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Lending a helping hand
To use the parlance of the time, everybody figured Grace was crazy as a loon.
It began when she started enthusiastically disclosing to family and friends a twilight zone of experiences involving spirits and psychic energies. That's what did her in. As an old psychology professor of mine remarked, "It's okay to be nuts as long as you don't talk about it."
Well, at the insistence of her husband and family doctor, Grace managed to talk herself into a psychiatric hospital. These happenings occurred early in my career when I logged a stint in an inpatient mental health unit. Back then, it was a lot easier to lock someone up on the basis of alleged mental illness than it is today.
“Who's the grandmother?” I asked a nurse the first day I saw her on the ward.
“Oh, that's Grace. She’s not quite all here. Keeps saying she communicates with spirits,” she replied.
“Can she?” I asked straight-faced.
“Sometimes I wonder about you,” my colleague quipped back.
Out of Touch?
That seemed like a legitimate question to me, so I asked to be assigned to Grace and went about getting to know her. From what I could tell, she had been written off as “out of touch with reality” by every professional in the place, not to mention her family and friends. Nobody entertained the notion she might be a normal person having a paranormal experience.
At first glance, Grace did look a tad crazed, but that countenance can be a natural byproduct of being regarded as bonkers by everyone in your life. However, my assessment indicated that, her psychic experiences aside, she seemed entirely sane.
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“So do you see these spirits?” I asked her.
“Not exactly,” she replied. “It's more like I feel their presence.”
“Do they talk to you?” I continued.
“It's not talk. They communicate. It’s dream-like.”
“Why can't I sense these spirits?” I asked.
“Probably because you don't believe in them,” Grace told me. “It's like a child having an imaginary friend. Once all the fuddy-duddy adults convince you it’s just your imagination, you can't sense them anymore.”
All Figured Out?
A few days later we "staffed" Grace, meaning a bunch of highly credentialed eggheads sat together and tried to convince ourselves we had her all figured out. But I wasn't so sure.
“I don't think Grace is mentally ill,” I began. “However, it does appear we're driving her wacky by treating her like she's from another planet.”
“Auditory hallucinations are an indicator of serious mental illness,” someone reminded me.
“Yeah, I took Psych 101 too, but what if she isn't hallucinating? I mean, physicists tell us most of the matter and energy in the universe is invisible to our means of detection. And there are people sitting around this table who believe in an invisible god they can’t prove exists, one they claim communicates with them. Why is her story so different from all that?” I argued.
Some of my co-workers looked at me askance. Mental illness orthodoxy was prominent at that time. But I pressed my point anyway.
“What's more, if Grace had been born into a different time and culture, like a Native American tribe, she might be viewed as someone with a special gift, not a disability. She could be seen as a priestess or at least someone touched by the divine,” I argued.
“Look, there are no spirits floating around the ward talking to her,” someone countered, sneering.
“Maybe, maybe not. But there are a lot of closed minds floating around this room,” I replied.
For her own good, I suggested to Grace she exercise more prudence when deciding who to talk with about her spirit episodes. So, she went back to discussing the weather and the hospital's lousy food and, pretty soon, everyone figured the wonders of modern psychiatry had cured her. But they only shut her up.
“You've learned the secret of sanity in the mental health world,” I told Grace the day she was discharged from the hospital. “Keeping quiet.”
“The spirits are still with me,” she whispered back.
I smiled and leaned close to her ear.
“Say hello for me.”
