Cannot explain the change of expression on the friend's face. She seemed to go ashen, as she told me, in a voice that didn't sound at all like hers, "Mim is living in prison. She's in a nursing home's shut-down Alzheimer's unit. I've begged her to request a transfer to a regular unit, and she won't."
Snake pit. My sister is voluntarily living in a modern version of Snake Pit. Only her story is the reverse of the 1948 novel, where the heroine works her way back to health & sanity. Mim worked her way into where she is now; whatever the reason she was first placed there (not enough room in a regular unit?), she remains there voluntarily.
Hearing about where she lives, that she has refused to make any effort to be moved, was somehow the last piece in the puzzle that's my sister. She is where she's always felt she belonged - with no independent life.
Since my mid-20s, Mim struck me as a person who hated having been born.
Up through the late 1970s, she was prone to deep, quiet anger. Not like my own bursts of utter frustration, which flame out & vanish, directed against myself rather than others. Mim's anger was definitely against others. It was her anger that had me, in 1980, on the verge of leaving.
As I said, Mim seemed to be a person intensely unhappy at being alive.
I never could understand her intense feelings of resentment against Mom, but total adoration of Dad.
Her darkness seemed to lessen over the years, but I remember the depth of her feelings back when we lived on Cherry Lane & our early years on Woodland Road. I can still remember sitting on Mom's bed in the Woodland Road house, telling Mim that I was moving out because I couldn't handle her chronic... rage is the best word, and her promising to change. And she did.
Or maybe the anger just went even deeper, muted but still there. It was never really against me, but against something bigger.
For some reason, Pam understood how the family felt about Mim. (Kerry never seemed to get it at all.) Soon after she & Peter married, Pam commented on how the family was afraid of Mim. Mim & Mom & I thought that hilarious. The rest of us - afraid of Mim?? What a hoot! Am still amazed that Pam got what no one else a) did or b) refused to acknowledge.
We were afraid of Mim, from Dad right down to me. Not once do I remember either of my brothers making negative comments to Mim about her weight, her general appearance. To Mom, yes. To Mim - never. That is unusual. I do not recall my parents ever taking her to task. Sure, I resented that, but it made sense to me. When you crossed Mim, you felt it.
It is impossible to describe the negative energies Mim could uncork, energies that did no physical harm but were unimaginably ominous & threatening. It felt like holocausts simmered just under the surface.
Mim only physically threatened me once, in the kitchen of the Cherry Lane house, holding a knife. I can see it as if it was yesterday. I was in senior high school, Mim would have been in her mid-20s. She was shaken with anger over something I'd said. I remember going stone-cold calm, looking into the face of something indescribable.
Mom used to describe how, as a little girl, Mim would act up all day but become good as gold whenever Dad walked through the door. She recalled how he'd take HER to task for making out that Mim had been difficult. That always got to me - Mom telling me, as if it was nothing, that her husband didn't believe what she told him about his daughter's behavior, that he faulted her instead. Mim learned early that she could be totally awful to the people who didn't matter to her, as long as she acted differently with those who did.
This most recent twist, with Mim living voluntarily in an Alzheimer's unit - in "prison," as her friend described it - is the coup de grace to my trying to figure Mim out. It is the poetically macabre expression of what she always conveyed to me, if no one else, she felt was her just due in life. No real life.
And I seemed to be the only one who cared about it. Mom wouldn't, maybe it was that she couldn't, do anything to help. She & Dad had Mim see a psychiatrist when she was young, but all that happened was she'd come home bragging about how she turned the tables on the shrink & took charge of the appointment.
Mom & Dad were the ones who should have sought counseling - Mim was already lost. To her last day, Mom could not deal with Mim. Easier to leave the room when things became unbearable then face it, acknowledge it, work with it.
No one cared about Mim, except her baby sister. In 1994, when Mike & Kerry stayed with us over Christmas, I tried to talk to Kerry about my worries, describing Mim's history of
Kerry was my last hope of someone, other than myself, helping Mim. The information I shared were things that happened, things other people could, if asked, confirm. But KCL shut me down.
Writing this, is sounds like my family was a small-scale version of The Snake Pit. With the person pointing it out - me - tagged by others as the psychotic.
Mim living - of her own free will - in a nursing home's locked-down Alzheimer's unit, resisting a beloved friend's entreaties to be moved into a regular living space, has liberated me from much of my past. It is what she's always seen for herself, has always seen in herself. It makes no sense. But it does to her.
This latest is just the last of a long line of similar damaging behaviors present throughout her life. Well, at least throughout my life. And yet she was THE person held up by everyone - except Pam - as the apex of what lesser lights could only faintly aspire to be. Voluntarily living the way Mim is now is no less unreasonable than how my family treated her. Was it that they couldn't see, that something I can't begin to envision blocked their sight of what was right in front of them? Did they just not want to be bothered? What dynamic in play caused them to see ME as psychotic while they placed Mim in the center of our family solar system?
My guess is that no one has a clue. About any of it. And they certainly had no interest in asking, in finding out.
Years ago, when we were talking about some of the autistic children she was working with, about their families, Mim made a comment that was immensely illuminating, at least to me. "When I look at their lives & their struggles, my life looks so much better." Wow. It took the depth of darkness of their lives to make hers look good, in comparison. Have never forgotten that.
Mim is physically handicapped. Am not clear what the situation is. Dicey questions were always off limits. She has tremendous problems walking. Maybe the reason she prefers the nursing home's locked-down Alzheimer's unit - the place her friend describes as a prison - is that when she looks at the lives around her & the struggles they face, hers look so much better. Maybe, in comparison, she feels relatively whole.
Or not. Maybe it's something completely different. But whatever it is, it sure ain't healthy or whole or what would be experienced as life affirming to 99.9999% of the rest of us.
And some form of Mim's present-day reasoning has been always & forever - literally - with me. Her brokenness always held up as the golden mean, my constant striving for health regarded by everyone, parents included, as an ugly aberration. Well, my take on it all was an aberration. A glorious one that's finally liberated to me the norm, unhindered by the fiction that my sister is anything other than whatever it is she is.
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