My Tatyana
A reflection on my relationship with my schizophrenic grandmother — and what her death taught me about being a creator
Valerie Royzman
When my grandmother died, I wonder if her imaginary friend died with her. Actually, he wasn’t a friend at all. He traveled with her from Znamenka, Ukraine, to Toledo, Ohio, in 1993. He slept on her perfectly smooth, blue couch and left it wrinkled when he was done. He occupied a section of her refrigerator and ate her Lemonhead candies. And he drew over her artwork, the thing that made her brilliant and breathing and my Tatyana.
Kesha, the man my grandmother brought into existence, the man who made her afraid, was imaginary to us. But to her, he was very real. My grandmother had schizophrenia, and to me, it was ordinary. There was nothing unusual about watching her unpack the groceries my parents would bring to her home at the Pelham Manor Senior Apartments and reserve part of her pantry for him. My mother, Irena, suspects much of her needless rationing connects back to the 1940s, when my grandmother lived through the height of the war in Eastern Europe and ate just enough to survive.
I know Kesha was a middle-aged man. I know he was a malevolent force. I don’t know what he looked like or who he was modeled after, and my babushka isn’t around anymore for me to ask. My parents and I wonder if he was an unkind shadow of the husband or brother she lost to the war.
From what I’ve read on schizophrenia, the manifestation of Kesha was what is known as a visual and auditory hallucination. My father, Michael, tells me his mother would mistake animal imprints in the dirt outside her window for Kesha’s footsteps. My mother says when they left their country behind and finally landed in the States, someone had cut one of the bags in my grandmother’s suitcase open. In it, were her undergarments. After Tatyana saw that, she immediately blamed Kesha. He did that on purpose, she said, to embarrass her and have everyone see her bras and underwear. She was welcomed to America by the imaginary man she had hoped to leave behind, but couldn’t.
It wasn’t until recently that I decided to really learn who my grandmother was and how her mental illness affected the course of her life. About a month ago, I sat on the couch beside my mother, sorting through Tatyana’s tattered journals and notes. I had browsed through her belongings before, but this felt like the first time my parents showed me her most personal writings. She often began entries with, “It’s late, I can’t sleep,” and her thoughts would wander for pages.
“On the table was a cup of tea I was getting ready to drink,” my mother read aloud from a small, gray journal dated 1984. “I noticed it tasted sour, but drank it anyway. Almost right away, pain started to spread to my stomach and heart. I was sick for almost two hours. Every month, this poisoning happens.
“The bathroom floor is slippery and wet. The bread is covered in mold. Not even the birds outside want to eat it. They don’t fly here anymore, like so many years. They’ve probably been poisoned.”
My mother and I just stared at each other, quiet. The dog looked at us, too. This was familiar in a way, but still strange to read after Tatyana died. It almost felt too intimate, too hers and not ours to be reading. It sounds like poetry, I thought to myself. Could it be that my distant grandmother and I had poetry — something I hold incredibly dear — in common?
My grandmother recorded every detail, and her thoughts bounced around like a pinball. One moment, she would write about the joy of seeing her grandkids (my brother and sister), then suddenly she would switch to the idea that someone followed her home that day. Paranoia interrupted everything.
I remember visiting Tatyana as a child, and each time, she was in pain. This seemed natural for an elderly woman — the idea that something was hurting. Sometimes it was her heart. Sometimes it was her stomach. Sometimes her grief. I think she lugged so much of it around in her lifetime.
The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and by the fall began the mass killings of Jews in Soviet Ukraine — people like my grandmother. “An estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews perished, and over 800,000 were displaced to the east,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica. My father said he wishes he knew more about Tatyana’s life before motherhood, but he doesn’t. Fleeing from the Nazis to Kazakhstan, though, is a story he remembers.
Tatyana’s father, Peter, worked in a pharmacy in at the time. He traded goods with a higher-up working at the kolkhoz (collective farm) for a horse-drawn cart that he could use to escape their occupied hometown in Vinitskaya Oblast. He and his wife, Bella, agreed to take their non-Jewish neighbors with them, a couple with a girl in her early 20s, like my grandmother. “It wasn’t safe for anybody to stay,” my father told me. “They just wanted to help.” Before leaving, Peter buried the belongings they couldn’t fit in the cellar, vowing he would return for them after the war.
“If the Nazis catch up to us, I’ll tell them you’re a zhydovka, and they’ll kill you,” the girl told Tatyana.
It’s a line my father will never forget. The details of what happened after that are blurry, but everyone made it to Kazakhstan, where it was common to evacuate. The war hadn’t spread that far yet, and it was a region where many bombs and wartime vehicle parts was manufactured. Tatyana and her mother remained together, but they were separated from her father. “Post offices weren’t working right. Everyone was in panic, searching for lost family members. … After the war, they found each other again,” my father said, smiling. “But when they returned to Ukraine, everything they buried and hid had been dug up.”
My mother and I couldn’t find any of these stories in Tatyana’s journals. In one, she wrote that she kept detailed accounts of her earlier years, but she got rid of them. I wonder if they were too traumatic for her to read and relive. Besides escaping herself, Tatyana lost her brother, Roman, to the war. Because he was a student at the university (an artist, like Tatyana), he didn’t have to join the Army right away. But in 1941, everyone was being sent to fight. Seventeen-year-old Roman was stationed in Kiev, but he never came home. Tatyana and her parents only got a letter in the mail that labeled him propavshiy bez vesti, or “missing person,” meaning his status was neither alive or dead.
Tatyana married after the war, in 1947, and had her first son a year later. She was working as a world history and art teacher, while her husband, Boris, was an engineer at a beet-processing sugar plant. He, too, fought in the war and suffered from illnesses after. He died of kidney failure in 1958, leaving Tatyana with two young sons to raise on her own. Her hours at work were cut, and the housing Boris’ job provided was taken away because they hired someone new to take over his position. Tatyana moved in with her father, the only person she had left, but four or five years later, throat cancer killed him.
I’m not a psychologist, but I can sympathize with Tatyana’s suffering. I cannot imagine living through death after death after death. My mother looked at me as I quietly processed everything. “Grandma Tatyana was a lonely person most of her life, and very misunderstood,” she said, “and I think that’s part of the reason why things weren’t always right inside of her head. She had to make up stories and worries to occupy herself because nobody else paid attention.”
I knew my grandmother was medicated, but I didn’t realize how complicated her medical journey was until talking to my parents. As a kid, that was never something I paid attention to. Even as a teenager when Tatyana lived in our home and showed signs of dementia, I didn’t take enough interest. Today, I wonder if I was actually aware of her illnesses and simply avoided the inevitable outcome: her death.
A few weeks ago, my mother texted me pictures of some old prescriptions she found, knowing I needed more information about my grandmother. I think my parents were so busy working and raising their kids and trying to make something of themselves in a new country that they can’t remember small details like the names of Tatyana’s medications. The list included: levothyroxine (it can treat hypothyroidism); zoloft, which treats a variety of things, like depression and panic disorder; gani-tuss-dm NR liquid, a combination medication used to relieve coughs and breathing illnesses; propoxyphene, a narcotic pain reliever; and so many others. Nowhere in that list did my mother find anything to treat schizophrenia, though she knows Tayana was taking something.
Even though my mother wasn’t Tatyana’s daughter, she was the most involved in her care up until the day she died. My father was often working, and it felt like he, too, was averting the sad reality that his mother was growing exponentially older and sicker. Upon arrival in Toledo, my parents and grandmother did not speak English. My aunt, Alla, had taken language classes in Ukraine before she arrived in the States about four years before my parents and she had a car, so she was responsible for Tatyana’s doctor visits for many years. Rena, a volunteer at Jewish Family Services — the organization paid for my family’s plane tickets and helped with rent payments the first 90 days — who spoke Russian with my grandmother, also helped until my parents were stable enough.
My mother remembers Dr. Markowicz, Tatyana’s family doctor, who began noticing signs of her paranoia and first used the term “schizophrenia.” Another doctor, a woman who understood and spoke a little Russian, got Tatyana to open up more. She also noticed, and asked my mother to stay behind after an appointment. The doctor said something like, “I suspect Tatyana has been struggling mentally for years, through it’s tough to say how long exactly,” my mother remembers.
Tatyana lived independently at the Pelham Manor Senior Apartments until about 2008. My parents and I were out of town (visiting friends in Chicago), when Tayana got into an argument with the bus driver. She noticed the driver had passed her typical drop-off point, so she panicked and started to yell. Management called Alla and my uncle Roman (my father’s brother) after Tatyana turned aggressive. They took her to the hospital and signed her into the psychiatric unit. Unfamiliar faces of doctors and nurses surrounded her, and she didn’t know enough English to explain that she wanted to see my father. Of course, she was hysterical. My parents think it might’ve reminded her of a time a few years before, when my mother drove Tatyana to a doctor’s appointment for an MRI. “She had a phobia of closed spaces, so she yelled and almost broke things in the doctor’s office. We couldn’t get the test done,” my mother said.
The apartment complex Tatyana lived in asked my parents to start looking for a new place because they were aware she was growing more troubled with age and illness. The doctors recommended she remain in the hospital, but my father signed her out and brought her home with us. “She was my mother,” my father said through the phone. “I felt bad for her. I wasn’t going to just leave her there.”
After getting over her fear of the staircase, Tatyana took over the guest bedroom upstairs, and I quickly gained a roommate. My father knew she struggled mentally, but other times, Tatyana seemed perfectly normal. “She functioned adequately” in conversations at dinner, and her paranoia felt private, my father said.
My mother chimed in that once she started living with us and they found her writings and noticed her strange habits — wrapping and hiding her belongings, throwing away her medications, nightmares — they began to discern her illness more. “Then we understood her illness was serious,” she said. “It doesn’t get much more serious than that.”
I remember this. Tatyana and I got along well at first; after I got off the school bus, we would sit together in the living room and draw. I had a huge appreciate for her artwork and wished I shared that talent. My parents said I would help Tatyana get dressed and walk down the stairs, though I can’t recall much of it. Very quickly, “some kind of jealousy happened,” my father said, and Tatyana would complain to him about my mother and me. My accolades in school and parents’ praise began to irritate her. She refused to take her medication, and her outbursts escalated. I remember she would hide her medication — we found pills under her mattress, under the kitchen table or she would hide them under her tongue. Tatyana knew certain medications worsened her hallucinations, so she simply avoided them. “It was like she became a big, old baby who demanded the majority of the attention in the home,” my father said.
“You stole my son from me,” Tatyana once told my mother. Another time, Tatyana bit her while she helped her into the shower and washed the long, gray hair she usually kept wrapped in a colorful, patterned head scarf. My mother laughs today about the time Tatyana woke up panicked in the middle of the night and screamed for her dentures, then pushed my mother down the stairs as tried to calm her. But I remember Tatyana’s behavior, especially toward my mother, aggravated me, and I couldn’t make sense of how someone could be so ungrateful. At the end of her life, we were cold toward one another.
In 2011, everybody knew the end was approaching; her body and mind were deteriorating, she was barely eating and she was on morphine by then for all of her illnesses. On Sept. 18, I remember stopping into her room to see if she was still sleeping. I remember looking at her chest to see it move up and down, leaning in close to hear her breathe. And I remember the fear that washed over me when I realized that was the end. For Tatyana, and for the relationship I hoped we could build.
The details of what came after that are blurry now, but I sometimes replay the sound of my father upstairs, crying and pleading for her to come back, and me downstairs, sobbing uncontrollably into my brother’s shirt, before people from the funeral home showed up. Tatyana’s death is the only time I have ever seen my father cry, and I can still hear the echo of him yelling “Ma” in my head, especially as I write this now.
I have some regrets about my final years with my grandmother. While Tatyana was sometimes unkind to my mother and me and I have a hard time forgiving her, I wish things were different. If I could go back in time, I would try to be more understanding of her mental illness and the cruel world that sculpted her. My mother’s parents lived in Ukraine and died too early, so Tatyana was my only grandparent close to me in proximity. When I think about Tatyana today, I realize she has been running from something her entire life. The war and hunger, death, single motherhood, a country on fire after the Chernobyl accident and, finally, from schizophrenia and Kesha. All those years, I really believe she was searching for a place to be still and to create, to be left alone. Tatyana’s art was the thing that calmed her. I will never have to live through her struggles, but I, too, am always searching for the place where I can be still and create.
We are both artists and storytellers — Tatyana with risunki, and me with slova — trying to make the world more radiant and livable in our own ways. We didn’t always get along in this life, but maybe, in the next one, wherever that is, we will. We can sit side by side and create, free of pain.
I thought of this as I sat in my room a few nights ago and leafed through her artwork and journals, quiet and in awe. Tatyana was brilliant, even during her schizophrenia. Reading through the workings of her mind left mine spinning and hungry to learn more about the grandmother I never took enough time to know.
Some Russian words were mentioned in the essay. Here are their translations.
Babushka — grandmother.
Kolkhoz — the collective farm in the former Soviet Union. “A cooperative agricultural enterprise operated on state-owned land by peasants from a number of households who belonged to the collective and who were paid as salaried employees on the basis of quality and quantity of labour contributed” (Encyclopedia Britannica).
Zhydovka — term used by Russian-speaking people in the old Soviet Union to refer to a woman of Jewish heritage in an anti-Semitic way.
Vinitskaya Oblast — “Oblast” refers to one of Ukraine’s 24 provinces/territories.
Risunki — drawings.
Slova — words.
