I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
The nursing home had brick walls on the inside. Big glass doors. But my grandmother’s room was white, unadorned, hospital-like. Her slurred speech echoed off the empty walls. At seven, I saw my mother emerge from the room, crying. I shouldn’t go in, she said, my grandmother didn’t remember her, didn’t remember any of us. But I remembered. Watching Bananas in Pajamas and her delicate china set and the wooden umbrella handle carved in the shape of a duck in the stand that sat by the front door of her apartment that seemed huge but now I realize can’t have been more than a two-bedroom.
Hers was the first funeral I attended. I stood on the dais and read from the podium and did not cry.
In History of Madness, Michel Foucault traces the trajectory of the mental asylum. How madness became less a crime of the body than a crime of morals. A disease that could be cured by acting with control. By curbing desire, emotion. By giving oneself over to the tranquilized stupor of the hysterics.
Are you sure? The psychiatrist’s voice was routine, almost bored. As if this was the way every evaluation began. It had been days since I had showered, had washed my hair, though on his assessment of my appearance and personal hygiene he awarded me a five out of five. I shook my head, my no affirmative, assured. I thought about my grandmother, drugged up and alone and told myself that it would not be worth it, that the small white pills I knew were just a signature away would make things worse, not better. He seemed convinced and continued with his questioning. Pretending to be okay is what women in my family do best.
Dysthymia, persistent depressive disorder, is genetic. Women are almost twice as likely as men to be diagnosed. Depression is often linked to “women’s issues,” the inherent faults of women’s bodies: puberty, pre-menstrual syndrome, pregnancy, menopause. Sex is a predisposition for sadness, misery. For hysteria.
The term hysteric comes from the Greek hysteria, womb.
My mother shared my grandmother’s womb with a sister. They came into the world together, but they didn’t leave it that way. Until well into my twenties I thought it was cancer that took her, until my own sister told me one winter that our aunt had slit her wrists in the psych ward.
At the University of Zurich, a team of neuroscientists is exploring the implications of trauma on an individual’s biology. How those epigenetic changes are passed down along family lines. How a grandmother’s madness may spread to her daughter, her granddaughter. Not madness. Sadness.
The asylums of the 17th century were not only for the mad or depressed or otherwise mentally unstable. Those individuals were joined by debtors, vagrants, and the poor. A veritable holding pen for Europe’s moral failings, pushing them onto the periphery. Out of sight, out of mind.
I won’t become her I think to myself the day after I again refuse a prescription, instead pouring Tylenol out into my waiting hand and washing it down with vodka, waiting for the tingling to begin, the first sign of the numbness I know is coming.
I write my moral failings down in a notebook, hoping I can cross them off, one by one.
A nursing home, I wonder, was it really?
CAROLINE FLEISCHAUER‘s work appears in Pidgeonholes, The Lindenwood Review, and was shortlisted in Fractured Literary’s 2021 Micro Contest. She reads for The Adroit Journal and earned her MFA from the University of Wyoming. Originally from Ithaca, NY, she currently resides in Bloemfontein, South Africa where she teaches English as an English Language Fellow at the University of the Free State.