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Being alone, truly and completely alone, should not be a burden carried by a human being for long.  I’m not sure we were born for it.  Our lives are such fragile existences just as they are – it only takes one blow to unhinge the mechanisms which hold us together.  There are few who can survive for long in such conditions.  I was lucky to have known such a woman, one who had survived essentially alone in a cacophony of insanity for fifty years.

My mother was a charge nurse at Wingdale State Hospital in Wingdale, New York.  It was a facility where the crazies and mentally handicapped were housed until the 1970’s when the government dismantled these facilities and dumped most of the inpatients onto the streets.  Mom worked in the wards for the elderly insane women.  It was there she met Lillie.

Lillie was in her seventies when Mom discovered her.  She was in a general ward – a huge room where twenty women were housed – all bedridden.  These women were certifiable.  They rocked in their beds . . . moaning, crying, or screaming – never silent.  They clutched toy dolls to their chests, hollow remembrances of children who no longer visited or never were.  Their matted, tangled hair hung strangled down their back.  The aroma of urine seeped into your pores when you were there, its reek steeped in the air, always stronger than any antiseptic could cover.  You can’t imagine the din.  It was awesome, ferocious, never ending. 

When she was twenty-eight, Lillie immigrated from Sweden to marry the love of her life.  Two weeks after the wedding, he dropped dead for an aneurism.  In shock, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to Wingdale where she began the slow process of piecing herself back together.  However, the state of New York had a catch-twenty law in place . . . once admitted to a state hospital, only a relative who could sponsor her could check her out.  All Lillie’s relatives were, unfortunately, in Sweden.  She was trapped.

For years she worked in maintenance and housekeeping, cleaning out bed pans and washing floors.  The state had a cheep source of slave labor.  It certainly wasn’t glamorous but it filled her days.    It was a tentatively workable solution until she fell and broke her hip. 

During her convalescence, arthritis set into her body.  Suddenly bedridden, she had to draw on inner resources to survive.  But she took it a step further and fell back on her spirituality.  Her faith was awe inspiring.  It was dynamic and fluid.  You could not witness it and fail to be changed in ways small or profound.  The staff seemed undeterred by the love which radiated from her spirit but those she met through my mother came away inspired.  They believe more because she did and it was inconceivable that she could have such a strong spiritual foundation in the face of such adversity.

And adversity it surely was.  My Mom started working at the “hospital” as a charge nurse when Lillie had been an inmate for about fifty years.  My Mom didn’t stay long at Wingdale.  She was horrified by the unspeakable conditions in which these women existed.  Care was demeaning, depersonalized and cruel.  Bed sores abounded, some breaking down to the bone.  When showers were given, it was on steel beds under ice cold water.  Patients lay in their own filth for far too long.  Food was withheld as a means of punishment and control.  Aides ran the floor as the nurse sat behind the desk knitting.  There was absolutely no positive stimulation, no television or radio, no music, no programs to look forward to, no sane voices; just the unending screaming and crying of the patients both day and night.  It was in this environment Lillie passed her days, in complete sanity.  When she met Mom, she had been bedridden for ten years.  Her body a host to her faith and grace. 

Mom started bringing me and a few of her friends to visit Lillie.  At first I was uncomfortable, especially when she was in the general ward where so many were housed in the same room, but after meeting her, my attitude changed.  We would bring some sweets and snacks, books, a radio.  The radio brought her contact with the world outside her four walls for the first time since she was admitted fifty years