 |
Clara Taylor, Emma Jane Carson Taylor
1887 |
I was 7 years old when my
mother asked me if I wanted to go to a funeral. It was for Grandpa Taylor’s
older sister, Clara, she told me.
I was sure she had made a
mistake. I had never heard of Grandpa having an older sister and, at 7, I was
the oldest I had ever been and knew quite a lot. But I was curious so I said
yes.
That funeral had a big impact
on me, not least because it was mysterious. On the way there, Mom explained
that Aunt Clara had spent many of her adult years in a mental hospital. I
couldn’t imagine what that might have been like.
I remember that the woman in
the casket looked old yet also sweet and even peaceful. I remember the skin on
her face as smooth, not lined like many old people’s faces. I wished that I had
known about her when she was alive and that I could have met her then.
Some people’s lives haunt you
even if you never met them. There are several in our family like this. Aunt
Ruth Baker is one whose brief life echoes down the years since her death in
1904, well over 100 years ago. She lives in the hearts of many of us who loved
the people whose own hearts were broken when Ruth died at 14 from cardiac
defects. My grandmother, Nancy Ethel, was only 17 as she held her dying sister
in her arms.
 |
| Mildred Jane Taylor |
Another whose memory still
haunts our family is 6-year-old Mildred Taylor, whose death in 1907 from
typhoid and scarlet fever devastated my Grandpa Taylor’s family. Twenty-year-old
Clara, who had been like a mother to her little sister, was so traumatized that
she suffered a schizophrenic break and stayed isolated in her room for a
month. [See Aunt CB and Pat Herdeg's earlier blog story.]
And now Aunt Clara's story haunts me – the
same Clara who was devastated when her little sister Mildred died, the same
Clara who lay so finally in that casket. I turn around in my mind what I know
about her life and try to imagine what it might have felt like to her to live
it.
From reading her mother’s journals, I gather that Clara’s childhood and
teen years, as the oldest girl in the family, consisted mostly of helping raise
her younger siblings and teaming up with her mother to do heavy housework.
Their method of house cleaning seemed to involve completely renovating one room
after the other – moving all the furniture out, washing down the walls,
refinishing floors, deep-cleaning heavy drapes, beating carpets, pasting up new
wallpaper, repainting, on and on, until the whole house was eventually scoured
and renewed – and then starting over and doing it all again.
The household demands on her
were so heavy that Clara didn’t even get to finish high school. She did play
piano for The Taylor Quartet (a quite popular local group formed by her father
and brothers) and participated in church youth groups. Still, the littlest
children in the family were probably one of her few bright spots of happiness. No
wonder then, when her little sister died, she just couldn’t bear the anguish.
But Clara eventually took a
six-month “household management” training course at what is now the Rochester
Institute of Technology (and I am guessing that she probably had quite a bit from
her younger life that she, herself, could have taught the instructors!). Then
she established a dressmaking and millinery business, making clothes and hats
in Batavia, New York.
 |
| Clara and Maurice, 1924 |
Clara married in 1923, when she
was 36, quite late for those times. I hope she had some years of happiness
then, but we know that they were far too brief. Her husband, Maurice Burt, left
her after only a few years. [See more of Maurice's story here.] Traumatic
as this must have been, my Grandma Taylor, who lived in Batavia and saw her often during that time, said she
seemed to weather it as well as could be expected.
For the next two decades, she lived with her brother Leon, kept house for him and continued her sewing
business. Always one of my mother’s favorite aunts, Clara charmed her nieces
and nephews as the Taylor families visited back and forth for frequent
gatherings and dinners.
But by 1944, her family
became increasingly concerned about Clara's mental health. She had begun to move
into a fantasy world, declaring that she and her long-gone Maurice were FBI
agents solving mysteries together.
Her father and brothers
decided to have Leon take her by train to New York City to visit her younger
sister, Florence, hoping that travel would help Clara back to a steadier
balance. But, instead, she began lifting things from stores.
So on September 11, 1944, Florence’s husband Uncle George Doran and a neighbor brought Clara to Kings
Park State Hospital on Long Island. Clara was under the impression that she was
coming to this hospital as an act of charity, to be a “sunshine girl” for an
hour and a half in order to cheer up lonely injured soldiers by reading to them
or writing letters for them.
What must it have been like
for Clara then when Uncle George and the neighbor left and it began to dawn on
her that she was not going home with them, that she was suddenly stuck there,
that she was the patient, not some
lonely soldier? My stomach wrenches, imagining the shock and confusion she must
have felt.
Five years later, she was transferred to Willard State Hospital in the town of Ovid, near Seneca Lake in central New York's Finger Lakes, as part of a state initiative to move psychiatric patients closer to their families. She died there in 1958.
 |
Willard Attic Suitcases, by Lisa Rinzler
From the website The Lives They Left Behind |
As Pat has written [see the ending of this earlier story here], Willard closed in 1995. But before it was demolished,
someone doing a final walk-through pried open a locked door and revealed a
forgotten attic preserving hundreds of suitcases. These represented the last
connections that patients had to the “outside” world as they brought with them
the belongings they loved most or thought they would need in whatever was to
become their new life. Apparently once they were admitted to the hospital, they
never saw these belongings again.
Two authors spent 10 years researching the lives of the
people who had brought these suitcases, although Clara’s was not identified in this collection. (We can only imagine how Clara would have loved to
help them with this real-life detective work!) Then they created a deeply
moving and compassionate book, website and traveling Suitcase Exhibit, telling
these patients’ stories.
FAST FORWARD TO 2013. San
Francisco’s Exploratorium, the quirky science museum that pioneered the kinds
of hands-on interactive exhibits that the best modern science museums all design
today, moved into new quarters on a pier jutting into San Francisco Bay. I was
shocked, yet also fascinated, to learn that it featured a new temporary display of some of the Suitcase Exhibit from New York's Willard State Hospital. Early this summer, I visited the new museum for the first time.
I headed straight for the
Suitcase Exhibit, where I found not only some of the Willard suitcases and
their belongings, but also some of the hospital’s furniture as part of a larger
exhibit challenging visitors to contemplate questions about mental health and
its treatment. Given our family connection to Willard through Clara, it was a
deeply poignant experience for me.
I entered the exhibit through
an entrance that recreated an unfinished attic space. Cubbyholes along the
walls housed opened trunks and suitcases, with thought-provoking displays of
their contents. Outside each cubbyhole was a sign that gave us some background
on the suitcase’s owner and asked us to ponder their diagnosis and treatment.
Some patients, like Clara, seemed truly in need of ongoing mental health care.
Others, however, seem to have been confined only because they were poor, alone,
immigrants, depressed as a result of traumatic life blows, didn’t speak
English, or somehow seemed “odd” enough that those around them were
uncomfortable.
The belongings that they
brought were fascinating. Some had whole wardrobes of fancy clothes. Others
used their suitcase space instead for books. Some brought musical instruments.
Many brought treasured photographs. Some had packed the tools of their trade.
Some appeared to be expecting to go on vacation. Others seemed to know that
where they were going would be for the rest of their lives.
How unsettling, then, to see
these belongings now, the last connections to these people’s pre-hospital
lives. It felt as though these were objects saved from a tragic shipwreck. Perhaps
in some ways they were. Whatever state of mind these men and women arrived in
when they came to the door at Willard, their suitcases carried the sum of their
lives as they understood them up to that day. Yet once through that door, it
appears that they were stripped of their previous lives and transformed into
“patients.” Their suitcases were shipped off to a locked attic. Their previous
identities, the memories and dreams they had so carefully packed, disappeared
from their lives as well.
How did poor Clara adjust to
this new, abrupt break with her former life? Did she panic? Did she fight it?
Did she eventually make friends in this new place? Did she ever come to feel
that it was home? Many of the owners of these forsaken suitcases were at
Willard during the same years as Clara. She must have known them, and many of
them almost certainly would have known her.
The Exploratorium’s corridor
of attic cubbyholes opens into a room with institutional furniture from
Willard. These red leather upholstered chairs . . . Would Clara recognize them
if she were here with me today? Did she sit in this exact chair, drumming her
fingers on the worn armrest and tapping one foot impatiently while waiting to
see a doctor?
And this utilitarian table .
. . Did she sit at it, maybe even in one of these exact chairs, perhaps sewing
a piece of clothing? My mother says Clara was wonderful at all kinds of sewing
and craft projects. We have the remnants of a gorgeous velvet patchwork quilt
that Clara made from soft and elegant fabrics. Someday we will make it whole
again.
Could Clara have worked on small sewing projects at these tables? Or could she have sat here
with people she considered friends? Maybe done a puzzle together? Maybe played
a game? Maybe complained about the food in the cafeteria?
In this room in the museum,
you can lift an old telephone receiver and listen to audio descriptions of life
at Willard by people who had worked there, often the third generation in their
family to do so.
Towards the end of the
exhibit, there is a poster that attempts to give some context to these memories
from a mental hospital. It notes that doctors at the time (up through the
1950s) had no knowledge of neurophysiology. It continues:
They also had limited understanding of the psychological harms
caused by trauma or poverty. At the time, psychotherapy was new and finding its
way. There were no effective medications, and mental illness was commonly
understood to be a defect of will or character. People often came to Willard
from poorhouses, where they were sometimes kept in chains. And doctors were each
responsible for hundreds of patients.
It goes on to note that many
patients were diagnosed with “dementia praecox,” as was our Clara. This was an
early term for what we now call schizophrenia. And then the poster adds this,
titled as a “Note on what is never noted”:
Although it was a hard place to work and a difficult place to live,
Willard had many aspects of an intentional community. The institutional records
and memories of those who lived and worked there show an often dedicated and
mutually supportive staff, patients who looked out for each other, and compassionate
relationships that made possible the survival of the human spirit, even in
extreme circumstances. These are all part of what happened, too.
I pray that Clara experienced
some of that sense of compassionate community. Coming from a harsh and isolated rural farming childhood in upstate New York and then experiencing severe losses in her
adult life, she deserved an older age freed from demands and troubles. I hope
that that look of peace on her face that I remember from the first and last
time I ever saw her was something that she had come to experience in this place
she had unwillingly been forced to call home.
