Sister Faith

Today I left school after 2 hours of sitting in the library studying. All morning the rain fell, but , from where I sat looking out on the Northern range, I could see the clouds had moved from the west back towards the valley and left in their place a blue expanse of sky. It was time to leave. On my way out I bumped into a friend from one of my classes and hitched a ride down Main street to where my sister lives. I expected to have to walk a ways to find the place, but as I disembarked and said goodbye, I saw Faith standing on the porch of her new house. It is a temporary new house.

She was standing there smoking a cigarette, the way she stands. I smiled as I came up. She looked so much better than the last time I had seen her. She said hi, and I said hi---small talk. I let her finish her cigarette while I walked into the house. It is a group home run by the Mental Health Ministry. I took two steps but saw no reason to continue and returned to the porch where Faith was just finishing her smoke. She is gaunt, drawn; her cheek bones are prominent, and her face is olive gray. Long, straight hair frames her face and appears to be very oily. She is wearing baggy pants, an old tee-shirt, and an open sweater with her sleeves rolled up. I am startled by how thin her arms are.

---How are you feeling these days?

---OK, I guess.

---You want to get something to eat?

---Sure. Robyn and I went down this way the other day.

Robyn is our mother. And so we began to walk off toward the busy sounds of Main street. Faith shakes her body a little before she gets moving, and when she walks she taps her left foot between each step. It is really quite amazing to see her do this because it is so meticulous. Each step she takes, she taps her left foot before beginning the next step. The sole of her left shoe does get worn down over time. So Faith began her slow, tapping, shaking-before-getting-going -walk, and I slowed down a bit to keep up with her.

As we walked, we talked, but what the hell did we talk about---nothing. I started gushing about how beautiful the day is, how the clouds parted in front of my eyes while I sat on the fourth floor of the library studying, how I heard that she and Robyn had had a fight, and as I blathered on I watched her gait. The tapping of her left foot in between each step slows her down a lot, and I had to keep adjusting my own sauntering speed. Talk was not flowing easily, and so we just walked until we made it down to Broadway where I pointed out the Kewal, a great little soul food place that’s been around for ages. We made our way across the busy intersection of Broadway and Main and continued to the Kewal.

The Kewal was one of first place that only served food without eggs and dairy products. It only has two or three dishes, all of which are closely related: lentils, rice, and salad, in various configurations. And it is cheap. As we walked in, I said hello to the man who runs the place and asked if he had been around for 12 years. He laughed and said that the Kewal had been there for 18 years! Who would have thought? The place had been around since the beginning of my puberty!

Faith takes some time to sit down. How do I describe it?---She repeats her movements. Just as when she walks she taps between each step as if to repeat each step, she repeats other motions as well. So as she begins her slow decent to the chair, she begins to tap her fingers on the seat. Sometimes she counts quietly to herself as she taps. Through a series of stages, she lowers herself to the seat and sits at an angle with her knees tight together pointing away from the table instead of under, as if she has not completed the job of sitting down and has stopped half way. She doesn’t move when she sits or stands. When she stands, she just stands there without moving her body as if frozen. Likewise, when she sits, she sits very still without moving her head. If you point something out to her that is outside of her line of vision, she can barely move her head to see what you are looking at. In fact, she doesn’t really look over at all. She only moves her eyes over and says, “Oh, yeah…;” although you know she has not seen what you intended her to. But then again, it’s seems unfair to ask her because you know she doesn’t move her head at all. She is totally stiff as she sits or stands. Even her walk is stiff, rigid, and stooped to some degree. But I am digressing from our visit, from our lunch we enjoyed together. What did we say that was so important? Why are the words so difficult to piece back together?

We looked at the rather simple menu. Before we ordered I began to talk to her about what happened between her and Robyn that resulted in her ending up at Venture House, the house we had just come from. I talk too much.

---So, you had a bit of a fight with Robyn?

---Yeah.

I wanted to bridge the gap of silence and find out how she felt about things. I wanted to see if anything had changed; if she saw this event as a break in the flow of problems with our mother and a chance for a new start in a healthier environment. Maybe I just wanted to know what happened, or to hear the sound of my own voice.

---I know it’s none of my business and I totally understand if you don’t want to talk about it, but I heard that you and Robyn had a bit of a fight.

Pause.

---She told me a bit of what happened. Was it pretty rough?

---Yeah.

---I’m sorry it happened. I’ve noticed that in our family we sometimes need a crisis or conflict to change things. I think we work unconsciously to get out of situations we feel powerless in. I don’t think this just because of what happened between you and Robyn, but because of patterns I see in my own personal history, my own foibles.

And I went on. Her silence is not unusual. She is very quiet, and sometimes I find myself dominating the conversation because of the discomfort of long periods of silence. I went on saying that I thought that possibly her exit from Robyn’s place was a good thing and that even though it had not been an easy way to leave, now she was in a new situation with new possibilities.

Faith nodded and began to speak.

---Now I have a scar on my head too.

I asked to see it, and she motioned to her forehead. There was nothing there that I could see. I didn’t know where this was going until she said that Robyn had banged her head and that’s how she got the scar.

---We had a fight.

I didn’t expect her to begin to tell me about it, so I shut up to listen and encouraged her with nods and murmurs.

---What happened?

---I should have just gone upstairs to wash and just go to bed. I was wet. Robyn kept asking me to go upstairs to wash and change my clothes. She was out for a while, and I just sat on the floor. I was just so tired; I couldn’t get up. So Robyn came back. I think she had been drinking. She sat for a moment on a chair beside me. She was telling me over and over to get up and go to the bathroom, and she started screaming. Then it got really physical. She grabbed me and started shaking me and screaming at me. She kicked me too. I was lying on the floor like this:

She raised her arms up over her face.

---I was yelling at her---Don’t do this! Don’t do this! Stop it!--- I said I was going to call the cops. She got off of me and went upstairs. I went to the phone and picked it up, but there was no dial tone. She was on the phone upstairs calling the police herself.

She paused often as if to remember what had happened. Her matter-of-fact tone began to soften as she went on.

---Did the police come?

---Up.

---And?

---They started asking us questions. They asked if there was any drugs.

---Were they assholes?

---Sort of. I just stood at the top of the stairs. I was pretty shook up. My head was hurting, and so they called an ambulance. I went in the ambulance to VGH emergency where they gave me a shot of Ativan. There was these two big security guys there… I had no choice.

---Did you refuse to take the meds?

---No. I pushed a tray of food or something onto the floor. They made me take a bath, and then I was in this little room with a bed and a toilet…

---Like a cell?

---Yeah. That’s what is was like. Then I was in VGH for the rest of the week.

---So you spent this last week in VGH?

---Yeah.

---Wow. I didn’t know that. So, did they give you meds?

---Yeah, but not too much.

---What do you mean? You mean a small dosage?

---Yeah. Two milligrams.

---And are you still taking them?

She nodded. She was imperceptibly crying, and her voice was growing rough.

---They are giving me more now though.

I reached over and gave a bit of a hug. She was not sitting in a way that made her easy to hug, so I just held her and rubbed her back.

---Sounds like a rough night eh? And then you end up a VGH for the whole week. Wow. How did that go?

She shrugged.

---OK, I guess.

---Did you see anyone you know? I said this with a smile.

---No, but the woman who was having a smoke with me at the house was in there.

We talked about the possibility of her going to a one night lecture with me on Wednesday. I showed her the pamphlet with the course description. She said, “ I could take this! “ I agreed whole-heartedly. Of course she could take it. We read about “The Sociology of Mental Health” a little further. I said I would register her and we could go together. She smiled a bit.

It was then that the food came. We both had the same thing, except hers was a little smaller. She had ordered a half portion. We began to eat and talk, and I finished everything and thought that I should have ordered the half portion for the plates were close to being the same size. She hardly ate at all. She ate very slowly and with many minute, jerky movements. She tends to repeat her movements when she is eating as well. So when she takes a bite, her fork repeats the motion a number of times before she begins the next bite. Her eating is greatly hampered by these repetitions, and it appears as if she is not really eating at all. It is very disconcerting to eat with someone who doesn’t seem to be eating at all. I finished my whole plate, and she still had her whole plate left.

---I’m going to get this to go, I think.

---Will you eat it later?

I had greedy designs on her food.

---Yeah.

And so we got all her food wrapped up; we said goodbye to our host and began to get up from our seats. I stood up. Faith began to push herself up from her chair as if her body was paralyzed, slowly, with short jerky motions, edging her way into a standing position. It was a painstaking process, exhausting even to watch. We ambulated out of the Kewal and headed back toward Venture House.

About a week later, I spoke to Faith and the phone and confirmed that she really wanted to take this class with me. We agreed that I would see if I could register her, and she could pay me the 15 dollars later. The next day I enrolled the two of us in a one night seminar called “The Sociology of Mental Health.” It sounded like an interesting class: a discourse on the theory and practice of Mental Health, or more accurately, psychiatry. The write up in the Continuing Education brochure said that we would discuss the biomedical model, the psychoanalytical model, the medicalization of social problems, and the theories of Foucault, Freud, and others. I had planned to take this course for no other reason than to learn a bit more, but, while Faith and I were eating lunch together that day at the Kewal, it struck me that she might get something out of it as well. She responded almost enthusiastically, and so I agreed to call her the night before to confirm.

I didn’t get around to calling her the night before, so I called a couple hours before the class. It was raining hard that night as it so often does here. Faith had moved back to Robyn’s because Venture house was only a temporary place. There was some discussion after Faith and I left the Kewal about where she was planning to go now that this falling out had happened with Robyn. I asked her if she thought of moving to a new place. I implied that maybe living with Robyn was not the healthiest place to be, and she might feel better somewhere else. Of course there is nowhere else for her to live. The question answers itself. It is naïve to think that “mental health consumers” have any support besides psychiatrists pushing drugs, police and jails, group homes that force you to take drugs, or the street. This may sound cynical, but naïve and cynical are two sides of the same fence. Faith knows. She can stay temporarily in a street shelter, but she wants to live at Robyn’s place and will do what she can to get back there. Robyn allows Faith to live with her although the two of them do not get along all that well. And so the cycle of crises is perpetuated.

I called her up in the early afternoon.

---So, are you up to going to this class tonight?

---Uh, yeah, sure, I guess.

---Um, OK. Should we meet at the class, or do you want to meet first and go together?

---Maybe we could get something to eat before we go.

---Yeah, OK…Did you have something in mind?

---How about the Toby?

Ah, the Toby. How best to describe this gem. It is a quaint east side Japanese restaurant and sushi bar. We have been going there for years. It is right in the neighborhood, and the food is good if you like to eat fish. It is not expensive for Japanese food.

---Uh, well, how about something less extravagant? Or we could just eat at home and then meet before we go to the class?

---OK

---So, I could meet you on the Drive at Broadway if you like.

---Why don’t we meet at that falafel place? I think I’m going to get a samosa.

---You mean Shandra’s?

---Yeah. Do want to get some samosas before the class?

---Sure. I can be there in 45 minutes.

---OK. I’ll see you there.

---OK, Bye.

---Bye.

I was late by at least 15 minutes, and I had very little money. She was the only one in the place, sitting in the corner eating when I burst in.

---I’m sorry I’m so late.

---Oh! That’s OK. So you want to get a samosa?

I went to talk to Shandra and order my samosa, but I did not have the measly $1.50. I was about 15 cents short.

---Hey Faith. Can you lend me some money to get one of these samosas?

---Yeah. Here.

She pulled her wallet out of her purse and dug around for some change. She managed these movements without that much difficulty. Occasionally she moves without repeating her movements but just very slowly. I watched as she found the change for me. Her movements seemed so natural as if she had forgotten to repeat them. I went back, paid for the samosa, splashed some hot sauce on it, and returned to the table. We ate together with very few words.

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