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A Godly Woman

KATHLEEN SCHEINER

Mental illness runs in my family, but it’s always been treated like a dirty secret. Nobody wants to talk about it much, maybe thinking the problem will go away if they ignore it.

The sun beat down—high noon in Missouri—and all the flowers had been arranged along with the Precious Moments figurines into an impromptu serenity garden for the memorial. We were fanned out across the yard in lawn chairs, and I made sure to face the fire pit where my uncle, aunt, and cousins burned their trash rather than paying the city to cart it away. I could see empty plastic two-liter bottles that used to hold soda fused together in strange clear sculptures, along with mattress coils and broken flower pots. I remember Grandma always having a bottle of Pepsi tucked under one batwing arm. She loved her sweets.

My uncle starts out the service, talking about the godly woman that Marjorie Billings was. I’m surprised to see everybody nodding and hearing the Amens coming out of them.

I remember Grandma running down the street naked to get a newspaper from the Wawa, talking to terrorists through her geranium, and telling me about how different aunts and uncles were conceived after a drink too many. Godly, I don’t remember. Well, there was that one time she thought she was the Virgin Mary and all the children in the world were hers.

We call it the family illness—it runs heavy in the females on my mom’s side, and my grandmother got a heavy dose of it. We never had a name for it until the 1980s—bipolar disorder. But every year Grandma had to go to the mental hospital—the longest time for a year after my Uncle Charlie was born, the kid she liked the least. “Just never cottoned to him,” she said. They tried shock treatments on her that year.

I used to be terrified it would soon be my turn. I’d worry, Are my emotions normal? Am I feeling too much? Will the trembling turn into something I can’t control?

I asked Grandma, “What does it feel like going crazy?”

She smiled like she was remembering a long lost love. “It’s the best feeling in the world. Sometimes I can’t wait for it to come back.”

I didn’t worry after that.