INHERITANCE: PSYCHOSIS DIAGNOSIS (PART V)

AUGUST 6, 2023 – I don’t believe that it was always that way—Dad calling all the shots. Mother was no shrinking flower and took after Grandpa when it came to domestic tranquility. He never flinched when Gaga invoked “house rules,” but he always complied. Likewise, during my lifetime, anyway, Mother never cowered when Dad imposed his “house rules,” but invariably, she obeyed.

A time existed, however, when Mother had been more assertive. Dad could be perfectly sociable once he got acquainted with someone, but unlike Mother, he rarely took the initiative in making the acquaintance. My parents’ initial encounter was a case in point. In search of university housing for UB, she was the one who strode next door from her own rooming house to make inquiries. By chance, Dad—towel wrapped around his waist—was in transit between a downstairs bathroom and his upstairs bedroom when one Orrell Holman rang the doorbell rang.

And Mother was the one who learned of the open clerk of court position at the Anoka County Courthouse and insisted that Dad take the civil service exam (which he aced) and apply for the job—to which he was appointed and held until he retired. Mother was the one, not long after she and Dad moved to Anoka, who dove into the community volunteer scene, starting with the local Red Cross fund drive—and conscripted Dad (who was elected president of the drive).

When Mother first went off the rails, Dad was put to the supreme test. He must have observed early signs that the wheels were coming off, but when he returned from work one evening to find the house in chaos, Nina—not even three—wandering unsupervised and Elsa—less than a year old—unattended, he faced the certainty that Mother was mentally in the ditch. Luckily, his parents lived a short distance away, and he summoned them to the scene. They were not up to the mighty task at hand, however.

He called his in-laws. Only God knows how he described their daughter’s psychosis, but I doubt he used the word or . . . the phrase, “post partum depression.” More likely, he used the catch-all phrase of that era: “nervous breakdown.”

In response, Gaga and Grandpa dropped everything, climbed aboard their Cadillac—in 1952, it might have been still been a Packard—and drove to Minnesota. There they scooped up their daughter and carted her back to New Jersey and ultimately to the highly renowned sanatorium in Belle Mead. No one alive knows the details of her admission there. I doubt that William Carlos Williams was involved, though Gaga might have asked him reluctantly for a referral. I’m certain, however, that Grandpa Holman covered the cost. It would have been far beyond Dad’s financial means: at the time worked in a factory as a precision machinist.

What we learned from Dad, Gaga and UB in the course of Mother’s much later psychoses (Grandpa had died before them) is that on the occasion of her very first episode, she was confined at Belle Mead for nine months;  that she was labeled “schizophrenic”; that she was administered shock treatments; that the treating psychiatrist told Gaga that Mother was “the smartest patient he’d ever had.”

Soon after Dad died in 2010, I discovered the letters.

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My parents had built their dream house in 1961. The main feature of its Colonial style was space, including four large bedrooms, lots of closet space, a basement that extended under the garage (thus doubling as a bomb shelter) and a full-story attic. Over the six decades during which they occupied the dwelling, the attic became a giant, crammed dumping ground. It housed not only the overflow from the three floors below but many of the things that had been housed in our Nilsson grandparents’ spacious home (Dad having been an only child).

During the year that followed Dad’s death and Mother’s move to Sunset, I tackled the challenge of sifting, sorting, saving, selling and . . . tossing . . . the accumulations that filled our parents’ home. I started with the attic and worked my way down. By nature and volume the attic promised to yield the most interesting discoveries.

If Dad was by nature an archivist, by necessity I became an archaeologist. My inspiration, actually, was a real archaeology dig in Tuscany supervised by a college friend during his pursuit of a PhD in the subject. A former star hockey player on the Bowdoin championship team, in his sunhat and kaki shirt and shorts and projecting the confidence of an undaunted adventurer, he cut the perfect image of Indiana Jones. After he gave me a tour of the dig, we sat down in the shade of olive trees, where he showed me the drawings in his sketchbook. Each pottery shard and trace of some trinket or another was carefully illustrated, and below the picture was written the object’s location on the dig grid. The actual item was then carefully removed by locally hired workers and transported to a building in a nearby village for cataloguing and short-term safekeeping.

I adapted this approach to the attic, starting with a large grid that I drew over a floor plan. Before inspecting or removing any object, I snapped a photo and assigned it a location on the grid. The carton containing Dad’s electric train set from Christmas 1928, for example, would be opened, the contents photographed, then identified by location as “M-4.” This archaeological method facilitated later efforts to re-locate things once ultimate disposition had to be decided.

The attic inventory was enormous: Ga’s sewing tables; Dad’s (antique) baby carriage; Mother’s box-loads of engineering calculation sheets; Elsa’s blue ribbon science project and my “honorable mention” one on rocks and minerals; ancient camping gear; whole grid sections filled with school papers; others loaded with vacation souvenirs; our childhood phonograph and sizable record collection; Dad’s “Addressograph” machine and boxes of flyers and form letters he used to try to sell the machine before he realized the “Addressograph” venture could never be a real job; my sisters’ doll collections; Dad’s leftover campaign signs; paintings and portraits—some framed, some not; stacks upon stacks of our Grandpa Nilsson’s violin music from his days in the orchestra pit of silent movie theaters; and trunks of all sizes—steamer trunks, running board trunks, haul-to-school trunks—all filled with old photos, letters, personal mementoes of our parents and Nilsson grandparents, newspapers and magazines featuring historic events; and scores of cardboard cartons containing treasures of every size, kind and vintage imaginable.

Then early one summer evening I opened an unmarked carton and found two more boxes inside. I removed them and opened one. It contained a cache of letters between Mother and Dad. The addresses and cancellation marks on the envelopes revealed that the correspondence dated back to the period of Mother’s confinement at Belle Mead.

I took the first dozen or so letters and sat down on the top step of the attic staircase to read them. Soon I was exploring the uncharted depths of my parents’ hearts, minds and emotions. Time stood absolutely still, despite the fading light drifting through the attic windows.

At this writing, the letters are still in deep in storage, where they’ve been for over a dozen years. If I had easier access to them, perhaps I would quote from them. It would be hard not to. Both Mother and Dad were superbly gifted writers, and these letters in particular were masterpieces of expression. Yet given the delicate nature of the circumstances, maybe publication of my parents’ remarkable correspondence would violate its beauty—much as dissection of a rose would destroy its scent once the concentrated fragrance was released.

As is the case with roses, however, the essence of those letters can be conveyed without destroying their beauty.

Dad wrote nearly ever single day during this period, and despite her condition, Mother managed to match his letters almost one for one. There were the thorns: Dad’s account of coming home from work and discovering that the hired caregiver had simply tossed the dirty diapers down the basement staircase to the laundry room; Mother’s worry about when she’d be ever be allowed to leave Belle Mead. Also covered were matter-of-fact questions (and answers) about how Nina and Elsa were faring in their Mother’s absence.  But the greatest feature of the letters was what they revealed about Mother and Dad’s extraordinary commitment to each other; their steadfast love; Dad’s unwavering faith that one day Mother would be whole again and return to Minnesota, where they could resume their lives together. He ended each missive with an expression of abiding hope and love.

Eventually, Mother was released and did return to Minnesota. Two years later, I was born; another three years, Jenny was born. We survived Mother’s parenting, though there were times when Jenny and I would be dropped off at the home of some all-day babysitter and Mother would forget to pick us up; and when it came to fixing school lunch, from first grade onward, I was on my own—for Jenny, it was second grade on, since Mother had convinced the school authorities that Jenny should skip first grade. But we did better than survive. We thrived on Mother’s parenting. And Mother thrived too.

In the end, maybe it was Dad’s “rules” that kept Mother’s bipolar tendencies in check; that provided the necessary guardrails within which she could live a productive life all those years from her first diagnosis (“schizophrenia”) to her second and more accurate one—bipolar disorder.

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson