Some Echanted Evening

    For some reason there are some people who just have unlucky breaks in life, and even more mysteriously those seem to be the people who have the best attitudes. I never heard my Grandma say a bad word about anyone, ever. She never said anything to hurt my feelings, she never made me feel like I was anything less than special. I remember as a little girl I would sit in her apartment with her and watch old movies. She loved old movies. John Wayne and Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. We would watch TCM in that little apartment all afternoon. She would give me candy or tell me to go get a cookie out of the cookie jar she used to keep in her kitchen. She always called me honey. "go ahead honey". I remember she had this little music box and I told her that I loved it for years, then one day she let me take it home with me. I would wind it up and it would play "Some Enchanted Evening".

    I know that her life didn't turn out the way she wanted it to. You see, she had a mental illness that kept her from living a normal life, not all of it, but there were years that she missed. Years that I know she didn't want to miss, but sometimes bad things in life happen to good people. Sometimes the worst things happen to great people. I'll never really know everything she went through, and I'm not sure I'd want to know. There were times she lived a nightmare, trapped in her mind. I can't imagine seeing the terrifying things that she did, or rather what her mind thought it was seeing. I can't imagine living with an illness like that and maintaining such a positive disposition. She experienced state hospitals in a time when you didn't want to. She went through shock treatment after shock treatment. She didn't start out this way. I think that's the scariest thing about mental illness, it can hit anyone at any time.  For my Grandma she had her first lapse after child birth. I honestly wonder if she had severe post partum at first, but they didn't know how to treat it back then. That, of course, is just me wondering. No one has ever said that to me. It just makes me wonder how many women suffered from sever post partum that were put in state hospitals. I wonder how electroshock treatments affected their minds. Sometimes I wonder if she wasn't a victim of this. How my mother explained it to me was that she was Bi Polar with a form of schizophrenia that is triggered by a traumatic event.  I'm sure there is a medical name, but I don't know it. In any case, for my grandmother the traumatic event was childbirth. My Grandparents had met at a roller skating rink where they used to dance like Fred and Ginger. The fell in love, they got married. They had two children, and something flipped the switch in her mind. My Grandpa told me once, that she used to not believe my mom was her child, and deny that she was hers, then sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night and see her holding my mom. He told me one time he was immediately concerned and asked what she was doing, and she said simply "what, she's hungry, I'm not going to let my baby cry for being hungry". He was a man in the 50s, he didn't know what to do, what was happening to her. It was just simply a sad story, one that eventually ended with my Grandparents being divorced and my Grandma in and out of hospitals for nearly the rest of her life.

She ended up getting well, well enough to be the person who primarily cared for her parents. She was well enough to hold down a job at Cosco for  20 years. She is an inspiration. She had her own apartment for years, and when she drove she drove a little blue ford mustang that always had stuffed animals in the back window. There were times when she needed a little help, times when the medication needed to be changed or times when she stopped taking it like she should, but over all she was one tough cookie.

 By the time I could really remember my Grandma she was on the right medication. Her last mental lapse happened when I was very young, and I have little to no memory of it. What I remember about my Grandma is what I mentioned before. Her kind spirit, her love for old movies, how she used to go out to Jerry's and Home Folks with her sister, and how she and her best friend, Lil, used to crack me up how they would talk about the old Casanova that lived in their building. I guess my Grandma had to set him straight a few times. I remember how sad she was when Lil passed away. I remember how sad she was when my Grandpa passed away. That part of getting old terrifies me. It terrifies me to think of people I love dying off one by one, until I don't know anyone anymore. You would think after everything she'd been through that she would be a complainer, but she wasn't. I know that some of the fear in her mind was still going on. I know she still had a problem trusting people completely, and I'm sure some of it was for good reason, some of it was the paranoia creeping back in. She was very quiet, and I knew she was living in her mind a lot, but every now and then, right when you thought she had no idea what was going on, she'd say the wittiest funniest thing she could possibly say in that moment. She had perfect timing, like one of the classy women in the 30s/40s movies, like Bette Davis. It would shock us, and I think sometimes she shocked herself, and it almost always ended with everyone, including her, laughing at what she'd just said. She was adorable like that.

She didn't live an extravagant life. She didn't have a list of accomplishments in her obituary. She lived a humble life, from the time she was born until she passed away, but she was far from ordinary. She was strong, she was a fighter, a survivor, a lady who could roll with the punches. She was my Grandma, and I love her, and whenever I hear Some Enchanted Evening, or when ever I watch Gone With the Wind or see Fred and Ginger dancing I'll think of her. Her mind is free now, it is no longer bound by illness. She is dancing again, smiling her unforgettable smile.