by Studs Terkel
Behaviorwise, on a scale of 1 to 10, as I told the doctor, we’re at about a 9.5. We’ve still got .5 points to go before I become normal. [Laughs] This I want to give to you because I wrote this down this morning. [He laughs as I read the paper he hands me.]
Judge me not by the number of times I have failed, but by the number of times I have succeeded, which is in direct proportion to the number of times I’ve failed and kept on trying. V.I.M.
Angelina Rossi
She is the mother of V.I.M., Victor Israel Marquez. She is seventy. I have known her for many years; a strong, independent-minded woman. She has worked as a bailiff in Chicago courts and as an investigator for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She is now retired.
VICTOR WAS A very sweet young boy, helpful—the neighbors all loved him. He was the type of kid that would carry the groceries home for the neighbors, sweep their yards or pick up their trash or dump their garbage for them. He was the sweetest kid in the world. And then he went to Vietnam.
He came back completely changed, an altogether different person. Sometimes it’s very difficult to take . . . for me. I’m his mother, I knew what he was before. It’s very difficult for me to see him the way he is today. It’s very sad for me. [A long pause]
I’ve had six children. One of them, his younger brother, was the baby of the family. The other four girls were bossy, as most girls are. They take after their mother, I’m pretty bossy too. I think he got to the point where he just couldn’t take so many females around him, and he felt maybe he was missing something not having a man in the house. And so he decided he was going to Vietnam. I’d been divorced for quite some time. I never remarried. I’m not sure what it was, but I think he just felt that he had to break out of where he was and be in a more manly society. So he picked what he thought was the greatest military service in the world, the U.S. Marines.
He’s an alcoholic today. He does things that . . . I’ve never seen him doing these things, but I’ve heard from others. He’s one of the people who has road rage or mall rage or restaurant rage or something. He doesn’t seem to care about having any self-control. I am completely confused. I have been very religious, up until five or six years ago. Then all of a sudden, science, technology, the furtherance of our minds has all hit me, and I think to myself, How could this be? How could there be a Heaven? When we die, our bodies turn into, the nice way to say it is, dust. We turn into nutrients for worms, for other plant life. We evolve and we come back into a sprig of grass or a flower or a tree. And I think that’s how we live on. [She chokes up.] I can’t believe anymore that there is a Heaven. Am I going to see my mother? I don’t think so . . . I am totally confused and scared. I’m scared because I think to myself, What if I’m denying my religious beliefs? What if I, for whatever reason, my age, the time of life, my thinking . . .
Maybe I want to be back as a six-year-old child. I want to just have my belief that there’s a God, that there’s a Trinity, that there’s Heaven, that there’s Hell. I think my Catholic faith has also got a lot to do with it, with my confusion. We have changes in what used to be laws: you couldn’t eat meat on Friday night. Now you can eat meat on Friday. You couldn’t be cremated. Would you believe I’ve already paid for my cremation because it’s approved now by the Catholic Church. If the Catholic Church, or any church I would guess, is that correct and that right, then how can they change their rules in the middle of things? So I think to myself, I’ve lived through so much life, I’ve seen things change, I’m realistic, I know what really happens, and I just don’t know . . . Is there a spirit that lives on? According to the Bible, we’re all going to meet our maker, we’re all going to be judged. Well, I don’t have to worry about that. I don’t think I’m going to be judged too badly. But I think to myself, how in the world can your entity, your human person come before a governing body, and they’re going to decide whether you’ve been a good person all your life or a bad person all your life?
There’s so many differences in people. Some people believe in having multiple wives. Our society believes, no, you only have one wife. Today our society believes you not only have one commitment to a person, but it could be a person of the same sex. You could marry another woman, you could marry another man if you’re a man. I’m confused. Am I alone? Am I the only one? I find it very difficult to have any straight thoughts about anything because even though I say things, in my head is something else, something opposite is coming through.
We found that there are as many things beneath the ocean as up in the sky. How do we know what’s there until we’re there? The floor of the ocean is breaking up on the Eastern Seaboard. They don’t know what’s going to happen—might be horrible tidal waves that hit the shore. What if there’s some kind of a living entity that comes out of that? Now we’ve got something else to worry about, something else to digest, something else to understand. Are we going to be the same like we are now with the crazy alien things? We’re going to go out and kill them? They’re human beings, or they’re beings, whatever they might be. What if they have a religious background? What if they think there’s life hereafter? As a child, there was no question—no question where I came from, where I was going to be, and where I was going to be when I died, I knew. When I died, I was going to Heaven, I was going to be in the arms of God.
I’m of the old school. Another thing that’s changed with the Catholic religion is there’s no longer a burning Inferno, there’s no longer “you’re going to burn forever.” Today, the word is that Hell is you’re just not in the presence of God—so that too has changed.
I grew up when the nuns used to hit your hand with the ruler or stick gum in your hair if you misbehaved. They did that to me for chewing gum in school. They didn’t just make you throw it out, but me, they stuck it in my hair—and my mother had to cut it out. Of course, my hair was real long so that was terrible. But you believed everything the nuns and the priests told you.
I regret my innocence, I regret the absolute belief that I had, because it’s making me nuts. I don’t know what to think anymore. And this scares me—I’m very fearful that my whole life has been a sort of living—believing a fairy tale. And, I’m wondering: Is there a supreme being? And I have to cross myself . . . [She crosses herself.] Because there’s the part of me that says, “You’d better not be too sure about that, because what if there is a God?” What if all my life my beliefs are right? What if something has happened as I’ve grown older? An arrogance about myself that I think, Oh, I know a heck of a lot more than the person on the street . . . And then I think God can’t hold that against me if He’s for real. Because God made me. He knew what I was going to evolve into. He knew the person I was going to become. So if there is a God, then I have nothing to worry about. I think that’s only because I’m as old as I am, and for me God has always been a male, a man. The pictures, the host, everything has always been he, he, he. Now, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if it’s a he, a she, or an it—it doesn’t matter to me. If it’s just a spirit, that’s OK. If it’s a force, that’s OK too. Whatever it is . . .
I know I’m going to die. The only thing I hope and pray for is that I die quietly, that I don’t die with pain and anxiety, fear. But I don’t fear dying. I’ve lived. My goodness, have I lived. I have lived a life: I’ve raised six children. I’ve had a law enforcement career . . . I’ve been very happy, I’ve got very good friends. I can go at any time, it doesn’t matter. And I’m all set for it. I’m all prepared for my death. I’ve got my funeral arrangements made. What little money I have is going where it’s supposed to go. I hate to be very, very human right now, but I’ve got to tell you: I just cannot stand the idea of my body being infested with worms and maggots. I would rather be burned. After all, we go to dust anyway, according to the Bible: dust to dust. So I’m happy about all that.
I’m going to be seventy years old. Most people call this the golden years. I don’t. For me, they’re the rust years. Everything is rusting up—especially the knees.
When I go, I’d like some kind of closure for my family. I would like them to have a little memorial service with any friends that might want to come. A lot of my contemporaries are deceased now, so it doesn’t much matter. [Laughs] I’m not a famous person, so there might not be that many people to come to my wake. If you’re around and you’ve got the time, come on over and just say a few prayers for me. Because still I keep thinking, OK, the person says a prayer for me, it works for me, so . . . I would like to be remembered as a person who always did the best she could do, but who had a lot of faults. And forgive me for the faults that I had. For the most part, I tried to do the best I could do.
I find that the majority of people don’t want to discuss death. I tried to speak to my family about what I want done when I die. I can’t find anybody that wants to talk to me about it. I had to talk to my son-in-law . . . [Laughs] It’s like it’s never going to happen. It’s like they’re ostriches with their heads in the sand. It happens to everybody else, but it’s not going to happen to us. See, that’s not the way I think: I know it’s going to happen. And I want to be prepared.
Guadalupe Reyes
She is eighty-two. She lives in Pilsen, Chicago’s largest Mexican community, where she is recognized for her involvement in neighborhood matters. Of her eleven children, four daughters are community activists. Her oldest, Mary, was the one who got her started. “I lost one child in 1983—that was Bobby. He was retarded and physically handicapped. He was number six and became the center of our lives.”
SINCE BOBBY WAS BORN, I always felt—and I think all parents feel this way—that we are responsible. You feel guilty. Maybe you weren’t resting well or eating the right food or whatever. I used to get depressed. I used to take him outside for walks, although he couldn’t walk very well, trying to make up for the guilt that I felt. I used to sit in my kitchen and cry, because I would see him sitting there, a big boy, playing with nothing. He was about twelve, thirteen.
They put a brace on him, so I would sit him on the table and swing his legs, put on oil, massage them and exercise them every day, in the morning. Then I put him on a tricycle, put on little elastic bands, and pushed him out in the hallway. Every morning or evening, when the kids were there, they would do it.
They told me, he may not talk because his vocal cords have been damaged.
I feel God was with me then. I read in the paper a little article that said blowing balloons would strengthen the vocal cords, so I taught Bobby how to blow balloons. These penny balloons. He loved it because he’d blow ’em up, then stick ’em with a needle. As he grew, I bought the five-cent ones, but now he was getting too expensive—he’d break them all. I thought of buying him a beach ball, but he didn’t like that because it wouldn’t pop. Bobby started to talk. I could hear sounds where he made noises. I was feeling my efforts were being rewarded. At the same time, I cannot say seriously that I made him talk. I wanted to cure him, but I knew it wouldn’t happen, right? I was still trying. I felt I owed him something . . .
I used to call Mental Health and tell them to send somebody to help me with my son. It didn’t work. I was going a little out of my mind. Finally, I decided to find out if there were other people who have the same problems.
I put a notice in the neighborhood paper, and I got about four people who had the same problems. We didn’t know what we wanted to do, but I felt comfort that there were people who could talk to me. What happened was that other people joined these meetings: students from the universities taking Special Ed, community reps working with schools. Mental Health came around, curious to ask what I was doing. I said, “We’re just talking.” We didn’t know what else to do, right?
The students were the ones who started it. They investigated places we might take our kids. That gave me a lot of courage. Mental Health would tell me, “Lupe, just don’t get disappointed if nothing happens, if things don’t work out.” I said, “Whatever happens will be better than nothing.” So I kept on working with these people. I had about fifty parents now that came together. We were just meeting in my house or in an office across the street.
One day, this professor came over, from some city college, and he says, “I’ll help you. We’ll have a school going and you’ll run it.” The hardest thing was getting parents to agree to let their children come to our school. Mary* and I had to go to their homes and reassure them over and over and over. We were at all the meetings, asking people if they knew any handicapped kids in the neighborhood, getting names, addresses, telephone numbers, and making follow-up visits. We decided to open the school.
We gave the school a name, Esperanza—it means “hope.” We started with a little pilot program of twelve kids. What happened to me is that I began to feel better when I started to do something for my son—no longer depressed. We had our problems, but Esperanza grew very well and is still going.
We knew that Bobby would soon have to leave Esperanza because of his age. Where will we put him? We didn’t know nothing about adult workshops, so we set up a place called El Valor—it means “courage.” It’s a place where Bobby could stay forever.
Bobby was thirty-three years old when he died. This happened at El Valor. He usually had seizures, because he was an epileptic. He had a seizure there and didn’t come out of it. Bobby was the center of everything we did. If we had a party, we counted Bobby in because he liked parties. He liked to dance. My granddaughter Anna used to take her guitar and say, “Come on, Uncle Bob, let’s sing.” They’d sing together. He gave us a lot of joy.
He was very funny at times. At my birthday party, Bobby wanted to give a speech. He started talking about Harold Washington and how we should vote for him. Washington was already mayor. We would clap for him and go along with it. He felt very proud and he made us laugh a lot.
When Bobby died, in a way I was thankful because he suffered a lot. He would fall and hurt himself—you couldn’t watch him every minute. He could walk around and he could talk and he could run out the door, and he wanted to be the president and all kinds of things. But we had to be watching him all the time. My kids used to worry because I was alone and they said, “When we marry, what are you going to do with Bobby?” I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be able to take care of him.” I said, “God will help me.” That’s why my faith is so deep . . . My youngest son came to me one day and said, “Mom, I’m the last one here at home. I guess I’m going to be here now to take care of you and Bobby.” I said, “No, you don’t have to. The day you’re ready to leave, the day you want to get married, you leave.” “But, Ma, how about you and Bobby?”—because Bobby was hard to handle. “Don’t worry, son,” I said, “God will be with me.” My kids all got married.
It’s because Bobby was with us that my family was together. On Sundays everybody was there. Whenever I had problems, they would come right away to help me with him. He was a big boy, about two hundred and fifty pounds. If he fell, I couldn’t pick him up—just put a pillow under his head and that was it. They were afraid that I would be alone with him. But Bobby and I managed very well. And he started to mature more. He started to be a little bit more calm, because there was no one there to tease him or yell or whatever. The television was his. My family didn’t abandon us—they came every Sunday. They took him to McDonald’s. He wanted to put money in the bank. He had about maybe a hundred dollars in the bank and he wanted to go to the bank every day to see his money. So my children would come on Sundays, take him for a walk to see the bank so he knew his money was there. I think Bobby also taught my children to love each other, because they cared about him a lot . . .
They used to get into fights with him because he was a nasty guy, but they were always there. So that taught me many things, too—compassion for people who have a problem like we had with Bobby.
Why suffer? After his seizure, they said, “There’s a pressure on the brain and we could try and operate.” “What guarantee do you give me that he will survive?” “None.” Ten percent or something. I said, �
�Let him go.” They said, “He has a right to life.” I said, “I understand—but he also has a right to go.” I got my family together and I said, “What would you like to do?” “Mom, what do you think?” I said, “For myself, as his mother, I have seen him suffer a lot and I don’t want them to open his head and not even know for what or what will happen to him. But you’re his family—you also tell me what you think.” They all decided to let him go. And we let him go.
The day that the Lord calls me, I want to be ready for everything that I had in mind. I’m Catholic, I want to have a priest, I want to talk to him and confess to him everything I have that may be bothering me. I want to be able to clean all that out. Then I want a very quiet time. I don’t want any fancy things. I don’t want to go to a funeral home where they keep you two or three evenings and people come to see you there. I want to be in my church because that’s my home—that’s God’s home.
I will be with Bobby. There was this dream I had about him a few months after he died. He was very happy, laughing, and I heard him coming down the gangway. Then he was banging on the door and he pushes it and comes in. And he says, “Hi, Ma.” I said, “Hi, Bobby, what are you doing here?” Because in my mind I knew he was gone. He said, “I came to see you. I don’t want you to worry about me, I’m OK.” Now Bobby had a little problem with his speech, and he also limped on his left leg. He says, “I’m OK, Ma, look—I can talk well now,” he says, “and I don’t limp anymore. Look at me. I don’t want you to worry about me anymore, Ma, I’m OK.” I said, “Bobby, why don’t you come back to me?” He said, “No, Mama, I just came to see you, but I’m not coming back.” And he started walking away. Then he came back and he gave me a big hug, and he says, “Mom, I’m leaving, but I’m keeping an eye on you.” I said, “OK, Bobby.” That was the last I remember. He was walking out, and I could still hear him laughing out there in the gangway. He liked to laugh a lot. I still hear him laughing in the gangway, banging on the door, pushing it open, and walking in and saying, “Hi, Mom.”
