Meemaw Part II

I was always so amazed by Meemaw, amazed at who she was when she was living, but even more amazed at what I discovered about her after she died: the things I could only understand at an older age. At 19, she had her period for over 12 months. The doctor’s injected her with sheep’s ova, and a year later she was diagnosed with clinical depression and bipolar disorder. She was forced to drop out of college, and admitted into two different mental institutions after having a manic episode. She blamed the sheep (and I do, too). At 21 she developed tuberculosis and had to have one of her lungs collapsed. Within the same year, she escaped from Shepherd Pratt Institution by breaking through her screen window and running home. Years later, she told my dad that one day she felt the depression lifting off of her, and she knew if she didn’t take control of it now, it would take control of the rest of her life. From that day on, she was without a manic episode for 50 years.

At 26 she married a man named Waller Morton Lewis. One year into their marriage, he walked into a gate, an iron rod that stuck out into an alley. It was dark and he had been drinking heavily. It ruptured his peritoneum, and he bled to death. Just like Houdini. Within a year, she met my grandfather, Jesse Brooks Nichols, but he went by Brooksie. They were married in December 1941 and three weeks later he was shipped to Britain, not returning for three years at the armistice of WWII. They tried to have babies, but the doctors advised her against it as she was too weak from the TB to care for an infant. She had one miscarriage, then my dad, and three miscarriages after him. Brooksie killed himself when my dad was 15, leaving him and Meemaw, yet again, alone.

I never understood how Meemaw did it, how she got through the days, how she kept on living her life after all the difficult times she must have experienced. When I think about all the bad in her life, it’s funny how what I remember of Meemaw is all good: her red lipstick, her slippers, her gold necklace, her soft hair, her cough, her southern accent, her love for crabs, her Christmas lace cookies, her voice. I was so unaware of parts of her life, so ignorant to the pain she must have endured, and as an adult I’m angry and sad, guilty that I never looked at her then the way I would now: with open eyes that want to know how she feels, and what she thinks about, and if she is okay. She was full of optimism, positive energy and a strength that never let her break emotionally. Hers is a story of not just survival, but of conquering the hardest fight of all, human emotion. I want to find a way to tell it.