For five years, she and her friends saw me more than my own family did. We spent some holidays together, went shopping, swimming and out to eat and even on a vacation together. The picture of Mary at age 5 or so sitting in a huge wooden institutional chair that was in her Polk admission records is one I have not seen in 26 years. However, I still recall it vividly enough that I could describe what she looked like to a police sketch artist to recreate it now. She was a beautiful, scared child whose family institutionalized her and then forgot her.
In the mid-80s, we got in touch with a brother who never mentioned to his wife or anyone that he had a sister until his grown son was marrying a special education teacher. After a weekend visit or two with her long-lost brother, she came running into the house crying and hugged me for dear life. Her caring but embarrassed sister-in-law cried, too, and pretty much let me know that there probably would be no more visits. All Mary wanted was a hug from her brother when she appeared to hover around him, but he just could not hug her.
That I didn't understand then, and I still don't even fully forgive not even a dead man for it now. She and another lady were semi-regular visitors to my family's home without incident. They knew where Mom kept the cookies and they appropriately made fun of my room upstairs, with albums everywhere and JBLs stacked, two typewriters out -- so always in need of straightening up, so unlike their neatly kept bedrooms at the group home. These sweet elderly folks, whose mild cerebral palsy or hyperactivity might have been enough to get them institutionalized as young kids, would never have been institutionalized had they been born later in time. They fit in with senior groups rather nicely with no significant indication that they had spent most of their lives hidden away and apart from society in virtual hell holes until some institutional reform started to make headlines in the 70s.
Mary wasn't your typical mentally retarded child or adult. She helped run the state institution that was supposed to be taking care of her. She assisted doctors with baby deliveries and helped them prepare dead bodies for burial by removing all bodily fluids. She also rocked, fed and diapered babies brought into the center by trains that she said always seemed to stop there during the night. Nobody was there to hug her, she said, when she arrived at Polk. Mary was the one chosen -- when state center nurses didn't dare be additionally exposed -- to dispense medications to tuberculosis patients in isolation. The system in time did make her retarded. Her social and coping skills weren't always the best, but then, when are any of ours the best all the time, either?
When the group home agency had a false tuberculosis scare not long after I started working there, Mary so easily recalled -- without having to stop and think about -- what color and size pills for tuberculosis treatment that a few of her group home friends received at the state center. She easily recalled with complete accuracy how many times her friends were in isolation and how many consecutive Christmases she also delivered small holiday trees to one particular group home friend back then in isolation at Polk. The older doctor at the Health Department simply shook his head in amazement at her ability to recall what by then were 30-40 year old memories.
It was around that time that Mary and two other ladies from Polk asked me to make a movie about them, to tell their stories to me on video as part of a graduate school film project. While I intended to shadow them on camera to maintain some type of anonymity, they loudly balked. They wanted to be seen clearly in hopes that the dentist who mercilessly punched their jaws at the state center in lieu of novacaine and a few nurses who treated them so badly would see the film and hopefully shake in their boots that their dirty little secrets were known. They taught me far more than I was ever able to teach them.
While there was some contact with her nephews, there was never the family quite what Mary wanted and needed. However, she and the friends who came with her from Polk to live in a group home became each other's family. She outlived the three others around her age, and at this point in time, some of the staff who worked with her. But Mary did not die unnoticed this week. She will be buried not with her father, brother or mother who she always wondered about and early on fantasized would return for her.
Instead, she will be buried in a cemetery with her real family members who came with her from Polk to the group home to live rather meaningful and significant, productive lives. Mary and her friends worked or volunteered their time, went to church, partied their butts off with a couple generations of other senior citizens at those functions, were very good neighbors and lived rather normal lives.
Mary and her friends definitely helped pave the way for other state center residents to come to live in the community without having neighbors complain or try to stop the homes from opening in their neighborhoods as they did more commonly in other counties. Rants that Mary and her friends are always overlooked when the county administrators honor those in the community who make a difference in the quality of life for the handicapped. Not that the others who have received those honors haven't done just that, but Mary and her friends were respectable charter members of that clique and should have been at the top of that list.
Raves to Mary and her friends who still aren't done teaching us yet.
jt
2 Apr 08
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