October 30, 2009
‘My Mother Marie’
Book looks at woman’s struggle with mental illness
By MARY ANN HUGHES (Message staff writer)
The book “My Mother Marie” was born out of great love, and as the author tells it, “it was accompanied by labor pains.”
Patti Happel Grannan of Evansville is the author of the newly published book entitled “My Mother Marie: One Woman’s Struggle with Mental Illness.” It’s the story of Marie Miller Happel, a woman who struggled through the Great Depression and the Second World War, and then with her own depression which eventually claimed her life.
“My children remember my mother as being basically an empty shell,” Patti said. “They didn’t know her as the vibrant, fun-filled woman that I remembered.”
Ideas for the book rolled around in Patti’s head for years. The actual writing took nine months “just as long as it would take to build a baby. I wrote the last words on my manuscript on the 11th of January, 2009. That would have been my mother’s ninety-eighth birthday. And I said with a big sigh, ‘Happy Birthday, Mom. I hope this is the best gift you ever got.’”
The book recounts life on Evansville’s west side during the twentieth century. The author begins her story with the “Great Flood of 1937 because I was born at that time, when a doctor came in a boat to deliver me in an attic apartment up by Reitz Hill.”
She says that some days writing the book was easy. Other days were harder. The biggest setback occurred when she lost 192 pages on her computer. “That was really difficult.”
As she struggled to write the book, she often remembered this passage: If you teach a bear to dance, you have to continue until HE wants to stop. “I would remind myself that all the frustrations just went along with what I was trying to accomplish.”
The book is filled with her memories of family gardens, neighborhood gatherings to butcher hogs, religious sisters dressed in black habits and white wimples, and living as a Catholic in the 1940s when she was a young girl.
She writes about meeting her husband, Dick, now a deacon and pastoral life coordinator at St. Joseph Church in Evansville, and the birth of their three children.
There are the joys of family life, and she writes about the sorrows too. Alcoholism. Car accidents. Early deaths. And the Catholic faith that sustained the family.
She writes about her mother’s struggle with mental illness which intensified during her menopausal years. “It was a horrible thing. She went to doctor after doctor after doctor.
“With mental illness, there is nothing you can do. It’s such a sad field. People just do not understand. Unless you’ve been there, you don’t have a clue.”
She remembers that her mother was “such a religious women. She prayed and she prayed.” But during those darks years, she told Patti, “I can’t pray anymore. I don’t feel like God hears me anymore.”
“That’s when she really got bad, when she felt there was no hope.”
Patti has often been asked why she wrote the book. She answers, “I did not do it as a selfish way to make myself feel better. I wanted to memorialize my mother, and let people know she was a different person before the depression took over.”
She recalls a woman who had a “green thumb that ran all the way up her arm,” a woman who was “very talented and self-taught,” someone who “crocheted and sewed and made just about everything I and my sisters wore, some of them out of the chicken feed sacks that were printed in nice patterns.
“My book is a testimony to my mother who never really knew her own worth. I hope she knows what I tried to convey with this book.”
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A copy of “My Mother Marie” has been placed in the Indiana Room at the Central Library in downtown Evansville. “This room is always locked and my book will never leave it or be removed. It is considered a reference book since it contains so much of the history of Evansville, the Great Depression, the Great 1937 Flood and World War II as pertains to our area.”
To purchase a book, contact Patti at (812) 963-3541.
E-mail maryann@themessageonline.org.