In Old Mortality, Katherine Anne Porter writes about the bald faced lies nostalgia drives us to tell. The aunt who died before the young narrator’s birth is transformed by the memories of her family into the most charming girl, the most graceful dancer, as beautiful as an angel.
The face staring out at the narrator from photographs and the ephemera left behind suggest this angel was like any other mere mortal during her days on earth: a little awkward, first too skinny and then a little chubby, pretty but not especially so.
The dead are so much easier to love and to forgive. I remember experiencing the same bewilderment when someone who’d struggled with mental illness, had been the source of so many emergencies, was transformed by death into a saint. She was so beautiful! She was so creative! It was a tragedy.
Her death was a tragedy, but it had been a lot more complex than that when she was alive and suffering — when her suffering appeared to leave a stream of chaos in her wake that I’d watched my family struggle to manage. She had not been a saint then.
But there are no saints among the living.
A vintage photo, circa 1894, of a young woman in Wisconsin.
Why are we so apt to tell stories about our lives, our families, and our community that paint a much more flattering past than reality would allow?
Is it to reassure ourselves and promise our audience that a better world is possible? To insist that things were once right with the world, no matter how wrong they might seem in this moment, and they can be set right again? Is it to offer them hope that we can reclaim this mythical world of love and loyalty?
It was fascinating to read the personal stories you shared with me on Facebook last week. It’s a gift to hear about other people’s family lives.
I was taken aback by the people who responded with bromides — in our parents’ and grandparents’ time people took care of one another, everyone shared the work gladly, people with disabilities simply didn’t survive very long. With some good old fashioned finger wagging at kids these days not having family values thrown in.
I got defensive, pointing out that these notions aren’t historically accurate. Plus, how can a group of caregivers claim that no one cares about their families anymore?
Then I realized how silly I was being. And unkind.
Sometimes family myths are true. In What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About an essayist challenges her preposterous family lore, only to have her mother provide historical documents verifying their accuracy.
When I told my (now ex-)wife the story I’d been told about a grandmother’s death, young and seemingly sudden, my wife insisted that has bullshit. She insisted that obviously what had actually happened was that my grandmother had been institutionalized and my grandfather lied to his children. That this grandmother had probably died decades later, to be buried in a numbered grave on the grounds of an asylum.
A quick search online returned a copy of her death certificate, with the date I’d been told to expect.
Simone Schmidt’s song cycle, Audible Songs From Rockwood, aims to recreate the lost stories of women who were housed in Kingston’s Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane in the late 1800s. The songs and accompanying narrative are based on the archival records.
Signs of the era of institutionalization are both easy to miss and nearly everywhere. They make little appearances in Alice Munro’s writing. Crumbling ruins dot the landscape. We know the history well enough for it to work as tropes in horror films and haunted houses. Like so much that is both common and unpleasant, institutions are mentioned in passing, in ways intended to be overlooked.
When Molly McCully Brown visited the grounds of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, she stood in the cemetery:
"I remembered hearing about the doctor who told my parents, when I was born in 1991, that I would probably never live independently, might never even speak. I felt time and space collapse: sixty-five years ago, born in my hometown, I might have lived and died in the Colony, been buried in that field."
The history of caregiving is complicated. The history of medicine is full of moral dilemmas. The things that save lives today have caused so much suffering. Brown notes:
"I owe the current shape of my body, almost every inch of mobility I've ever had, to scores of people taken apart without their consent, people no one cared enough to name or suture into any kind of remade whole once they had taken what they could."
When conducting dissections was considered defiling the dead — as modern physician Paul Kalanithi still viewed it — the bodies of criminals, prostitutes, the homeless, and enslaved people were used. The experiments conducted by the Nazis on prisoners were designed to save the lives of German children, German soldiers, German citizens.
I struggle to understand what led to the age of institutions and what it was like to live through. The horror stories of asylums and residential schools are complicated by how the wealthy eagerly sent off their own to sanitariums and boarding schools. This was the era of public health and social hygiene, of a new class of experts helping us live our best lives. Families were encouraged to be scientific — from the laboratory to your kitchen and all that. Simply doing your best at home was irresponsible and neglectful in a world that promised to restore everyone to health.
Deborah Cohen’s Family Secrets and Madeline Burghardt’s Broken tell a story about institutionalization that’s not just about the harm it caused. They the stories of families who institutionalized their children, the ones who did not, and the impact it had on everyone.
It’s the story of families doing their best, which often meant following the advice of experts. Just like parents do today, parents who will do anything to provide their children with the best care available.
For a few decades in American history, experts told parents that doing their best meant telling their friends and family their baby had died, then quietly going to visit it each month until it was buried in the cemetery on-site.
In Broken, a sibling of an institutionalized child tells Burghardt: “I don’t think my mom ever regretted sending him away; I think she regretted that there weren’t other choices.”
Another grandmother of mine had three sisters. When the middle sister got sick, she was left behind with family friends. Perhaps the families exchanged letters. She eventually recovered. My grandmother’s family didn’t talk about her anymore.
A third daughter, the youngest, was too little to understand what happened or even remember her middle sister. One day when I was in high school my great-aunt asked my grandmother who that little girl was in all their childhood pictures.
That’s how she found out that she had another sister. They tracked her down on the internet and met for lunch, sixty or so years after they’d last been together.
At the very end of Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit writes that in the 1950s Americans expected there to be a revolution that would usher in a new golden age. Having been born in the 80s, it’s so hard to imagine that.
That revolution didn’t come to pass, but many of us, even those “on the left,” seem to look at aspects of that era as a lost utopia of family and community.
Why do we cherish the idea that the generations before us took care of their own?
When we believe care work was not sometimes a burden in the past, does it reassure us that this is a solvable sort of problem? That love and burden can be extricated from each other?
Does the idea that a generation ago everyone had a peaceful, beautiful death reassure us that we can provide that for our loved ones?
Does viewing living with disabilities as a temporary phase of the development of scientific medicine free us from needing to think about long-term support?
Does faith in the idea that families a generation ago lovingly shared all care work and related expenses, supporting each other without question, give us faith that our own family disagreements can be resolved?
Are we talking about the past or envisioning a different future?