Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

All in the Family

All in the Family Less than two months before my sister died, she received a letter from her Guru's spiritual partner, his shakti, Alo Devi. I have had this letter and have held onto it for many years. I don't remember where I found it or what made me want it. Like the court documents about the circumstances ofmy mother's relationship with Elliot Chess, this letter fills in some ofthe gaps in Nola's story and at the same time, adds new mystery to it. The only two documents about my sister that I kept for myself, in complete secret, for fifteen years or more (secret even to myselfin a sense), are the two documents that best act as bookends to her life. All the other documents ofmy sister's life, including her memoir, have been sent to me by my mother. The court papers tell me how she was born, the pain and fiction ofit. The letter tells me why she might have died. I can only guess that I took these documents because I knew on some intuitive level that someday I'd need to look at them, that someday they'd tell me as much about myself as they told me about Nola. That's one explanation, at least. The letter, dated April 16th, 1973, is a four-page-Iong plea from Alo Devi to Nola to surrender herselfentirely to Sri Ramanuja, to put herselfcompletely in his care. The forces that were trying to pull her down were, according to Alo Devi, not so much psychological as spiritual. Alo Devi told Nola in the letter that Nola was far from insane, but that "little (but persistent) entities" had found their way into her being during her university years, and that explained everything: her voices, her nervousness, her confusion: GURU SAYS HE WILL BE fULLY RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL HEALTH IF you WILL OFFER HIM YOUR fULL AND ENTIRE SURRENDER. This line, all in capital letters and underlined, as I have written it, baffles me. I thought that Nola had already offered him her complete emotional and mental surrender, that she already considered herselfa Nola 299 disciple, and that he considered her one, too. Apparently, she wasn't convinced; even one so spiritually and psychically inclined as Nola thought her cure might not be a spiritual one as she had always hoped. What despair this must have caused her, to believe she was simply mad, that all that was in her was sickness, nothing divine. She must have felt this way. She must have written this to her Guru, or else Alo Devi would not have written in this letter, "You are far from insane, believeme ." Alo Devi chided Nola in the letter for not following Guru's advice completely. The last time she had visited, she had taken a job as a waitress for a short time, and her mental health had worsened. Guru blamed this on the "lowervital forces" in the restaurant, that they had harmed her psychically. If she was to get better, Alo Devi said, she needed to follow Sri Ramanuja's advice completely. She needed to be with him. She needed to stop all psychiatric treatment: "The psychiatrists , as you have pointed out so clearly can only sedate and tranquilize the patient, but they really can't come to grips with the forces themselves." Alo Devi wrote that Nola needed to see only Sri Ramanuja, that she needed to be under his care entirely. This would make her better. And all disciples, of course, needed to stop taking any drugs or medication "or at least slowly diminish these." "Come to Long Island as soon as possible," she wrote. "We shall give you greatjoy and affection, both inner and outer .... We shall take you to your Destined Goal. This is my Promise." They kept that promise, in a manner ofspeaking. * * * A few days before Nola left for Long Island, she and I took a walk to Pandora's Books, a bookstore not far from our new house in South Bend. I clearly remember the walk, a mild day in April, up a wide treelined street. We so rarely did things together these days that this walk in itselfwas remarkable. Her mind, too, seemed lucid on this day, and I had let all my grudges drop, all my barriers. We were brother and sister . We could have been running away together in the way we had when I was five...