Welcome Home, Tom!
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A STRANGE GIFT FROM NURSE RATCHED
As I was putting the finishing touches on a caregiving memoir of my mother, I received, quite out of the blue, a letter from a complete stranger—a genealogist-- informing me that a state hospital on the West Coast had been in possession of a copper canister of my great uncle’s ashes for fifty-nine years and was now reaching out to me to reclaim them.
This was the first I or any sibling had ever heard of this poor man--my great uncle and brother of my suicidal grandmother—who spent the last 15 years of his life holed up in the place where they filmed ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and who had spent his afterlife along with 3800 shelved residents in a locked storage facility dubbed the ‘room of forgotten souls.”
Truth is, you have to be remembered in order to be forgotten. And nobody ever came for him.
Yesterday the doorbell rang. The dogs went nuts. Placing a large package on the steps, the postal lady reaches up for my signature.
“Don’t want to be disrespectful, ma’am. So very sorry for your loss.”
“Oh no, don’t be.” I try to assure her. “He went through so much…a lot worse.”
Chateau-Thierry (WWI) with a bullet in his brain, Leavenworth, homesteading in the Pacific Northwest and then, well, the Cuckoo’s Nest. (I’d read the medical record.)
I wish I could tell my mother how Tom finally got sprung from the asylum. She would not just laugh but roar at how the dark side of the family --that side-- managed to spook us through the ages. She would also urge me, I’m sure, to change my address.
Closing the door, I announce to the dogs “Tom’s home, at long last.” Jumping up, dog eyes register that quizzical look of ‘I don’t see anybody. I’m a good dog.’
No longer #4524, Tom, who would have been 127 years old in July, will now have a name and bookend dates at long last. The ceramic urn of his ashes will be interred snug next to his sister almost a century after her death. What a ride, I think. What a strange gift from Nurse Ratched.
The copper canister where Tom spent the last half-century in a darkened room, now sits on my windowsill--empty with its lid popped open and copper glimmering, stray dust floating almost effervescent in the sunlight.
And the haunting words of a child analyst: “It’s a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found…” An epitaph for Tom, perhaps for all of us. (10.4.19 --from the memoir)
As I was putting the finishing touches on a caregiving memoir of my mother, I received, quite out of the blue, a letter from a complete stranger—a genealogist-- informing me that a state hospital on the West Coast had been in possession of a copper canister of my great uncle’s ashes for fifty-nine years and was now reaching out to me to reclaim them.
This was the first I or any sibling had ever heard of this poor man--my great uncle and brother of my suicidal grandmother—who spent the last 15 years of his life holed up in the place where they filmed ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and who had spent his afterlife along with 3800 shelved residents in a locked storage facility dubbed the ‘room of forgotten souls.”
Truth is, you have to be remembered in order to be forgotten. And nobody ever came for him.
Yesterday the doorbell rang. The dogs went nuts. Placing a large package on the steps, the postal lady reaches up for my signature.
“Don’t want to be disrespectful, ma’am. So very sorry for your loss.”
“Oh no, don’t be.” I try to assure her. “He went through so much…a lot worse.”
Chateau-Thierry (WWI) with a bullet in his brain, Leavenworth, homesteading in the Pacific Northwest and then, well, the Cuckoo’s Nest. (I’d read the medical record.)
I wish I could tell my mother how Tom finally got sprung from the asylum. She would not just laugh but roar at how the dark side of the family --that side-- managed to spook us through the ages. She would also urge me, I’m sure, to change my address.
Closing the door, I announce to the dogs “Tom’s home, at long last.” Jumping up, dog eyes register that quizzical look of ‘I don’t see anybody. I’m a good dog.’
No longer #4524, Tom, who would have been 127 years old in July, will now have a name and bookend dates at long last. The ceramic urn of his ashes will be interred snug next to his sister almost a century after her death. What a ride, I think. What a strange gift from Nurse Ratched.
The copper canister where Tom spent the last half-century in a darkened room, now sits on my windowsill--empty with its lid popped open and copper glimmering, stray dust floating almost effervescent in the sunlight.
And the haunting words of a child analyst: “It’s a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found…” An epitaph for Tom, perhaps for all of us. (10.4.19 --from the memoir)
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Tom’s interment--Oct 9. 2020
Thomas Edwin McGuire was born on July 31, 1893 to Thomas McGuire (a soap peddler) and Mary Ellen Screaney (a weaver)—one of twelve or thirteen children. He was the wandering lost uncle whom my father, Atty. John J. Harrington of Fall River had never met. And to my brothers John Jr., Jim, my deceased twin, Bill, and my beloved Robert who had planned on being here today but passed away on June 30th, Tom was the great uncle we never even knew existed. But throughout their early lives Tom was ever the troubled little brother of our father’s tragically stricken mother Mary Ellen, who died in 1924.
Most people have a story of their life and Tom’s story remains largely unknown to us—[from childhood malnutrition, to a brain injury in WWI, to Leavenworth in his twenties, and a decades-long confinement at Oregon State Hospital],-- but Tom also had a story of his death, sixty years spent on a shelf with 4000 other lost souls in a shed of a state hospital, til some person of conscience insisted that his life and their lives mattered enough to reunite their cremains with their families. Some acts of kindness are timeless.
So after a hundred and twenty-seven years, Tom has found his way home… to Fall River and St. Pat’s. To borrow words from Gibran’s Prophet …
“To behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”
To Tom, who has waited literally two lifetimes for this moment, for this strange belated homecoming, and who endured so many indignities in life, may your spirit be freed in death. And as we commit your cremains to this grave today (‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’), may you truly rest in peace here with your older sister.
And may both your spirits dance.
--Angela von der Lippe
(October 9, 2020)
Thomas Edwin McGuire was born on July 31, 1893 to Thomas McGuire (a soap peddler) and Mary Ellen Screaney (a weaver)—one of twelve or thirteen children. He was the wandering lost uncle whom my father, Atty. John J. Harrington of Fall River had never met. And to my brothers John Jr., Jim, my deceased twin, Bill, and my beloved Robert who had planned on being here today but passed away on June 30th, Tom was the great uncle we never even knew existed. But throughout their early lives Tom was ever the troubled little brother of our father’s tragically stricken mother Mary Ellen, who died in 1924.
Most people have a story of their life and Tom’s story remains largely unknown to us—[from childhood malnutrition, to a brain injury in WWI, to Leavenworth in his twenties, and a decades-long confinement at Oregon State Hospital],-- but Tom also had a story of his death, sixty years spent on a shelf with 4000 other lost souls in a shed of a state hospital, til some person of conscience insisted that his life and their lives mattered enough to reunite their cremains with their families. Some acts of kindness are timeless.
So after a hundred and twenty-seven years, Tom has found his way home… to Fall River and St. Pat’s. To borrow words from Gibran’s Prophet …
“To behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”
To Tom, who has waited literally two lifetimes for this moment, for this strange belated homecoming, and who endured so many indignities in life, may your spirit be freed in death. And as we commit your cremains to this grave today (‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’), may you truly rest in peace here with your older sister.
And may both your spirits dance.
--Angela von der Lippe
(October 9, 2020)
