My Story - Out of the shadow

It took a lifetime to escape the effects of a lost childhood

By Marie Hazledine-Barber

From Reader's Digest Magazine

The apartment is eerily silent. My neighbour Joe is newly departed, felled by a stroke that had him confined to his bed for days in the tiny but homely apartment alongside mine.

Now he is gone and, as I watch, all that remains of his life is being tossed down from the apartment balcony into a waiting trailer below. The paucity of Joe's possessions takes my breath away.

In the year since I moved here, no-one had ever come to visit Joe, but that didn't mean he was short of friends. Like me, Joe had found unexpected succour in this Wesley Mission complex. Whoever said there was no milk of human kindness had obviously not witnessed the circle of concerned faces that had held vigil at Joe's bed before he died. I look forward to one day going myself like Joe had: in his final hours he'd been surrounded by people who cared, and was sent off with a funeral service that moved me to tears.

Not all of us in society reach the age of 60 to a glowing future of a comfortable retirement. Yet tragedy, financial hardship, poor health and broken spirits need a home, too.

Joe had probably entered the world eager as a child, but a car accident had robbed him of his mind and, over the years, society had turned its back on him.

My community had turned its back on me once, too. That's why I'm humbled when I realise that I have finally, at age 60, found a place where I feel truly secure. For most of my life, I've been looking for somewhere peaceful to rest.

Family life had never offered me shelter or sanctity - my adoptive mother had always been sickly and she'd died when I was young. My adoptive father had never recovered from the wars in which he had fought; as we grew up, my sisters and I were continually thrashed to within an inch of our lives.

When I was taken away at the age of 15 because my father could no longer cope, my first response had been relief. I didn't realise then that things were about to get worse.

It was the '60s and precious few places existed to harbour a wild and rebellious young girl like me. The authorities had two choices: prison or a mental institution. I got the mental institution. For the next six years, my life and spirit turned back on itself until I saw myself as simply the shadow behind the door of an institutional cell. My primary focus was to find a way to escape.

Some days I was allowed to roam free in the institution's day room, but mostly I was left, butt-naked, to amuse myself in the solitariness of my locked cell. I'd watch the sunlight arc its way across the wall of the room and play imaginary noughts-and-crosses in the shadows of light and darkness that my cell bars formed. It was a challenge to stay alert. It was hard to stay warm. It took everything I had to stay interested in life. It was an achievement simply to survive.

As my guards withheld privacy, information, personal contact and legal or professional counsel, I became canny at appearing submissive and meek. I'd do anything to avoid the electric shock therapy, the drugs or any of the other disproportionately cruel responses my keepers would deem appropriate should I dare to protest anything. Fiduciary duty was missing from this place, the Hippocratic oath patently absent, leaving "patients" like myself to wander the corridors like ghosts.

I may not have been insane, but emotionally I felt unhinged. I had so little freedom and so few choices that when I was eventually discharged at age 21, it was years before I stopped acting like I was locked in a room with someone else in charge of the key.

The light in the outside world was blindingly bright, and curly questions would throb persistently in my brain. How could I measure or explain to outsiders the physical and psychological dimension of my pain? How would I win back the years that my incarceration had stolen? And was there, I often numbly wondered, a God? The answer, I discovered, was a resounding yes.

In fact, God resides where I myself have found lodging. Here at the Wesley Mission in Christchurch, Chaplain Bill and his colleagues open the door and their hearts to the downtrodden and broken-spirited.

And here am I, after a lifetime of searching, making myself a pot of coffee and lazily buttering my toast in a cosy, sun-filled apartment. I have rebuilt my life and found a home among a kind-hearted community. My life was a mess once, but now it feels good. And it's blessedly clear: the shadow behind the door is no more.

Marie Hazledine-Barber lives in Christchurch and writes poetry and short stories. Life, she says, is one hell of an adventure!

My Story - Out of the shadow

It took a lifetime to escape the effects of a lost childhood

From Reader's Digest Magazine

Sponsored Articles