Wounded Hearts by Lois Legge

Author:Lois Legge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nimbus
Published: 2020-05-27T12:43:56+00:00

Breakdowns

soon sandy started “road trip living, with all the different mothers or daughters.”

He lived in Cole Harbour, and in Shad Bay. In Liverpool and in Bridgewater. And eventually, back on Oak Street after Mrs. Morris’s youngest daughter got married and had children and moved into her mother’s home.

They all kept “the promise,” and Sandy is grateful.

But, it was “a pretty complicated thing to be happening to you,” he says.

“They have their own kids; they love their kids more than they love you, and you’re a bit of a pain in the ass, so anyway it’s like a second fiddle,” he says. “None of them mistreated me; they all took very good care of me, but the reality was—it was a tough road to haul.”

It had been a tough road for a long time. And eventually, because of a strange convergence of events, it caught up with him.

Sickness and his upbringing—maybe even his family’s history of mental illness—merged into a harrowing and life-changing event Sandy suffered through then, but is grateful for now.

As their mother had been, Sandy’s brothers Gus, Warren, and Earl, were all eventually hospitalized for what he calls “breakdowns.”

And then Sandy was hospitalized, too.

He’d already moved with a different Morris daughter to Ottawa and had finished school there. Thanks to a good teacher in high school, he straightened up his attitude and his marks. But he got sick—physically and emotionally—at age twenty-one when he came back to his Halifax home to visit, and to bring Christmas presents to the children in the orphanage.

Sandy’s appendix ruptured and they rushed him to hospital. Doctors operated, and when he woke up he started to hallucinate. He saw a white light; he saw nuns standing over him, even though it wasn’t a Catholic hospital. He was having “an out-of-body experience.”

“I go back to stay with the [Morris family] while I was waiting to get a plane to go back to Ottawa, and I start having problems with my mind,” he says. “I just lose control of it. I basically get on a plane, and I get back to Ottawa, get in bed, and I’m going insane….I’ve got these thoughts of godliness. I’m picking up children. I’m holding them. I’m saying all kinds of religious stuff—just mindboggling.”

He ended up in the Ottawa Sanitarium, a psychiatric hospital, where he stayed for about eight months.

For the first three days, Sandy lay on the floor, crying. He lost his ability to count and to communicate.

“You’re like a child,” he says, but “you’re twenty-one years old.”

Sandy gradually worked his way back to health. He’d forgotten many things, but not how to paint—a lifelong love that remains. “I painted my way back to sanity,” he says.

And eventually, he was “reborn”—not in a religious sense, but because he got to begin again.

“I was lucky to have a nervous breakdown,” he says. “That was the best thing that ever happened to me because it saved my soul. I mean, I had the guilt….The way I treated Mrs. Morris….My system was

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