Remembering M

I will call her M because I'm pretty sure her last name started with M. I do not remember her first name and this is really bothering me. I was 18. I met M at Mclean Hospital in their behavioral disorder unit, Upham 1. Mclean is a famous mental hospital. Sylvia Plath wrote about it in The Bell Jar. Susanna Kaysen wrote about it in Girl, Interrupted. I never knew why they put me in this unit. I suffered from depression, not a behavioral disorder. Most of the people in the unit were young women with eating disorders. Most had bulimia. M had anorexia. She was around my age, weighed around 50 or 60 pounds. She was very short. She was emaciated and a horrible sight, but one of the nicest persons I remember knowing.

I saw very little of M. I think she spent a lot of time off the unit, I don't know where. When she was on the unit she seemed to spend most of the time in the Quiet Room. It is a lot scarier than it sounds, at least for the behavioral disorder unit. There were no doors to the Quiet Room. No staff were posted to watch her. The behavioral unit itself was unlocked. Any patient could have walked out the door at any time. Nobody was forced to do anything in this unit, but there was sort of a subtle form of coercion that went on. I remember that she was supposed to eat ice cream. I'm sure that the arrangement was that if she didn't eat what they wanted her to eat, they didn't give her any privileges and made her hang out in Quiet Rooms all day. She took hours eating the ice cream. It just became a drippy mess. I don't know if she ever finished it. And whatever calories she consumed from the ice cream were probably burnt off from the exercising she did, which I'm sure she was not supposed to be doing. M had a tube surgically implanted in her stomach. I'm not sure exactly how it worked. Maybe when she left the unit they fed her through the tube. I never asked any details and I had no real interest in knowing.

M had contempt for the eating disorder specialist because she was unusually thin. She viewed this as hypocrisy. M didn't see why she should follow the advice of this woman when she looked anorexic herself. M did have a point. The eating disorders specialist (who I actually personally liked) was very thin -- and I agree with M that she was too thin. The eating disorders specialist probably suffered from eating disorders herself. Personally, I think that it's good to have a person who suffers from the same problem that you have helping you, but I completely understand how M didn't see things this way, and I admired M's "bad attitude." I also have a bad attitude. I don't feel comfortable with people with good attitudes.

When I left the unit after my stay of about two months, M hugged me. It was horrible. It was like hugging a skeleton. I bumped into M's parent's about six months later. They were actually very nice people but extremely deluded. I asked about M. They told me she was still battling anorexia. And I thought to myself, that battle was lost a long time ago, if it was ever even started.

A few years later I received word from someone who knew M that she had died. I had already written M off as dead. I didn't feel grief, only anger at M for being weak and not trying hard enough.

Recently I have been thinking about M, and now I realized that I passed judgment on her. I blame others all the time for passing judgment on me. Nadia asserted that there was nothing wrong with me, and only laziness was preventing me from getting a real job. It is only an illusion that there is me the "human being," and I am separate from the others -- the "proto-humans" who judge. We're all passing judgment. We're all assholes.

Now I understand that M's disease was too powerful for M to overcome or even acknowledge. M's death was not caused by her weakness or her lack of motivation. M was just a victim of a Godless, imperfect universe. That's all, and nothing more.

M was an adult woman. If I had been M's father now, I would have asked her what she wanted. If she didn't want treatment, I would have had the fucking tube taken out of her stomach and tried to spend as much time as possible with her for the rest of her days. I'm probably passing judgment on M's parents right now. It's so easy to do this.