CHRISTINE KEHL O’HAGAN
I came to school one Monday morning in February 1961 to learn that Richard McGee, the smartest boy in my sixth-grade class, had died over the weekend, not of the stomach flu that had sickened his eleven siblings, but of appendicitis. I knew that children could die, for I’d found a photo in my grandmother’s hall closet of two of my mother’s three lost brothers, I just never expected it could happen to a boy who sat right across the aisle from me. There were no grief counselors in those days; there weren’t even playground mats. For children in 1961—and adults too—there was little cushioning of any kind. Sister Francis, so very young, passed Richard’s red pencil case around the room, his marble notebook, his spelling test from the previous Friday. He got a 98. “A grade Richard will never see,” Sister Francis cried, the tears catching in her sheer veil.
There’s a concelebrated Mass for Richard, three priests on the altar, baritone Latin, clouds of incense that smells like the Bell’s Seasoning my grandmother dusts across the Thanksgiving turkey, all trussed and tied with twine.
Richard’s casket, white with gold metallic flecks, rolls down the aisle past me, inside of which Richard, his blond hair, his blue eyes, his freckles, his bright white teeth, wears—according to my classmates, who weren’t too frightened of his wake—a plaid sports coat.
Years later, when my own child dies, and I am digging through his closet for the navy blue blazer I’d put away specifically for the occasion, I’ll think of Richard and his plaid sports coat.
Then, shortly after Richard dies, a little girl goes missing in Harlem. Her name is Edith and she’s seven, as old as my sister. The story is in The Daily News and The Mirror that my father tosses on the end table every night when he comes home from work. When I grab the newspaper, my father stares at me through his gold, glittering eyes. “Would you jump in my grave that fast?” he asks, but I don’t know what he means. I’m just so worried about Edith. My father says that all of my reading is what’s ruined my eyes. He tells me to go and sell pencils on street corners, but I don’t know what that means either. My mother buys pencils in Woolworths. My father says that instead of reading, I should be running around on the street with the other kids and getting some exercise. I don’t see the point of running around on the street with the other kids when the library is only two blocks from home and there’s so much I want to know. My father says that I don’t run around enough, and that’s why I’m so fat. Most people eat to live, he tells me, but you live to eat. I don’t know what that means either. My mother says not to pay attention to him, he doesn’t mean it—the “Irish flu” is on him, it’s just his way, that’s how men talk. She doesn’t know what else to do: it’s 1961.
While Edith is missing, our apartment building gets a new handyman who pays too much attention to my little sister. He pulls on her ponytail, takes her jump rope or her prized Baby Dear doll and puts it behind his back. He’s got some sort of speech impediment, and he calls my sister something that sounds like “Miss Plint.” It’s Miss Prim, my mother laughs. “It’s from an old-time comic strip. He’s harmless,” she says, but I don’t believe her. My sister is in and out of the hallways, the cellars, and sometimes the roof where we kids, as plentiful as roaches, are not allowed but go anyway. Pam is small, the super is not big, but short and powerful-looking, with tattooed arms as big as Popeye’s. I lay in bed at night, icy-cold yet sweating, unable to sleep, recite a hundred Hail Mary’s with the blue plastic Rosary beads I keep under my pillow in my fist, begging the same God who took Richard McGee to find Edith and keep the super away from my sister.
When Edith’s body is found in a cellar just like the ones we kids are in and out of, her uncle is arrested for her murder, but I think our handyman did it.
“You’ve been watching too much Perry Mason,” my mother laughs, waving me away.
After Richard McGee died and Edith was murdered, Pam got a stomach virus that she just couldn’t kick. She dehydrated. The skin on her feet peeled away. Her tongue turned black. Following the doctor’s instructions, my mother was up all night pushing green beans and carrots through a sieve, but when my sister still couldn’t keep anything down or in, the doctor sent her to the hospital. Aunt Nellie was recruited to climb the four flights of stairs and stay with me and my four-year-old brother, Richie. She sat on the sofa between us, and we all watched my mother cover Pam, who was in my father’s arms, with her own coat. Then they were gone.
“You’ll never see your sister alive again,” Aunt Nellie weeps, and although I know she’s a foolish old lady who takes cans of anchovies from the A & P and slips them into the deep pockets of her giant tweed shoplifting coat, I’m nearly destroyed. I love my sister, and everyone in the neighborhood knows what happened to poor Richard Mc Gee.
And although I do see my sister alive again, and in fact, a week after she gets out of the hospital, we are once again drawing battle lines down the center of our shared bedroom floor while my brother stands there watching us, chewing on the bars of his crib, the damage has been done. There is something very wrong with me. I cannot let my sister out of my sight. I watch her sleep, I follow her around the apartment, I knock on the bathroom door if she’s in the bathtub too long and possibly drowned. If Pam leaves the house before I do, running down the four flights of stairs, through the darkened hallways where the handyman lurks, I am in agony, terrified that by the time I get downstairs, she won’t be with the other kids and none of them will know where she is. When I run out of excuses to visit her classroom, asking her for a pencil, a pen, tissues, I ask her for “the keys” that neither one of us have. Her teacher stands with her back to the board, chalk held in midair, waiting. What keys? Pam stares at me, confused.
When Sister Francis says that no, I can’t go to the lavatory again, when “going to the lavatory” means sneaking past my sister’s classroom just to make sure she’s still in her seat, my friend Kathleen helps me out. Kathleen is living a life similar to mine, minus the obsession. Kathleen’s father, an alcoholic executive, is routinely carried through the front door of their beautiful brick colonial by taxi drivers or truck drivers. Her college-educated mother has a job going door to door selling Melmac dishes just to put food on the table. Kathleen doesn’t question me. She leaves the classroom on a fake, risky lavatory run just to walk past my sister’s classroom and make sure she’s at her desk.
I don’t know where I would have been without Kathleen.
When Sister Francis finally meets with my mother and asks about our home life, my Irish mother, used to keeping Irish secrets—especially about the Irish Flu—gave nothing up, especially not to a member of the clergy. My mother didn’t tell Sister Francis about the harrowing nighttime ride down Bear Mountain with my father drunk at the wheel, my mother leaning over the back of the passenger seat, pushing me, my sister, and little brother on to the car’s floor in those pre-seatbelt days. Or about the nights she threw her raincoat on over her pajamas, ran down the stairs and through the empty streets, one lone woman peering through the dirty windows of the Irish bars, while my sister and I, in a jumble of vanilla-scented hair and long flannel nightgowns, laid on our bellies on the cold Art Deco tile floor on the landing outside our apartment door, our ears pressed to the top stair, waiting to hear the door to the building open up four flights below, our parents finally safely home while inside the apartment, our gentle, oblivious baby brother—before the muscular dystrophy—slept on. Despite the private schools, the Buster Brown shoes, the cod liver oil, ours was a childhood filled with grief.
A more compassionate person, a more forgiving person, a kinder person, would let go of a father like mine. He came from a long line of alcoholics. He was orphaned young. He suffered concussions and a fractured skull. He could have had, probably did have, neurological damage. Maybe he was depressed, though depression doesn’t cause a father to hurl a hot baked potato the length of a dining room table at his bare-chested little girl, sitting on the other end, or cause a father to stare at his own child in such a way that she drops her eyes, and for her entire life shrivels in front of him, filled with shame. Maybe he was just mean. How sad it is to remember him in this way, me older now than he ever got to be.
This first depression wasn’t my worst depression, but it was the scariest, mostly because I was only eleven years old, sad all the time, anxious, confused, and I couldn’t understand what was happening, and neither could my smart, funny, irreverent mother, who normally understood everything and was generally fearless—except if it had anything to do with craziness. My mother was terrified of craziness. She had panic attacks, unrelenting anxiety, fainting spells that, in her Irish way, she laughed at, thinking we children would never notice her clenched hands, her fingernails digging into her palms, the traces of blood she left on the newspaper, a hysterical stigmata.
When my mother was a child, she watched her beloved, Alzheimer-afflicted grandmother pace the screened porch of the family’s rented Rockaway bungalow, screaming at invisible demons, while roaming packs of kids, with their bikes between their legs, stood outside laughing.
She threw her zombie-like uncle’s “nerve pills” down the toilet, along with her own father’s “red medicine” (phenobarbital), and my father’s whiskey. On the phone at dinnertime, she frequently walked her alcoholic cousin through complicated recipes she was too drunk to attempt on her own, while our own dinner sat cooling on the stove.
In my mother’s day, there were “nervous breakdowns,” not “depressions,” and “sedatives” or “tranquilizers” were the only available medication.
For a mother like mine, nothing could be worse than a daughter “off with the fairies,” as the Irish say.
I know now that for months there had been fault lines leading up to that first terrible depression, that it hadn’t just fallen from the sky, but I didn’t know that then, and oh, if only for my mother, how I struggled to be “normal.”
When my mother takes me to the pediatrician, he sends us home with a prescription for a thick, yellow liquid that costs $12—a lot of money in 1961—and it’s a tranquilizer. My mother takes it out of the Mishkin’s Drugs paper bag and stands it on the faux-marble table top. All I can think about while I’m staring at the bottle is that it will offer me relief, that all the worry that’s killing me could be that simply cured by thick yellow medicine in a bottle.
But my mother, wearing her gray coat and melon-colored scarf, her nose perpetually leaking, has another idea.
“You can get through this hard life with medicine,” she tells me, “or you can get through it by yourself. Now, which will it be?”
I pick up the bottle, and just as she (pill tosser, phenobarb dumper, whiskey drainer) intended, I take the bottle over to the sink, and I pour it away.
I was in and out of depressions for the next thirty-five years.
After my brother, my childhood’s deepest love, died of muscular dystrophy, my younger son, Jamie, at age seven, was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and soon confined to a wheelchair for the remaining fifteen years of his life, where pneumonia was a constant threat. As Jamie got smaller and sicker, my older son, Patrick, grew taller and stronger. At age twelve, Patrick was taller than most full-grown men, and yet Patrick was my life’s jewel, and I was obsessed with the fear of losing him. If he was five minutes late coming home from playing hockey, I sunk to my knees on the front lawn, apron fluttering in the wind. I had to put away the walkie-talkies Patrick and Jamie shared, Jamie from inside the house, Patrick from somewhere outside. I couldn’t bear hearing Patrick’s voice weaken as he went further and further away. My husband, usually the voice of rationality, was rarely home, and I worried about him too. His job took him to dangerous places around the world.
My mother, on the other end of the phone, not only understood my anxiety but listened. She made me promise I wouldn’t “succumb to substances,” as she put it, and for all of those hard years, my mother was my only medication.
In 1997, at the end of a visit, what she called “a simple overnighter,” my mother suffered a massive heart attack and died on my kitchen floor, before my horrified eyes. So small she was lying there, too small for what she meant to my life. The night that she died, my husband wrapped me in a quilt and held me, like a child, on his lap.
Jamie, who will go first and make room for the other? my mother had written in a sporadically-kept journal that I found after her death. I hope it is me, dear boy, for losing you would destroy all hope in my heart.
She went first, and that is a comfort.
There she was, on my kitchen floor, the hope in her exploded heart strangely intact, yet destroyed in mine.
My mother’s death changed things with Jamie and me. Although he was hardly able to move, he took care of me. “Did you eat?” he’d ask, rolling up to me in his electric wheelchair. “How did you sleep?’ he wanted to know, while I sat on the sofa, staring at him, hardly able to speak, grief covering me in something like cement. After my mother died, I wasn’t the mother I had been, and I knew it. I told myself that I would make it up to him. He was doing well, the doctors said, his lungs were no worse than they had been, and his heart, a muscle, was still strong. But it wasn’t to be. Not quite a year after my mother died, Jamie caught a cold that became pneumonia. I leaned over his hospital bed as he struggled to breathe and inhaled as much as I could of his pneumonia-drenched breaths. I didn’t want to live without them, my mother and my child, my alpha and omega, my beginning and my end.
When Jamie died, I looked up and saw my mother standing by the door. I was holding onto his chest when I felt his spirit leave, brushing across my knuckles like a feather.
For six years I wrote my way through grief with essays, journals, and even a memoir that hardly scratched the surface of what I felt about losing a child and was not the catharsis I expected. When grief started to kill me and I no longer wanted to die, I turned to medication. Though it’s no cure, medication lets me put to one side that image of my mother on the kitchen floor and on the other side, Jamie’s eyes locked on to mine in the last seconds of his life, just as they were in the first—and move forward.