River Passage

by Susan Pope

Hockey posters—two walls’ worth. A row of ball caps slung on hooks. The requisite electronics—TV, computer, smartphone. Dishes caked with dried food. And over every inch of floor space, camping gear, some with price tags still attached.

Perched on the bed in my fifteen-year-old grandson Cason’s bedroom, I watch him pack. Tomorrow we leave for a raft trip, on a river we’ve never seen with people we’ve never before met. He’s had five months to get ready. His mom—my daughter—has quit nagging. He could have recruited his grandpa, my husband, to help. But he knows that Papa—the name Cason calls him—would just say you’ve got the list, check it off, pack it up. That leaves me, the organizer, explainer, and most of all, the soft touch.

I miss talking with Cason. We used to have moments of conversation in the car, on the way to hockey practice, when his sister and parents weren’t around. Little things: How he hated math. Liked his new hockey team. Hoped to catch a king salmon this summer. Now he rides with his buddies who drive, so the two of us rarely speak except in passing.

Cason asked for the trip. Not this trip specifically, but any river trip. I’m not sure why. “Sounds like fun,” is all he said when I asked.

His family—my daughter’s—does not camp or fish or hike. “Roughing it” is a cabin with running water on a lake surrounded by all the mechanized toys an American family could desire. To Cason and his pickup-driving, four-wheeling, dirt-biking friends, my husband Jim and I are the quaint old bird watchers, nature lovers, greenies.

But something made him curious, made him want to find out for himself if our stories were true—the river journeys that changed our lives, the adventures, mishaps, near disasters. Maybe it was the passion in our voices or the faraway looks in our eyes as we sat around a family dinner while Cason half-listened to us reminisce about running rapids through the Grand Canyon or dodging ice on an Arctic river. Maybe he just wanted a way to impress his friends. Whatever his reasons, here was this boy turning sixteen asking to spend time with his grandparents—on a river, no less.

As his life is opening up, our lives are narrowing down. We have this brief moment in time when the dreams of the old and the young intersect, while Jim and I are still hardy enough in mind and body to give him this gift. Of course, we said yes.

Pen poised to mark off items as he packs them, I read from the gear list.

First aid kit. He unzips the small nylon bag with the Cabela’s tag still on it. Band-aides, gauze, alcohol swab, tweezers, eye drops, Neosporin ointment.

Check.

Socks. Two pair.

Check.

Bandana.

“Why do I need one?” He asks.

“To keep the sun off your neck, wipe the sweat off your face. We’re going into the desert in summer.”

 “I’ve got one, but you won’t like it,” he says.

“What’s not to like about a bandana?”

He ducks into his closet and retrieves a neatly folded blue and red piece of cloth. With a flip of his wrist he opens it out. It’s a Confederate flag.

“Not appropriate. Not anywhere.” I’m about to launch into a lecture and history lesson when I notice the half-smile on his face. He’s baiting me. Of course I won’t approve. He knows that. I remember doing this with my father, but not until I had left home and was in college. It’s called breaking away.

What I can’t stand is Cason’s sullen, sarcastic, and disrespectful side. Screaming and door slamming are easier for me to handle than silence or outright refusal to help with something so simple as carrying groceries up the steps.

Yet just a few weeks ago, at a Father’s Day barbeque, he was the perfect son and grandson, serving food, cleaning up, smiling. Which person will he be when we’re out in the wilds without his parents as the enforcers?

As for me, I’ve taken a silent vow to be the warm, relaxed grandmother who lets Cason experience the river in his own way, enjoying the terrain and our companions, taking responsibility for himself. No nagging, no hovering, no treating him like the four-year-old he sometimes seems to be.

But I draw a line at the Confederate flag. “Dump it,” I say. “If you don’t have another, I’ve got an extra.”

Cason shrugs, then drops the bandana back in his closet. We return to the last few items on the packing list. He starts pulling knives out of drawers, off his desk, from his closet. “I’m not sure which ones to take.”

“No knives on the list.”

“But I’ve got to take one.”

He lays them out on the bed. A small stainless-steel pocket knife, a bigger one with a bone handle, a sleek silver one that when he hits a button pops out a long, menacing blade. We used to call it that a switchblade, the kind used by gang members and criminals in the movies I watched as a kid.

“What are you doing with so many knives?”

“I collect them. I buy them with my own money.”

I’ve known this kid all his life—changed his diapers, cradled him when he was sick, comforted him when he was hurt—and these are the tools he shows me to prove he’s grown up. Inhaling slowly, I hit the pause on my internal alarm and point to the plain silver knife on the bed, the kind that unfolds into a pocket tool kit—knife, screw driver, pliers, everything you could need to repair anything. “Take that one.”

He slips the knife into a small nylon bag with his first aid kit and resumes packing from the list. Broad-brimmed hat, camping towel, long sleeve shirt. With each item he grills me. “Why do I need this?”

I should be more patient, relishing this rare opportunity for conversation, but there’s only so much you can explain about a raft trip through the desert Southwest to someone who’s never been there. Besides, I have to get home to my own packing.

“Trust me,” I say. “If it’s on the list, you need it.”

***

1:00 a.m., Vernal, Utah. In our motel room, a pale blue light radiates from the next bed. Cason’s face is aglow with flashing images from his cell phone screen.

          “Cason,” I whisper. “Shut that thing off.”

          A grunt. Covers rustling. The flashing glow shifts from one side of the bed to the other.

          “We have to get up early.”

Another grunt.

Beside me, my husband kicks the covers, mumbles, and turns over.

No electronics on the river. No cell phone coverage there, so that’s our deal. Cason said he was fine with that. Later, I’ll find out he’s loaded his phone with an entire season of Grey’s Anatomy and brought a solar charger.

I want Cason to find life more compelling than images on his screen. I want this trip to be successful, memorable, even life-changing for him. I want him to fall in love with rivers, canyons, the desert, a world beyond.

I believe one journey can change a person’s life. The Grand Canyon changed mine. I was fresh out of college, traveling with my then-husband, backpacking with cheap equipment and ill-fitting shoes. We descended from the rim in February to two nights of camping in single-digit temperatures, hiking the trail beside the river, then trekking ten miles back up, icy trail beneath our feet, stars scattered extravagantly across the ink-black sky. Every step was agony but also triumph. For two Alaskan kids on their first traverse of the United States, the world opened up, the map of the country becoming more than just abstract shapes on the pages of our social studies books. More than that, I discovered a person could strike out into unknown territory for no reason other than to find out what the rest of the world looks like.

Sluggish here at our put-in, the Yampa River, which straddles Utah and Colorado, will gather speed until it merges with the swifter, bigger Green. At the end of the trip, we’ll run a long string of rapids as the Green rushes to join the Colorado.

Helmets on, life jackets zipped and buckled, paddles raised, the two men I love most in the world are poised to shove off into the brown water on this first day of our journey. Grandpa and grandson. They’ve never kayaked together, and Cason has never floated a river. Yet without hesitation, he slips into the inflatable double kayak in front of Jim. A few moments of circling, drifting, bickering, swearing, and they float away. I’ll see them—hopefully—at our first camp. 

          This is what I wanted, grandpa and grandson working together, sharing an adventure. As I snap their picture, I’m proud but also a bit jealous. They’re off without me.

I find an empty space on one of the blue rubber rafts and hop in. Together, we are twenty-two guests and six guides in a flotilla of six rowing rafts, one paddle raft, one double kayak and three single kayaks, all traveling at different speeds but never out of sight of each other. With the exception of our guides and two sisters ages thirteen and ten, everyone in the group but Cason is over fifty.

In early evening, we dock our boats on a hard-packed river bank. Jim and Cason—wet but intact—have managed to propel themselves successfully down the river. Together with our group, we haul the rafts and kayaks up on shore and tether them, then form fire lines to unload gear—folding tables, chairs, stoves, pots, pans, dishes, coolers of food, and waterproof bags containing tents, sleeping bags, and personal gear. A pattern we will repeat at each new camp on our five days along the river.

When the boats have been emptied, Deja, our trip leader, yells, “Campers: Set up your tents.” 

We each grab our two waterproof bags and scurry to find shady camp spots. After surveying our options, Jim picks out a flat space big enough to pitch two tents and far enough away from any snoring neighbor. Working together, we three assemble the tents we’ve rented from the guiding company. When we’ve mastered the mechanics of poles and pegs and our two identical tents are pitched within a few feet of each other, Cason throws his gear into his tent, then stands beside me while I pull out clean clothes to replace my smudged and sweaty ones. I hold back a barrage of questions I want to ask—about the river, the guides, our fellow travelers, and most of all about whether he’s having fun.

“What do we do now?” he asks.

I’m not sure what to say. The options seem obvious. “Sit, watch the water, swim, take a nap, go for a walk, take pictures,” I tell him. “I’m going to wash up in the river.”

He wanders off to sit by himself in the crescent of canvas chairs facing the river. I stifle an impulse to rush over and sit beside him so he doesn’t feel lonely. This is the empty space I wanted him to experience. 

Day two. Cason tries out his skills in the paddle raft with some of the seasoned river runners in our group while Jim and I split up into separate rowing rafts. Our journey takes us through narrow canyons, sweeping meadows, abandoned ranches, and old outlaw hideouts. We tie up in early afternoon and make camp on a floodplain at a curve in the river.

When we’ve pitched our tents, the group scatters to find patches of shade, awaiting a hike that will start when the heat of the day has passed. An hour later, we fill our water bottles and pull on day packs.

Cason remains in his canvass camp chair in the shade. “Hiking is boring,” he’s declared repeatedly whenever I’ve invited him to join me for a walk at home. The truth is that hockey has made him a sprinter, not an endurance athlete.

Bross, our wiry, twenty-something guide, will lead the hike. With his rumpled brown hair, big sunglasses and gray hoody, he could be one of Cason’s high school buddies. “You coming?” he asks Cason.

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you are. Get going.”

Bross grabs a pack, tucks in a first aid kit and a bag of granola bars, slings a jug with extra water over his shoulder, and starts walking.

Cason jumps up, fills his water bottle, and hurries to catch up with Bross.

The trail that begins behind our camp switchbacks up the canyon wall. At the top, we’ve been promised a vista of the river, where we’ve traveled and where we’re headed. As our group of twenty snakes up the hill, Jim dallies to take pictures, while I fall behind trying to spot birds with my binoculars. Cason takes the lead with Bross.

At a fork in the trail some forty-five minutes into our climb, Bross and Cason pause in the shade of some thorny bushes while we stragglers catch up. I sip from my half-empty water bottle, feeling light-headed. Even now, in late afternoon, the air feels no cooler than when we made camp. Alaskans, we’re not used to this desert heat. I worry that Cason’s not drinking enough water.

As I weigh whether to express my concern, Bross articulates it. “Drink water,” he commands, and Cason obliges with a big swig out of his red bottle.

From here the trail is not as steep, but now we labor in soft sand, so the way is no easier. Where we reach solid rock, the trail levels off, ending abruptly at the canyon rim. I peer over the edge at the brown river curving gently below, bright yellow pods of our tents spread out along the bank. I’m dizzy—the heat, the height, the edge—so I step back while others pose for pictures against a backdrop of unobstructed sky. I take pictures of the guides, the other hikers, and Cason, slightly apart from the group, at the rim’s edge, smiling back at me in his red Oklahoma Sooners tee shirt, blue ball cap with American flag on the front, red water bottle in hand.

While I fill my bottle with the extra water Bross has carried all this way, Cason wanders off. When I turn back, he is sitting by himself on an overhanging ledge, feet dangling into oblivion, gazing over the canyon. My brain yells get back, stay away from the edge, you’ll fall off, while my stomach flips and lurches in its own panic dance.

Even if I yelled, he’s too far away to hear my pleas, so I motion for him to get back, but he doesn’t see me or pretends not to. I wave again. He lies back on the flat rock and stares at the cloudless sky. In my mind, the ledge cracks, gives way, and his body hurtles to the valley floor.

I turn away. He’s showing off, testing his limits, feeling the power of his own body.

When I turn back, my husband is approaching the ledge. He’s talking some sense into Cason, I think. But no, they’re both leaning over to watch something below the precipice. I gesture at the two of them, but they pretend not to see.

I rush to Bross and point to the two crazy guys on the brink. Bross shakes his head and waves them back. Moving slowly, Cason pulls in his feet, takes a swig from his water bottle, leans over for a final look, then rises and rejoins us. Jim follows.

***

Day three. I join five other women in the paddle raft with Travis, one of the guides. We’re at his command, relying on his well-timed directions and expert rudder skills to pivot us from lethal boulders and rubber-piercing logs. The afternoon heat beats down on my bare legs. Even though slathered in sunscreen, they feel as if they’ve been basted in olive oil and roasted in the oven. Whenever we have a few seconds’ break in paddling, I unzip the mesh bag strapped to the pontoon in front of me and gulp water from the bottle within, only to be put back to work by Travis’ sometimes frantic orders to forward left, right, back paddle, stop.

In my peripheral vision, a shape drifts past. It’s a big rowing raft with Cason at the oars. Bross stands behind him, ready to avert a disaster if necessary. Cason flashes a quick smile and continues rowing. I grab my camera from its waterproof case and snap his picture. Broad-brimmed hat, orange-framed mirrored sunglasses, faded red life jacket, blue tee shirt, yellow and blue and orange gear bags lashed behind him. Facing forward, he’s leaning into the oars, propelling his raft through the riffles.

How different we are. My life has been careful, measured as I’ve mustered the courage to take risks, unsure in my body, while Cason is confident, competent, a risk-taker. In another culture, he’d have harpooned his first whale by now, shot his first seal, killed his first caribou. Instead he’s here, learning to master the art of reading a river.

Later, as we sit next to each other watching the river at sunset, Cason says, “I wish my family could be here.”

“Your sister hates bugs and your parents don’t like to camp. They’d hate it.” 

I catch myself before blathering on, realizing I’ve cut off a chance to find out what the trip means to him, and to say what it means to me.

 “You’d like to share this with them,” is what I finally blurt out.

 “Yeah.”

Day four. The Yampa, the last undammed tributary of the Colorado, has merged with the broader, more powerful Green River. We’re camped near a wide, grassy valley just past Jones Hole Creek, a clear, swift stream that empties into the Green.

Cason is now Bross’ sidekick. “Guide in training,” Bross calls him. Bross has mastered the unique set of skills essential to a good river guide—river running, local knowledge, yarn-telling, bravado, and above all, patience. Not a bad role model for a teenage boy.

We ready ourselves to hike a trail that follows the creek. The guides promise opportunities to cool off with plunges into the cascades and to view rock pictographs and petroglyphs left by the Freemont people who lived in this country long before the first Spanish explorers.

Bross will stay behind, on dinner duty with Deja and Bob, another guide. I call out to Cason who has slipped into his tent to take a nap.

A muffled moan.

I call again.

“Uh, uh,” he mumbles.

I want him to have this experience. But I want him to choose it.

We leave without him. When we return hours later, bringing stories of still-vibrant drawings by ancient people, immersions in icy water, and encounters with snakes, Cason greets us with a slight nod from a chair in the shade. Hair combed, clothes changed, he looks fresh and clean, his red shirt drying on a tree limb above his tent.

“Bross and I floated down the river,” he says.

The logistics elude me. After floating the river, they’d have to paddle back upstream to return to camp. “How’d you manage that?”

 “We hiked up to the creek, put on our helmets and life jackets, floated down the creek, then down the river and back to camp.”

Slowly, I comprehend their feat, undertaken without boats. Frigid water, bouncing over boulders, dodging sweepers, dog-paddling like mad to reach camp before being swept down the mighty Green. “Wow, that’s quite a trick.”

What I don’t say is What were you thinking? What was Bross thinking? I wanted Cason to discover a sense of himself on this trip, but letting go is harder than I imagined.

It’s our last night of camping. Exhausted hikers leave the campfire one by one, saying goodnight before they slip into bed.

Cason sticks with the guides at the fire. I take toothbrush and water bottle down to the river. On the way back to the tent, I contemplate nudging Cason out of the circle, allowing the guides their night to kick back and drink a few beers, sparing Cason the inevitable foul language and stupid tourist stories. But, as I catch his face in the glow of the fire, he looks older, like a taller, leaner version of someone I once knew. So I duck into my tent, slip into my sleeping bag next to Jim, and leave Cason and the river crew laughing around the fire. 

The next day we face the biggest whitewater on the river. One long intense stretch that must be scouted, pondered over, strategized by the guides. They’ve done it before, many times. But each run is different. The river never stays the same.

I decide to ride with Garth. Measured, cautious, conservative, college math teacher in his other life. Jim chooses a different raft, while Cason of course rides with Bross, who takes the most aggressive run through the rapids, drenching everyone in his boat. When we reunite at the take-out, Cason’s grinning, eyes wide, wet clothes clinging to his body. 
          “That was so much fun. I want to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Be a river guide.”

          This is what I wanted: For him to fall in love with rivers, to find a world beyond cell phones, hockey, and pick-up trucks. And for me: To step aside and let him.

Back at the Microtel in Vernal, I awake to a familiar blue glow in the bed next to me. I get up and gently tug the cell phone from Cason’s sleeping grasp. He jerks awake and snatches it back. Doctors and nurses flicker on the screen. He’s back to Grey’s Anatomy.

          “Cason, we have to get up early.”

          “I don’t care.”

          I climb back in bed and think how nothing has changed. And how everything has.

Susan Pope writes nonfiction from her home in Anchorage, Alaska. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Damselfly Press, The Southeast Review Online, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Under the Gum Tree, among others. Her writing reflects intimate connections to home and family in Alaska as well as a restless wandering in faraway places. Throughout her career as counselor, teacher, and researcher, she has continued to pursue her first true love, writing. Her essay entitled, “Canyon,” which appeared in Bluestem, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. 

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/. 

Stage Six

by Dawn Corrigan

Global Deterioration Scale, Stage 6:

People in Stage 6 require extensive assistance to carry out daily activities.

They start to forget names of close family members and have little memory of recent events. Many people can remember only some details of earlier life. They also have difficulty counting down from 10 and finishing tasks.

Incontinence is a problem in this stage. Ability to speak declines. Personality changes, such as delusions, compulsions, or anxiety and agitation may occur.

Average duration: 2.5 years

6/14/09

It’s often said that old age is a second childhood, but at eighty-nine, my Nan more resembles a cat. Specifically, a cat washing her face. All day long, every day, she rubs and rubs her face. Sometimes with a tissue, sometimes just with her fingers. And just like a cat, she periodically licks those fingers, or the tissue, then resumes rubbing again.

But unlike the experience of watching a cat giving itself a bath, watching her rub her face all day doesn’t fill me with a sense of well-being.

I try not to let it get to me. I try to look away and just listen as she tells me—again—how she earned her retirement because she worked as a senior tax compliance agent at the World Trade Center for forty years.

At first, Grandpa and I used to remind her that the Towers only stood for twenty-eight years, not forty, and that her career with the New York State tax division lasted eighteen; but our facts can’t compete with the cadences of her imagination. The phrase “senior tax compliance agent” in particular seems to give satisfaction.

6/23/09

Over the weekend my uncle calls to say she’s complaining of abdominal pains, so on Tuesday after work I run in to check on her.

“How are you feeling? Is your tummy any better?”

“Yes, I’m feeling a little better today. My stomach was so rumbly, and I kept having to run to the bathroom. I thought I was pregnant.”

When I burst out laughing, she rolls her eyes upward. “God forbid!”

8/13/09

In August she’s still rubbing. She’s also begun to complain that she has something in her eye, which she surely does, a result of the constant rubbing. She puts makeup on, then rubs it off. She covers her face in Vaseline, she rubs it off. Finally, my aunt makes an appointment for her to see a psychiatrist.

I take her to the appointment. On the drive over, she tells me her father came to visit the other day.

“He drives the car and comes to see me,” she explains.

In the office I tell the doctor about these hallucinations, and about the rubbing. I try to do so furtively, so she won’t know we’re talking about her. But of course she does know.

“What are you saying?”

“I was telling him you have these sores by your eye,” I say, brushing her temple.

“Oh, that’s where my husband punched me,” she says, looking straight at the doctor with a deadpan expression. “It’s all right, it will heal.”

Other things may be deteriorating, but her sense of humor—tough, outrageous, of another era—is still intact.

8/25/2009

Less than two weeks later, she falls and breaks her hip. I wait with her in pre-op.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says. “I would be very lonesome if you weren’t here.”

The surgical nurse stops by to remove her dentures and jewelry.

A minute later, she asks, “Where are my teeth?”

I explain where her teeth are.

“I bet they’re talking about me.”

She says she’s cold, so I ask for some of those warm blankets from the little blanket ovens that are the nicest thing about a hospital. The nurse brings two, tucking one over her and draping a second around her head, forming a kind of halo.

“I look like an angel now. Where are my teeth?”

I tell her.

“They don’t want me to swallow them during the surgery?”

“Right!” I say, happy she remembers something.

“But where are my teeth?”

I tell her.

“They were afraid I’d bite them,” she says.

9/13/2009

After the surgery, she’s moved to a nursing home for four weeks of physical therapy. When I visit a couple weeks later, she’s out in the hall by the nurses’ station. She gets excited when she sees me, and throws her arm around me and gives me a big kiss. Then she says, “People are going to think I’m a lesbian!”

9/20/2009

The four weeks she spends in the nursing home are by far the longest interlude she and Grandpa Dom have been apart since they married in 1966. And because Dom isn’t around and she doesn’t understand why, she imagines the worst, like any jealous lover.

After the first week she starts telling me about all the fun Dom’s been having. “He’s been playing cards—and dancing! I had no idea he could dance so well! You should have seen him doing the Charleston! He was great.”

Part of the problem is she doesn’t know she’s not at the assisted living facility anymore. The corridors, the staff wearing scrubs, the wheelchairs parked in corners—the details of the nursing home are just too similar to the ALF where she and Dom have lived for the past two years. Her fading memory can’t parse the difference The only possible explanation she can fathom for why she doesn’t see Dom is that he’s staying away on purpose—because of his wild new social life.

However, it’s also still important to her that she should appear as a sophisticated, worldly person in my eyes—as she has for my whole life. Therefore, she makes an effort to mitigate her jealousy: “That woman he was dancing with, she was great too.”

When Dom and I visit her together on Sunday, though, the gloves come off.

At first she keeps it fairly good-natured. Ignoring Dom, she addresses me. “He has a girlfriend, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“It’s okay. He can have a girlfriend. In fact, he can have three girlfriends.”

“No one could argue with that, Nan. That’s very generous.”

My grandfather, however, is not amused by this largess. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he tells her nervously.

“What’s your girlfriend’s name? You know, the tall one.”

“My only girlfriend is Frances.”

Frances is her name. She isn’t fooled by this trick.

“No! You know who I mean.”

“Dawn,” he says.

“Hey!” I say. “Leave me out of it.”

“The tall one,” she says again.

All of a sudden I have a terrible feeling I know who she means. Her friend Sara at the ALF is quite tall, a fact she’s commented on frequently.

“The tall one,” she says again, looking at me impatiently.

I shrug. “I don’t know, Nan.”

10/1/2009

On her last night in the nursing home, I arrive to find her telling one of the staff members, a young woman who’s been extremely nice to her, to “Shut up!”

“Nan! I don’t want you to tell people to shut up.”

I sit next to her. After a few minutes, she says, “I guess I’m getting older. I get scared. But I’ll try to do better.”

I take her for a walk outside. Back in her room, she starts going through her drawers in preparation for the next day’s departure, about which she’s very excited.

In one drawer there are several boxes of tissues. I notice one is covered with her handwriting, in a narrow column that runs the length of the box.

Frances was playing

all by herself

Dom was downstairs

or upstairs

and I was

all alone

From

now

on

I am

playing

by

myself

The

hell

with

Dom

To the best of my knowledge, it’s her first poem.

12/28/2009

A month after returning to the ALF, she breaks her other hip. She’s back from the second surgery by Christmas, but she can no longer walk. This time she refuses to participate in physical therapy. And there isn’t much you can do to make a person with dementia do something she doesn’t want to do.

Even before the dementia, there wasn’t much you could do to make her do something she didn’t want to do.

When she returns to the little apartment she and Dom share, it doesn’t go well. She immediately begins falling a lot. When I stop in a few nights after Christmas, he’s agitated.

“Thank goodness you’re here! She’s trying to get out of the bed.”

Dom and I start the lecture: You have to be a good patient, etc.

“You fell TEN TIMES,” I tell her, holding up my ten fingers.

“Oh, my.”

“You have to do what they say,” I continue. “Otherwise you’re going to wind up crippled for life, and you’ll never get out of that bed.”

She nods in agreement with me. “They have to do what,” she begins. Then I see she knows she has it wrong.

“They have to ...” she shakes her head. She’s trying, she really is, but dementia and a lifetime of her true temperament are fighting against her.

She tries again. Slowly.

“I … have to do ... what they say.”

1/10/2010

By the new year it’s clear she isn’t capable of independent living anymore. She’s moved to the ALF’s specialty unit, up on the third floor. Dom remains in the apartment downstairs.

Tonight when I arrive she’s just been served dinner, a hot dog and fries. There isn’t a lot of extra room in the specialty unit dining room, so I tell her I’ll go see Dom and then come back once she’s finished eating.

When I return upstairs, I’m happy to see she’s made a good job of her hot dog, finished the fries, and is working on a serving of pudding.

“Did you see Dom?”

I admit I did.

“I played a trick on him. I pretended I was mad when I wasn’t. That was mean.”

I agree it was mean.

“Mean, but funny.”

5/7/2010

In May, she turns ninety. When I arrive on the big day, she’s dressed up in a new outfit, hair freshly permed, a corsage on her wrist, and clutching the strings to some balloons in one hand. Dom holds her other hand. She’s very excited. While we wait for the other guests, she wraps the string from the balloon around her neck like a noose, pretending to hang herself. Then she looks for my reaction.

My aunt and uncle arrive. We sing and pass out cake.

In her room afterward, she rubs her belly and mumbles. We look at her with concern. Is she complaining about wearing a diaper again? Does she have a tummy ache? She rummages around for a moment, then suddenly produces a package of cookies she snuck out of the goodie basket downstairs and stuffed down her pants.

When I crack up she smiles, pleased she still has an audience for her comedy bits.

10/26/2010

In October, she falls again. The ALF staff takes her to the hospital to be checked out. By the time I get off work, she’s already back on the specialty unit.

When I arrive, there she is, sitting in the middle of the hall in her wheelchair, in lavender from head to toe. There’s a scratch on her nose, but aside from that she looks fine.

In my hand I hold a notepad, which she regards with great interest.

While I chat with staff, she takes off her left sock and tries to hide my notepad in it.

The staff member excuses herself. “She’s hot shit,” Nan says, after she leaves.

6/13/2011

Shopping in a secondhand store, I find a pink jacket I think she’ll like. Her clothes are always going missing. I think she sneaks into the other residents’ rooms and hides them in the drawers.

The jacket looks like something she would have worn years ago, when she was, yes, a senior tax compliance agent, and she looked the way Dom described her to me last night:

I used to drive her around, you know, when she had to go see

some of her clients. The ones who were likely to give her trouble.

But I’d just hang back and let her work. Sometimes I’d look up

and see her on the street in front of me, wearing her suit just so,

and the sun gleaming on her blonde hair.

So I buy the pink jacket, and take it to her, and bundle her into it. She buttons all the buttons, and we play with the sleeves for a while.

“I’ve loved you since the day you were born,” she says.

Dawn Corrigan has published poems and prose in a number of print and online journals. Her debut novel, Mitigating Circumstances, an environmental mystery, was published by Five Star/Cengage in January 2014. Currently, she's working on a family saga set in southern Italy, Hell's Kitchen, and South Jersey. She lives in Gulf Breeze, FL. Learn more about her work at www.dawncorrigan.com.