be paralyzing. It can leach away power.
My sisters and I have wondered if our grandfather was an alcoholic, or was addicted to drugs, which, for a dentist, we assumed, would have been easy to obtain. Addiction could explain his moving the family so often, unwise for a professional man but necessary for — what? We don’t know what drug, available then, would have caused his rages, not to speak of his strange absences for stretches of time. Our fantasist Aunt Ruth, who came to North Hatley again for a visit in her old age, told my sister Ruth and me on a long evening walk that he had been a bigamist and had another family in a nearby town. That was her explanation for his absences, based on scenes “observed” or “overheard” by her as a small child. She was only nine when he died so her spying seems improbable.
She told us another story on that walk. It turned on one of our grandmother’s brothers. Remember she was one of seven children, and we know almost nothing about them, bar one brother whom we met once, and Aunt Emmy, also seen only the once. The dramatic tale she unfolded was something we’d never heard a whisper of but she had several details: one dark night our great-uncle rushed into a millenary establishment — a code term for a brothel, she explained — and there he shot and killed his faithless mistress. She lay in a great pool of blood and he fled the scene, racing to hide in the family home on Beaver Hall Hill. Aunt Ruth claimed to have watched from the window there as the police came and dragged her struggling uncle away.
As soon as we got home from this rather electrifying walk Ruth and I could not resist hastening to our father for confirmation, or much more likely, denial, of all this. His face went very pink and his bright blue eyes bulged a little as they did when he was overcome with emotion. He was extremely upset. Aunt Ruth had details wrong; she had been much too small at the time — a toddler — and would not have been staying in that house, and so could not have observed his arrest. But the murder was not a lie, nor was the brothel detail. Our father was upset simply out of shame. He had hoped we would never know of such a deeply unpleasant blot on his maternal side.
As for the bigamy story there is no evidence to support that notion. Certainly no other family came forward after his death. And as for drugs, when he died the family was left destitute. Would a man’s financial resources be drained back then by drug addiction as they could be now? In that era, the years leading up to World War One (he died in 1913), laudanum, for example, was readily available and I believe not particularly costly. As well, opium derivatives are calming not enraging.
In the family Bible, in an erased and rewritten entry, his cause of death is recorded as meningitis. However my sister Ruth before she died did research that resulted in a different finding: he died in a mental hospital in Whitby, Ontario, of what was described as “acute mania,” whatever that might have meant in 1913. My brother recalls a further detail Ruth turned up: our grandfather died over a five-day period. I don’t remember this as part of our sister’s findings, and my brother had his death year wrong, but he may well be right about the five days. One thing I’m ever more sure of is how shifting all of our memories, anyone’s memories, are. We select, we remove, we add.
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,
