Psychopathic. Maniacal. Severely Neurotic. Demented. Lunatic. Paranoiac, and other terms medical experts call people with mental illness. In our neighborhood, they are simply called crazy.
Though it’s hard to tell the difference when you first encounter them because they look like you and me, once we realize that they are indeed different, we are often gripped by fear and hurriedly avoid them. It’s an instinctive reaction and nobody can hardly blame us for it. But have you ever thought why some people become insane? Or why they are more vulnerable than you are?
I wanted to understand what causes mental illness when a member of my family went through with it. I read thick textbooks and browsed through Internet websites. All the information I gathered helped me one way or the other to better understand mental illness. But the most informative and hilarious book I was fortunate to read was in the deepest shelves of the library where I used to attend educational cultivation.
The book is Daughter of the Queen Sheba by Jacki Lyden. The writer is known to many as a foreign correspondent for the National Public Radio, a vocation that brought her to the front lines of some of the world’s most dangerous regions. In this memoir, she tells of the precariousness of her childhood and her struggles growing up with her manic-depressive mother.
In her book, Lyden attempts to enter the world of fallacy in the only way she can: by framing it to the style she wants, by turning on the light, by giving it a vocabulary and imposing a circular chronology. In the real world, she was fascinated by the roots of her mother’s mental illness. Madness was for her the sheer vocabulary of imagination. Yet in truth, you cannot have a dialogue with someone who is mad or delusional. You can attempt it, but it will be like turning the pages of a book and not understanding its true content, or like listening to a melody you cannot quite catch. Be that as it may, Lyden remarks that, however, she could have a dialogue with the Queen of Sheba (a popular illusion her mother created among others). She could give her a history, a reason to become an all-conquering power. She could speak back to her. Lyden gained authority in what was previously Sheba’s dominion. Her mother could hardly answer her back or turn away from her. For Lyden, writing was a chance to meet Sheba in her own world of imagination and capture her on the page as she could never have hoped to do so in actual life. In real life, her mother was a free spirit; in her book Lyden could hold her down and understand her.
The novel was set in the 1960s. Beautiful with a quick imagination and a constant yearning for a wider life than the one she was offered in her small Wisconsin town in the US. Dolores Lyden, Jacki’s mother, filled her daughters’ lives with the uncertainly that comes from parental instability. Her divorce from her first husband, a man who was dearly loved by his three daughters, was the initial blow to their family life. But her subsequent, and ultimately destructive marriage to a wealthy physician triggered the primary episode of Dolores’ manic depression – and sent Jacki and her sisters’ lives into a freefall of confusion and chaos that would last for two decades. Jacki never knew how and when her mother’s sickness would take hold. And the concept of the mad housewife hadn’t quite swept the American consciousness yet nor had the realities of spousal abuse. The doctor’s cruel treatment of Dolores’ daughters, especially Jacki as the eldest among the three, forced Dolores to make a choice between her daughters’ welfare and her marriage. It was a choice difficult enough to drive any woman crazy and quite possibly brought about the onset of Dolores’ mental illness. As a teenager and a young woman struggling to find her own parent at a time when she could have benefited from a mother’s good sense.
She turned instead to her grandmother Mabel, a hardscrabble woman had suffered enormous losses of her own yet managed to live happily in her own terms. The influences of these two powerful women instilled in the Lyden daughters an appreciation for the unpredictability of life, but it also instilled in them a determination to make their way in an uncertain world, and helped them appreciate the force of their own imaginations – a force which, sadly, often got the better of their mother.
Jacki grew to accept, and even relish, the manifestations of her mother’s illness. In her memoir, she marvels at her mother’s creative energy, at the intricate workings of the extraordinary mind that took Dolores to such exotic places as Mesopotamia or 18th-century France. Later, Jacki would become a traveler in her own right, more at home in the unsettled territory of the Middle East than with the comfort that comes from a quiescent life. As a journalist covering the front lines of some of the world’s most dangerous war zones, Jacki’s chaotic childhood experiences allow her to comprehend the insanity that prevails in so many peoples’ lives. Hers was not, perhaps, a childhood she would have chosen, but it’s the only one she knows.
Untreated mental illness can be frightening or inspiring. Sometimes it is a little of both. But it needn’t ultimately rob either the victim or her kin of their humanity. The fight we have to fight is to keep those we love alive long enough in order to reach them. Sometimes, we never can. They elude us forever. People who are mentally ill, who shun us in life, often take us somewhere – often to some place we never expected to go.
When someone close to you is actively delusional, you sometimes wonder who that person really is. How do you know for sure if that person, like an aunt, is really mad? And if that creature she has become is no longer your aunt, then who is she and what is troubling her?
The brain gives us many chambers to hide and only a few of them do we inhabit. And so Sheba is an attempt to create in a literary way a reality that eludes us in life.
Daughter of the Queen of Sheba is a unique memoir with powerful prose and includes the psychic drama of the writer’s experience with her mother’s behavior. Lyden beautifully describes her love for a troubled parent. She finds words to describe emotional landscapes few of us ever dare to see and understand. In this hilarious, lyrical, and achingly beautiful tribute, we come to know Dolores. To empathize with Jacki Lyden is to revel in an unusually moving story of three generations of mothers, daughters and growing up. Though in reading this particular book, you should have patience and wide imaginative reflection.
Lyden stated that she has her mother’s cherished memories in the pages of her book. As for my aunt, I could not possibly know how to deal with her in the early stage. I was fearful to be near her, imagining possibilities that can happen if she decided to switch characters from Cleopatra to Elizabeth Taylor to Magdalene to the Death Keeper. Ahh… you might laugh at the other characters she created.
Still, we love her so much and she never fails to show us new illusions every day. At least in her kind of fantasy, no one can hurt her real bad and she can find her true happiness in her world. It’s jut sad that she can’t fully share her world with us.
I can’t deny the fact that I miss her. I just wish that in time she would come home to us.