For decades, families would often institutionalize relatives experiencing mental illness.
Stephen Trimble at age 10 with his mother 39-year-old Isabella and 18-year-old brother Mike in 1960. I am six. I tuck between the wooden studs in the garage, folding into a ball, my hands over my ears. Buckshot sprays of angry words fly at me through the open kitchen window. Summer heat fills the garage. I stare at the stipple of oil stains on the concrete floor and monitor the dust motes as they float from lightless corners through golden sunshafts.
A few days after Mike’s searing confrontation with our mother, my parents, at wit’s end, admitted him to Colorado Psychopathic Hospital for evaluation. Mike never spent a night at home again.Years later, my brother’s death made headlines. His loss wasn’t just a family tragedy or even just a scandalous failure of public policy in Colorado but a national one, a replay of the consequences of the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill.
That Don salvaged and safeguarded the file shouldn’t have surprised me. My father was a scientist to his core and made sense of his world by organizing facts and constructing timelines so he could analyze the incoming stream of data that composed his life. He documented his family as he documented his geologic research and fieldwork.
I left Don’s papers in boxes for months, needing the time to grow comfortable with my new identity as a man bumped into the “older generation” by the deaths of my parents. When I finally unpacked Dad’s archive, the clasped manila envelope surfaced again, the sole record of Mike’s place in our family, along with a scattering of photos in our family albums and an artifact or two.
The “Mike File” feels incendiary. It’s taken me a year of distance from my father’s death to open it. But, finally, I unclasp the envelope and spill the contents onto my desk, each sheet of paper a clue to Mike’s life. This time, I won’t defer to our mother’s desire to let old wounds heal and remain closed. I can no longer be complicit in erasing Mike’s memory.
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