Mental Illness? or - Salvation Copyright ©2014 Hazel Gay
Oklahoma
January 1984 – Dream
I’m going to have baby and for the first time in a dream, I feel labor pains.
February – Dream I’m in a hospital.
March
Reading: Jess Lair, I Don’t Know Where I’m Going but I Sure Ain’t Lost
Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Quiet Planet (A fantasy)
C.S. Lewis was recommended to me by the minister in ’71 but I couldn’t handle it then. This is the FIRST TIME since I haven’t been afraid of it; I guess it’s time. I don’t know why but it’s important to me.
Having a little bit of “vibrating” quality.
Oklahoma
March 1984
Jess,
When I’m entering, in, and leaving psychosis, the ego, the shell, is permeable and the inner me that’s exposed is sure, confident. Some of the “personality changes” I seem to experience during altered states I don’t consider changes at all. The REAL ME is simply coming out, the REAL ME I was afraid to let come out before. I am already inside what I want to be. It’s my ego, the shell, my defense, my armor, that’s in the way.
I have also known for a long time I wanted to keep that feeling, when I wasn’t afraid of what someone was going to think of me, when it just did not cross my mind, not a bravado, that appears during every altered state. It always lasted for sometime even after I became “sane.” I thought about going to a hypnotist in Las Vegas to see if they could make me feel permanently “confident.”
The totality of the religion I was brought up with was “Repent and be saved.” Repent – of what? I had repented till I turned blue in the face; you saw me repent for a few things. I got to a place I didn’t feel I had anything left to repent for so where did that leave me?
No one ever said anything about when you get hurt real bad; no one ever said anything about people like me. How many years I listened to people, “You don’t have any reason to feel inferior – you don’t have any reason to feel ugly – you don’t have any reason to feel this and that and the other thing.” Sure, common sense tells me I didn’t have a reason to feel all that stuff. I’m not stupid, I could see I was intelligent. I could see I was not a liar and thief and murderer and harlot, etc. etc. Common sense I had. But I still knew I didn’t measure up.
I don’t know. I wish I could think of a short phrase that would sum it all up but right now, I can’t. I have DARED to stand eye to eye and toe to toe with everything I was taught, knowing there was the possibility they were right. I knew my heart was right with God; I never tried to play games with God. Yet…
What do you tell someone like me? I want to find the words for all the people like me. All of the songs I could have written, all the careers in the world cannot make the inside of me feel OK like I’m talking about.
After starting my book I came to realize I didn’t experience that “restless” feeling – “looking for something but I don’t know what” I had experienced for as long as I could remember. For the first time I was “quiet” inside. When I’d go for a long period of time without working on it, it was like something “gnawed” on me. NOTHING I became involved with stopped that gnawing. It stopped only when I returned to my writing and I would find a certain “peace.”
You may be the only person in the world who has REALLY understood what I decided in 1976.
Oklahoma
April 15, 1984
Jess,
I can’t believe I’m sitting here, again on a Palm Sunday, writing. It started – where? I wanted to say on March 4 but that’s not exactly true. That morning I got up and it was as if “Yesterday was a hundred years ago.” All the pain of the past has lifted. It began to be more of “I was born this morning.” It’s as if something inside me has been fixed, put back together, healed – the miracle of my heart being put back together again – like when I sent you the cryptic telegram in ’80 – about the putting back together what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put back together again – the acute, acute pain. A curtain has been lowered between me and it. I’ve had transient times of experiencing this during all altered states but today is April 15 and I’ve been like this since March! Granted, I just spent two weeks in a hospital in Oklahoma City.
My cousin wanted me to sing at her sudden wedding on February 18 – big shock to me that she wanted me to sing. It turned out beautifully; one song was PERFECT. My mother was at the wedding and you’ll never guess in a million years what happened! MY MOTHER looked at me right in the eyes and said, “I think you did a good job with the songs. I liked that. I’d like to have a tape of it.” Here it is, I turned 45 just two days before and for the FIRST TIME in my life my mother is telling me there is some part of the REAL me she actually LIKES!!
My cousins even told me they liked it. My aunt told me she was getting the Christmas card I’d given her, the poem and sketch, framed! MY poem, MY sketch. (When I wanted to get six pictures from the photographer who had done the study of me working with young deaf children, my mother insinuatingly asked, “Why would anybody want six pictures of themself for?” So I didn’t get them.)
Since I’m staying only about 20 miles from the spot where I was born I suddenly wanted to go there; to walk around where I was born, where I had learned to walk. I touched trees still there that I had probably touched as a child. I had come home. There is a concrete section line marker there now and right in front of it were the bones of a very young calf that had died right there. Somehow, I felt like I was starting over when I left there that day.
When I got to the confusion of time, the feeling of existing on two planes simultaneously, I handled it for a longer period than ever before with less confusion. I was just beginning to be “confused” on Saturday, March 31, (Lindy dumped me at my sister’s house the night before since he couldn’t handle my “temper tantrum” as he was calling it) but not so confused that I couldn’t make it to my aunt’s house a two hour drive away. The next day my R.N. cousin simply thought I had taken street drugs because of my dilated pupils and “fluctuating emotions,” the most obvious changes in me. That afternoon she took me to the hospital at Oklahoma City. I was quite surprised, and hurt, that she thought I had taken drugs since I had told her I had NEVER done that.
One of the first things I did at the hospital was clean up the refrigerator, the only thing I could find dirty, complete with assertively informing the staff such items as, “Juice should not be stored in those OPENED cans.” (I had spent a lot of time cleaning the hospital in 1980.)
The first night I had some kind of strange, happy dream. I was talking to some people, I want to say “God,” and a voice said, “Go back and sing.” I turned my back to them, went back to double doors, opened them up wide prepared to sing when I was blinded by a brilliant golden light. At that moment, a nurse woke me to take my blood pressure.
A young student nurse stepped into a room with me, looked at me for the first time and made the mistake of saying, “Well, I hear you’re a manic depressive.” Did I read her the riot act about mental set! She didn’t know what to say that day but she apologized for the next two days.
My whole manuscript seemed to start coming together for me. I may not have the words yet, but it represents some kind of synthesis between the Old and New Testaments. I’m reminded of something I wrote in ’76, “I couldn’t take Abraham’s God or Christianity’s Jesus so it was take my marbles and go home. Where was home? For me?” I don’t know the name of it yet but I feel like I found it. And it feels good!
Interestingly, there was a young man there also working on the same adaptation of the Star of David, he had his a little more than half finished.
One of the things I worked on this trip was the last time I was raped. It hadn’t seemed that big a thing to me. Because I don’t know that only women are not supposed to do certain things, I placed myself in a situation where a man of a certain mentality interpreted it differently from me. Since he was a son of an ex-president of Nigeria I knew better than to cause a scene with someone like that! Thank God by that time I knew how to push some kind of button in my head and all I thought was, “You fool, you pathetic fool,you can’t really touch me.
I didn’t realize there was as much sadness associated with that event as there was, however. If I were a man, I would have been treated like an equal or at least there would have been the possibility of that, meeting someone from another culture and exchanging ideas. This is the sadness I discovered…
My sister has moved back here. It all seems so strange. Here we are, where we were more than 20 years ago. She takes one mg. of Haldol a day; her doctor told her she’d have to take it the rest of her life. She had a mild recurrence a couple of years ago. We don’t spend a lot of time talking about her psychotic experience; I let her take the lead; I ask few questions. Her trips are apparently different from mine in some ways. About the first time she said, “…I started to change a light bulb in a ceiling fixture and as I reached up it was like I saw a blinding light; I knew it wasn’t in the room somehow and what I really felt like was I was going to see the face of the Lord.” (The radio was on to a POP music station and at the EXACT MOMENT I put the period at the end of that sentence a men’s choir started singing, “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord.”)
I was VERY surprised to learn my sister is starting to question the old religious beliefs. I learned I was probably the only person in the world who really understood she still wanted to be a nurse, something she’d wanted to do since childhood. In fact, I may be the only one who remembers. Now her husband doesn’t think she can do it; it might be too much since she has “mental problems.” He wouldn’t ALLOW her to work till her psychiatrist (a man) told him he thought it would be good for her! So she can take Haldol the rest of her life.
*********
Shortly after I got out of the hospital, Lindy’s house had burnt to the ground after some of my family and I had smelled smoke off and on for three months, intuitive feelings on my part for two days and an unusual sequence of events.
May 18, 1984
Jess,
I ran across notes from my ’74 episode. It’s been ten years. I hadn’t understood some of them then but I do now. On those pages are the beginnings of my adapted Star of David.
I compare the Messianic idea to the young girl waiting for the knight in shining armor to ride up on a white horse and rescue her. Seems a lot of mankind is waiting for someone to come and rescue us, “the world,” from this mess we’re in, the mess we made, like that’s the only thing that can save us. That way we don’t have to feel any responsibility for helping change anything – no guilt, either.
Saw on TV someone had found some seeds in some kind of ancient archeological find; seeds thousands of years old; they sprouted and grew when planted.
My youngest daughter went with a friend to a Pentecostal type church meeting. She heard a woman making the same kind of sounds I do when experiencing my emotional pain – she was experiencing the “Holy Ghost.” (I had described it to her before as “My soul is crying.”)
A few weeks ago I heard this same daughter say, “I’d rather my mom go off her rocker every few years than have her take medication all time. I’ve seen what that does to her.”
It’s funny the turn my mind has taken. From wanting to find a “cure” for schizophrenia, my ATTITUDE towards these “altered states” seems to have changed. The time may be coming when I find them acceptable, even desirable. Progressively gaining in positive experiences till this last episode I might consider 99% positive! If my kids can hold out for a few more years if they’re going to have some kind of “unusual” experience, maybe I can find someone somewhere who feels more like I do; that they won’t be subjected to some of the same kinds of inhumane treatment; that we can find a place where they will be allowed to have at least the possibility of a POSITIVE experience. In the meantime I’m getting in my 2 cents worth trying to have some effect on changing THEIR attitudes. I know this may be radical but that’s where I am now.
When I said something inside me had been fixed I also remember when I felt like I had gathered me up from all around. It’s kind of more of that, too. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like so much of me is all in one spot!
May 1984
Here it is, 1984. We’re on the brink of genetic intervention. The scientists think they’re going to find a “kink” on a chromosome responsible for schizophrenia. I told Jess once, “I don’t want them messing with my genes.” He said, “Don’t worry; they won’t touch yours; it’ll be your children’s children.”
As I sit here writing, a very real fear is coming up from way, way down inside me. How do they know when they destroy or alter, what they will have? Have they found another spot for creativity? If they mess with the “kink,” will they wipe out the future artists of the world, the prophets, the deepest spiritual nature of mankind? How do they know those little spots on the chromosomes work independently, that they’re not all interrelated in some way; by messing with one you throw the whole system out of kilter?
Sitting here watching grade school kids playing across the street, I started thinking about young people and drugs, the rising suicide rate among young people.
We have to give them back their spiritual nature. We have to give them back a “God” they can’t see, touch, taste, smell or hear. We have to give them back the mystery of life. Without that unknown, we are nothing.
Yes, it’s 1984.
I’m seeing a young clinical psychologist in Ardmore, the first person I’ve talked to who has rather radical ideas about the things taking place during psychosis, that there is a possibility of something good coming from it. Though I had come to that conclusion, I had not met anyone else who allowed that possibility. (I was reminded of my dream ’76, going into Ardmore, stores to the right, etc., to the left seeing the upper part of the back of a man in the window.)
“What do you do that gets you carried off to the hospital?” he asked.
“The first thing I think of is the pain I get in touch with, the pain sounds I make.”
“What else?”
“Symbolism, the extreme symbolism, all becomes symbolism.” As I sat there talking to him, I suddenly realized how utterly devoid of symbolism my life is out of “psychosis.” I began to wonder what would happen if I allowed some symbolism into my everyday life. I started to say I’ve been almost o.d.ing on symbolism since, but perhaps that’s what’s happening during psychosis, an o.d. on symbolism.
I’m starting a scrapbook, clipping newspaper articles that in some way reflect what I feel, things from the outside world that reflect my inside world, eg., a new Spirit Lake on Mt. St. Helens. For the first time they don’t have to be a delusion. Sure, it may be childish, BUT, that may be just what I NEED. I just ACCEPT I may need what might appear to be a child’s project. It’s fun, too. Certainly, no one knows how to “fix” the inside of me.
After leaving the psychologist’s office that day, I was parking on a parking lot when out of nowhere, I KNEW all the stuff with Jess, all of my “delusions” and semi-delusions, the whole thing was a FANTASY – apparently a necessary fantasy for me. I knew it in some sense for the FIRST TIME and I was amazed at the realization and amazed I had not known it before; I AM intelligent! (Strictly an intellectual knowing.)
Within three weeks that therapist moved to western Oklahoma.
While around Lindy working with animals I noticed how he acted with them, especially the ones he called “high strung.” Not making any sudden movements, talking quietly to that supposedly “crazy” Wagoner strain quarterhorse, acutely alert, totally controlled movements, I realized the way he worked with that horse was the same way people acted with me who had positive results during my altered states. They didn’t make sudden movements, didn’t talk loud and their eyes were calm, steady.
July 11, 1984 Dream, during SEVERE electrical storm
I’m moving objects with “will.” I become aware of something in one of my Sunn PA speakers trying to communicate with me; a woman’s face starts to appear. Eyes become visible first, left one dilates, right one scares me a little, like a spiral, lets me like look into her soul. Seeing more of face but she doesn’t speak. A total stranger, pretty face but a grotesque appearance because of a pointed, cap-like thing on top of her head, don’t know what that is. I ask, “Do you want me to help you?” Not clear answer but felt no. I ask, “Do you want to help me?” I show her how to nod head yes or no but she makes no response. Finally I say, “But I’m not afraid.” She makes me feel she’s not afraid for me while the cap-like thing is removed and to my surprise, there’s just pretty hair underneath; it’s not hideous. I’m stunned she’s so beautiful, a classic beauty, so much beauty that I have to lower my eyes and head in awe and cry. I wake to see the lightning.
August 1984
I went to Portland to make a master for an album, Lindy’s idea. It would take till the middle of December.
We put nine of my songs on the album, doing the whole nine yards, strings, horns, arrangers, the works. The name of it became “With All My Heart” and would be released spring ’85.
If you are interested in hearing one of the best songs on the album, click here: Like Jon Does ©1976 Hazel Gay
I discovered that fall that when I had problems getting to sleep that counting 1, 2, 3 doesn’t interfere enough with my thinking. I became very aware that I could count and think about other things at the same time. I tried counting in 2’s, still too easy. Counting in 3’s I found I had to use just enough of my brain to figure out the next number that I couldn’t think about other things at the same time and counting in 3’s put me to sleep! Till I began to count automatically and it lost its effectiveness.
The records were pressed in Phoenix. In December, going back to Oklahoma from Phoenix, I went to Mexico for the first time. Since one of my best songs, “Goin’ to Mexico,” that I wrote in ’80 was heard first by a friend in Portland, I sent him a postcard that said, “It took me four years but I finally made it!”
If you are interested in hearing this song click here: Going to Mexico ©1980Hazel Gay
April 13, 1985
For the very first time I see a possibility of editing, an objective coming into focus, a point to make. I feel a direction coming at last, at least this is the FIRST time I’ve felt I might even know a direction….
Oklahoma
April 17, 1985 Dream
Jess and I in “foreign” territory, fighting man who has us and others “enslaved.” He’s like ruler of “the mob,” vicious, a killer, no conscience. Jess is not supposed to be there. A house, we’re not supposed to go in but we go in after the man sees Jess. Jess goes to the right; I go to the left. Jess watches as the man attacks me; Jess fights him but doesn’t kill him. Jess goes out of house – talking to another man, his friend. I hit the man in the house in the head with a chair, addles him, hurts him more than Jess. He’s bleeding. We know he has to die for us to be free of him.
******
Consciously “calling forth” the “right hemisphere” of my brain, I gradually entered an altered state that lasted about two weeks.
Oklahoma
April 21, 1985
It’s been one week today that I became so consciously aware that I’m living, walking, talking in “another world” besides the one I’ve grown up with. I’ve known this each time I’ve been psychotic but I can’t believe the clarity of my conscious understanding of what has appeared full blown during each episode since 1971.
“Right brain” has been coming up with the symbols, images, analogies, etc. and the “left” deciphers, interprets. I can ACCEPT this as some kind of altered state, learn how to live with it and in it or say, “My God, I’m schizophrenic!” I’m going to learn to live with it – it feels good. (“Right brain” – I refer to it that way. May have nothing to do with it but I need some words to try to communicate. Just don’t lock in “right brain.” It’s something in my brain somewhere that I am not normally tuned into at a conscious level.)
One persistent delusion since 1971 is based on the feeling of being watched. Could that be that unknown, unseen part of me WATCHING me, like two of me inside me. With no judgement, it’s more objective, uninvolved in an emotional way. Was this “entity” what I projected to “the doctors” all these years? (10/23/19 – Could that be Jung’s “objective psyche?”)
My “left brain” is not being completely overwhelmed. Little by little, with each episode I’ve gotten more used to the ideas, accepting then one by one till I can accept more new ones; the “left brain” becoming more accustomed to dealing with the “right brain” contents; there are more and more recognizable features here. (In reality may have nothing to do with brain hemispheres but it gives me a way of talking about something unknown.)
The “connectedness” I feel in these states. If one has no memory of having FELT this, one doesn’t have a frame of reference for it. If one is so alienated, alone, isolated, in a box, what happens if abruptly one FEELS “belonging,” “connectedness.” Suddenly, acutely, it’s GUT LEVEL, one FEELS – CONNECTED. Thus, the thoughts to interpret that feeling, “Those people in that car know me,” “The whole world is involved in some way with what is happening to me.” Not having been part of my experience, (and never having heard or read about it), it is totally alien. There’s no category to put it in except “crazy.” And of course, the one experiencing, and everyone else for that matter, has no idea they are simply becoming “normal” for the first time.
The “entity” becomes a little more dominant, only now I’m TRYING to relax my “left brain” to allow a better look at the “entity,” to allow that “entity” existence. Boy, to explain this without appearing schizophrenic! Is this “entity” who or what I handed the reins over to in 1976 – the “other?”
I cannot recall ever having experienced at gut level just the GOOD feelings until I was thrown into an altered state. It’s only been in the last year I’ve allowed myself to develop full-blown fantasies.
(These fantasies were full blown at an intellectual level but still were simply
mental pictures of relatively short length. In the recording
studio, I had been able to visualize standing in front of a large
audience, and for THE FIRST TIME consciously getting a few seconds
of FEELING about it in an effort to liven up my studio sound)
Why couldn’t I fantasize before and recognize them as such? If I fantasize and I DON’T KNOW it’s fantasy then I confuse it with reality… (Still not full fantasies though I didn’t know it at the time.)
April 24, 1985
Odometer showed 4 4’s going into Healdton, rolled over to 044444 as I stopped in front of Lindy’s house.
Oklahoma
April 28, 1985
Woke 3:00 a.m. wondering if it’s a “metal” framed structure in my dreams from ’76, a “metal” thing to close in the attic in dream in 1979, or METTLE? When I close the “metal” thing in the dream, the house is saved.
******
I’ve had 8 days of intense experience, maintained, no Stelazine, withstood traumatic onslaught in personal life. I feel like something might be starting to turn me loose with the intensity of whatever is going on in the brain starting to slacken a little.
******
By the end of two weeks the experience was over and I was back to “normal,” my first experience of this kind in which I didn’t go too far mentally. I seem to be retaining more for longer periods of time with perhaps some of the ideas/feelings of these states becoming permanent.
Picked up The Aquarian Conspiracy by Marilyn Ferguson and to my astonishment I recognized my “elite,” “network,” the “they” I was always “feeling,” part of my “delusions” since 1971 – people aware of a new development in the human mind.
I see parallels between some of the current popular movies and the exploration of inner space; Indiana Jones striving to regain the stolen “heart” of religion; E.T. developing the idea of “Good” alien forces and my “entity” keeps me one step ahead of being a computer.
May 4, 1985
Kick off day for record promotion. With minimal radio play, TV and radio interviews, newspaper coverage, human interest and paid advertising in all the media, people started to recognize me on the street. Watching my videotapes till I was comfortable with that, I was surprised. I looked so professional and appeared quite intelligent! I realized how EASILY one could lose the real self to an “image,” the “schizophrenic” twist possible in seeing oneself in the media and one’s pictures everywhere. I thought I handled the exposure quite well; Lindy was acting as my manager and promoter; I spent more and more time on the promotion.
In June or July I indulged in sexual fantasies – FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE! With FEELINGS! Very aware of experiencing the feelings; I could really get into them. At the time I vaguely knew I had never done anything like that before in my life.
July 1985 Dreams
Dreamed all one night about healing people. (I’ve never written about the times when I’ve yearned so, ached so, prayed so to be an instrument in healing.)
Had recurring childhood dream, “Willing” myself to rise from the ground, absolute, total bodymind concentration, (not in words) starting to come down if any word thought comes into my mind, rising again with total concentration to just above rooftops and power lines. This time I went higher than I’d ever gone before and took a little girl, a stranger, with me.
August 11, 1985
Talking to Lindy trying to explain some of my thinking when it hit me, an acute clarity of the “coming home.” I had known in April, but couldn’t explain how I got there. Suddenly, I SAW, GUT LEVEL KNEW I had reached THE SOURCE, what I had come to this life from; that in some way I may have come as close to seeing the “face of God” as I’ll ever get in this life.
Trying to explain, haltingly, emotionally, with tears at times;
“…I’ve known for some time the swallows don’t know where they’re going when they start out for Capistrano – they just know when they get there. When I moved out on that farm in ’70, I felt like I had “come home.” When my sister moved out on that farm down in Mississippi, she said she felt like she had “come home”…There’s this thread going through our experience about “coming home.” In 1974 I first wondered if we retain some kind of memory, link, back to creation…My adapted Star of David stands for something – it’s when I reach “home”…”with “God,” psychically, something in us somewhere that was there at the beginning. We still have a link with it,…and somehow, sometimes I have experienced that link, that through this little…thread… from generation to generation to generation…,To experience it, our controls have to be let down. And a minute ago, it’s the first time, the very first time I knew WITH MY BEING…and it’s just like when those swallows get to Capistrano, they know when they’re there. I know I’m there. That’s it. I can’t explain it any better than that right now and that’s what I’ll have to try to do – explain it better.
I salute the light within your eyes where the whole universe dwells. For when you are at that center within you and I am at that place within me, we shall be one.
Chief Crazy Horse, Oglala Sioux 1877
(10/95 Karen Armstrong in A History of God describes mystical
experience as “a return to primordial beginning.”)
August 16, 1985
I had 5 very distinct dreams. Putting 4 of them here.
l.
There’s a broken Aztec “urn” by the right side of my bed. Unexpectedly, I defecate near or on it. Man stranger – know his family? has dilapidated Aztec statue in his office. We’re both having problems – read something about Aztec products, the use of “human waste” in making them – I decide we’re both allergic to them – we have to put them “outside,” only there can we “live with them.” Decide in dream I WILL trust dreams.
2.
Someplace I’ve never been, “wilderness,” on a high bluff looking at small Aztec piece, a cube maybe 4 inches square, the corners worn off, with a hole going through it, an iron piece threaded through the hole with a wider piece of iron connected to it to attach it to the mountain. It’s loose and I get it off, want to take it home. I’m going on with it to lower area, a spot like prehistoric lower right front quadrant of jawbone of whale, front to me, to my left as I’m facing it – more a child’s idea of what a whale jawbone would look like. It has teeth, like “human” teeth not “animal” teeth but not as close together as human teeth. Only this part is exposed, the rest is in the mountain. I see one tooth loose; it’s falling in the EXTREMELY clear water in and going down the throat. I want to get the tooth, too, it’s falling down, down. I try but some kind of trouble, not clear – like bottomless well? I have to go back up – give up on getting the tooth. About this time I realize this is some kind of “reserve;” I see a few other people for the first time, strangers, looking around and it becomes clear that everything here is “protected” so everyone can look at it – I can’t take anything home with me. I’m wondering if I can take the small Aztec and iron thing under my clothes to get it out. I know I’m not supposed to according to this preserve law but I’m wondering do I dare try; I wake up.
3.
Part of dream like big lake, like Ponchartrain in size – good bridge on left – to right of it water went down some to expose very narrow road – built up that goes to other side of lake. Seems I or “we” traveled on it when it was underwater? when younger. I’m driving a vehicle across, very scary, dangerous, not muddy even though it had just been covered with water. There are two tracks like vehicles have been crossing, kind of like a wagon road.
4.
At party a while but don’t know anyone. Jess appears – see his wife (stranger) who is leaving him, leaving their infant son with him. She said all he wanted her for was to take care of the baby. We talk – he asks if I went to see something in other room. I haven’t so go to see. It’s his son in a “bassinet” made of clear plastic but looks like an open casket. The baby is awake, lying there holding a pink long stemmed rose – there are pink and blue ribbons, pink and blue pillow, etc., Jess’ way of telling me something. The baby is handicapped – I didn’t know it till they told me – he’s slow in physical development – 11 months old. I figure he just needs some special attention. I’m changing baby – he really made a mess – have him turned over washing feces from his back when Jess comes back in.