| She had a very, very sad life. She'd had a good life until her diagnosis with diabetes. I've known people for whom diabetes was something they managed rather easily, but the way the disease affected Jean was devastating. She would often just pass out and fall down and sugar would have to be spooned into her mouth. There were periods during which she had to weigh all her food and once when I was a child I saw her clip the corner off of a piece of bread with scissors. She had to take a blood sugar test more than once a day, and keep adjusting her insulin injections. She developed a painful nerve condition in her feet that eventually crippled her, and began to lose her sight when she was about fifty. She died at about sixty, having lived longer than anyone expected her to. I know from knowing Jean that diabetes can be for some people a truly terrible disease, and that insulin isn't a miracle cure. I don't know what she had to live for, once she got sick and lost most of her independence. Once after Mama and Grandma banished one of the few friends she managed to make in her constrained life, she had a "nervous breakdown" and was hospitalized with a diagnosis of clinical depression and given shock treatments. She was also paranoid then, because I visited her in the hospital and heard weird tales of conspiracies she believed had been hatched against her. (There were conspiracies against her, all right, but not the conspiracies she imagined during her illness, which involved messages designed to torment her being embedded in a magazine she was reading.) The shock treatments worked, in that she became functional again, so I never know what to think about the campaigns against them. Her memory was never the same after the shock treatments, though. She was intelligent and interesting, but I believe the feeling that dominated her consciousness after she fell ill and came home was self loathing, and my sister does, too. My mother chose to term it "a loss of self confidence." |
