Holding fast to the family secrets: Motherhood in heroic terms

OUTSIDE of the Mafia, the family is the most effective repository of secrets, most of them bad.

I know of no family which doesn’t go purse-lipped when the name of a missing person is mentioned, or of a particular disease. TV and until relatively recently, cancer, were seen as bringing shame on a family.

But families still tend not to share the glad tidings that diabetes, psoriasis, epilepsy or depression run through their clan, sometimes skipping a generation only to come roaring back to strike a later generation.

On the other hand, not many families are silent about the fact that their grandfather may have had a dentist bumped off, even though, before dentists concentrated on cosmetics and pain management, many of us would have quite enjoyed assassinating one of them. Patrick Tracey’s grandfather — a leading member of the Teamster — was widely believed to have done in a dentist. His family rarely spoke of the rumour, but when they did, it was with approval. That was one dentist, the family consensus held, who had it coming.

Patrick’s grandmother, May Sweeney, brought up in Boston and of Irish descent, started to go strange in her 20s. She had six children in rapid succession, which might make any modern twenty-something feel a little challenged, but which, back then, was par for the course. After her sixth, however, her peculiarities and her withdrawal became more marked. So, when she dressed up particularly well one morning in autumn 1924 and disappeared without leaving a note, her husband became anxious as the day wore on without any sign of her.

Eventually, he saw her coming up the long driveway to their home in the gathering dusk, her shoes in her hand, her feet swollen from hours of walking. Her husband rushed out to greet her. She stood waiting for him, and when he arrived in front of her, smiled at him, revealing that every tooth in her head had been extracted.

“She had gladly paid for the dental surgery,” her grandson writes, “to stop the voices in her head. The voices had grown in power and strength until she could no longer bear them. The voices told her they would go, happily, if she would free them from her dental cavities. Whether extension of her mind or enemies in her head, these strange voices lied, though; they were still chattering, her empty gums still bleeding, as May collapsed into my grandfather’s arms and was carried inside to an old Victorian fainting couch.”

May Sweeney had schizophrenia, and spent the remaining 31 years of her life at the Rhode Island Institute of Mental Health. Her grandmother, who had left Ireland with her husband at the height of the Irish Famine, is believed to have stepped off the ship onto American soil already enmeshed by the same mental illness.

Patrick Tracey, who has written an account of his family’s secret entitled Stalking Irish Madness, grew up knowing about his grandmother, because his mother visited her every weekend. He grew up in a family of five children, two of his older sisters being non-identical twins. It was a reasonably happy family, despite his father’s fondness for drink and gambling. The children knew that some older members of the family were “unwell” but his mother tended to change the subject whenever their illness came up in conversation.

“What is without remedy should be without regard,” she would say, quoting from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

Her son understood that her “big worry was that she might pass her mother’s madness down to her own children. She suspected it was genetic, built in, that the mental illness that apparently runs in families ran rampant in ours, and she knew full well the risks. Schizophrenia swoops offstage the one you thought you knew. In his or her place comes a sad alternative, like a changeling. It throws a long shadow, too, the spared suffering from an almost hypochondriac obsession that they too could be carriers”.

Tracey’s mother had planned to be childless and to have a career in law until she met the love of her life, married him, and gave way to his optimistic need to be a father. Patrick, the youngest of the brood, adored his talented, funny, affectionate older sisters, and, perhaps because he was the youngest, was ambushed and nonplussed when the best friend of one of them contacted him to collect his sister off a train, because she was not “doing well”. That, he quickly found out, was an understatement. His beloved sister was suddenly, floridly delusional.

He took her home, trying desperately to follow her wild stories of having had an affair with Warren Beatty before dumping him for Christ. Coming of a generation that experimented with drugs, he assumed that this was episode was some kind of bad trip and that, with treatment, his sister, eight years older than he was, would return to normality and be just fine.

The most shocking reaction, for him, was that of his mother, when she came home later that evening, the expectant light in her eyes dying the moment she saw the condition of her daughter, to be replaced with the infinite sadness of a mother who has lived half her life with the dire dread that the disease which had crippled her mother and great-grandmother would visit one of her children. At a glance, she diagnosed her daughter’s illness.

“It’s the schizophrenia,” she said, and was right.

His sister, Michelle, was eventually hospitalised after a series of shocking actions which included walking naked down the aisle of their local church and verbally abusing the congregation. What bothered Patrick almost as much as Michelle’s illness was the lack of interest shown by another sister, Austine, when he telephoned to tell her what was happening. It never struck him that the disconnected responses he was getting from Michelle’s twin were caused by the disease moving in on her, too. Again, a friend organised her return to the family home.

“Two beautiful girls, child models, each with loads of charm and personality, who left home one day as young women, just as May had, and came home mad,” is how Tracey sums up their story.

Tracey wondered if their shared Irish heritage had anything to do with it, and came to this country to their home county, Roscommon, to explore the family history there. He found that, despite folklore to the contrary, “genetically speaking, the Irish are no more at risk [of schizophrenia] than other people”.

Shortly after the diagnosis of the second daughter’s illness, their mother dropped dead. It was, in some ways, a merciful escape from a life spent visiting daughters suffering the same grievous mental illness as had afflicted her own mother.

When we play out the profitable rituals of Mother’s Day, we rarely think of the mothers for whom the role is more punishment than pleasure, who serve but cannot solve, who do the needful, bear the unbearable, keep up a good front, hold fast to the family secrets.

But we should. Because it’s those women who express motherhood in heroic terms.