An Otherwise Impressive Line of Leaves

At age 16, I was already able to comprehend that the reason good people sometimes do horrible things is because horrible things were done to them. For a long time, I blamed the bad things Murray did to me and everything that went wrong in our family on Grandmother Ruthanne. If only Grandmother Ruthanne had gotten treatment for her obvious mental illness, my mother would have been better cared for and would have been better able to care for us, and on and on.

But how could Grandmother Ruthanne have gotten treatment? In her lifetime it was common to lock hysterical women away at the “State Lunatic Asylum No. 2”, which has in recent years been renamed to the more euphemistic “Northwest Missouri Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center”. Would such treatment have been effective? What I wonder about the most, though, is what was the source behind Grandmother Ruthanne’s mental illness? What horrible thing was done to her?

There was some story about Grandmother Ruthanne being sent away to live with her grandmother in Oklahoma when she was a teenager. And a marriage to a man from St. Louis when she was sixteen. A divorce when it turned out he abused her. People learn how to abuse when they are abused themselves. Is this where she learned it? I have no idea. No proof of anything.

What I know is that Sidney Joseph Murray, who we called Grandpa Joe, was an introverted genius who had been orphaned at age 12 and worked his way up to owning his own plumbing business and that Grandmother Ruthanne was pretty when she was young. They met after Grandmother Ruthanne’s first marriage ended and she landed back at her parent’s house. She met their plumber friend, Sid, who she renamed “Joe” so people wouldn’t think he was Jewish.

Yep. Where are all the “Happy Easter You anti-Semetic bitch, Grandma” cards at the store when you’re rushing in late to pick up your contributions to the Easter Sunday family dinner? Feeling pleased with yourself that your family has come to rely upon you to remember to bring napkins and ice, you decide to go a bit overboard: buy Grandma a card! This was always when I snapped to and headed for the register. There was no use even looking at the variety of Easter cards from which I could pick for the grandmother I despised.

She was able to attract Grandpa Joe, though. They married, had two kids. Mom remembers Grandmother Ruthanne being sick all the time. Mom spent her childhood being quiet and coloring. Waiting with Grandmother Ruthanne in the doctor’s office for her non-stop appointments. Going to the market and running errands for her mother whose agoraphobia kept her inside between doctor’s appointments. Mom’s earliest memories are these: eating ants in the cracked earth in their back yard at the end of the Great Depression. Her father brushing her hair without pulling it like her mother did and washing her face without scraping it off like her mother did. And sitting on the couch, trying to get her shoe on, while Grandmother Ruthanne was screaming at her to “Get up, Get up! The couch is on fire!” Mom said she thought Grandmother Ruthanne was just being hysterical as always and figured she had plenty of time to get her shoe on before she’d burn to death. Grandmother Ruthanne was so crazy she couldn’t even convince her daughter she was a trustworthy enough source to heed a call not to burn.

I don’t know why Grandmother Ruthanne was mentally ill. I have only puzzle pieces of her abuse story passed on through the generations of a fallible family which nonetheless grows on laughing, loving, working, playing, and teaching our children and regularly reminding ourselves that compassion and creativity and humor are our enviable hereditary traits, but there are certain weedy stems that, if ignored, will choke the family tree and wilt its otherwise impressive line of leaves.