Crazy Through the Years

“Why would you tell him that?!” My grandma asked.

“It’s something he should know!” said my grandpa.

This exchange came directly after my grandpa told me that his mother – my great-grandmother, whom I’ve never met – had been committed to an insane asylum for at least some part of her adult life. I didn’t push the matter further. Thinking to it now, though, it is an intriguing piece of family lore. It is both historical and mysterious, or at least controversial. 

If I were to pursue this as the subject of a story or a novel, I’d be torn as to whether or not I’d want to ask more questions of my grandpa. Both paths seem fruitful in  different ways. Not asking him anything satisfies my immediate desire to fictionalize everything, to jump away from real life as quickly as possible so as to a) avoid being limited by factual accuracy and b) seize my creative license and make an entire world of my own, spawned solely by the brief conversation above.

More likely, though, I would start with my grandpa. Because I would have to do extensive research anyway (since I have little knowledge of what early twentieth century asylums were like), I might as well start with the personal, firsthand source. I would ask him at what age she was committed, and if she died there, and when the family first thought she was mentally unstable. [As I’m writing this, I’m becoming increasingly unsure if the subject at hand was actually my great-grandmother, or instead my great-great-grandmother, i.e. my grandpa’s grandmother.] I would be torn about whether to ask more revealing details, such as her full name or which institution she was admitted to, because I kind of like the idea of rifling through records (though this is probably restricted for many reasons) of a bunch of hospitals in whatever general area she lived in, and using those limited reports to simply guess at who could be her. This again falls back on my desire to fictionalize; I’m much more comfortable conjecturing than actually trying to get to the bottom of something.

The second undertone of this story would be a self examination, either an openly autobiographical one, or, as I’m hinting is my preference, a fictional one. In any case, this examination would focus on parallelisms between this mysterious woman and myself. As someone with a family history of mental illness beyond simply this great-(great-)grandmother, this is something I’ve already thought about (and written about). But I like this prospect even more, because this is most chronologically distant instance of mental instability in my family that I know of. I like the stark difference in contexts that would emerge, since it’s likely that this woman was committed for something that today is probably fairly commonplace and something we would treat with drugs or therapy.

As a final note, I’d also want to collect opinions and pieces of information from other members of family – what tidbits my grandma/pa have chose to dispense over the years, and, more importantly which ones they chose to omit – to underscore the “family lore” angle.

Huh. Maybe I’ll actually write this thing...