Maybe today our grandfather would be diagnosed as bipolar. But I think a person doesn’t actually die of that. Maybe he committed suicide while manic. If so and the five-day lingering on death’s threshold is true, he must have almost botched the job.
And where was his family during his time in the mental hospital? I have no idea. My grandmother would have been just thirty-three years old, her children, my father eleven, his sister, nine, and Bunny, the little brother, just three.
Whatever he died of the worsening of his frightful affliction over the years must have terrified his family, my father bearing the brunt as far as the children were concerned, though what his mother was going through I can only try to imagine. I, two generations later, would find it horribly difficult to cope with a mentally ill husband — with the fear, the shame, the threat of violence — but I knew that, ultimately, my family would help me. My grandmother’s family never did so in any sustained way. There were occasional visits, stays in an attic room. Old clothing might be passed along. My father had to wear a girl cousin’s outgrown boots to school, cruelly humiliating for him.
My father himself suffered from several severe clinical depressions in the 1950s and 60s. I know now that the doctors who treated him during those years knew almost nothing about what they were doing. For him his own father’s bizarre life and death must have added an extra turn of the screw. As well as suffering the illness, and the horrific shock treatments, cruelly administered daily and for many weeks without anaesthetic, he must have dreaded turning into a replica of the man whose cruelty must have haunted him.
This is not an unusual story. I am sure there is a fantasist aunt in many a family tree (in our case, Aunt Ruth), and many a mad grandfather, or even a great-uncle murderer, spoken of only in whispers, or never, by their descendants. Dead, they are perched safely now among the leaves, as silent as daytime owls. But it’s not that long ago, well into my lifetime anyway, that such relatives ranted and flailed about their families’ living rooms or brooded grimly in corners. If they couldn’t be stuffed into the attic, Bertha Rochester style, or into a locked shed or a boathouse, as two women in my North Hatley childhood were, they embarrassed or terrorized others until death released them. And their dark secrets float down the generations, appearing sometimes in dreams. Subtly they may affect us. We are never told enough to understand, just enough to be uneasy. How can we know if a particular strain of lunacy lurks within us too, and do we encourage or discourage its emergence when we dig out and pass down the tales (as I am doing now)? Or is it best to hide them, as our parents did?
I came across a poem by Thomas Hardy just now. I must have read it long ago, but rediscovering it as I write this, I shivered. It is called “Heredity” and begins, “I am the family face.” The “I” of the poem, the face, reappears again and again. It hops down the years and lands in one generation or another. The ancestors are lost in time’s mist. Current inhabitants of the face know nothing of them. I have, as did my father, my grandmother’s eyes and hair. I was once told I have her hands. What do I carry of my mad grandfather?
Nowadays, with more known about the brain, we have ways, sometimes and if they are willing, of helping such people. And there is help for families even if the sick individual is unwilling to accept any. But a generation or two ago there was silence and deep shame. And I think of our current society’s recognition of the need for support for those suffering from mental misery arising out of past events — PTSD. My generation’s parents were affected by the Depression, by both World Wars — the first, as children, and the second, in adulthood — with a father or older brother either killed, as was my mother’s brother, or returned home often in speechless shock.
I have mentioned several close friends who were children in Europe during World War Two. One woman, now eighty-two, after a full, very busy and happy life as a wife and mother in Canada, at eighty began to experience extreme night-time horrors. Her doctor helped her to recognize that she was experiencing the delayed PTSD she simply had not had time for earlier. In old age she had fewer defences against her memories’ surfacing.
All this has always been the human lot, one generation’s wars and other horrors hanging, usually not spoken of, in the background of their children and grandchildren.
I mentioned my father’s Aunt Emmy earlier, the richer sister of his mother and with whom he spent those North Hatley summer visits he remembered so fondly and were the reason for our going there many years later. Aunt Emmy’s history was in one way similar to my grandmother’s: she married the wrong man. His name was Robert McNeil and he was a wrong choice in one rather key way. He was an alcoholic. Yes, that familiar story. But he was a good choice in another, for her if not for him. There was money in the family and when he left or was sent away, somehow the money stuck to Aunt Emmy.
One of the snapshot images I have in my head from old family stories is of someone coming home: there is a limp bundle of old clothes unaccountably at the doorway. Whoever is returning approaches, puzzled. The bundle turns out to be a man, the erring husband, Aunt Emmy’s husband, drunkenly unconscious. That’s the whole of the snapshot. So — they had rid themselves of him somehow and now they must do so again. And did. How? Family history does not reveal.
But his backstory is the interesting and lucky part, for Aunt Emmy. His father, also Robert MacNeil, had been a bank manager somewhere in New England. One fine day — those are the words in which the story tells itself (so much happens on either “a fine day” or “a dark night”) — he removed all the funds deposited in the bank he managed (I picture him swiftly stuffing bundles of banknotes into a large carpet bag), grabbed his wife’s hand, leapt into a horse and buggy and nipped away, to Canada. He crossed the border from Vermont into Quebec and soon fetched up in North Hatley where, with his thieved funds, he bought property up behind the hill to the north of the lake. He built a house to which he added a secret set of rooms in which to hide if the law came after him. He feared a posse galloping up over the border and up the highway to North Hatley. It never came. In the fullness of time the stolen funds, or what was left of them, became Aunt Emmy’s.
We visited Aunt Emmy once in Montreal, on our way through. She lived in a large stone mansion on the mountain and had a lover called Mr. Fraser, whose presence made my mother uncomfortable. I suspect she hadn’t known he would be there when she agreed to the visit. When he subsequently sent us a shiny tin pail of hard candies for Christmas, she spirited them away. We weren’t allowed to eat them — lest we be morally contaminated? Was that when we learned he was her lover? As a child I wouldn’t have understood what was involved with the role but later when I did know it was even more of a puzzle. He was stout and old and looked like Beatrix Potter’s Jeremy Fisher. I couldn’t see the point. But it was clear Aunt Emmy had once been beautiful. Attractive women misbehaving at any stage of life were thick in the family tree. No wonder our father worried about his daughters.
But these flowing streams of life, of biology — brain, limbs, eye colour, the blood moving in my veins, the colour and curl of my hair — all of them connect me to my siblings and parents but also to long dead people. But I wrote “brain” first just now: if the other things come down to me from the dead, what about my brain? Me?
Everyone, depending on our stage of life, is a bud, a leaf or a dry twig of an enormous, endlessly branching system, each of us convinced of our own pulsing and immediate self as a singular thing. I never thought about this when I was younger. It is only now that I see it could be a rational way to accept my mortality. I will be gone but my genetic substance will carry on.
At the same time I have to feel there is an essential individual, Anne, who has created herself out of what was given. Rational or not, I have to feel that.
~
When I was a small child my father was writing a book, or really not yet writing it but just doing preliminary research. The title I remember well as the project was spoken of for several years. It was to be “Inland Navigation by the Stars.” He had spent much of his life in various inland wildernesses — in the Canadian far north