IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE - CHAPTER 2

   In the Spring of 1962 mother picked me up from school early one day and as we walked into the front door of our house we noticed pills strewn all over the floor. It looked like someone had taken pills by the handful and had thrown them everywhere. We could hear the sound of moaning coming from the bathroom. Daddy was naked except for a white wife beater tee shirt and he was slumped forward on the toilet. He had attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. Mother asked him several times what kind of pills he had taken. She called an ambulance and they rushed him to the hospital. The pills had affected his brain and at the hospital he was hallucinating. Mother told me that he kept talking about a family of cats living behind a heater in his hospital room. This probably sounds bad what I am going to say but I have always wished that he had died. 

 When daddy was out of danger he was committed to Madison Sanitarium. It was operated by the Seventh Day Adventists. He was supposed to stay ten weeks and while he was there he underwent electroshock therapy. Or as it is actually called electroconvulsive therapy. It was first introduced in 1938 by an Italian psychiatrist named Ugo Cerletti. Electroshock therapy was used to treat depression which is why they used it on daddy. They also used it on schizophrenia, mania, and catatonia. There has been an ongoing debate over the years as to the benefits of electroshock therapy. One of the side-effects of it is short and long term memory loss. I saw this in Daddy after he was released from the hospital. Daddy hated shock treatments and I believe he was traumatized by them. He talked about patients heads being swollen after taking ET. I don't know if he was imagining this due to his mental state or if there was any truth to this. ET was given in America under anesthesia and it usually caused the patient to go into convulsions.

  Mother and I regularly went to the hospital to visit daddy which was a real burden. We were still living in West Nashville and mother was running herself to death. She was managing the store, taking care of us, and going to see daddy on top of everything else. She was the only one allowed in to visit him and I always waited out in the waiting room. Didi told me later that daddy would beg mother to sign the papers to have him released from the hospital. Under this relentless pressure she finally gave in and had him released after about six weeks. Many in the family believed that she made a mistake doing this but I don't believe it would have changed the eventual outcome at all. If it had been up to me at the time he wouldn't have gotten out of that hospital. I loved my dad but I wanted to be happy again and the way he was acting I knew that wasn't going to happen. At least as long as he was around. Daddy was even worse after he got out of the hospital. This experience in my life has made me very distrustful of the mental health industry in America. He had memory problems and for a while severe back pain. One night we went to the Belle Aire drive-in theater on Charlotte Avenue. Daddy had hay fever and he was sneezing quite a lot that night. Every time he sneezed he would scream out in pain. The back pain may have been a side effect of the shock treatment. Daddy was acting weird most of the time. It was as if aliens had abducted my dad and replaced him with some creature that physically looked like him but that is where the resemblance ended. 

 I believe that families have generational curses. For some it is cycles of addictive behavior like alcoholism, physical and mental abuse of women and children. Pedophilia, co-dependency, sexual addiction, drug abuse, or in our case mental illness. My great grandmother, Hattie Vandergriff Swann, Aunt Margaret, and daddy were all victims of mental illness. I began having severe anxiety attacks in 1974. My daughter Melanie and my son Jon have also dealt with severe anxiety. Anxiety is a form of depression. I have an advantage because I am aware that our family may have a chemical imbalance. When the beast appears I recognize it for what is. Because of this I was able to beat some of my own problems and help my children get through their bouts with anxiety. The bottom line is that you must be a fighter in order to be able to overcome it and break the cycle. You can't defeat any enemy unless you properly define who or what the enemy is. Many people are in denial when it comes to family curses. 

 For my sixth grade year of 1961-62 I attended Charlotte Park Elementary school. It was a brand new school within walking distance of our house and I loved going there. My teacher was Mrs. Hearn and I passed with flying colors. For my seventh grade year in the Fall of 1962 I was enrolled at Hillwood Jr. High and I hated the whole experience. Unfortunately I was forced to ride the bus again which I absolutely hated. I was very modest and terrified at the thought of having to undress in front of people. Everyday I would make up an excuse so I wouldn't have to dress out for gym class. I would use the excuse that I had a stomach ache or I would conveniently forget my gym shorts. This went on for a while and the gym teachers patience was growing mighty thin with me. Hillwood and I just didn't mix because I didn't fit in. I joined the band and played the snare drum. One day I got into a fight with another drummer and got in trouble over that. I can't think of any positive experience that I had there. Daddy, however; was actually stable enough that he took me to a Hillwood varsity football game one Friday night. This was the last time that we ever did anything together.

 I have trouble remembering chronology during this period of my life. The events I am writing about from the day that daddy attempted suicide to his eventual death mostly happened in the last six months of 1962. Exactly when they happened I am a little fuzzy on. Daddy's attempted suicide had to have happened in the late Spring because I was still in school. He was released from the hospital probably sometime in July. In late November we were awakened one night to the sounds of a loud scuffle coming from mother and daddy's bedroom. The bedroom where we were sleeping was in the left front of the house and it was parallel to theirs in the rear of the house nearest to the back yard. The reason that I think that it was late November was because Donna was no longer living at home. The bedroom where we were sleeping had been Donna's bedroom and she married Larry Sircy on November 26, 1962. Our house only had two bedrooms and prior to Donna moving out Mark and I slept on a pull out couch in the den. Upon hearing the commotion we scurried into their bedroom and saw daddy choking mother with his left hand while trying to hit her with a nightstick in his right hand. He had her pinned against the wall and she was trying to break his grip on her neck with her right hand while fending off the nightstick with her free hand. 

 Mark and I were screaming and crying in terror, begging daddy to stop. Our screams seemed to jar him back to reality. He let go of mother and fell back on the bed landing in a sitting position. Daddy buried his head in his hands as the realization of what he had done seemed to take hold of him. Mother took us back to our bed and stayed with us until we stopped crying. She told us that daddy would never really hurt her and that she could easily handle him when he was drunk. I wanted to believe her and I didn't learn until years later that he was actually trying to kill her that night. Mother became afraid of him after this. He had left bruises on her neck. It was after this incident that she decided that we needed to move in with my grandparents. She couldn't trust us with daddy and she needed somebody to watch us while she ran the store.