A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Reasons

There was an old woman at Medical Lake with Elinda. She was like a grandmother to everyone and would play pinochle with Elinda. She was in there for killing her husband and children. Another woman had drowned her kids. Those were reasons for being there, Elinda thought. Those women had even sent warnings and when those warnings were ignored, they did what they said they were going to do.

Another woman who spent time at the hospital while Elinda lived there was my dad’s sister, Evelyn. She was battling depression and schizophrenia. But oddly, they weren’t aware of each other.

Elinda could never come up with a clear, solid reason why she was there in the first place. No specific label or complicated acronym. “The simple way of expressing what I could have had is crazy,” she has told me. “But they wouldn’t label me crazy. I’ve got to fight my brain all the time now.”

When she left, she was worse than when she entered.