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cosmic coincidence, death, funeral, handicapped, Janefield Colony for Mental Defectives, Love, Margaret, mentally disabled, Narties, Peter Pan, second cousin, Smarties, special needs
She never called them by their proper name. I don’t think she could actually say the word Smarties, but she loved them fiercely. Narties were her favourite.
And this coming Saturday I’m going to her funeral – a woman no one can really say they knew intimately. Except for the little things about Narties, her love of cats and bright trinkets.
Much of what you or I take for granted as basic rights and freedoms were permanently denied to Margaret by cosmic coincidence.
She never travelled. Never went to school. She never read classic literature or rocked out to her favourite band. I’m not sure she even had a favourite band. She never rode on public transport by herself or had the chance to vote. She never had a facial, a massage, spent hours drinking wine and talking long into the night. Never rode a horse or camped under the stars. She’s certainly never been to a yoga class!
She’s never been kissed passionately or been made love to all night long.
I doubt very much that she spent hours, weeks, months or years in the grip of depression or self-loathing. Not even that, something we wish we didn’t experience, was available to Margaret.
Because her world was very small. Contained. And yet she was in her way, happy enough.
So who was Margaret? My second cousin, the only daughter of my maternal grandmother’s sister. Having made it to her sixties (quite marvellous for someone with her life-long health issues), she passed away from kidney failure in the early hours of Thursday morning.
To use language which horrifies the politically correct, yet draws a swift and relatively accurate picture – Margaret was retarded.
Or, as per the name of the institution she lived in for much of her life – Janefield Colony for Mental Defectives.
Mental Defective.
Using kinder terms, I guess you’d call my second cousin mentally disabled, handicapped, special needs… whatever.
PC or no, I find all these descriptions rather vague. I’m not sure if they ever gave her a proper diagnosis.
Margaret permanently lived in her own Peter Pan world and I often wondered it was like in there. Internally, she forever had a mental age of perhaps eight, while externally her body aged like everyone else’s.
She didn’t have a bad life, not once Janefield was closed and she moved into a managed house with live-in carers.
My immediate family were good to Margaret when few others cared, especially once her own parents died. We’d bring her over for Christmas while she tolerated us (eventually her anxieties meant leaving her home wasn’t feasible) and give her small gifts suitable for a young girl – costume jewellery, cat toys, scented talcum powder, bubble bath, and sweets.
Many would look at people like Margaret and feel pity or sadness. Or perhaps they feel nothing when they see the Margarets of this world. Or embarrassed, even.
Hardly anyone knows Margaret and even for those that did… there will be no outpouring of grief. Because there was almost no way to connect, interact.
Is that what love hinges on? This idea of our connection to the object of our affections? Where that object reflects back for us a view of ourself that we really like? And how does one connect anyway, to a person who can’t share anything in return?
Although I’ve known Margaret for much of my adult life, I can not cry at her passing. But I want to. I want to cry and say I wish we could have talked. I wish I knew how your life went. I want to ask you what you experienced and felt. I want to know if you were happy, content even. I want to know what you wished for, and if your wishes came true…
There won’t be a crowd at the funeral, because she never met many people. Never had the chance to, actually.
Mum asked me if I wanted to attend and my response was, of course. She deserves to have people pay their respects, I said.
Because even though her experience was so utterly different to the general human consensus of ‘normal’ life, she is still one of us, of course.
We can’t relate, we can’t share what her life was like because she could never tell us, but we can mark her passing with what we do know.
So come Saturday we’re bringing flowers, Narties and toy cats to her service.
And we’ll farewell this human life as she is released from her very contracted incarnation and flows back to Source.
Margaret, you’re in my thoughts and prayers. May your passage through the bardos be swift, and may your next incarnation be an expansive and joyful opportunity.
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. Hari Om Tat Sat!
~Svasti
Svasti: A Journey From Assault To Wholeness 
This is beautiful, Svasti.
Thanks for sharing it with us.
This is a beautiful tribute to Margaret Svasti. Very well done. I too thank you for sharing.
Svasti,
What a beautiful tribute. I don’t know if you knew this or not, but I worked with persons with developmental disabilities for 17 years and could really relate to what her life might have been like. This is such a wonderful tribute to her and I am sorry for your loss and your family.
CC
Svasti, as the others have said, you have honored your cousin Margaret beautifully here, and through you many now know of her life and how it’s made an impact. Through Margaret you pose some amazing questions about how we love and whether or not we choose to love – is it purely from the heart, or is it for what we get in return? namaste, Karin
@Bob – Thank you. I am honoured to be sharing this story.
@tricia – I can’t stop thinking about her. What she experienced being so sick and fading away. Was it the same or different than what we do because of her very limited understanding of even the concept of death?
@CC – I don’t think I knew that (or remembered that). The “girls” she lived with were all lovely and they did have some fun, that’s for sure. Thanks for your condolences.
@Karin – I think love is expansive, and bigger than our concepts of it, even. But I think for most people, we don’t consider that wider view of love. Not enough, anyway. And its well worth contemplating.
This is a wonderful tribute, Svasti. I love it for the honesty and tenderness you combined in your descriptions so that I can have a sense of who Margaret was. My boyfriend in HS had an older brother who was “retarded” and had been farmed out away from the family due to parental shame. Their grandfather would have none of that and so established a home for mentally challenged children in a town nearby, and that is where this kid grew up and died in his 20s. My boyfriend’s parents and he also had big drinking problems and I think it had a lot to do with the fact that they had denied one of their own and the guilt ate away at them.
So you go with your Narties and cat toys and don’t worry if you do or do not shed tears. Your respectful acknowledgment of her life, both while she lived and now in death, is simply beautiful.
what a beautiful post. Thank you so very much for sharing. I work with children with cognitive delays, varying degrees of severity and differing “labels”. The labels are fine, they help us understand a bit better, but they don’t change the person. I love that you focused on Margaret the person, and not Margaret the label.
Many Blessings
Lisa
@Lydia – I think the prevailing attitude to mentally challenged people a few decades back was exactly that. One of fear, shame and so on. Apparently Margaret’s mother (my great aunt) used to work tirelessly for Janefield. I think she had a lot of guilt that she couldn’t care for her at home. And those institutions were not nice places!
@EcoYogini – I didn’t know that was your line of work. I imagine its very rewarding! Labels I think, are kind of useless. What it all boils down to, is that she was a person. Always.