over to others so he and his children could sleep in peace? Life with her must have been worse than living with the stigma of having a wife in the asylum, but nonetheless he was losing his companion, the mother of his children.

I like to think a farmwife like Elizabeth would have found solace in the hospital landscape—150 lush acres punctuated by trees, shrubs, well-manicured lawns, and lakes. Opened in 1888, the Toledo State Hospital initially operated on the premise that environment was the best medicine for a troubled mind. Instead of being locked in a sterile hospital ward, restrained with straps and mittens, Elizabeth and other “moderately disturbed” patients lived in solid two-story brick cottage with spacious day rooms and inviting porches with inviting chairs lining the front porch. Three times a day, attendants escorted patients along tidy sidewalks to the women’s dining room, where other attendants served as wait staff. 

Examining pictures of the hospital found online, I try to envision how the grounds must have appeared to work-weary farmwives with demanding husbands. Could a woman raised with my great grandmother’s rigid German-Lutheran background ever learn to relax? I can see her attending church services in the chapel, but it’s hard to imagine her joining other residents at dances, concerts, theatrical performances, baseball games, lantern shows, and lectures. Did she ever accompany other patients on outings to the circus or the nearby Walbridge amusement park, with its colorful merry-go-round and wooden roller coaster? Was she in the audience when the newly emerging African American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar recited his recently published work?

In addition to providing a healing environment, hospital employees administered noninvasive hydrotherapeutic treatments, including soothing baths, needle sprays, salt glows, and wet sheet packs. Only later, after state hospitals grew overcrowded, did they experiment with electric shock therapy and lobotomies.

In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the state hospital superintendent believed work assignments would give able-bodied patients a sense of purpose and accomplishment. In keeping with this premise, Elizabeth became a bed-maker, stripping soiled linen, turning mattresses, applying clean sheets and blankets, and fluffing pillows. I don’t know if she had other gender-specific assignments, for instance, cleaning wards, washing and ironing clothes, and working in the kitchen. I know she sewed, because I have her quilt, but in all those years there she may also have tried her hand at making woven baskets, rag rugs, and paper flowers—anything to pass the time in a constructive manner.

A number of patients recovered their health and returned home. According to the document from the Ohio Historical Society, a hospital physician pronounced my great grandmother ready for a trial home visit in March 1896 and promised to discharge her into her husband’s custody if all went well. In the two years since Elizabeth’s admission, her son had grown into a young man of fifteen and her daughter, now eleven, had become the mistress of the house. Imagine the tension and uncertainty.

Likely uneasy in his wife’s presence, my great grandfather arranged for a neighbor to sleep in the house at night. In an environment filled with constant scrutiny and emotional distance, Elizabeth’s paranoia resurfaced. In less than six weeks, she accused her husband of trying to poison her, and he returned her to the hospital. The admitting physician recorded her inability “to remain adjusted to home conditions,” noting she had threatened “injury to her family and herself.” It was her last visit home.  

When I told my father about Elizabeth’s home visit, I sparked another memory, this time of a day in the early 1930s when the state hospital informed his parents of her eligibility for discharge. The hospital had grown overcrowded and administrators deemed a number of patients eligible for release. By this time, Elizabeth’s daughter Alma was caring for a household of men—her father, husband, and four strapping sons. She worried about how her mother and father would interact. Alma’s husband, my grandfather, feared his mother-in-law would be too much of a burden for his already overworked wife. And my great grandfather, a small man, still feared his wife might cause him harm.         

Meeting to discuss their options, the family could not figure out how to reintegrate Elizabeth into the household, so they decided to leave her in the hospital. The decision came at a cost. It was the Great Depression and the fees for her care had reached $600 per annum, far more than many farm families earned in a year. In her seventies and illiterate, she had nowhere to go.  

Their decision appalled me, but I was not surprised. My childhood was peppered with stories about neighborhood men who failed to get ahead because they had wives who insisted on doing frivolous things like buying store-bought clothing and going on vacation. Good daughters, I learned, took jobs in town, lived at home, and turned their earnings over to their fathers. I knew the barn was more important than the house, crops than flowers, sons than daughters, and land ownership the most important of all. There was no place for Elizabeth in this worldview.

A simple five by seven card records great grandmother’s death from bronchial pneumonia on December 23, 1940. During her time in the hospital, her diagnosis, originally chronic mania, changed to dementia praecox with paranoid tendencies, a diagnostic box appearing in American asylum records beginning in 1896. According to historian Richard Noll (American Madness), state hospitals at one time assigned this label to approximately twenty-five to fifty percent of patients. As I read more about this premature form of dementia, later relabeled schizophrenia, I started questioning my great grandmother’s diagnosis. Given the progressive disintegration of dementia praecox patients in a pre-pharmaceutical era, I doubted her condition would have improved enough to justify a proposed discharge after forty years of hospitalization.

When I first learned about Elizabeth’s lengthy hospitalization, I assumed it must be an aberration. I wouldn’t allow myself to believe others suffered a similar fate. Then I read an article about the Toledo State Hospital cemeteries, where at least 1,994 men, women, and children who died during their hospitalization lie interred under brick-like stones inscribed with patient numbers. Like Elizabeth, many of them had spent decades in the hospital, but upon their death, no one claimed their bodies. Some had outlived their families, while others had been abandoned, in life and in death.

With the passage of time, state hospital cemeteries in Toledo and throughout the nation fell into disrepair, their neglect perpetuating the stigma of mental illness. In many locations, only rows and rows of depressions in the ground remained to mark patients’ graves, the numbered stones obscured by layers of dirt and grass. In recent years, however, volunteers working under the auspices of state hospital cemetery reclamation projects are restoring grave markers and identities to these faceless patients, and they are transforming hospital cemeteries into places of remembrance and reflection.

As I scrolled through the names of hundreds of women buried there, I wondered if I had found my great-grandmother’s friends, women who she knew better than members of her family: Gertrude G., Phoebe H., Grace L., Jennie P., Lettie S., and many more. Year after year, decade after decade, they had celebrated Easter, July 4^th, Thanksgiving, and Christmas holidays together. They had walked to and from breakfast, lunch, and dinner talking about the weather, flowers in bloom, and squirrels running across the lawn. They had worked with one another in the hospital kitchens, laundries, and sewing rooms. The optimist in me wants to believe they grew to care for one another.

Unlike the patients buried in the hospital cemeteries, my great-grandmother’s body returned home for interment in late December, 1940. During her lifetime, our nation matured as it endured the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. Women earned the right to vote, experienced the autonomy that comes with driving a car, and had their voices heard in public as well as in private, but she missed out on these rites of passage. A daughter, a sister, an aunt, a wife, a mother, my great-grandmother was denied the day-to-day reality of these roles. Yet the day after Christmas a handful of mourners, all of them family, gathered in her former home for a subdued funeral service. For his text, the pastor chose Luke 8: 4-8, the parable of the sower. He may have compared Elizabeth to the seed scattered on a busy path where it has no chance to grow, or to seed spread among rocks and thorn bushes, but I prefer to think of her growing where she was planted, on the grounds of the Toledo State Hospital, as friend to other patients, helper to attendants, seamstress who mended clothes, and creator of the quilt that comforts me on cold winter nights.

Joanne Passet lives, writes, and knits in Bloomington, Indiana. Her latest book, Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Readers can follow her blog at https://knitwritebton.wordpress.com/. 

A Bipolar Christmas

by Martin Achatz

My daughter was born at the end of an early December snowstorm. I remember the wind that night while my wife was in labor, the kind of wind that shakes parked cars. It tore up the darkness, as if it was mad at the sun for disappearing to the other side of the planet. At some point during that long, midnight vigil, I joked to my wife, Beth, “Keep it down. I can’t hear the wind.”

She didn’t laugh.

At 7:29 the following morning, our daughter was born, screaming and healthy.

The storm had blown itself out like a birthday candle by the time Beth gave the final push that brought our baby into the world. Outside, everything was blinding white and calm, a scene from Currier & Ives. Inside, I stood by my wife’s bed and stared at her and my newborn daughter, felt myself opening up, unfolding like some rare orchid in the moment. So serene. So perfect.

I’d like to end with that Madonna and child moment, tell you that later in the morning, three kings showed up and showered us with presents and food and free camel rides. But that isn’t quite what happened.

Before she became pregnant, my wife had been battling crippling bouts of depression. She’d been to counselors and therapists, talked about her mother’s death, started taking Prozac. Nothing worked. The depressions kept getting deeper and longer, as if she were on some endless donkey ride through the Grand Canyon at night during a full lunar eclipse. These lows were always followed by periods of respite, chrysalis times when my wife broke free, became all wing and sun and light.

Then Beth got pregnant. For those nine months, the darkness simply vanished. At first, we kept watch, waiting for the nose of an iceberg to appear on the horizon. After a few months of clear seas, however, we relaxed, began planning our future with something like hope. My wife seemed to be waking up after a long fallow season. Our life became a series of doctor’s visits and firsts. First hearing of our daughter’s heartbeat. First ultrasound. First time our daughter moved.

When we painted the nursery walls that autumn, my wife’s depressions were like shadows in the corners of a well-lit room. I was in graduate school, writing poems about mosquitoes and moons. Beth only had one bout of morning sickness her entire pregnancy. Approaching her due date and the upcoming holidays, we never heard the chains of the Ghost of Mental Illness Yet to Come rattling at our front door.

It took only a couple days after our daughter was born for the honeymoon to end. Beth woke up one morning and said to me, “I have a nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach.” These nervous feelings were omens that something dark was about to descend, and I could see it in my wife’s eyes. She had the look of a rabbit being chased by a screech owl, ready to bolt down the nearest burrow.

Her ob-gyn seemed concerned but not panicked. She gave Beth estrogen patches and told her it was the post-partum blues. We liked this doctor a lot, and both of us clung to the belief that these little round stickers of hormone would steer the UPS truck to our house to deliver a glowing package of joy to our front porch.

As the winter solstice approached, however, I would come home from work night after night to find Beth still in bed, our daughter on the pillows beside her. The bedroom was a cave filled with the smell of sour breast milk. I’d climb into bed with them and hold Beth while she wept. As a writer, I don’t often use the word “wept.” It’s too melodramatic a verb, summoning up Heathcliff and Jane Eyre on the moors. But there’s no other word for how my wife clung to my shirt and sobbed, her body convulsed with a grief so profound it made her seem unstitched, as if her bones and muscles and skin couldn’t contain it. Sadness seeped out of her pores like thick, black sap.

Pain is a part of most Christmas narratives. Mary is a pregnant teen, shunned and rejected. As a boy, Scrooge is abandoned by his father. George Bailey is suicidal. Rudolph is bullied. And then there’s Nestor, a little donkey with ears as long as elephant trunks. In this Rankin/Bass holiday special, Nestor is teased for his anatomical anomaly and eventually gets kicked out of the barn during a blizzard on the winter solstice, a night, according to legend, when animals are given the gift of speech. Nestor’s mother follows him and ends up lying on top of him to keep him warm. She saves Nestor but loses her life in the process.

Despair accumulates like heavy snow in all these stories. Yet, there are also Garcia Marquez moments of magic. Ghosts. Wingless angels. Blazing comets. The long December nights always end with warm hay and church bells and sunrises.    

The druids and Celts understood this dual nature of the winter solstice time, this battle between death and life, darkness and light. I think early Christians understood it, as well. That’s why they chose to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ around December 21. They saw it as a time when human beings reached through the black and cold of winter toward the warmth and rebirth of spring, the very planet tilting from sorrow to hope.

On Christmas Eve, Beth was having a good spell. For a few days, she’d been able to get out of bed, play with our daughter, and wrap presents. During the day on December 24, we made sugar cookies and fudge, watched one of the multiple broadcasts of It’s A Wonderful Life on TV.

Outside, the clouds were the color of a dirty gum eraser, smudged with the promise of snow. The lilac bushes along our property line were capped with white. Their branches rattled in the wind like startled deer hoofs on ice or stone. A storm was coming. The weatherman was forecasting several inches by Christmas morning.

At church that night, Beth and I sat with family. Our daughter slept in the crook of my arm the entire service, her velvet dress the color of evergreen. As we lit candles and sang “Silent Night,” my wife slipped her fingers into my open palm and looked at me, a thin smile on her face. She wasn’t doing well, I could tell. It wasn’t anything physical in her appearance. It was the pressure of her body against mine as we stood, as if she wanted to climb inside my skin, disappear into me.

We drove home in silence, her hand holding mine so tight my fingers ached. I thought of the new ornament hanging in the branches of the tree in our living room. It was an angel sleeping on a cloud, and on the cloud were the words “Baby’s First Christmas.” It should have been that simple, that peaceful.

As we walked to the front steps of our house, Beth leaned into me. The moon pressed through the clouds above, shedding a dim silver on the snow banks along the sidewalk, like a failing flashlight. Familiar shapes, shovels and garbage cans and bushes, became looming shadows. My arms ached, as if they were holding up not just my wife and baby, but the heavens, as well. All of the talk of light and hope and joy from the church seemed as distant as Orion or Antares.

Then I saw something move in the night. A small, hunched shape on the apex of a snow pile. I stopped and stared at it. For a few moments, it remained frozen, and I started to believe it was simply a chunk of ice, that my mind was playing tricks on me. But it eventually stretched upward, like a crocus blooming in time-lapse, until it stood half in darkness, half in moonlight.

It was a rabbit, brown and tall. Its ears twitched back and forth, testing the night for danger. I could see the Christmas lights from our front porch reflected in the black marbles of its eyes. Its body was taut, like the band of a slingshot. It stayed balanced on its hind feet, regarding me. I suddenly thought of the legend of the talking animals, of Nestor crying for his mother in the night. The rabbit looked as if it was going to speak, to impart some ancient lepus wisdom of how to avoid pain and sorrow.

I waited on that Christmas Eve, that night of turning from darkness to light, for some kind of miracle to happen. I wanted to believe that a rabbit could tell me how to help my wife, that God could become human, that happiness could overcome the black of winter.

My daughter cried out in my arms, and the rabbit bolted. I watched it scramble out of the moonlight into the pitch of the lilac bushes. Then, silence and snow and dark. We began moving toward our front door. For some reason, the distance seemed unusually hard, as if we were struggling through water or against a strong wind. It would be half a year before Beth was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Those six months were filled with more deep depressions, followed by flights of sleepless energy. Some days, Beth would carve hieroglyphs into her arms with razors or knives. Other days, she would book airfare to Florida and Walt Disney World. I kept waiting for the long night to end. For a ghost bear to materialize and groan a healing incantation. Or a flock of angel starlings to gather in our maple tree and sing a lullaby. Something soft that would quiet my wife’s unquiet mind.

That Christmas Eve, as we walked to our home, I thought of the magi, struggling through desert and mountain. I thought of the sand in their teeth and hair. Their tired camels and mules. Their muscles and bones aching for water and rest. Their long journey, following a star, through the darkness toward the promise of light.

Martin Achatz’s work has appeared in Kennesaw Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The MacGuffin, and Dunes Review, among others. His collection of poems, The Mysteries of the Rosary, was published by Mayapple Press, and his contribution to the anthology The Way North was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan, where he is the Poetry Editor of Passages North.

Fortune Cookies

by Rebecca Marks

I have never considered myself to be an overly sentimental person.  While I pin old Playbills from my favorite Broadway shows to my bulletin board, I have never been a scrapbook keeper or a superb memory preserver.  The movie ticket stub from my first date is nothing but a fond memory, and my camera generally lies untouched and forgotten in a desk drawer.  Of the half a dozen diary entries I actually committed to paper in my youth, the most exciting one reads, “Dear Diary, I felt sort of barfy (sic) today.  Mommy gave me some Saltines.  I hope tomorrow is fun.  Love, Rebecca Gayle Marks.”  My elaborate calligraphic signature takes up nearly as much space on the page as the scintillating entry itself.  I do, however, maintain one sentimental practice: the preservation of years’ worth of fortunes from fortune cookies.

        I have always loved fortune cookies.  In truth, I have yet to meet a cookie that I did not adore; complex carbohydrates and I share a deep, enduring bond of love and commitment.  Fortune cookies, however, have always been a favorite of mine.  From the rare opportunity to play with my food to the sweet, buttery taste melting on my tongue, these confections are truly excellent from start to finish. 

For someone who has always lived with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, fortune cookies have taken on a particularly meaningful role.  These multifaceted desserts are my unscratched lottery tickets, magically holding the promise of wealth and prosperity.  When cracking open the cookie’s sugary shell to uncover the clairvoyant slip of paper within, I become the treasure hunter about to unearth an elusive chest overflowing with riches.  When your life is largely characterized by sadness, the fortune cookie’s ability to deliver the promise of a better tomorrow becomes an incomparable treasure.  Dozens of these small slips of paper float about my room, resting in the bottom of forgotten wallets and nestling in the deep recesses of unused drawers.  My favorites assume a place of honor, featured prominently above my desk where I can view them daily.  Of the hundreds of fortunes that I have encountered in my lifetime, three have played an especially prominent role.   

The first came to me while celebrating my younger sister’s ninth birthday at a local Chinese restaurant.  Due to my life-threatening peanut allergy, I must be hyper-vigilant at Chinese restaurants as several traditional dishes contain nuts.  I was dining on an innocuous bowl of chicken lo mein when the restaurant staff brought a tantalizing chocolate birthday cake to our table.  The glowing candles atop the sugary confection emphasized the rich frosting and chocolate chips sprinkled across the top.  Our waiter delivered the cake sans singing or general merriment, as my sister has been known to run from the table crying hysterically if anyone sings “Happy Birthday” to her.  All birthday photos of Shana up until the age of six display red-rimmed, swollen eyes and a tentative half-smile.  As my sister blew out her candles, my father inquired to our waiter whether the cake contained nuts. 

“Why, yes,” the waiter replied eagerly. “Our chocolate fudge black-out cake is filled with a hazelnut crème ganache.” 

While the waiter’s eyes twinkled, basking in the glow of this gourmet display, three other sets of eyes shifted nervously to me.  Their owners knew that I would now face the daunting task of watching my mother, father and sister dine on a scrumptious looking cake without being able to touch it.  Not a simple feat for an eleven-year-old lover of all things sweet.  I couldn’t very well demand that my nine-year-old sister send back her birthday cake (though I considered it), so I dejectedly poked at my leftover noodles with a splintered chopstick while my family enjoyed their mouthwatering dessert.  I was confident that if I didn’t complain and played my cards right, I’d be treated to fruit sorbet upon our arrival home.

        After the torturous treat was consumed, our waiter brought the check and a pile of fortune cookies to our table.  Finally, I thought to myself, a smile broadening across my face.  Here was a dessert in which I too could take part.  As I eagerly tore open the plastic wrapper and split the cookie in two, my fortune fluttered to the table. 

“What does your fortune say, Becca?” inquired my mother.

Unraveling the slip of paper reverently, I read aloud, dumbfounded, “You can have your cake and eat it, too.” 

After a few moments of silent uncertainty, my family and I burst into laughter.  The juxtaposition of an eleven-year-old having to watch other people eat a beautiful, undoubtedly delectable chocolate cake to which she was allergic and a fortune reading “You can have your cake and eat it, too” was utterly hilarious.  While it was my sister who was celebrating a birthday and enjoying rich deliciousness, I was the one who walked away with the true gift that night.  I learned first hand that laughter truly is the best medicine.  I didn’t know it then, but this prescription would prove invaluable later down the line. 

        Fast forward to my sophomore year of college.  My sorority was celebrating welcoming a new member class into our organization.  After an exhausting day of bubbly name games and bouncing on trampolines in matching, neon sweatshirts, we were all thrilled when dinner arrived.  The new member coordinator had ordered half a dozen varieties of noodles, several of which contained nuts.  The members of my sorority were all well aware of my nut allergy, so I was permitted to jump to the front of the line and serve myself first.  Avoiding a line of a hundred ravenous sorority girls and tearing into the macaroni and cheese first is definitely one of the few benefits of having allergies.  After heaping a generous portion of al dente pasta and creamy cheddar cheese onto my paper plate, I took my first warm, salty bite.  Immediately, my teeth bit down on something crunchily out of place and reminiscent of Asian cuisine.  I knew that the restaurant had sent us several orders of pad Thai as well, so I was immediately terrified that I had unknowingly ingested a cross-contaminated peanut.  My eyes wide and my face stricken with obvious panic, my friend Katie worriedly asked me what was wrong.  After violently spitting out the bite in question, I pointed to the chewed up food and shouted, “I think I just ate a peanut!”  Without blinking an eye, Katie plucked the regurgitated noodle from my napkin and popped it into her mouth.  Her brow furrowed in deep concentration, she eventually announced, “Not peanut, bean sprout.”  This impressive display of unconditional friendship would not mark the last time that Katie would swoop in as my knight in shining yoga pants.   

At the end of the school year, I reluctantly drove Katie to the airport so she could return home to Chicago for the summer.  After a tearful embrace at passenger drop-off, I returned home and settled down at my desk for some last minute studying for final exams.  Sitting on top of my computer was a pale yellow post-it note inscribed with the words “Love you - Miss you” in Katie’s neat handwriting.  Taped to the post-it note was a fortune with the word “bean sprout” typed in Arial 12 on the “Learn Chinese” side of the paper.  Laughing warmly to myself, I smiled and pinned the note to my bulletin board where it has remained ever since.  Whenever I look at it, I think of the friend who was miraculously brought into my life, just as serendipitously as she stumbled across a fortune cookie containing the word “bean sprout”.

                                                       

        The following year, my mental health took a dangerous turn for the worse.  I remember the day distinctly—February 6, 2012.  The impetus for my almost lethal overflow of emotions is essentially irrelevant; the combination of my chronic depression, overwhelming anxiety, a dash of obsessive-compulsive disorder and complete lack of medication meant that hitting rock bottom was completely and tragically inevitable. 

        As tears streamed down my face like turbulent floodwater spewing forth from a fractured dam, I fell deeper into the dark and dangerous depths of hopelessness.  I became increasingly certain that the situation would never improve and utterly positive that I would never truly know happiness.  Feeling wholly defeated and desperate, I did not think that I had the strength to continue living and fighting. 

I paced back and forth across my small room, feeling my nervous energy churning throughout my body with absolutely no outlet.  As I continued to wear lines in the dated carpet, my eyes settled on a bottle of pills.  The ordinarily harmless ibupofren that I often mindlessly swallowed to combat headaches and body cramps suddenly become a horrifyingly tempting deadly weapon.  While I had experienced thoughts of suicide regularly for the past several years, this situation was unprecedented.  For the first time, I felt there was a scarily real possibility that my life would end that night at my own hand.  In this damaged state, I decided that this was my destiny, so I may as well get it over with before accumulating more hurt and sadness.  As terrifying thoughts of overdose and impossible letters to friends and family menacingly swirled through my head, a life-saving deus ex machina in the form of my best friend intervened. 

Stopping by my room to see if I’d like to study together, Katie immediately took note of my condition and stepped in.  “I am not leaving your side.  Period.”  As Katie took control of the situation, I felt relief wash over my body.  The tiny white off-brand analgesic drugs instantly transformed from a lethal device back into harmless pain reliever.  I was immensely thankful that my life had been saved, but angry and confused that I had been the one about to destroy it. 

        Two hours and one emergency phone call later, Katie dropped me off at my home thirty minutes away into the open arms of my mother.  Armed only with a pillow and a haphazardly packed suitcase, I saw my world turn upside down. I had gone from the well-accomplished college student at the top of my class to a mental patient living at home.  In that moment, I felt that I was no longer the successful, independent woman of whom my family was so proud.  I was the daughter, the sister, the granddaughter, the cousin, the niece and the friend who had almost taken her own life.  I was the girl who was almost gone.  While I was still miserably unhappy, I was determined to get my illnesses in order and above all, continue living. 

One exhaustingly long month of waiting later, and I was admitted into a partial-hospitalization intensive therapy program.  Every Monday through Friday, I spent seven hours in a hospital to develop stress management and coping skills and an effective medication regimen. 

The first morning of the program felt completely surreal.  Who was this person bringing a sack lunch and emergency anti-anxiety pills to a mental hospital?  When I looked in the mirror of the hospital bathroom that didn’t even lock, I didn’t recognize my own reflection.   

After going far too long without cracking a smile or emitting so much as a giggle, I discovered that my therapist for the program sat on an enormous bouncy ball rather than a desk chair.  As I tearfully described what brought me to this low point in my life, Cindy nodded earnestly and continued to ricochet back and forth on her bright red alternative-seating device.  I quickly discovered that the words “suicide attempt” sound substantially less frightening when punctuated by constant squeaks.  Little by little, bouncy squeak by bouncy squeak, I felt the glorious soreness from smiling too widely return to my cheeks.  As I wiped tears of laughter from my eyes while recounting the nonsensical tale to my family, I realized that this moment of much needed humor constituted the best medicine I had ever received.  For the first time since that heartbreakingly dark sixth of February, I felt the tiniest beam of sunlight fight its way through the clouds and reach my skin. 

        Later that week, my mother and I were eating at a Chinese restaurant.  As I licked remnants of sweet and sour sauce from my lips, I split my fortune cookie in half to reveal the following prediction: “Your eyes will soon be opened to a world of beauty, charm and adventure.”  The only thing to which my eyes were open was the prickling of hot tears.  This slip of paper became a divine message telling me that my life was worth living, that my simple goal of happiness was not beyond reach.  I have never subscribed to the superstitious school of thought that ascribes cosmic significance to a moment, but I know that this fortune was ordained to be mine.  This moment and this tiny slip of paper was my sign that my world was turning around for the better.  

        A little over a month prior to the almost tragic sixth of February, I was at a friend’s apartment celebrating New Year’s Eve.  “Enjoy the last New Year’s ever!” shrieked exuberant party guests, referring to the Ancient Mayan belief that the world would be brought to a catastrophic end in the year 2012.  While cheery partygoers surrounded me toasting with cheap champagne and exchanging friendly kisses, I closed my eyes in silent prayer.   I prayed fiercely that 2012 would be my year—the year that I would be freed of the shackles of depression, finally able to embrace life and all it has to offer.  In the most unexpected way possible, my prayer was answered. 

On February 6, 2012, the Mayans’ prediction came true for me.  My world burned in a fiery conflagration of pain and sorrow.  When I almost took my own life but didn’t, my world changed.  On that night when my illness almost killed me, I miraculously regained control of my life.  The years of hurt and countless tears were destroyed, leaving behind the glowing embers of potential and determination.  I was left standing in the ashes, but the flames did not destroy me.  I was a phoenix, reborn amidst the blaze. 

Just as fortune cookies splinter into tiny shards of baked flour and sugar, I too fell apart when I almost committed suicide.  But rather than disintegrating into forgotten crumbs swept swiftly into a garbage can, I became the smooth slip of paper, filled with the promise of a better tomorrow.  I discovered a new, stronger person within.  A person who can and will laugh even when she can’t have her cake or eat it, too.  A person who can fully realize and appreciate her amazing friends and family.  A person whose eyes will indeed be open to a world full of beauty, charm and adventure. And above all, a person who has many, many years of fortune cookies ahead of her.

Rebecca Marks’ qualifications include a wicked under-bite that yielded a pronounced lisp, a laundry list of allergies that necessitated years of shots and an addiction to antihistamine, a Jewish heritage that provides a boisterous family and an overflow of neuroses and sarcasm, and most expensively, a nearly completed Bachelor’s degree in English.  Her work will be appearing in an upcoming issue of The Inconsequential and has been featured in The Portland Review.