LY #105 The Endless Mirage of Explanations

These are the explanations for my sister's murder of her child.

1.  The LSD made her do it.

In the weeks preceding the terrible event my father was writing a series of stories about the drug menace in the Bay Area, especially in the schools.  The mainstream press in those days was filled with stories of young people jumping out of windows thinking they could fly.  Early on Dad blamed Sally's behaviors on the mind altering drugs she and those in her milieu were taking.

2.  She was a biologically a paranoid-schizophrenic.  (Nature did it.)

Who made this diagnosis?  I don't know.  Maybe a jailhouse shrink or someone in Agnews State Mental Hospital in Santa Clara (now Sun Microsystems/Agnews Developmental Center).

Someone, probably Mom, told me that Sally had heard voices telling her that she herself was evil, that her child was evil, and that she should kill them both.  Over the next five years until her death she certainly behaved in some of the ways typical of people given that diagnosis.  She would be institutionalized for awhile, put on anti-psychotics, get stable, get released, get tired of the terrible side-effects, go off the drugs, and wind up doing something extreme, like starving herself and then showing up on my parents doorstep screaming at them and talking word salad.  Her self-hurting included more suicide attempts.  Often these attempts seemed to be about sending a message to my parents, like the time when she drove off the cliff near Monterey when my Mom was up in Idaho visiting me. 

Certainly, there was some madness in Dad's family -- the great aunt who occasionally tore her clothes off and went wandering through the streets and the 19th Century religious obsessives.  One might also interrogate the alcohol and cigarettes consumed constantly by both parents during pregnancy as well as an almost killing fever she experienced as a baby.  And knowing where they were living in my sister's baby years (with my cat-loving aunt Huldah in Pocatello), Toxoplasma gondii might also be part of the witches brew.

Then again, I was once told by a psychologist that in the seventies, paranoid-schizophrenia was something of a catch-all and often meaningless label.

3.  The psychiatric establishment did it.

The was an explanation Mom gave me a few times.  She blamed a psychiatrist for telling Sally to "express all her emotions."  In other words, Mom thought psychiatry was to blame for Sally acting on her rage.  Mom didn't believe in expressing anger or sadness openly.

4.  Dad and Mom's behavior toward her in childhood made her crazy.  (Nurture did it.)

In the late seventies and early eighties I blamed my Dad.  At the time I was under the influence of a variety of Sixties psychologists, including Jules Henry (Pathways to Madness) and R. D. Laing (Knots).  Both men believed that environmental stressors within families were at the heart of schizophrenia.   According to Professor Emeritus Victor Daniels, R. D. Laing considered schizophrenia "A sane response to an insane situation. This is Laing's comment about what 'going crazy' entailed."

What behaviors?  Well, Dad was a drunk in my early childhood so there was all that chaos around the time of Sally's adolescence.  He pushed her toward perfection and didn't recognize her unless she was doing big things and succeeding and being special.  And she was special and perfect and high functioning.  Until she wasn't. 

My Mom was great at setting up double-bind situations in which the other person, often one of her children, was punished whichever decision that person made.  She had trouble letting go of her kids, letting them go out on their own.  I remember one Christmas before her breakdown when Sally gave Mom a copy of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and called attention to the section on Children: 

Your children are not your children. 
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

5.  Sally experienced a virulent form of postpartum depression.

This was suggested to me by a member of the close family and it makes some sense.

6.  Cultural variables acting through my parents and later through my sister's social system in a devil's dance with genetic inheritance and early brain damage overdetermined the tragedy.

This is my explanation now.  Everything did it.  And because her story is like a Greek tragedy -- my sister was a brilliant star whose secret vulnerability brought her down - I'll say it was the Moira - spinning, weaving, and cutting her as they cut all of us to fit the form that god requires.