A Mind Destroyed

Jim and Paul Donahue both graduated as valedictorians of their high school senior classes. They also both went to Albion to continue their schooling at the same place my grandmother received her teaching certificate. The brothers shared a room together. They also both were called to serve in the Korean War. Though my Uncle Jim wasn’t in the middle of the fighting, he didn’t fare so well.

He didn’t ever talk about the war itself. He did tell me about the Korean children who had very little and were hungry for food. He said the American soldiers would throw a single candy bar on the ground in front of the children and watch them scramble, scratch, and fight each other to get that candy bar. He didn’t make it clear what point he was trying to make by passing that image on to me. We didn’t really talk about anything. He would throw out odd comments, statements, observations and I just received them. When he told me about the children, he didn’t really express an opinion as one might expect such as the tragedy of war, the baseness of humanity, or our animalistic natures. He just presented it with an odd half smile, maybe of amazement. I wondered why he told me that.

Uncle Jim had a wife, Kitty, and a daughter, Anne Jeanette. The family didn’t last long. As I was growing up, my Uncle Jim lived with my grandmother. He had about six different medication bottles that the VA sent him every month. They stacked up in the pantry. My grandmother told me he didn’t like to take them because they made him feel loopy. He became an alcoholic.

Pretty much every Friday night until I was about fourteen, I stayed the night at my grandmother’s. In the middle of the night, Uncle Jim would come home, walk across the living room past our bedroom door, and sit in his leather chair. He would chain smoke Pall Malls or Camels. Sometimes, he would mumble and grumble. Sometimes he would tell a joke to no one present and he would share a laugh with them. Sometimes he would carry on an argument. He might sleep for a while in the chair, but most times, he would make his way up the narrow, steep stairs to his bedroom.

In the mornings, I would awaken to hear he and my grandmother arguing in the kitchen, both loud and harsh, criticizing the other. I would walk out to the kitchen and they both would smile at me and tell me good morning. Uncle Jim liked to tease me. He prided himself on finding a person’s sore spot and taunting them. I would smile and shake my head like he was getting to me. However, I never let him know what would truly bother me. That is where I learned to smile, keep my mouth shut, accommodate, and put on a poker face. He would smoke a cigarette or more, tons of ashes in the ash tray, and the tips of his fingers were stained yellow from the nicotine of unfiltered smokes. He would drink some coffee. The cup could only be half full; his hand shook so that the coffee would slosh and spill. It would shake as he lifted the cup to his lips. I learned what the DTs were. He would leave at 8:30 or 9:00 in the morning to walk downtown to find an open bar. He had a car for a while, but it went away along with his driver’s license.

Sometimes, he would come home so drunk he couldn’t make it to his chair. At least once, he fell on the porch trying to come through the door. My grandmother dragged him into the house just to the point she could close the door. She left him passed out on the floor. Many times, he vomited in the bathroom, missing the toilet, and my grandmother would rant about cleaning up his mess.

They would argue because he lost the mail during his wanderings downtown. He would blow up at my grandmother, accusing her of opening his mail or of stealing it. Once, when no one was there, he picked up a chair over his head and threatened to hit my grandmother. She yelled at him that he better not because if she couldn’t do it herself then “Joe Anne will make sure you go to jail. You know she will!” He put down the chair. I was witness to a time my mother got between him and my grandmother and shouted him down. Many years before, when my dad was first with my mom, Uncle Jim threatened to beat him up. My mother pulled a kitchen knife on him and told him she would kill him. I tried to never upset anyone in my family.

Only one time, as I was trying to understand what had happened to make Uncle Jim this way, my grandmother told me something that seemed unreal. She said that during the Korean War, Uncle Jim had a mental/emotional breakdown. The military saw this as a danger because Uncle Jim had a high security clearance and knowledge of sensitive information. She said they put him through electric shock to his brain with the purpose of erasing his memory! She said it made him infantile. He needed to learn how to talk again and how to do basic motor skills. She had to feed him with a spoon like one feeds a baby! That’s the way to hammer the nail into the coffin.

My mother thought he had been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. I didn’t know if that could truly be the diagnosis with his alcoholism and this supposed purposeful trauma to his brain. He definitely was paranoid. Years later, my mother called me and told me that Uncle Jim’s grandson had been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. So there was evidence that it truly was and it had been passed down genetically.

I don’t know how it logically falls into place. Uncle Jim and Uncle Paul both returned from Korea and graduated from Idaho State University. Uncle Jim did work for some time with the technological cutting edge computers that were so big they filled entire rooms. But, he could never keep a job longer than about a year. My grandmother’s firstborn son who was supposed to be the hero, the champion of the family, dissolved into belligerent illness. In the end, his brain deteriorated. One Christmas, my sister gave him the book, “All I Ever Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.” He stared at the cover vacantly. Half an hour later he chuckled at the title.

I was never afraid of my Uncle Jim. He always was happy to see me and his teasing was his way of being friendly. He never turned his anger in my direction. Once, he ran into me downtown and he bought me a hamburger. He wasn’t drunk and he must have just received his check. After a stay in the VA hospital, he brought me a hand crafted marshmallow roasting stick his roommate had made out of a golf club handle. Once, he sent me a card while I was at college. He was up in the night unable to sleep. Then he heard my grandmother and he said he had better close and turn out the light before she knew he was up. Paranoia? One time, my grandmother wasn’t home and I was there to mow her lawn. Uncle Jim came out to tease me about my skinny “chicken legs.” He said, “I know I give your grandma a hard time, but she truly is a good woman. But don’t you ever tell her I said that!”