The Silken Tent
      My Letter to the World
      October 2000
      October 2, 2000
      Monday


      Most writers have a small core of themes they frequently revisit. There are the suburban marriages in John Updike's work and working class lives in Raymond Carver's. Stephen King, who seems descended directly through the pen of Edgar Allen Poe, explores the ways people scare themselves to death with their own imagined terrors. Jeff O'Brien, a local writer who wears the mantle of Henry David Thoreau, lives close to the land and spins philosophy out of a spider's web and a well stacked wood pile.

      I write about loss. I look at broken connections, vanished pleasures, opportunities missed in hesitation. My characters are often strangers in a strange land, moving through others' lives, wanting acceptance, understanding, remembrance.

      Today I was a stranger in a familiar land. I went to another Eleanor Rigby funeral.

      We'll call this woman Christine. She was in her early sixties, and had lived for many years with the bane of mental illness. I don't know her official diagnosis, but if I had to guess I would suspect it was paranoid schizophrenia or severe bipolar disorder that did not respond well to medication. For nearly twenty years she had lived at the nearby state psychiatric hospital. I knew her in the last years she was able to live on her own.

      Back then I worked part time for a local social service agency that provides, through telephone contact, a listening ear and a counseling voice for reassurance, basic problem solving, and referrals to other providers. Christine was a frequent caller, and almost everyone who served a shift in those days was familiar with her.

      Christine was brilliant, educated, a skilled actress and musician who'd had a brief career as a teacher. Flamboyant and dramatic, she had problems observing certain social and corporate conventions of conformity and subordination. Perceived as rude rather than direct, blunt rather than outspoken, she often hurt people's feelings or wore them out with the volume and range of her ideas.

      When it became clear that she had a treatable condition rather than just a difficult personality, she began the long process of auditioning treatments, some of which worked, for a while anyway, and some of which made things worse. This was the early 1960s, when "better living through chemistry" became the way we solved problems.

      As her illness progressed, Christine became unable to hold a job, and by the time I knew her she was living with her mother on her disability income and a small inheritance. She'd become a local character, known to shopkeepers as a woman who could be sometimes jolly, sometimes querulous, always entertaining. She endured periods of hospitalization, often heralded by an increase of late night calls to the hotline where listeners like me would notice that she was losing touch with reality.

      When her mother died, Christine's siblings, all of whom lived out of town, moved swiftly to sell the family home. They found her an apartment in a midtown complex populated almost exclusively by people on the fringes of society -- recovering down-and-outers, recently released prisoners, the lame of body or mind.

      I remember a long conversation one summer midnight just before she moved. By then Christine and I were old friends. She knew my voice, she knew when I worked, and she knew I knew her history, so she could speak in a shorthand and trust me to know if this was a night when I needed to call for intervention.

      That night she talked about loss, about how she'd recently lost her mother, and now she was losing the only home she'd ever known. She understood her brothers' and sisters' needs, and she was brave in the face of these new challenges. She talked about the things she would take with her and the things she would leave behind.

      A week after she moved there was a public auction of the remaining contents of the house. I moved through the rooms where Christine had lived and saw the residue of a life that had always been just on the verge of beginning. Laid out on every available surface were dishes, crystal, gleaming flatware, polished serving pieces ready for gala dinner parties that had never been given.

      For $10 I bought a dozen white linen buffet napkins, large squares starched and folded, the edges lined up perfectly and a sharp crease ironed in. I was outbid on her college graduation portrait, which the buyer obviously wanted for the handsome silver frame. I couldn't embolden myself to ask if I could have the picture.

      I talked to Christine a few times after the move. I could hear the loneliness and the loss of the familiar informing her outlook. Eventually she was hospitalized after a psychotic episode. Not long after that I ended my association with the agency. About a year later I learned from former colleagues that Christine had become a permanent resident at the mental hospital. I was not surprised.

      When I saw the obituary last week I knew I would have to attend the services. I was afraid there would be no one interested in, or even aware of, the daytime funeral of a single woman who had not held a job in forty years and who'd been institutionalized for twenty.

      I was astonished to find more than thirty people there. Among them were nurses and attendants and therapists who had cared for her, people from the agency I'd worked for, and two pastors. One was the institution's resident chaplain. The other was the visitation minister from the congregation where Christine had been baptized and confirmed, where her membership had been maintained, where she was considered a member of the family though none among the active members had ever actually met her.

      And on a stand beside the closed coffin was the portrait in the silver frame I remembered. Someone, it seems, had bought it not for the handsome object it was, but for the person it represented.

      Most people understand that funerals are not held for the benefit of the one who has died, but for those who are left behind. I listened to the two pastors speak with genuine affection of this difficult woman who demanded all of their skills as practitioners of compassion. I left with a grateful heart -- grateful that I had known her and cared for her in however small a way, grateful for the abundant blessings in my own life, grateful that I do not have to work as hard as Christine did to find joy this side of paradise.
       



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      Margaret DeAngelis.

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