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My Sister

For many reasons my younger sister and I were not close. Years and distance kept us apart and it wasn’t until this past October when I was called to the emergency room of the local hospital that I was brought to the realization that I was indeed my sister’s keeper. When you yourself are in the twilight of existence the thought of being responsible for another human being and one that you weren’t close to is scary. My sister seemed to be on more than one plane of existence and the nurses were quietly telling me that they would find a place for her, that there was no way my sister could go back home to the house she was camping in. Then the doctor came in and said that there was nothing physically wrong with her and she was to go back home*. The nurses looked as outraged as I felt. My sister needs care I said and the 911 operators told me that she shouldn’t be allowed back in that house. But the doctor was adamant. “Take her out of here or I’ll let her spend the night sitting in the waiting room.” So there was nothing else to do and I took my sister back to her home, made sure her bed was made and left her for the night. Thus began my odyssey to find a home for my sister. 

With luck and another hospital stay, this time with a caring doctor, my sister was placed in a Care Facility and I began the journey of closing out a home filled with memories of my sister.

Her home was filled with books. Not just novels but textbooks on a number of different subjects. My sister had been in the Navy as a WAVE back in the early days when women in the services were an auxiliary and worked mostly in hospital settings. She joined the Navy after getting her AA degree from college but went on to get an LLB degree and ended up with a PhD. She went to Truck Driving school and received her certificate as an over the road truck driver. Was there anything my sister hadn’t done or couldn’t do? It didn’t seem so as I found numerous blue ribbons where her handicrafts took first place in county fairs. A stranger seeing this life would thing how blessed she was and there was nothing to stop her from reaching for the moon and obtaining it. What a stranger wouldn’t see was that my sister was plagued all her life with mental illness. Our parents didn’t recognize this mental illness because they expected a brilliant person to have quirks. Her bosses didn’t recognize her mental illness and the navy just said not to put her in certain situations, but my sister knew that there was something wrong with her. Her college classes abounded with psychology courses and her textbooks were overwhelming about the brain. She knew she was different and tried in her own way to discover what made her act as she did but trying to find out why she acted as she did, did not stop her from acting that way. Her biggest problem was being paranoid. We joke about being paranoid and state that it isn’t paranoid when we KNOW they are out to get us but in my sister’s case she ‘knew’ just who was out to get her. What she wrote about my youngest daughter and me would curl the hair of a bald man and she really believed what she wrote. She had two next-door neighbors who couldn’t do anything right. In fact she wrote letters to judges claiming one of them was taking her name and saying they owned her house while the other one was blamed for coming in and stealing everything up to the kitchen sink.

The problem with mental illness is that when JFK was in the White House he said that just because people were mentally ill didn’t mean that they had to be incarcerated. Now in theory that is fine. Many a mentally ill person can live a fulfilling life outside of a hospital as my sister did for years but what about when they can no longer maintain even a semblance of a life style? It doesn’t matter. They are still able to live as they wish even if they aren’t sure just what it is that they wish. Most of the homeless people that sit on the curb with their worldly possessions in a grocery cart are mentally ill and should be put where they can get fed and cared for but the law says that it is their right to be mentally ill and need to scrounge for every bite of food that they put into their mouth.  What can we do? Are we our brother’s keeper? I didn’t want to be.  It was thrust on me and now I want to become like an avenging angel fighting to be sure every mentally ill person who crosses my path gets the care that they need. Then I remembered that I had read about West Central and their full beds and not enough money. I remember that they even tried to close it down. The mentally ill are cast offs and unwanted by society until they become our personal responsibility and then we realize just how badly those with mental illness are treated. Just what is our responsibility? Do we do as the first doctor did and say that as long as she wasn’t physically ill she could spend the night sitting in a waiting room chair or do we take an active part in trying to change a bad law?

I know that this is a different column and one I never thought to write, but if it can make even one person stop and think it will have served its purpose.

*My sister was diagnosed less than a month later as having bleeding ulcers. The doctor will be reported.

Have a thought for a column? Contact me at <isis.temple@knology.net>