Rumpus Sectional: An Excerpt from Gayle Brandeis's The Art of Misdiagnosis

Prologue

DECEMBER 2009

After my mom hangs herself, I become Nancy Drew. I am looking for clues, for evidence. Answers. I put on a detective chapeau and then I won't have to vesture my daughter hat, so I can acquit combing through her business firm. I wrap my new baby to my chest with a commodities of dark-green cloth—my baby born exactly ane calendar week before my mom'south death—and recommence the dig.

When my sister and I offset ventured into our mom'due south bedroom the day of her memorial, Elizabeth said the space was a perfect metaphor for our mom—lovely and elegant on the surface, total chaos underneath. In the end, our mom couldn't hide the disarray; everything had spilled out, spilled over. Papers were strewn on every surface, leaking out from under her brocade-swathed bed. I aptitude down that day and found an erstwhile Mother's Mean solar day card I had written as a teenager, one that gushed almost how she was "forever doing things to make me well." I cringe to meet it now.

My sister has just flown home to Toronto; information technology'southward harder to sift through everything without her here. In the commencement folder I open afterward she leaves, I discover notes our mom had taken during a workshop on the seasons of grief. A surprised little express mirth kicks in my throat; she's left a guidebook of sorts. The starting time season, according to her notes, is the "Season of Grieving." Her notes say "Shock—shipwreck of our soul. Disbelief—Lost. Didn't know the world anymore. You but don't fit anyplace. The true 'you lot' is non present." Okay, I can relate. The baby on my breast is a life belong; without him, I would exist sinking.

I read on to see what I take to look forward to. The second flavor, her notes tell me, is "Season of the Death of the Soul": "Enter into a landscape for which in that location are no maps. Walk into the long night dark with no guarantee to notice your way out. Nosotros must learn to wait without promise. We may hope for the incorrect things." Bang-up. Tin't wait.

Next comes "Third season of mourning"—"Nosotros grieve considering nosotros have dared to love and we grieve because we dare to dearest again. Love is the nigh difficult chore of all, but all is a preparation for love. Fear of loss makes loving and then difficult. Death is the bride of honey." Death doesn't seem similar a bride to me. Death seems more than like a gangster, a gangster of love, and not the Steve Miller, space cowboy kind—this is the ruthless, brutal, kind, the kind with complete disregard for decorum. A bride leaves pastel, sugar-coated almonds on the table; a gangster leaves blood.

In the 4th season, nosotros are supposed to "Open to the larger story that grief can interrupt." "Creation of a empathetic heart," her notes say. "Our wounds open up u.s.a. up to others, not only to other people, but to all of creation." Maybe someday I'll get there.

I keep excavation.

I discover a motion picture of my mom and Eli, the love of her life, her sister Rochelle's psychiatrist, the married man she loved from the time she was sixteen until he died of cancer ten years later. I've never seen him before; she had always described him as dashing, magnetic, but he looks like a bulbous old lech. His arm is around her in the trivial blackness and white snapshot tucked into an sometime address book—she is radiant, so happy; he looks then happy, as well, his arm around a beautiful teenage girl, claiming her when she couldn't claim him, although her oldest sister Sylvia told me she knew almost the relationship; she said there was an free energy around the two of them when the family went to visit Rochelle in the psychiatric ward.

My mom had told me Eli was the blood brother of a Supreme Court justice, but when I look upwards the judge on Wikipedia, I tin't detect any mention of a brother named Eli. I practise find an article almost Eli in the archives of the Chicago Tribune, still—an article that says he had been kidnapped and held for a sizable bribe, that says he had escaped. It appears to have happened the year they met. Is that what made my mom autumn in honey with him? Is that what led to her obsession with large sums of greenbacks? I notice a note about an independent-study high school she briefly attended on Michigan Avenue. I follow a hunch and await up Eli's old part accost. Michigan Avenue, too. Had he arranged for her to go there? Did they sneak off together during luncheon breaks?

Nancy Drew, Nancy Drew, Nancy Drew.

Asher has fallen comatose. I unknot the wrap from my body, lay him gently on my mom's bed. He stirs a moment; I allow him nurse for a few sips until he nods off again. The pale greenish textile unfurled adjacent to him is super long—at least four yards. It could hands exist used as a noose. Asher has never rolled over in his life, only I imagine him rolling across the bed, looping the heavy cotton around his neck. I gather up the wrap and prepare it on the end table. When I stand, my shirt is plastered to my breast with sweat and milk. I stretch it frontward, allow the air bear upon my skin, let the sudden chill push button me back to work.

I detect a list of my mom's fears:

Poor health
Loneliness
Angry feelings
Fear of daughters not loving me
Depression
Always friendless
Getting old—older looking
Clutter—mail service disorganization
Cats
Ants

I find her copy of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and open to a folio she has marked: "We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against u.s.a.. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has information technology abysses, those abysses vest to united states of america; are dangers at mitt, we must effort to beloved them."

I find a scrap of newspaper that says "TAP WATER BURNED LIPS 10/17/09" adjacent to a near empty drinking glass.

I discover a letter of the alphabet dated November 20 to an Oceanside constabulary officeholder who had manifestly visited her house: "I was taken ashamed by your title but presume you can meet I am not a psychotic Oceanside resident," she had written. Afterward in the letter, she accused Dad's "cyber goons" of wiping out her computer and stealing files relating to the documentary she was producing, The Fine art of Misdiagnosis. I wonder what the officer'due south championship was, wonder why he hadn't recognized her equally psychotic—co-ordinate to the alphabetic character, he had suggested she get a restraining order against my dad. If that officeholder had brought her in on an involuntary psychiatric hold, where would she, where would we, be today?

I find a red clothbound journal with a handwritten title page within, "A Wife (in proper noun only) by Arlene Baylen-Brandeis," followed by a few poems, similar "invisible mom":

adult daughter
walks past me
to lavish dear and
affection upon
her father
don't you know?
i'm the one
whose
starving

Most of the journal is blank, just waves of guilt waft toward me from every folio. I feel even more guilty when I realize I want to correct her misspellings, change "whose" to "who'southward," add some punctuation. You criticize me even when I'm expressionless, I tin hear her say.

I observe a shopping list with the word "Life" on information technology. She meant the cereal, a staple in her house, simply the word looks so poignant, her desire for Life. The last give-and-take she ever said to me.

I find a alphabetic character she had written but never sent to me and Elizabeth in 2005, when she thought she was dying of eye valve illness. Part of information technology says "I call back I have slightly more than a year to live. Oct '06, is the time I will pass into the next phase. Celebrate my life. I did it my way, and accept no regrets. I hope the two of you and Dad also accept no regrets." It closes with "I know y'all'll both keep my retentiveness live with your precious children. I will be a good spirit for all of you." I observe myself wishing that this was her existent terminal alphabetic character, her true last words. I wish I could imagine her equally a skillful spirit.

I as well find a hand-written will from her own mother within a brittle envelope. In information technology, she bequeaths the family unit firm on Mozart St. to my mom, Rochelle, and Don, "as you need a Home + y'all three are all sick + have to shift for yourselves." I wonder what illness she was referring to regarding my mom. Rochelle and their brother, Don, were both mentally ill. Did she know my mom was, equally well, or was this related to the rheumatic fever—or at least what was called rheumatic fever—that plagued my mom when she was young? My grandmother also wrote that she hoped her seven other children would empathise and that there should exist "know hard feelings." I go along looking at that phrase, which repeats three times in the will, same spelling—"know hard feelings." That's what I want to permit myself do at present—know hard feelings. Face up them and know them head on. Something that's never been like shooting fish in a barrel for me.

And maybe it is my desire to know hard feelings that leads me to open up the brown paper handbag from the coroner's office—the large grocery sack folded over and stapled close like a school dejeuner for a giant—that contains the wearing apparel my mom was wearing when she killed herself. I've felt so removed from the physicality of her death. Every dark, merely equally I'm about to autumn asleep, images barge into my head of her hanging herself—the wrap, the drop; sounds clomp into my caput, also, the unlike gasps and gurgles that might have issued from her throat, but these are phantom imaginings, not the visceral reality of her suicide. I appreciate how everyone wanted to protect me in my postpartum state, simply part of me wishes I could have seen her body in the mortuary, wishes I could have gone to the coroner's office to think her things. This I can do, right hither, right now. I can touch the apparel my mother died in.

Everything is bunched up within the bag as if it had been ripped off her body without whatever intendance, and this makes it worse, knowing her body was treated roughly, no tenderness in the undressing.

My hands shake as I pull out one detail later another:

  • A blackness, white, and gray bouclé jacket with large black buttons.
  • The red ribbed short-sleeved turtleneck she wore in her senior modeling photograph, wrenched inside out.
  • Black Chico's pants, also within out, smelling of urine.
  • White panties, inside out, too, smelling even more strongly of urine. I acquire later that when someone hangs, their bladder lets loose.
  • Tan and brown tiger-striped bra; this touches me, somehow, this affect of wildness she carried beneath her dress.
  • Ryka sneakers, white with silverish trim, the lining bunched upwardly within as if her feet had been yanked out, smelling of sweat.
  • Elizabeth's tan and black batik scarf, the one our mom had draped on her head the final dark we saw her. Is this what she used to take her life?

I touch each piece of clothing gently and weep, laying them out on the floor around me the way I would lay out baby clothes when I was pregnant, imagining the life that was going to fill up them; now, though, I imagine my mom's life ebbing away within the fabric. I try to sense any lingering traces of her aliveness here—perhaps a lingering trace of Joy, her signature fragrance—but all I odor is her death. I hadn't known to set up myself for this, the scent of her death. The olfactory property reminds me of when a baby raccoon had died under my business firm many years ago; information technology took a while to notice the source, and the stench kept getting stronger and stronger. But that was a dead animal, I tell myself, until I realize that'southward exactly what she was, likewise; in the hours between her decease and the fourth dimension she was institute, she had already started to decay. I apace stuff everything dorsum into the bag, tum heaving, the smell of her body burned into my brain.

***

Rumpus original fine art by Clare Nauman.

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Excerpted from The Fine art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother'south Suicide by Gayle Brandeis (Beacon Press, 2017). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

Read Kelly Thompson's interview with Gayle Brandeis well-nighThe Fine art of Misdiagnosishere.

Gayle Brandeis (@gaylebrandeis) is the author, most recently, of the novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns (Black Lawrence Printing), longlisted for the Bram Stoker Award, and the memoir The Art of Misdiagnosis (Beacon Press). Earlier books include the poetry collection The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press), the craft book Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne) and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement judged by Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Hong Kingston, Self Storage (Ballantine), Delta Girls (Ballantine), and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt BYR), which was called as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction accept been widely published in places such as The Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, O (The Oprah Magazine), The Rumpus, Salon, Longreads, and more, and accept received numerous honors, including the Columbia Journal Nonfiction Award, a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poesy Honor, Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2016, 2019, and 2020, the QPB/Story Mag Curt Story Award and the 2018 Multi Genre Maverick Writer Accolade. She was named A Writer Who Makes a Difference by The Writer Magazine, and served as Inlandia Literary Laureate from 2012-2014, focusing on bringing writing workshops to underserved communities. She teaches at Antioch Academy and Sierra Nevada University. More from this author →