Jan age 11 Felisa age 14
Dec. 1964
"The Lord, the Lord is my strength and my song..." Isaiah 12:2b Zondervan NIV Study Bible
I debated about posting this online. It's fairly self revelatory, but told with a sense of humor, which I have had toward myself my entire life. That humor has made life fun, and it makes people laugh, but my concern is that someone might think I don't take mental illness (I prefer to call it brain illness) seriously, which I do.
A lifechanging event like the death of my 17 year-old sister Susan in a car accident in October of 1964, when I was 14, can cause even the most stable among us to lose our footing. This post tells something about my initial foray into developing coping mechanisms, but explains my inability (thankfully) to become totally neurotic because of the one-person intervention by my then 11 year-old sister Jan. (We didn't even know the word intervention in 1964, at least not in the current vernacular). My pragmatic family, my own personality orientation, and for me, most important, my faith in God were the legs of the tripod that kept me firmly grounded after my tranquil world was changed so abruptly.
Just to be clear, I didn't unravel. I marvel, looking back, that I continued to seem normal to my peers and for the most part to my family, who simply told me to "quit" when I did something untoward.
When I read this over, I thought, "my goodness, there was a seriously troubled kid," but I wasn't. Or if I was, I was delightfully unaware of it. I was just working very, very hard to make sense of my personal world, which had been upended.
Writing this made me realize anew that there are all sorts of behaviors that kids develop to cope during their teenage years, be it relative to personal insecurities, divorce, death or any other upheaval. And they can't all just "quit" like Jan demanded that I do. Fortunately, I was able to stop, or at least to go underground with my little idiosyncrasies.
Thank goodness for typing class, beginning when I was 15. I think I transferred my compulsive behaviors there and thus moved on through high school being able to have a sense of order in my life.
My younger daughter still teases me about changing my hand position constantly on the steering wheel, and she remembers that I always moved my hands constantly on her back when she lay in my lap at church when she was small.
So perhaps in that way the behaviors persist, but I am thankful, for as I have learned more about brain illness, I realize that I am probably one of the lucky ones. Nothing in this post should be taken to make light of those illnesses as they are such a serious problem to so many. You can, however, laugh at my antics if you like. Fortunately, I am strong enough to take it.
I know that we moved when I was 9, so the "teeth counting" started before that age, because I remember lying slouched in an old brocade rocker in the living room at Purdon simultaneously watching television and clicking my teeth together as I mentally counted each click. Thinking back, it may have been related to the first major anxiety- provoking event that I experienced, as we planned to leave our little town of Purdon and move to a ranch near Corbet, where we would ride 15 miles on a school bus to a much larger school in Corsicana.
That particular oddity, the "teeth counting", I never revealed to anyone, certainly not my ultranormal sisters and older brother, or my ultracruel teasing brother. And maybe I forgot about "teeth counting" for a while, a few years, but when I was 15 and in the 10th grade, I perfected that particular routine. Once I landed in typing class and started the "asdf ;lkj" routine, I began to obsessively type on my teeth again.
Granted, given the tenuous nature of teenage relationships, my desire to "fit in", and the endless ability of youth to be cruel to one another, I could only do the dental typing in private. Or surreptitiously in public, but I had to be careful not to contort my face even the slightest bit or some sharpeyed girl or guy would notice, call it to everyone's attention, and I would immediately become a social pariah after being unable to explain why my left jaw suddenly jutted forward, then the right.
I didn't think the explanation that I was simply typing "a" and then "i" in the word "pain" would satisfy their interest. They'd push until I had to tell them I was dental typing an entire sentence expressing, "you are a pain".
No, that ritual had to be kept quiet, but the teeth typing helped me in some strange way to alleviate tension, I suppose. I've never really been sure what the reason for it was, but then I guess most people would say that about their own tics, obsessions, and compulsions and other miscellaneous odd behaviors. No explanation really seems adequate or to make sense.
You're probably thinking I was a really poorly adjusted misfit who got made fun of all through junior high and high school, but actually I managed to fit in fairly well, and somehow I was clandestine enough with my own set of odd behaviors that they were never discovered. Well, almost never discovered.
I think I teetered on the brink of mental illness once, without realizing it, after Susan died. Unaware of what they were, I developed some odd routines; maybe they were compulsions. I later learned what they were called after I studied psychology. I was "outed" by my younger sister, who like the rest of the family was very pragmatic, not given to drama, and simply not tolerant of aberrant behavior.
"What are you doing?" Jan demanded, opening the door to my room suddenly one night. Her deep blue eyes probed the room like search lights on a police helicopter.
"Nothing," I lied. Or maybe I wasn't really lying. What I was doing
was nothing, really, as it may have given me a sense of control, but would not change the fact that our world had been rocked.
"Yes, you are. You were doing something. Didn't you just jump up in the air?"
"Oh that," I said, casting quickly about inside my head for an explanation. "That was just a practice for a cheerleading jump." Election as 9th grade cheerleader had definitely been a highlight of my junior high career.
"Well, it wasn't very high," she said, eyeing me suspiciously. "I know you can jump high. What else were you doing? I saw your light turning on and off, on and off. Why do you think I came in here?"
"Oh," I said a little sheepishly. This was getting a little harder to explain. "I was just checking something about the light. I thought something was wrong with it." I could see by the skeptical look on her face that she wasn't buying my explanation.
"Well, stop whatever you're doing, or I'm going to tell Mother," she said, like it was a threat. It
was a threat in a way, because Mother would never understand the rituals I had developed. Or how it helped me cope with the huge changes in our family. And I sure couldn't explain it to her, nor did I understand, why it had started.
"And while you're at it, stop lining your shoes up like that." I glanced where she pointed, at my open closet door, where four or five pairs of perfectly aligned shoes glared up at me now like accusing witnesses.
Straighten my red King James version Bible exactly in the center of the shelf of the blonde nightstand, then pat it three times on top. Stand straight up facing the nightstand and the lightswitch and make a quick short jump up, bending knees at 90 degrees keeping toes pointed. Simultaneously reach across with the index finger to the light switch and turn the light off, then on, then if it doesn't "feel" right, off again. Until all of it felt balanced and right, I had to repeat the ritual, and that is why Jan caught me, turning the light on and off.
Years later, I read about people- it helped my feelings that some were famous or accomplished- who developed rituals so strong that they couldn't get through a doorway or leave their home because they had to repeat them until they were perfect. Sometimes that left them standing mid doorway, unable to enter or leave. I was just trying to get things in order so I could go to bed, I suppose, and I was always able to complete the routine, until the night Jan "discovered" me and interrupted the drill.
Jan left the room, her blond ponytail swinging purposefully behind her, but tried to catch me performing the routine by jerking the door open quickly and entering the room again, her eyes wide, lids stretched to capacity. I was on to her though. I didn't start the routine again, though I had an overwhelming urge to do so.
After that day. the compulsions just took different forms. They still reared their head during times of stress, but they found a different outlet--in thoughts only. In our family, blunt honesty coupled with threats brought most behavior under control. Jan probably accomplished with her confrontation and threats what years of psychotherapy might not have. We couldn't have afforded therapy anyway. And Mother wouldn't have thought it was necessary.
It bothered me some for a few days not to have the Bible exactly straight and be sure the light was properly turned off, but I thought of other things, distracted myself. And Jan had said something about mental illness. And I didn't want to be mentally ill. My maternal grandmother had mental illness. I didn't want to end up rocking in a chair repeating a phrase over and over like she did. So I stopped. Just like that. Well, for the most part. Some of my thoughts were still obsessive, but I dealt with them.
Not long after that evening, I had a dream. I had stepped into the front yard. Over my right shoulder, a flash of color high up on the roof caught my eye. I looked up to see Susan there, walking along the center seam, the highest point, where the front and back of the long house joined. She held her arms far out to each side, palms open, fingers widely separated, walking carefully, using her hands to keep her balance.
The day was bright and beautiful, a perfect autumn day, the brown and gold leaves on the big oaks in the yard competing in a color contest with the blue sky. And she was wearing an emerald green fitted wool skirt and matching mohair sweater, the last thing she had worn, but she was barefoot.
She looked toward me smiling, as though making sure I saw her, but she didn't say anything. It wasn't she who could walk on a roof. That was me! She was the indoors girl!
Looking at her, though, I felt a sense of peace and contentment emanating from her, reassuring me she was happy and safe. That was all. It was enough.
A few months later, at Collins Junior High, I was singing in the choir. We sang a melancholy melody called "Song." The lyrics that impacted me most were , "when I am dead my dearest, sing no sad songs for me, plant thou no roses at my head, or shady cypress trees. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain, I shall not hear the nightingale sing on as if in pain." I thought of Susan so strongly that a lump in my throat almost prevented my singing. Few of our choir songs had dealt with death. After all, we were only 14. What did we know about death? Most of my friends were compassionate with me. They just couldn't know what it felt like.
Later, after school, I sat on her bed in her room (both now mine at my mother's insistence-no shrines allowed in our family) and leafed through one of Susan's old high school notebooks. There, on an inside divider page, were the lyrics I had sung hours earlier. They were from a poem by Christina Rossetti written in the 1800's. Susan had handwritten them there. It was as if she had reached from heaven to give me a message of comfort.
I also found a letter she had written in July to one of her close friends, explaining that she felt she would die soon by either an auto accident or drowning. She had not given the letter to her friend. Perhaps it was a childish fantasy, but she was not given to those. It was written out, about 3/4 of a page in her beautiful, neat script.
She insisted to Mother that she be allowed to complete high school the summer after her junior year, skip her senior year and start college. Named a National Merit semi-finalist, she gave up scholarship chances and entered Navarro Junior College, just seven miles from our house. She rushed to soak up all the world of knowledge offered.
We wondered why she seemed to be in such a hurry, but I think God knew, and perhaps He gave her a nudge. One could wonder whether she had foreknowledge or whether these were the writings of a dreamy teenager. Her faith seemed as strong as her intellect. I'll leave each reader to his/her own conclusion though I have my own as well.
During July and August of 1964, my mother and Susan had been discussing Susan's summer school novel,
Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad. On her memorial marker, Mother wanted a quote from the book. "The last word is not said."
"The last word is not said, — probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word — the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be shaken, I suppose — at least, not by us who know so many truths about either." from Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.
Grief is not a one-time event, to be experienced so that you can "get over it." It can, in the right context, and with the right perspective, make us infinitely deeper, wiser, more compassionate, heighten our awareness, and develop our capacity to cope with life events.
It must be woven into the fabric of life so that it fits into the pattern rather than "sticking out," enriching our lives, not diminishing them. How people choose to deal with grief is as varied as the human species. Time changes grief ; it does not and should not erase it, because the way we grieve is as much a part of our character as the way we love.
'Be the green grass above me, with showers and dewdrops wet,
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget."
from
Song by Christina Rossetti
We will remember. We will not forget.
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