Of My Father’s Tears
I was having trouble sleeping. I was on edge, waiting for the familiar to happen. The day itself had been precipitous–like all days before Ken’s scheduled return to the Institution. There had been a fight, not a physical fight, but still, a knock-down, drag-em-out screaming match. I was used to this, not because I was no longer affected by the screaming, but because I had simply seen this sort of thing play out so many times before. My body still shook with fear, and I still prayed for the fight to end. Like the other times, I pleaded for my brother and father to stop: “The neighbours will hear!”
I was conscious of my own breathing. Each breath required a deliberate effort. Ken’s epileptic cry caught me in mid breath. There it is, that’s what I had been waiting for. “Dad… Dad!” I could hear his feet hit the floor, and then I could hear him rifling through the kitchen drawer to find Ken’s spoon. Bent and tarnished, it was the one that dad always used. Soon, he would be pounding up the stairs to our bedroom. But now, I could see Ken’s neck turning slowly and stiffly to the left, locking into place. His eyes had already rolled up in his head, and his arms were contracted against his chest. His legs crossed and tightened into rigid planks, pulling at his hips… Patrick Chan at the apex of a Triple Lutz. By this time, Ken’s breathing had paused and his lips had turned a pale, cyanotic blue. His jaw was clamped in a tonic vice; his body was preparing for a volcanic eruption.
It began as it always had, slowly, working up momentum. Each convulsion triggered the next. They built up steam, becoming faster and more violent. As the violence of each convulsion increased in speed and intensity, Ken’s bed began to rattle against the wall and then inch across the floor. His breathing, while restarted, was heavy and stertorous, as violent as his convulsions.
It was then that dad ran into our bedroom, dressed only in his sagging, greyish-white jockey shorts. Since mom had died, nothing was quite the same. Clothes were never as clean, and the house was never as tidy. Appliances broke down and weren’t repaired. Life had become more random, more unorganized. Ken’s trips home from the Institution had become more infrequent.
Dad took the spoon and wedged it between Ken’s now chattering teeth to prevent him from swallowing his tongue. It would still be years before dad would learn that this could do more harm than good, that the odds of shattering Ken’s teeth were far greater than the odds of swallowing his tongue.
“It’s alright son… it’s alright… I’m sorry son.” Ken remained unconscious and couldn’t hear dad’s soft, caressing voice. He couldn’t see his eyes well with tears, or feel his loosened grip on the spoon, and then the gentle brush of his cheeks. The eruption had slowly subsided; the clonic spasms had slowed and then stopped; the stertor changed to a deep, unconscious snore. Dad wiped the edges of Ken’s mouth with a tissue from the bedside table, and on his way downstairs, turned out the light, and for a second time, wished us both a good night.
As always, Ken would sleep through the night. He would awaken by mid-morning with no memory of the grand mal seizure, and of the chaotic neural discharges that so violently convulsed his body.
Following an early lunch, our aunt and uncle arrived to drive us an hour west to the small prairie community where the Institution was located. Our father had never owned a car. Instead, we walked or took the streetcar wherever we needed to go. When she was younger, our mother had driven an old, borrowed grain truck during harvest on her small family farm. As infants, her parents were among the first Mennonite settlers to arrive in Manitoba from South Russia… part of an agreement forged with John A. MacDonald. This group of Kleine Gemeinde, or “Little Church” members, was formed in the Molotschna Mennonite settlement in 1814. They were a strict, uncompromising sect that rejected “worldly” interests and pursuits. They were pacifists who could not abide the compromises made by the main church with Czar Alexander II in order to avoid military service. To the Kleine Gemeinde, there was little difference between military servitude and serving as a uniformed forest ranger. The Canada-Mennonite Privilegium guaranteed freedom from military service as well as educational and religious autonomy. These privileges, though, were not without contention, particularly as war years approached.
This first wave of Mennonites settled on land that had been put aside for them, dispersing indigenous populations further south. The East Reserve, as it was known, became home to Stony Brook, Manitoba, and eventually, to our mother and my brother Ken. It was above the town’s lone bank that Ken and our mother lived while dad, a Geordie from northern England, was overseas during World War II. Over time, Ken learned to speak Plautdietsch, a hybrid of German and Dutch spoken by Mennonites, and the only language spoken by our maternal grandmother. “Dat is dummtüch!”, “Mak di üt’n stoom!”, and “Werden Sie nicht frech!” were phrases that worked their way into Ken’s Low German vocabulary. These admonishments would later be repeated at the Institution: “that’s nonsense”, “go away”, and “don’t interrupt”. Because of his German heritage, some residents and staff members at the Institution called Ken “square head”.
It was deathly sombre inside the car as our uncle’s black 1949 Ford sedan neared the Institution. Grey clouds draped the Institution like a funeral shroud. The Institution seemed to create its own Karloff-esque climate. A collection of bleak and forbidding nineteenth century brick buildings stood on sprawling rural grounds, incapable of conveying warmth. As a “Home for Incurables”, it once contained a mixture of the aged and infirm; the spastic and the epileptic; the insane and the feebleminded; and those who for other reasons, were not wanted. Now, this relic of archeology was simply home to the feebleminded, that is… the “mentally deficient”: twelve hundred idiots, imbeciles and morons, according to the day’s nomenclature.
The buildings were clustered into units for ease of administration: East Wing, West Wing, North Wing and South Wing. Each of the buildings’ “wards” was given an inviting, pastoral name: Rosewood, Cherry Blossom, Northern Pine, Cotton Wood, Silver Birch, Columbine…
Located on the bottom level of a two-story building, Silver Birch was part of the North Wing cluster. The upper level housed administrative offices and served as control central for the one nurse who oversaw all two hundred and twenty North Wing residents during the overnight. Each ward within a cluster was allotted one attendant to provide direct supervision. This pattern of overnight supervision was repeated throughout the Institution. A recipe for certain disaster.
Now twenty-five years old, Ken had lived at the Institution since the age of nineteen, an uncommonly old age for a first admission to the Institution. Without a community support system in place, and increasingly unable to cope, our parents had finally consented to Ken’s admission, and in the process… had permanently fractured our mother’s heart. Like John Singer in Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, mom’s dedication was unqualified. But unlike Singer, her lonely, broken heart did not end with a gunshot to her chest, but with a massive stroke four days before Christmas, and three years after Ken’s institutionalization.
Ken had been admitted to the School for Mental Defectives in 1956 with a diagnosis of “moron”, or as Ken and others like him were ranked by institutional staff, “high-grades”. On this patch of post-war prairie, the hoax was that the institution was not an actual “school”, but instead, a penitentiary, a place to simply keep people in as God-forsaken a manner as possible. It would be nineteen more years before a light would be shone on the abhorrent conditions at the Institution. Before grainy black and white images of naked, feces-stained men and women curled up on cold, barren floors made their way onto evening news reports. Before stories of abuse became public knowledge. And before ten lives were lost in a tragic, overnight fire.
The Institution, built in 1890, was chronically overpopulated and understaffed, despite its in-house nursing school. Student nurses spent their final year of “training” washing walls and mopping floors. High grades were commonly given responsibility for the “low-grades”; for the idiots; for individuals who could not care for themselves. Attendants recruited from the local community and unpaid prison inmates on early release programs filled out the staffing requirement.
To staff members, all institutional residents were children, regardless of age. As a collective, they were “the kids” and as individuals they were Kenny and Billy, Bobby and Joycey. This meant that for staff members, crayons and colouring books were necessary tools of the trade. In later years, elevated, plexiglass-enclosed TVs eased the workload.
As we made our way through the visitors’ entrance to Silver Birch and into the receiving room, a mixture of urine and disinfectant filled my nostrils and clung to my clothes. The receiving room was a sickly green colour, shedding flakes of its lead-based paint onto the hard tile floor. Footsteps echoed in the hallway long before we heard the clatter of a skeleton key in the lock. The heavy metal door to the ward groaned open. A ward attendant greeted us, a thick wad of skeleton keys hung from a black boot lace that tied to the belt loop of his blue jeans… part of the standard uniform. “Any new clothes to be tagged?”
As Ken walked down the aisle toward his bed, he could hear the crackling, fading strains of Onward Christian Soldiers as a small, balding, middle-aged man sat on his lower bunk, tuning his Sunday radio… “with the cross of Jesus going on before”. The staff called him “Bingo”. Every day, Bingo stood at the south entrance to the Institution’s grounds and greeted everyone who entered: “Still prayin’ for ya … still prayin’ for ya.” Hour after hour, he was the Institution’s unofficial sentry, its own Walmart greeter. At the far end of the aisle, an attendant called out loudly: “Hey shithead!” A young man with a tousled mop of red hair turned and smiled. “See, he likes it” the attendant said to a new staff member. They both laughed.
Walking further down the aisle, Ken passed an elderly man sitting on the toilet. The entrance to the bathroom gaped open. All of the stall doors had been removed, and the grainy, single-ply toilet paper was under lock and key.
Beside the bathroom was the shower room. The cement floor had a concave-ish appearance, with a gradient that led to a slightly scummy drainage grate. A two-inch by ten-foot black rubber hose attached to the shower room wall in the manner of a water wand at a do-it-yourself carwash. With it, an attendant could hose down a good-sized cluster of naked men in little more than a few minutes if he was efficient.
The on-duty nurse met Ken when he arrived at his lower bunk. “Time for your meds, Kenny.”
It was hot and airless on the ward, and Ken’s regular mixture of phenobarbital, phenytoin, thorazine and procyclidine clotted in a paper medicine cup on a small green dispensing tray. The procyclidine, an attempt to control the extrapyramidal side effects of the antipsychotic, thorazine, only partially stemmed the tremors in Ken’s hands. The thorazine was standard issue on admission for all men and women of a threatening size.
“How was your holiday, Kenny?” Many of the nursing staff believed that “the residents” were “worse” when they returned from their trips home, and some resented the need to “re-educate” returning residents. The sense of this always made me uncomfortable. It was still some years later, after our father had died, that the Director of Nursing informed me, with a curious amount of energy, that Ken would never “make it” in the community because he was “just too bossy”. It seemed that expressions of independence competed with the dependency of intellectual disability as reasons to be detained in the Institution. Compliance… doing as you’re told… was highly valued in the Institution. Non-compliance risked time in the lockup and an increased dose of thorazine.
In later years, during trips home, Ken would load up with job applications from fast food restaurants, hoping that a job would be his ticket out of the Institution. Always a hard worker, Ken had delivered the Star Weekly before admission to the Institution. The legend was that subscribers could leave monthly payments in their mailboxes and always receive exact change in return. Now, he was the neighbourhood jester, someone to be humoured: “Why sure you can have an application, and here’s a cookie, have a good day Kenny”.
An attendant dealt slices of dry toast onto the surface of Ken’s breakfast table with the indifference of a bored blackjack dealer. An indifference that drained the humanity from those residing at Silver Birch… these nijch follstendijch… these defectives. A low-grade scuttled over to snatch up an unclaimed slice but was quickly chased back to his table by an attendant armed with a rolled up Star Weekly. Bingo flinched as the attendant passed his table… muscle memory intact. He cut a wide swath around the attendant as he prepared to take on his day’s sentry duties.
Ken got up from the breakfast table and adjusted his glasses, still pieced together by strips of electrician’s tape, a remembrance of an earlier scuffle with another high-grade. He grabbed his work clothes from the hook in his locker and changed out of his gaping, striped pajamas. The name tag sewn onto the waistband of Ken’s jeans said “La Roque”, while the faded label on the inside of the collar of his long-sleeved, flannel shirt, said “MacDonald”. After getting dressed and released from the ward, Ken took up his position at the back of the dray, ready to pick up the day’s sacks of laundry from the wards. Ken was strong and was tasked with the bulk of the back-breaking job while the salaried employees issued instructions from the truck’s cab. As the old dray rattled by the south gate, half loaded with laundry, Bingo called out to Ken: “Still prayin’ for ya Kenny… still prayin’ for ya.”
“Ekj begoodjen… I’ll be good”, Ken wept as the dray turned left, toward its next pickup. “I’ll be good” he wept as he remembered the brush of dad’s hand on his cheek, and our father’s soft, tearful voice as the attendant escorted Ken through the reception room door and onto the ward: “It’s alright son… It’s alright… I’m sorry son.”
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About the Author
John Simpson is a widower and retired professor of psychiatric nursing. His work, interests, and volunteer activities have focused on the lives of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities, as well as on the lives of others in positions of social disadvantage. Along with his late wife Laurel, John was a long-distance bicycle traveller. For seventy-six years, John was also the brother of Kenneth Roy Simpson.