FOr Ate

[Alone]

It was 1985 when Ate Ellen, the sister of my friend, beauty-queen-like, with suitors right and left and lots of friends, started acting strange, she was in second year high school. While stammering, she said that she was seeing dwarves and hearing tiny voices. She was in a trance dancing and chanting. The private hospital that admitted her in the midst of her hallucinations gave her an IV and prescribed depressants. She breezed through high school after that.

In 1989, while in college, the “voices” came back. Her talk with her mom revealed that these tiny voices were following her, telling her things she couldn’t disobey and made her “lose” her way to the dormitory twice. Her parents were not superstitious lot but they took aside their own beliefs and stepped inside the boundaries of the supernatural. At first, the countless incense and tawas provided relief. Or so her family thought. That same year, she was sent to a home care clinic where psychologically-challenged individuals were coping with their unrealistic world.

She didn’t finish college after shifting to two courses. At 18, she married. Her husband promised to take care of her and stick with her no matter what. He did, and even helped in the family’s thriving hardware store, for quite a while. Ate did not show any serious signs of instability for the next five years, although she was a regular at a psychiatrist’s clinic.

Her parents bare all of their daughter’s psychological fits after 1995 as they were the ones who stayed with her most of the times. Her husband flew to Taiwan twice and came back wanting to start their own business and home. But Ate Ellen couldn’t be of much help. The demands of being a full-time wife and mother were too much for her thinning forbearance. As much as she hated to, she easily surrender to worries and anxieties, when her husband expected that she could choose to be stress-resistant if only she wants to. Of course she does, but she can’t. Her emotions could only bear so little.

Their eldest and youngest siblings and my friend during those troubling periods were in college but they would hear about the bouts of their sister’s mental illness when it happens. They would read incoherent phrases written on the walls of her room, see broken religious artifacts, find torn family photos, hear her chatter about talking snakes crawling and hiding in corners of their house.
And yes, she oftentimes verbally and rarely physically abuses her siblings, and herself. When out of stupor, she would admit not wanting to. The voices in her head made her.

They don’t restrain her in chains nor lock her up. Her first psychiatrist, when he called them to a family session, told us that those are a big NO. She doesn’t need it. She needs them-her family.

When sober, she savors her time helping her daughter with her school works, playing horses, trucks and trains with her son, and helping with the household chores. It was odd though, her mother once realized as if making a forlorn scientific discovery, that Ate Ellen was really uncontrollable, to the point of not knowing who we are, during the odd years—1995, 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2003. She was then sent to the National Center for Mental Health and three home care clinics, each promising that she’d be well after regularly taking her prescribed medicines. Those medicines don’t come cheap. And so are the support, care and acceptance of her community.

For psychologically-challenged individuals are never quite well given outside loving treatment and understanding when those, supplemented by medicine, are what would primarily help them to full recovery. People with a history of mental disturbance, even after surviving it, are often subjected to scorns, raised-eyebrows, tsismis and snickers. Ate Ellen was not shielded from these even when they go to church. my friend would look behind her back and saw huddled heads breaking away with disregard.

Once, when ate was watering plants in their front yard, I heard a little boy tease her in a playful shout. He was pairing her with a neighbor with a muscular defect. I was angry, mad, and in tears when I shouted back. Ate Ellen was smiling timidly. In her soft disconsolate voice, she told me not to mind him. He was just a kid, she murmured. After her chore, she went silently to her room—the only place where she felt safe from the unwanted stares of our neighbors.

Over the years, her mother would pour out a litany of her motherly pains seeing that one of her daughters couldn’t live in a world as realistically as others do. She has enjoined us to pray for Ate Ellen’s total healing, that they would have enough resources to sustain her medicines, and most of all, that our neighbors and her former friends would treat her like any decent human being, even for just the time when she is doing fine. She has become “untouchable.” People would only be forced to speak with her when she’s with her mom, or with us. Maybe because they don’t know what to talk to her about and how. Or maybe because they are “afraid” of her blank stares, her silent replies, or her open and sometimes vulgar honesty. Or maybe they just don’t care at all even when she already discusses current events and speaks from her normal mind state.

Most often, my friend will told me that when she come home, she would find Ate Ellen, now 32, anxiously waiting for her. She would also ask how her events and projects went. She would listen, a few times with divided attention, though. And I would think of a day when she could blend in a crowd without betraying her agitated stance and wandering thoughts. When she doesn’t need to take Risperdones or Clozapines or Lithium Carbonates. When the “voices” in her head would finally fall muted in silence.

Ate Ellen had just been discharged from her recent treatment this year. She is proud upon hearing the news that her daughter has topped her class again and was voted MVP in volleyball. She prayed and was worried upon hearing that her son has flu. She takes pleasure in taking care of “Juju,” our lively Pomeranian Spitz. She enjoys cooking and watering plants again. She happily tells me stories of her recent newfound caregiver friends she met at the clinic while helping me compile my reports and printouts. I can almost feel her struggles in wanting to act “normal” even when her medicine slurs her speech or lulls her to sleep. In her moods and actions, in trying to adapt once again, I can see that she does not seek for social acceptance.

Only one thing fuels her now. In her coping mind and her wanting heart, she longingly waits, as we would now all wait, for a visit from her two children, now 11 and 4, who were adamantly taken by her husband, moving out, the day Ate Ellen was admitted for treatment at a home care clinic a month ago.

They did, once a week only after my sister’s birthday. I saw her face lit up, a smile never left her face. The visit lasted for an hour. Ate happily waved them off when they said goodbye but retreated hastily to her room when they finally left.

I could almost feel the pain in trying to hold back what I really feel inside. And I was not alone. Her father even asked if his two grandchild could stay a bit longer. her mother didn’t say anything—she was near in tears when she followed Ate Ellen to her room.
I know that her mom would try to hide her grief to cheer ate up, even when she, herself, is breaking..