Our father would have been enough for any family, but we had my mother, too. By this time, she had begun the slow slide into madness that would eventually send her to the Northampton State Hospital in restraints. She started seeing things overhead. Demons, people, ghosts … I never knew who or what she saw. They were in the light fixtures, in the corners, or on the ceiling. “Don’t you see them?” she would ask. I never did. Some of the things she said were so disturbing, I blocked them from my mind and can’t repeat them today. My memories of that time are like blinding flashes of harsh, actinic
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