Grandfather's Home

My grandfather was born at the turn of the century. He was the son of an Irish immigrant, a fisherman who died at sea, and grew up in a Boston Brownstown with his widowed mother and the uncles--3 Boston bachelors. He attended BU, became an accountant and worked himself to the bone, during the depression, amazingly eking out a nice middle class life for his wife, my grandmother, and his two children, my mother and my uncle, in Marblehead. I've been told he was brilliant, with numbers, that he could add two columns of numbers concurrently, one with each hand.

At some point around 1948, right before my mother graduated from high school, he had a nervous breakdown, was institutionalized and became a ward of the state. My grandmother took on a job as a cook in a nursing home, having never worked outside of the home; and, when she graduated from high school, my mother obtained a job in advertising and display for Filene's in Boston. She lived with her mother to reconstruct their lives having had their loved one claimed by mental illness and the associated barbaric treatments that were standard practice at that time (they fried the shit out of his brain) and their family assets claimed by the state. On Sundays, she made the trip to Danvers to bring her father home for dinner and then back to the asylum that was his home for the next 30 years.