Elgin State Hospital Part VI

So this is the last post, last thing I have to say about Elgin State Hospital and my interlude there as a summer nursing intern. You know, there isn't even an Elgin State Hospital anymore. And I don't know if that's a good thing or not.

Some good things from there and then I have taken with me. Some great examples. Like Pat's family. An example I have long remembered. I loved Pat, though highly anxious about things in general, she was lucid, intelligent and a practical doer. She was middle aged, and had been married briefly when young, though not happily.  Think she said they'd eloped on a train?  Or maybe she met some guy on a train to Denver and got impulsive.  I'm wanting to blame the train somehow.  Anyway, no kids. Following her divorce, things were rocky and she didn't think she could handle the outside world on her own. I'm not sure how long she had been institutionalized.  Probably longer than I'd been alive.  But every second Sunday afternoon her ex and his second wife would bring their family to visit Pat.

In all my experience at this institution, I never saw more than a handful of visitors---total. Forgotten, forsaken, I would think that covered many of the abandoned souls I saw there. I'm sure some people got visited, just sayin' I never saw it much at all. But this ordinary and, to me, remarkable man and woman unfailingly came with picnic lunches and gave this woman a life! I can't imagine how easy it would be to forget your divorced spouse of long ago, with no shared children to tie you to one another. And to be a second wife and willingly set aside a couple weekends a month year after year to visit my husband's ex? I'm not sure I have that bone. But I'm hoping for a transplant, because I know who I want to be when I grow up.

This was a hard place in many ways.  Tough lessons along the way.  Things to learn.  Like- I am indelibly, eternally in contempt of psychotropic drugs, I scorn them vehemently, even if they help a few, the damage humanity has suffered is so egregious that they should be wiped from the face of the earth.  And I'm saying that as nicely as I can. 

Then.  Kindness is #1, sense of humor #2.  I do know the most enduring thing I took from my time there is the even deeper realization than before that we are indeed all human, all deserving of love and attention, even respect.  We are all responsible for each other.  And the most valuable lesson learned there for me was that those who got involved in looking out for the other guy and got out of their own little worlds were the happiest.  Who's to say that was possible for everyone to do?  I'm not sure some could even make that choice.  Actually I'm sure that was a bridge too far for many.  But it became apparent that those who could break out of their own private concerns, obsessions, worlds if only momentarily, and reach out to help others in even the most trivial of ways from lighting a cigarette for another to sharing your sweater or sandwich, were no longer living in hell at that point, though their bodies may well have been imprisoned in this bizarre scenario.

I think I need to borrow a page from their books. I trust all these years later they, and those they loved and served, are held very close in God's arms. Perhaps they always were.