Laugh or Die Chapter 1

Chapter One
In the Beginning

They say that I was the only one of my brothers and sisters that was born in a hospital. Like most things that happened before I was 19 I really don’t remember. I count on the stories that others tell me but once in again I will get a flash of something but I don’t know if it is a memory or some fantasy that I have created based upon stories that I have heard.


I saw a video tape once that was a compilation of old family movies and I guess I create a lot of my thoughts of my childhood based upon that viewing. Apparently I was pretty cute and happy. I was running around and smiling a lot. As I look at old photographs I can see that my hair always looked like it was combed with an egg beater and most of the time today I manage to maintain the same uncontrolled look. And I still smile a lot unless I am depressed. I can tell by looking at my eyes that I had allergies which I still show today with bags under my eyes when the evil allergens decide to attack.


After the time when my memory started to function again, every time a new girl child would be born into the family that seemed particularly precocious every one would say she is just like Mary Alice. Oh, I forgot to tell you that I was born Mary Alice Hail. So from the families projection on the new children in the family as being like Mary Alice I can get somewhat of a feeling of what I was like or at least how the family liked to think that I was like.


I am the youngest child of a blended family – his, hers and ours. My father had been widowed and had ten children. My mother had been widowed and had three children. In the stories that my Mother shared with me there was quite a surprise and not a particularly pleasant one when Mom and Dad got pregnant and I was to be born. Dad was either embarrassed or afraid of another responsibility and asked Mom to have an abortion. She was totally shocked because my father was one of the founders of the Nazarene church and the idea that a man of God would even suggest an abortion was more than she could really fathom. In the last days of her life she said she fought for me even though she had questioned why God had brought her a child at such a late time in her life. Mother shared other stories with me of that time before memories were shocked out of my head.


Apparently my brother David was so appalled that his father had sex at his age – Dad was around 60 when I was born that he could not cope. In fact, I have been told that he would not even be in the same room where I was for at least six weeks. If you ever wondered about karma here is a funny little side story that Mother told me. There was a girl in the church that kept coming to the altar to be prayed for because she had a tumor. Turned out the tumor was a baby that was a result of David’s passions. At the time David was at a Bible college studying to be a minister, my father went and got him and brought him to the hospital and married them before the baby was born. Always wondered as I heard these stories why Dad wanted Mom to have an abortion and then forced my brother to marry a girl he had made pregnant instead of helping her get an abortion. It has been stories like these that I have heard over my life that has shown me life and people are full of dichotomies that we can seldom understand.


My father died when I was 11 and I seem sometimes to get flashes of this time. But are they real memories or family stories? I can see me in a little grey suit with pink checks and I can see my brother Joe crying. And crowds of people. A funny thing that I seem to remember but again is it fantasy or reality. I was sitting in the front seat of a car with one of my sister’s husbands and I could hear my father talking to me from the back seat. Again, with all my years before I was 19 I don’t know what is real, what is story tales, or what is fantasy.


As I grew closer to my teens I seem to have some clearer memories that are mine. I know from history that between the first grade and ninth grade I went to fifteen different schools. I know that sometimes I would live with my mother and sometimes I would live with relatives. When I was sixteen my mother remarried and I remember that I was ashamed to be seen with her husband. He was a blue collar worker and I was used to being the daughter of a minister which in many circles has a little more class. In order for the family to get social security to help raise me he adopted me and I began to call myself Mary Hail-Smith. I sure as hell was not going to be plain old Mary Smith. With Mother’s marriage to Smitty I inherited 4 step sisters and 2 step brothers. So in essence I was the youngest of 20 children.


Choosing to go or not go to church was never an option. From the time I was born till I left home to go to college at 18, I attended church a minimum of three times a week and more if there was a revival going on. Sometimes I am thankful for my electro shock and memory loss because it erased a lot of the fundamentalism that creates such conflict of fear of death and the afterlife. To be inundated weekly with the idea that one might die and go to hell and burn forever is not a good thing. In relationship to this environment I have one memory that haunted me for at least 40 years. My mother, father and I had gone to hear my brother David preach (remember the one who married the girl with a tumor that turned out to be a baby) and he preached that every sin could be forgiven except for taking the name of the Holy Ghost in vain. We were driving through the wild mountains of West Virginia on route 60 where the turns are so sharp that going more than 10 miles an hour could send your hurtling over the edge to your death. I was asleep in the back seat when there was a sudden clap of thunder and flash of lightening. I woke up frightened and I said something. I was not sure if I said Holy Cow or Holy Ghost and for some thirty years I lived with a secret fear as to whether I was forever condemned to hell or was safe. Till the day she died I never told Mother this story afraid to hear what she might say.
One thing that I definitely remember is my first kiss at Christian children’s summer camp. His name was Wesley and we had our first kiss behind the archery range. Now I don’t remember who I first had sex with but I sure remember who I first kissed.


I must have been an creative child and I know I had a strong fantasy life because of a discovery I made a few years ago. I found a Bible that I had been given for perfect attendance at Sunday School. In the front of most Bibles of the time there was a place to record family events. In my little black book I had inscribed that Mary Hail had married the Lone Ranger. When I found the book, I was amused and slightly sad because I couldn’t even remember going to Sunday School much less watching TV and the Lone Ranger.


I often wonder if it is just me or if other people just recreate memories of their childhood. Stories repeated over and over again by family that create a consistency in the middle of chaos. I am not sure. It is probably a combination of both and with our own memories do we recreate them to fit our own desired perception of ourselves? Did I live in a family that was like Ozzie and Harriet? Or did I live in a dysfunctional family that created memories that fit more into the desire to recall the past.


When I was 18 I went to college. My grades were not particularly respectable and apparently neither was I. I had never been on my own and all of a sudden I was given a world of freedom even though girls had to be in by 10 pm during the week and 12 pm on Fridays and Saturdays. I guess they thought people only got pregnant after 10 during the week and after 12 on the weekends. I learned to drink. I learned to smoke. I don’t think I had to learn to flirt and that was probably inherited from my mom who had an amazing way of attracting people. And I wanted to be an actress. My brother Joe who so kindly paid for my first year of college in response to my grades where I had an A in debate jokingly said wouldn’t you know that the one thing you would excel in is mouth. Now that hasn’t changed much over the years all though as time came along my words became more from my fingers as I worked to explore my life and reality through writing.


When I returned for my second year of college I was really devastated. In order to help pay for it I had to work in the cafeteria. I found this to be degrading for a woman who was going to be an actress. So on a wish and a prayer and carrying my teddy bear, I boarded a bus for New York. I don’t have many images of New York in the early sixties except that I know I lived in Greenwich Village, I can still see the lions at the Library, and something about a Chinese restaurant – maybe that is why I don’t like Chinese food to this day. My mother received a call from some friends whom I am sorry I don’t remember telling her that I was ill and needed to come home. She sent me money for bus fare and when I arrived back home my sister Marjorie had made arrangements for me to be committed to a mental hospital.


Later I requested my medical records. My diagnosis was schizophrenia and it read something like this: The patient presented herself in a delusional state speaking with a French accent. There was an apparent lesion in the lower left back of my brain. Numerous shock treatments were administered to stabilize the patient. Now, I don’t remember the shock treatments but I remember in my cellular memory a drip of some sort being administered and a rubber something being placed between my teeth apparently this is to keep one from biting one’s tongue when having a seizure created by the shock. To this day I find myself clinching my teeth when in a stressful situation.


While I was in the hospital I do remember an orderly taking me into a closet and raping me. It is a fuzzy image but real still the same.


When I came home I could hardly remember anything or anyone. I could not remember my boyfriend Jimmy. I felt trapped and in a hostile and alien environment. I needed to escape so I agreed to marry Jimmy when he asked even though I really didn’t have a clue who he really was. So there I was a blank slate almost married to man I hardly knew who was a musician. At the time since I was female and under 21 my mother had to sign for me to get married. I often wonder if she knew how really ill I was and what jeopardy she had placed me in. We went to live with his parents in an exclusive part of town. Nine months later I delivered my first son Jimmy (James the III) and a month after he was born I had an ectopic pregnancy and was clinically dead on the operating room table. Nine months after that my second son Donald was born. My journey into madness had began and over time I would learn truly to believe that sometimes one truly doesn’t know whether to laugh or die.

Introduction Laugh or Die

Sometimes You Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or Die
Madness as a companion along life’s path.

I was 19 before I was diagnosed with mental illness. First I was said to be schizophrenic but over time and changing research into the illusive qualities of mental illness I would find myself having a new diagnosis du jour. As I write this story some of it will be real as far the truth as recorded but other parts are actually my memories which are not always clear of my life’s journey. What is true is the emotions that I share as a mentally disabled person. Don’t you love that label: A mentally disabled person. Over the more than forty years that I have carried this label I have found other labels more fun: Mad. Crazy. Wacko. I like other labels because I don’t like to think of myself as disabled. I think perhaps the kindest label of all is mentally ill. But then again I don’t feel ill. Sometimes I feel perfectly normal – or at least normal for how I perceive the world. Other times, I feel alienated and unable to comprehend the others around me.


I start my journey at 19 because when I was that age my family committed me to a mental hospital where I received extensive shock treatments to the extent that I was confined in a padded cell and the only way I remember anything before that time is through little bits and pieces that I have used to reconstruct my life before that time usually based on the stories that others have told me. Whether they are true or not I don’t know.. I will often joke and say that I was rewired at 19. That is where the humor comes in that has kept me trudging through life when times became unbearable. There have been times when I was unable to find the cosmic joke and I truly desired to die. In fact, as you will learn many times when faced with the option to laugh or die, I would try to die. Apparently I was not very good at suicide because I am still here after multiple attempts.


Some of my story is humorous and some is sad and even decadent by many peoples standards. However, it is my life as I recall it sometimes based on truth, sometimes based on memory, sometimes based perhaps on wishes and dreams. My life as I remember it has been filled with many times of chaos created by a shattered mind and then learning to draw the pieces back in a new recreation that allows me to continue to survive and hopefully thrive. I have also had to carry the burden that my children inherited my disease and watching their pain has seared my soul at times but it has also allowed me to grant me compassion for my apparently mad or bizarre behaviors.


I invite you to walk with me along the path that has been filled with many dark nights of the soul and also many epiphanies about the seed of hope that keeps those trapped by a mental illness to survive and perhaps for those of you who have had family members who did not survive you may gain some insights into the mind when death seems to be the only option.
If at times I appear detached it is because that detachment has become my greatest armament to grant me surivival.