Her name was
Carmela, a lyrical name meaning “garden or orchard.” Carmela with one “l” she’d
always say. My mother really disliked having her name misspelled.
Understandable, especially considering that her vibrancy as an individual was
so often dismissed throughout her life, because when you suffer from mental
illness, that one fact is often the primary thing, sometimes the only thing,
people remember about you. And she was so much more than the madness inside her
mind that she could not escape.
My mother was
also called Millie, a nickname given to her by her Sicilian mother. Born in
Brooklyn, New York, she was in the middle mix of ten children and a
first-generation Italian American. Her parents, Nicholas and Rosa, had immigrated
to America from Palermo, Sicily. When she was a young girl, her parents moved from New
York to New Jersey where her father opened a barber shop.
On this
Mother’s Day, I’d like to focus on who Carmela was beyond the darkness of severe
bipolar disorder. Although my mother had limited education (her Old World
Italian parents did not believe in education for their daughters, only
marriage), she had much talent. She was a budding writer, and after she died, I
found part of a short story she had written when she was young. She read the
dictionary to improve her vocabulary and enjoyed learning new words. Mom liked
reciting quotes, especially the Abe Lincoln quote: “You
can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time,
but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” I believe she felt that quote was applicable to her own life.
Carmela had a beautiful soprano singing voice.
During World War II, before she married, she sang at local USO shows entertaining
troops from the nearby Army base. Her jet black hair was styled in pretty waves;
she sometimes wore a flower in her hair. When we were children, she sang along
to the radio all the time. That is one of my best memories of my mother, when
she was singing. At those moments, she seemed unencumbered and she sang with passion.
Her favorite musical artists were The McGuire Sisters, Tony Bennett, and Frank
Sinatra. Sinatra’s version of “My Way” was her favorite song.
I am not in the medical profession, but I believe that music therapy could have been a more effective treatment for her illness than all the electro-shock therapies (now referred to as electro-convulsive therapy), so heavily advocated by her doctors and which produced no beneficial results, not once. In fact, those therapies caused her to forget entire parts of her children’s childhood, the end result being that when her children were taken away, my mother cut-out pictures of children from magazines and framed them as if they were her own, as if creating a new family.
I am not in the medical profession, but I believe that music therapy could have been a more effective treatment for her illness than all the electro-shock therapies (now referred to as electro-convulsive therapy), so heavily advocated by her doctors and which produced no beneficial results, not once. In fact, those therapies caused her to forget entire parts of her children’s childhood, the end result being that when her children were taken away, my mother cut-out pictures of children from magazines and framed them as if they were her own, as if creating a new family.
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| At a birthday party for Mom with my brother, George, and sister, Rose. |
Toward the end of her life, my mother, Carmela, became nearly comatose after so many years of failed ECT therapies and medications. She was locked in her own world with images no one could envision and she barely smiled anymore. Yet, she was once a vibrant woman with the potential to be so much more than the darkness that stole her mind.
In my dreams since her death, Mom is young, happy, without any signs of mental illness; I am a young girl again playing with my siblings, and Mom is smiling and playing with us, something she never did. Yes, I am seeing her in my dreams the way I would have liked to have seen her in life. I am seeing the mother I never had. That is the magic of dreams; they are an alternate reality of hope. Hope and dreams are survival skills.
Carmela passed
away in 2002 and was buried alongside my dear father, who had preceded her in
death by twenty-two years, 1980. Mom loved the colors rose and pink, so we chose
a rose-tinted marble headstone for my parents’ grave and had their wedding
photo permanently encased in an oval on the stone. She would have liked that.
At the bottom of the stone I had inscribed the quote: “Hope sees what is not,
but yet will be.”
It is my hope
that Carmela’s spirit, my mother’s spirit, free from the physical constraints
of madness, can now embrace a life full of joy in whatever way that life
continues. I know she will be singing…singing with passion.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Playing Sinatra for you...
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Playing Sinatra for you...
©2013
JerseyLils2Cents, all text and photos.
