On Saturday afternoons I would go with my father to visit his parents. Sometimes my brother came with us. My dad went every week, even when we couldn’t go and my mom never did.
We entered their property through a side gate which my dad would unlatch, passed through the cactus filled garden (the wind was strong and often where they lived) and then using his own key my father would let us into their home.
We walked quietly past the bench at the front door where the telephone had its own table of honour and down the long, doored passage to their bedroom. The room was dark with curtains closed but as we entered both or either Granny Milly or Grandpa would invite us to join them up on the bed, under the heavy eiderdown. There was a not at all unpleasant but specific smell in the room. Thinking back now I can only guess that it was uncirculated air. The large windows behind the curtains were always shut too.
I was 18 years old when Granny Milly died and in all that time I never saw her leave her house. I don’t believe that she ever even ventured into her oasis like garden with the prickly succulents, chased the introverted tortoises or ate the fruit of the very generous loquat tree.
It has taken me 53 years to realise that like Rapunzel, my grandmother was locked in her castle, an undiagnosed mental health condition, her captor. “Hermit” was one of the most flattering names that my mother gave to her mother in law but whether it was agoraphobia, depression, anxiety or simply her default coping mechanism, something kept her hiding from the world.
I have been told that she wasn’t always shut off. I have faint memories of stories of a smartly dressed, clever woman with a wicked sense of humour. I can guess that fleeing from what she knew and escaping to a land far away, might have changed her. Or maybe it was after she moved from the old country to the new, when she transitioned from mistress of the house and the only shop for miles, to anonymous in the big city, that triggered her change?
Over the years I have noticed that when people struggle to understand other people, behaviours or events, they are quick to offer explanation and attribute reasons. This is especially true at times of mental health crises. “There were financial problems or marriage issues” can be gossip mongering or well –meaning, straw-grabbing attempts to make the unpalatable easier to digest.
Somehow with illnesses of the mind we think that we are qualified to diagnose and then remedy. Yet somehow we just know that we cannot do that for a friend who receives a cancer diagnosis.
I will never know what exactly kept my grandmother inside for so long. Years later, the first overt sign of my father’s depression was his inability to get out from under the duvet, his modern day eiderdown. I have worked hard at times to resist and repel the magnetic attraction of my own bed.
If my grandmother were here today I would encourage her to get all of the professional psychological and medical help that she needed to move her. Perhaps then she would have been moved to tears watching her grandchildren perform on the stage or moved enough to reach the window and take in the view of the mountain and the sea.
In My Head 