The Two Kinds of Decay

Prayer

Once in my life I promised to say a prayer for my Catholic grandmother.

I picked up the phone when she called one morning at seven o’clock. She begged me to come and visit her. She said she was lonely. She was eighty-three years old and her friends were dead. I said I would visit if I didn’t have to go to school. I was in the seventh grade. She said, Oh, school. Then she thought for a moment and said, Say a prayer for me.

I was self-conscious generally, and prayer embarrassed me. I had learned phonetic Hebrew and had been taught Hebrew prayers, which, to me, were just a sequence of sounds, but I didn’t know how to pray in English.

After my grandmother’s death I remembered my promise and felt sad, but less about my grandmother than about the idea of a young person promising to say a prayer for an old person and then forgetting to do it during the old person’s lifetime.

Twelve years later, in the psychiatric ward, I was eating crackers in the kitchen when two other patients sat down with me.

One woman was my age. She was schizophrenic and had spent her first few days in the dayroom, standing, holding a Bible, reading loudly and clearly, and sometimes singing in a pure soprano.

The nurses asked her to stop. Later she explained, I just wanted to bring the Lord into this place.

The other woman was poor and had a very ill son who lived in a state home. Like many of the patients, she chewed nicotinelaced gum, because smoking on the ward was prohibited. And like all of us, she had no pretensions of superiority to anyone else committed to the ward.

She asked me, Do I seem depressed? I looked at her desperate, ruined face, and answered with careful solemnity, Maybe a little.

The ward was the only true community of equals I have ever lived in. What I mean is that we all knew we had already lived through hell, that our lives were already over, and all we had was the final descent. The only thing to do on the way down was to radiate mercy.

The singing schizophrenic, the sad mother, and I sat quietly for a few minutes, and then the schizophrenic asked, Would you like to pray with me?

The two women and I joined hands. One of them spoke for a while and then stopped. Then the other spoke. They addressed God humbly and directly.

One said, Please take care of my friends Nico and Sarah, and help us leave this place.

Then she said, I love you, Jesus.

I hadn’t ever heard my Catholic grandmother speak to her Lord like that. And the rabbi at my synagogue never seemed to want much to do with a heavenly God.

The schizophrenic was allowed to leave before I was. Her parents came to get her and seemed terribly ashamed. But to me she seemed no more or less joyful, no more or less insane, than on the day she’d arrived and first sung in the dayroom.

The only changes I noticed in her were what looked like painful muscle spasms from her antipsychotic medication, of which she now took a higher dose.