Stories help us to understand the world around us, says Robin Kelly. But we still need to speak about the things that remain unsaid.
Listen to the story as it was told at The Watercooler storytelling night or read on. (WARNING:This piece includes frank discussion of suicide and other violence. If you, or someone you know is struggling, help is available.)
We live our lives surrounded by stories that help us understand, help us process and help us accept the world around us. But every storyteller omits. They leave out something too painful, or too confronting. They smooth out the rough edges and cover over the cracks.
This story is about my family. It’s about how I’ve come to appreciate the importance of those things that remain unspoken.
A few years ago I started feeling a tightness in my head. Like a band squeezing my skull, or a pressure building up from within. I wondered if I might have some sort of brain inflammation. ‘Chronic encephalitis’ - sounded like a reasonable diagnosis. Sleep and alcohol seemed to be the only things that gave me relief, and I indulged liberally in both.
The feeling built up around people and around work. I went to a doctor and there was nothing obviously wrong. So my thoughts turned to my grandfather, Graeme. He had things wrong with his head, too. I mean that literally. He had paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
This was not a taboo topic in my family growing up, it formed part of the mythology of my mother’s family – this eccentric, ambitious, and charismatic man. Suffering from a mental illness that resulted in divorce, sure. Confined to a rest home for most of my life and the last of his, sure. But he’s a grand figure in the stories my family tell.
I kept wondering if there was a connection between the pressure inside my head and Graeme. Maybe this was how it started? I heard that smoking weed at a young age increases your chances of developing psychosis, and I grew up in Dunedin, so there was that.
I started delving into the stories we’ve told again and again in our family to see if there was anything I could learn. Anything that would help me understand what was going on.
I heard that smoking weed at a young age increases your chances of developing psychosis, and I grew up in Dunedin, so there was that.
The narrative starts in a very familiar place. The time my grandmother, Valerie, met Graeme. It was at a party at his house in 1949. She was 17 and he was a couple of years older. Graeme’s family were all there. His mother, Welc, was sitting on the stairs finishing her makeup, which meant coating her face in cornflour and painting on eyelashes and big arching eyebrows. Everyone called her ‘Welc’ although it wasn’t her real name, and like any good myth the origins of the nickname are unclear. It was short for ‘welcome’, as in ‘welcome mat’ (by all accounts she wasn’t a particularly welcoming woman). Most would say she got this moniker because she would sleep on the kitchen floor by the back door. She would maintain it was because everyone tried to walk all over her.
Graeme’s sister, Tina, was there too. She was an artist who had been crippled by polio, so she would plant herself in the middle of the room and lord over the conversation. Her boyfriend was also there. He wore a heavy beard which housed real canaries, and would later go on to claim he was the second coming of Christ.
Graeme’s father came late to the party, dressed in the full white coat and tails of a grandmaster of the Masonic Lodge. He apparently just looked around the room, harrumphed, and walked back out again. This was fairly typical behaviour. He was stern, distant and aloof.
And in the middle of these characters, who I assure you are absolutely real, was Graeme. Sure, I’ve given the game away – Graeme was not a mentally well man – but at this stage of his life he held the family together. The one sane person in the madness. Valerie recalls leaving for a date with Graeme to see a movie. Tina, who was chronically depressive and very dramatic, had her head in the oven and the gas on. Graeme, not wanting to be late for the movie, simply walked Valerie out of the house and turned the gas off at the mains. The man had a certain flair.
A few years later, Graeme and Valerie were married and Valerie was eight months pregnant with her first child, my mother. They lived with Tina in a small flat in Melbourne, sharing a twin room, with Graeme and the heavily pregnant Valerie sharing a single bed.
Tina wasn’t well and was again suicidal, so whenever Valerie left for work she would hide all the knives in the house. She would tell us these stories of having to scramble around on the kitchen floor, heavily pregnant, just to get a knife to make dinner. Once she overlooked a breadknife and came home to find Tina had slashed her wrists, so they piled her into a taxi to the hospital, holding her wrists above her head to stop blood loss.
These were the stories I grew up with.
In the telling and retelling of it this night becomes like a scene from ‘The Shining’. Graeme became irrational. Violent. Threatening.
My family did their best to de-stigmatise mental illness. This was all part of the Bethell family way – a pragmatic realism, always understanding and accepting. As a family we transformed these characters. Graeme became My Grandfather the Entrepreneur, My Grandfather the Inventor. They were My Grandparents the Restauranteurs, rubbing shoulders with Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra in the Melbourne night clubs.
We also talked about the night Graeme became ‘My Grandfather the Schizophrenic’. Valerie and Graeme, and their two young daughters – my mother and aunt – were living out on a farm at the time. Graeme’s mental health was worsening. In the telling and retelling of it this night becomes like a scene from ‘The Shining’. Graeme became irrational. Violent. Threatening.
Valerie was afraid for her life, and for the safety of her daughters. With Graeme advancing towards her she stood in the hallway, in front of the door to the children’s bedroom, putting her body between him and them. She knew he was going to kill them all. With the stress and pressure building inside her, she starting bleeding from her nose and mouth. The sight of blood hit Graeme hard. He crumbled. She says he turned to her and pleaded “please, I’ll do anything you like, just please stop bleeding”.
In an effort to calm everything down, Valerie made dinner and got Graeme some sleeping pills. He refused to eat what she had made, but requested something else instead. Valerie did her best to oblige, and Graeme ate his meal, took the pills and went to sleep.
She later found Graeme’s diary. In it he wrote about this night. He said, in this diary, that he knew the ‘sleeping pills’ his wife was making him take were actually poison. He wrote about how he deserved no better, about the unrelenting pressure in his head, about requesting a final meal and taking the poison pills. Ending it all.
It was the night his schizophrenia made him believe his wife was trying to kill him, but I believe there was something else that made him, of his own free will, take those pills anyway.
That’s where the stories stop. That’s where the mythology we’ve built up ends. But those stories didn’t help me understand the feeling in my head. They’re stories and they’ve taken on the allure and romance of good drama.
I decided that I needed to understand what wasn’t talked about. Through long and difficult conversations with my mother and grandmother I’ve come to know about the things that remain unsaid. I came to learn about the impact mental illness really had on my family.
Through long and difficult conversations with my mother and grandmother I’ve come to know about the things that remain unsaid. I came to learn about the impact mental illness really had on my family.
I learned that during their time living together, Graeme and his sister Tina had carried on a love affair. The guilt of this had haunted Graeme and eventually broken him. Years later, Tina succeeded in ending her own life. She took sleeping pills.
Six months after Tina’s death, Valerie’s own sister, Gwen, walked out of a movie theatre and disappeared. Her body was found six weeks later. She had bought a rifle, walked to the nearest rubbish dump and shot herself. I can’t help but think that she felt that pressure building and building, and could only think of one way of relieving it.
These stories aren’t glamorous. They aren’t romantic. But they’ve been crucial in allowing me to understand what’s going on in my own head. Today, like most days in recent memory, I’ve noted the pressure building in my head. Today, like all those other days, I think that if there was a way to make it stop I would. If there was an ‘off’ switch, I’d switch it.
This isn’t me with my head in the oven, and it isn’t me walking out of the movie theatre, but it is a daily reality. Stories are incredibly important. They keep us safe. They help us to understand, process and accept the world around us.
But for myself, for my family, and for so many people in all of our lives we need to speak about those things that remain unsaid. We need to speak about them now – to the people we love, and to people like yourselves with the compassion to listen.
Kia kaha.
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held at The Basement Theatre. If you have a story to tell email thewatercoolernz@gmail.com or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Giselle Clarkson
This content is brought to you with funding support from New Zealand On Air.