A tribute to my sister Lois

My sister’s birthday was Feb. 28. This year, it was on a Friday. My wife and I always go out for breakfast on Fridays. Over breakfast I commented that I must call Lois as a birthday greeting. I have never been very good at sending birthday cards. Phone calls have been more satisfying.

We returned home. I had good intentions. Calling Lois was tops on my “to do” list. Before I could punch out the numbers, the phone rang. Lois had died earlier in the morning. Frail with age, she had fallen, breaking her shoulder and her nose. Her worn out body could not recover. She had died on her birthday.

Lois was the sixth of seven children born to Helen and Ernest Bess in Fairbury, Ill., a small farm town in Central Illinois. I was two years her senior. Why or how I became her confidant, I do not know. I suspect I knew her better than any other family member. Her five older brothers and sisters were all high achievers. Our German parents had few rules, but high expectations. High expectations and five high-achieving older siblings haunted Lois. She shared with me that she felt that she could never keep up. Publicly, she was smiling and happy. In private she cried a lot and drew inside herself. When she did not “get” algebra, I became her tutor. When troubled, she sought my counsel. She had friends, but never seemed to have that “close” friend that is typical of teenage life.

Our mother died in 1947 when Lois was 17 and headed into her senior year of high school. Mom had struggled with diabetes and high blood pressure. She died of a massive stroke at age 47. I was in Korea serving in the Army at the time. Without Mom, our father was ill-prepared to finish raising two young teenage daughters. The next several months were emotionally hectic. Lois graduated from high school and met Ben, a handsome, shy and devoted young man. They were married. She was 18. Ben was 20. They had four children, three boys and a girl, in rapid order. They moved to Cody, Wyo., to Denver, back to Cody and finally to Billings, Mont. Along the way Lois in her mid-20s suffered a severe mental health breakdown. The diagnosis was schizophrenia.

In the 1950s, schizophrenia was little understood and treatment was experimental. Well-meaning but knowledge-short psychiatrists put Lois through a hell of treatments. She was in and out of mental institutions. Her husband was loving and devoted. He was raising four kids as best he could while working as an insurance salesman. I wanted to be helpful, but felt helpless. I was the pastor of a church in California. I visited Billings and spent hours with a psychiatrist trying to figure out what went wrong. Finally, science figured out what prayers could not heal. Schizophrenia is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Lois was returned to being a wife and mother with the help of medication. That, too, was at first experimental and the path was not easy, but love and persistence had their say.

Lois was my impetus for learning more about long-term mental illnesses. I read and observed. I found little public knowledge or concern. Seminaries were well behind in the learning curve. Families did not know what to do with the strange behavior that appeared in their midst. Long-term mental illnesses were as physical as a broken arm or diabetes, but behavior changes were not accepted, as were crutches or arm slings. Few families, when torn apart by a mentally ill member, have the loving, stabilizing presence of a Ben. Too often, mentally ill people end up rejected by family, divorced, separated from children, homeless, dependent on public assistance, institutionalized or in jail. The way people with long-term mental illnesses in America are treated is little short of criminal.

Because of Lois, the helping of people with long-term mental illnesses became a significant part of my work as a Christian minister. As a result of my efforts, appropriate housing has been built for very ordinary people who struggle with long-term mental illnesses. I regularly visit one particular 20-unit apartment complex. Every person in the building is my friend. I never enter the building without saying in my heart, “This is in honor of you, Lois.”

In addition, I was one of the founders of a not-for-profit social work organization. Our social workers work with dozens of clients who struggle with long-term mental illnesses. Our social workers provide only one service. They hook up their clients with the services that are needed. Our record of successful outcomes is phenomenal. This too is for you, Lois.

Because Lois eventually received the medical help that she needed and because of the support of her husband, their four kids and their church, Lois lived the last five decades of her life in relative stability and productivity. If ever a human being is to be elevated to sainthood, it is my brother-in-law, Ben. Thank you, Lois, for being my mentor. Thank you, Ben, for being there for my kid sister.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.

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