The Truth’s The Truth

The Myth

As a child, I was told that all four of my grandparents died before I was born. Stories prevailed: Bubbe Faygie, on Mom’s side, died of high blood pressure and heart failure. Her devoted husband, Israel, died six months after, of “a broken heart.” Dad’s father, Phillip, much adored, died of a ruptured appendix. No one — not my dad nor my four surviving aunts or their children, ever mentioned their mother, my grandmother, Bubbe Sarah. 

Dad lived his life as if his mother’s fate, her depression after the birth of his youngest brother, her gradual decline into postpartum depression, had no bearing on his or my life. He applied the same denial of mental illness to my clinical social worker profession and never inquired about my work. When I told a story, he would listen attentively but the silence that followed, what I now name the snaking secret, choked off all commentary. When I left institutional work and established my own psychotherapy practice, his interest in my work awakened. As a retailer, he could relate to the idea of a business in which I provided a service for a fee. He often asked, “Faygie, how’s business?” My response was always the same, for I had by then learned that my father was about the bottom line. “Good, Dad. Business is good.” His reply: a predictable, warm smile.

In 1982, during a casual conversation at checkout at our father’s Army & Navy store, a customer remarked to my older brother, “Isn’t it a shame your grandmother was hospitalized all those years in the same hospital as your Uncle Maurice?” Phil, rattled by the shocking information, called me instantly. “I can’t believe it. Our grandmother died in the state hospital. How could it be?” he said.

My Father

In that moment, the world turned on its axis. I had no idea how our father, whose mantra was “the truth’s the truth,” could have kept such an important secret. Mental illness was not new to our family. Dad did ultimately share the secret of Uncle Maurice, his youngest sibling, when he became eligible for release from the mental hospital into the care of a farmstead foster family.

As a family therapist, I realized how my grandmother’s fate, the fact that she had been erased from family stories, was of a whole different order. My brother and I needed answers, yet neither of us could imagine ever mentioning the incident to our father. Our father had a taciturn, no-nonsense, “John Wayne” side. Confronting him was out of the question.

You could set your clock by my father; order was essential. He was the “provider” who retreated to the comfort of his wide, plush green velvet chair with the matching ottoman, where he napped after lunch or read The Portland Press Herald from cover to cover after supper. He had the uncanny ability to leave the pages folded, neatly tucked, one behind the other, as if the paper had never been read. 

As an adolescent, I worked in my father’s Army & Navy store as a helper, shorthand for dusting and sweeping. During every sale, my father gave the impression he had all the time in the world. But in his private world, if things were out of order, he became impatient and short-tempered — a trait which assured cooperation from his wife and children. When I asked about my grandparents, the response was clear and simple: “All your grandparents died before you were born.” These storied words were spoken by my mother and silently assented to by my father. As a child, I sensed not to press. Questions stirred strains of discomfort and my father’s steely blue eyes flashed their warning: Do not tread. 

Quest for Truth

I share my father’s high regard for certainty and detail. As a therapist, I’d come to understand how secrets, snakelike, curl around a family’s emotional life and choke it off. I spent every waking hour of my work life carefully tracking client’s relationship patterns and their effects. How could I not know my own? 

While attending a professional workshop on the effect of family secrets on mental health, I consulted Norman Paul, a psychiatrist friend who had risked tracking down his own family story. For most of the twentieth century, psychiatric records were sealed and available only to the medical profession. He shared my belief in the power of secrets and offered to obtain a copy of Bubbe Sarah’s hospital record. But there was a caveat. He warned that in the aftermath, untoward events might occur and that what I found might forever change how I experienced my family. He seemed unfazed. I asked him to proceed.

During the three weeks of waiting, I was not fine. I was certain the decision was right. Underneath, I was as worried as a child defying her father. With trepidation, I retrieved the thick packet from Norman. In my hands, I held forbidden testimony — fifty pages of hand-written notes, some barely legible. Too nervous to read slowly, I scanned pages of scratchy and worn handwriting until I came to the last notation indicating that Bubbe had contracted an infection and died in September, 1934, five months after my second birthday. 

Patient was born in Russia, forty-six years ago… Married at age twenty and came to this country when twenty-one years old, landed in New York and lived there five years. Has had nine children; no trouble at childbirth. Patient is described as… jolly and sociable until the last baby was born. After last childbirth nine years ago, patient commenced to show a gradual change. 

I called my mother. She had been disapproving of my project; but to my relief, when faced with the undeniable fact that I’d so boldly acted, she confirmed that Bubbe’s hospitalization had occurred after Maurice’s birth. Bubbe was flesh and blood, a tiny, likeable woman whom Mom described as a “sweet, gentle person.” When I asked what she thought happened, she said, “Your grandpa was strong, an autocrat who was much loved. All he thought of were babies… babies.” In a moment of candor, she said, “He was not the right husband for her.” 

In that instant, Mom’s voice was clear and strong: a truth teller to be respected and above all, a woman who knew and who could identify with Bubbe. She fueled my resolve to dig further.

The record described Bubbe as reclusive and irritable, didn’t care to have anyone see her and when people called, put them out of the house… On many days, she refused to leave her bed and had not been able to do her own work… on others, she had brief periods of excitement during which she was restless and noisy. 

Even though Bubbe spoke Russian, Yiddish and English, the staff described her as solitary, melancholy, and uncommunicative except that she was worse around her periods when she became outspoken and scolding. My heart ached, as I understood the magnitude of what had happened. Many of my clients struggled with symptoms related to postpartum hormonal imbalance. The hospital record indicated she had rubbed her head frequently, complained of headaches and wept. It’s unlikely her caretakers had knowledge of the connection between post birth hormonal shifts, mood alternation and headaches.

I was relieved to read the physician’s note of April 20, 1913, There has been no change in the patient’s condition since the last note. She was allowed home today with her husband on a six months trial visit.

On June 5, 1913, two months later, a reversal. The patient was returned to the Hospital today. Her daughter said the patient could not stand the excitement at home… quiet the first week … inclined to be talkative… said much about the Hospital. She also talked about her money… spiteful towards her husband and objected to him interfering with her… sat a lot by herself, thinking. She couldn’t stand seeing garbage around the house. She was returned to the Hospital because they couldn’t take care of her at home.

Abandonment, abandonment, I thought over and over as I came face to face with the tormented spirit of the grandmother who hovered at the edge and caused each of my aunts to look away when I asked questions about what it was like to grow up on Oxford Street. The visit home, so important and essential in re-connecting to the family, backfired. In her absence, my aunts, Bubbe’s three elder daughters, had taken over the role of managing the household and supervising their younger siblings. 

As I read, pictures formed in my mind: there was Bubbe, seated at the edge of a small table. She watched as Lenah, tall and stately, embodying an efficient countenance, and Mary, her sweet-tempered, willing helper, directed the morning activities. Catherine the middle girl, readied for school. The youngest, Betty and Rae, had dark and wavy hair, neatly combed with ribbon bows. Bubbe beckoned for a kiss but they shied away. Her youngest, Maurice, scrubbed and erect, held a book bag. He glanced her cheek with an obedient kiss. 

Bubbe was essentially a visitor. I wondered, Did she have an ally? Who dared to come close, to touch her, to try to soothe her? The family was helpless in the face of Bubbe’s erratic emotions and so she was shepherded back to Augusta to be sedated and locked away. “No change” was the unwritten conclusion. Sadly, she was never afforded a chance to return home again. 

Triggered

The essence of Bubbe’s story, what I read in those fifty pages, festered and lingered. I spoke at length with my graduate school colleague, Ruth, whose grandmother had a similar fate. “It wasn’t so unusual in those days,” she said. My mother echoed her words, “It’s what they did in those days.”

After a restless night, three weeks later, I awakened feeling irritable and out of sorts. As I poured a glass of orange juice, a swift surge moved through me. A force, strong as lightning, grabbed my hand and flung the glass at the porcelain sink, shattering and pitching shards into the air. Trembling, I fell to the floor. Slivers splintered my hands. Blood trickled from my palms. I sat back on my haunches, lifted my arms to the heavens and implored aloud, “What… what am I so angry about?” 

As if someone pulled a lever, I switched into a state of altered consciousness and entered a reverie: Bubbe Sarah stood alone in a spare, old-fashioned kitchen with a black iron stove. A sweep of dark bangs framed her fire-flared eyes. Bracing her sturdy legs, she clenched the back of a wooden chair. In slow motion, she lifted it high and threw it wildly. Hitting a wall, it splintered. 

Like a soft, spring rain, waves of relief washed over me. I collapsed into tears. Bubbe’s spirit moved through. The sun on my back, I gathered myself up to sweep the broken glass and tend to my hands. 

Marv, my husband, also a therapist, recalled how later that day, I stormed around and ranted about the unfairness of my grandfather’s decision to put Bubbe away for the rest of her life. I understood, “It’s what they did in those days,” but couldn’t fathom how my father and his sisters could have maintained their silence during their lifetimes. The fact that Aunt Mary and an Overseer of the Poor, not my grandfather, accompanied Bubbe Sarah on August 21, 1912 to the Maine Insane Hospital, saddened me. The plight of my grandmother, especially her aloneness, seemed overwhelming.

I was totally identified with my grandmother’s fate and unable to imagine the toll her emotional slide took on the family. It would take many years of writing and reflecting to appreciate the fact that like most families in similar circumstances, they struggled with worry, frustration, and upset that their mother was in emotional free fall. Given the family’s limited means and the lack of mental health resources in 1912, my grandfather had no other recourse. 

Aftermath

When I chose the profession of social work, I had no awareness I was but a generation away from mental illness. In my first childhood memory, I am in the back seat of my father’s black Ford. Mom is sitting in the passenger seat. My eyes are riveted on my father dressed in a black topcoat and a fedora hat as he walks down wide, red brick steps. His mouth is firmly set; his eyes cast gray. He enters the car. “Are you all right, Jack,” Mom asks in her high-pitched, worry-voice. Dad is stone silent. I was two years and five months old.

When your father insists, over and over, “the truth’s the truth,” how can you not believe him? And when you realize the paradox: if the truth is not always what it seems, how do you reconcile the sense of disorientation? I don’t know what happened in that stately building but I believe the memory is significant. Perhaps, he made arrangements for Bubbe’s funeral. 

Children absorb strong affect. The skin has no barrier to sound. My father was six years old at the time of Bubbe’s first slippage into despair and fifteen when she was committed. After his father’s death, Dad became the family patriarch and guardian of both his mother and youngest brother.

Every summer of my childhood, Aunt Mary, a clerk at Gimbel’s in Pittsburgh, returned to Maine for a two-week visit. She and Dad had the ritual — always, on a bright and sunny day — of setting out for a “picnic in the countryside.” This was the storyline for their annual excursion fifty miles north to Augusta State Hospital to visit Uncle Maurice. Mom prepared a picnic basket, and in retrospect, it seemed unusual that the rest of us were left behind. The hidden rule to stay on the surface of things was that powerful. Dad was a wonderful actor and Mary, a fine actress. At supper, Mary always told the story of their outing. In her soprano lilt, she nearly sang the opening line, “We had a wonderful day in the country.” 

After Aunt Mary’s death, a formal portrait of Bubbe Sara appeared on the wall of my parent’s den. I recognized traces of myself in her face. Her hair, its thickness and fullness, how it swept her brow was her outward legacy to me. But the story behind eyes deep set in sad resignation seared my heart. Zayde Phillip’s picture, smiling out at me with my father’s wide and welcoming grin, was next to hers. I took note of the contrast between my grandparents: Zayde, the extrovert, a playful man who would have made me laugh and Bubbe, the introvert, a woman it would take time for me to know. 

Reflections

What is the point, all these years later, to write this story? It’s about my sense of a flesh and blood grandmother, how she thought, what she desired and missed, and the myths that compress memory. It’s about my need to grasp what kept Bubbe secure and what finally caste her off into the wild undercurrents of “Dementia Praecox” or “Hebephrenia,” labels for the agitated states associated with schizophrenia. She was given the worse diagnoses and yet, a mere fragment, the shell of an idea, for neither term was specific. Dementia Praecox was a general classification and included any of several psychotic disorders and yet, because of timing, before modern psychotherapy, family systems theory and psychotropic medications, it became a terminal diagnosis with no possibility of remediation. 

It’s significant that Bubbe lost her first-born in a traumatic accident. Trauma alters the structure of the brain and creates increased sensitivity to stress. Did marriage to a traditional, autocratic husband, create stress for a sensitive wife? I would think so. What of the arrival of each child, the worry over its safety and the effect of the challenge of adapting to each child’s personality and needs? And more, what of the challenge of shopping and cooking and watching over the children when your husband is a peddler, money is sparse, and your extended family is based in New York? 

I have enormous empathy for Bubbe. I raised only two, high energy, creative children. My parents and in-laws lived out of town. There were few emotional supports and I worked at my career. There were many days when I felt like a “nut job,” my therapist friend Pat’s name for a state of mind among over-functioning, professional women with multiple roles. 

Time and the passage of generations have a way of reshaping and deepening our perceptions. Years after my parents’ deaths, I came to a place of readiness to write and grapple with Bubbe’s story. I wondered, What if, all these years later, I could manage to read the record with less anxiety and angst? Was there a possibility I missed some nuance or a detail that might deepen the story?

When I returned to my files, I couldn’t locate the large manila envelope. I recall tucking it away in a folder in the metal file cabinet housed in my study. Somehow, I had misplaced the entire record. In my initial anxiety to learn the truth, I’d circled back into my father’s footsteps.

The Truth

Fortunately, in 2008, I was entitled to Bubbe’s record so long as I could prove our bloodline and provide her official death certificate. Within a week of my formal request, I received a registered envelope with a blue-edged, beige document scrolled in black: my grandmother’s death certificate. “Dementia praecox, duration 30 years” was listed as a contributing cause of death. This sets the onset of her illness at thirty-eight years old, late for the onset of schizophrenia. 

After sending the certificate and check to the State of Maine records, I received a typed, easy-to-read record. Twelve pages with the heading “Maine Insane Hospital” summed up the nearly twenty-two years of Bubbe’s life between 1912 and 1934. Calm and deliberate in my reading, I was more able to step back and call upon my clinical judgement. During the psychological part of the examination, Bubbe did not talk but sat and stared.

Attitude and Manner: When admitted patient gave no special trouble… was somewhat resistive and did not want to give up her jewelry and belongings. Patient is slow in movements and has but little to say… talks some in her native language but will say little in English. The patient grasps questions but will not attempt to cooperate with the examiner. She is fairly neat in personal appearance… eats and sleeps well. Shows no evidence of special delusions or hallucinations. 

The record was just as I recalled except for the detail that although Bubbe’s symptoms began shortly after Maurice’s birth, the family managed to keep her at home for nine years. It was startling to learn that before Maurice’s birth, she had been convivial and jolly. Afterwards, she became irritable, scolding and at times, refused to talk, struggled with exhaustion and gradually stopped doing “her own work.” 

There is no discussion of underlying physical etiology. An untreated postpartum condition, now well documented and labeled postpartum psychosis, comes closest to explaining Bubbe’s melancholy, decline into rage and severe depression after the birth of her last child. 

Remarkably, four doctors were uncertain of Bubbe’s diagnosis. Their dialogue reads like a play. Two agreed upon Unclassified Depression, duration nine years. Another preferred Unclassified Dementia, Dementia Praecox (?) while the final arbiter, Dr. Miller, the Superintendent, declared, I think she has deteriorated. She probably belongs to the Dementia Praecox Group. I think I should put her in Dementia Praecox, Hebephrenic Type (?). Duration nine years plus. September 13, 1912. 

There are actual question marks in parenthesis noted two times in the official record but absent in the death certificate. 

We now know that when postpartum psychosis is treated with hospitalization, psychotropic medications and/or ECT, the patient has a good option for recovery. What seems true is that initially, Bubbe did require hospitalization and rest to reconstitute. Over time, without remedial treatment, the isolation furthered her deterioration and despair. It was startling to realize that this woman, labeled in 1912 as “deteriorated” was the same energetic woman who, years before, was “excitable” and reportedly “tore her mattress because it was old.” My grandparents were a fertile pair. Was this desperate act the equivalent of birth control — the mattress message, undeniable, no more babies! 

Sadly, I believe that if the profession of psychiatry had present day knowledge of antecedents, talk, drug therapies, ECT, the medical staff might have concluded differently. Bubbe was strong in body and will. Would that she had more options for recovery. The medical profession offered her what they knew — containment and protection. 

Bubbe Sarah died suddenly in the middle of the night within three hours of becoming critically ill. She succumbed to a virulent form of a boil accompanied by a staphylococcus infection and was interred next to my grandfather at the family gravesite. 

I’ve out-lived Bubbe Sarah by decades. Now retired from my psychotherapy practice, I have the option to imagine and write, read and garden, converse with my husband, visit with children, grandchildren and friends — all choices that were taken from her. Like Bubbe Sara, I am quick to anger in the face of adversity and unfairness; thankfully, I have learned to process feelings and channel strong emotions. I cannot imagine twenty-two years of walking corridors, shuffling to the cafeteria, unaware of her progeny or ten grandchildren. 

The irony of Bubbe’s story is that while my father and aunts all kept their vow to keep their shameful secret, there were those in the community, like my brother’s customer and perhaps even neighbors on my childhood street, who knew and even now may recall some version of this story. 

Like Bubbe Sarah and Dad, I have a strong will. It has taken will to push through the pain of these facts and imaginings. It has taken will to hold and explore the meaning of the early memories and family myths. In the many years it has taken to write about the wall of secrets and their inconsistencies, I’ve been able to explore, experiment and embrace my life. I have gained perspective and practice forgiveness. As a young social worker and now as an elder, I carry Bubbe Sarah’s story and the lessons learned — the need of a woman to have and to hold herself, with authority, at any age.

Image: photo by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.

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Faye Snider

Faye Snider, MSW, MFA, is a Newton, MA resident and 2009 graduate of the Solstice Creative Writing Program. A former family therapist, she writes both poetry and creative nonfiction with a lens on immediacy and meaning. She has published chapters on managing Holocaust antecedents in a therapeutic practice, as well as family and nature focused poems in literary journals. She was the 2022 recipient of the Friends of the Chautauqua Writing Center Writing Contest for her poem, Cousin Lewie. Her verse-memoir chapbook, Seeking Grace, was published in November, 2023, by Lily Poetry Press.

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• The Truth’s The Truth - January 17, 2024