The Uncle Who Was “Sent Away”
I NEVER KNEW my uncle Robert and there is no one living who remembers him. My father doesn’t remember him— although there was an empty space in the house where he grew up, an empty space in his mother’s heart.
When I first learned of Robert’s existence, he was a story my mother told me. “Your father had a brother who was institutionalized,” she said. “He had a brain injury,” she added, going on to imply that he was injured accidentally or negligently, somehow caused by his own mother’s inattention, distracted by my father and his twin brother.
“Your grandmother wasn’t able to handle him,” she said harshly. She mocked my grandmother for her quiet life, resting in the afternoons, the clock ticking on top of the television, the table set for dinner by three in the afternoon. The dark house, no books to be seen.
It didn’t have to be that way, I think. My grandmother, Margaret was the bright star of her family. I have a photo of her with her parents and her two younger brothers when she was nine or ten, all in white, standing with the proud poise of Degas’ young ballerina, a girl filled with energy, excitement. She wears a necklace and a ring. To me, she looks ready to launch, to jump into her future. I see a Jewish girl who lived in a small town in Minnesota where her father was a merchant. In the 1920s she went to college, wanting to be a teacher.
I feel such urgency to know. To lay a stone on a grave, to say kaddish. And I want to understand what this child and his absence meant to Margaret, the mother of four, married to a Russian Jewish shopkeeper in small-town Minnesota.
One of my brothers is the family historian. He has spent hours on Ancestry and other genealogical websites trying to put together our family’s stories. He found the first piece of evidence, which is where I will begin. But it is the end, for it is Robert’s death certificate.
Robert died of pneumonia in April, 1957. He was 29. The death certificate says something else:
Other significant conditions contributing to death but not related to the immediate cause given in part: Mental deficiency (idiopathic) severe with psychotic reaction.
Robert spent most of his life in state hospitals in Minnesota. He died at Anoka State Hospital, located in what is now a northern suburb of Minneapolis. But unlike so many other residents of state hospitals, Robert was not buried in the hospital graveyard. His body was transported to Minneapolis and cremated. His ashes were scattered at Lakewood Cemetery, a leafy green cemetery adjacent to some of Minneapolis’s famously lovely lakes. This is the cemetery where prominent Minnesotans such as Hubert Humprey, Walter Mondale, and Paul Wellstone are interred. It does not have a Jewish section. But at the time of Robert’s death, Lakewood Cemetery was close to where his parents lived. His father, my grandfather Morris, ordered and paid for the transport and cremation.
We are not unique. Many families had people who were hidden or sentaway. Jennifer Senior wrote about her reunion with her own aunt who was sent away in her article in the September 2023 Atlantic, “The Ones We Sent Away”—and elicited a wide response from others who shared aspects of her story. In the thirties, when our family story took place, it was typical for the doctors, the experts, to instruct parents to send their kids away if they were deemed “mentally deficient” The language that was used to describe those children is difficult to read now and in Robert’s case the term “Mentally Deficient” was stamped in red ink on the single index card that documented his life in Minnesota’s state institutions.
I do not believe anyone has ever said Kaddish for Robert.
I believe that when Robert was sent away it broke Margaret’s heart. I imagine different days in her life. The day she met my grandfather, Morris. The day they married, in Spirit Lake, Iowa. But mostly I imagine the day that they received Robert’s diagnosis, his sentence.
THE HUSBAND AND wife and little boy sat in the doctor’s office, across the desk from the doctor in his white coat. The wife was hugely pregnant, expecting twins. She sat quietly, hands folded, looking down. The husband watched the doctor carefully. The little boy played with the zipper on his new jacket, zipping it up and down, up and down until his mother placed her hand on top of his. Their eyes did not meet. He stopped playing with the zipper. He was six years old.
Robert was a little boy who did not speak. He could not be toilet trained. He played with things like his zipper, like the metal bowls in the kitchen. He scratched and bit his little brother and his mother. His mother knew there was something wrong with him when he was an infant, when he failed to smile at her, screamed and flailed. The doctor told her it was colic and it would go away. She was a new mother. She thought the doctor must know, but she knew, too.
Margaret kept to herself and when she took Robert out for walks in his carriage she only stopped briefly to say hello to the other mothers. She didn’t want them to see him. When he got older and could walk and run she tried to keep him away from the other children, from his little brother. She tried to protect herself from the repercussions of the neighborly gossip, the wondering, the curiosity about what was wrong. She was already different, Jewish, did not attend church services with her neighbors, did not drink coffee with them in their kitchens. She stayed home—and if she ever had a free moment she tried to read, tried to remember what it was like to be a college student in a library surrounded by books. And not to be a young mother with a child who was not quite right.
Morris hadn’t wanted her to come to the appointment. He brought her a glass of milk in the morning and said, “I will take the boy. You stay home and rest.”
She insisted and she was there, in her large brown maternity smock, feeling conscious of the twins’ movements. Could the doctor see them? The arms and legs, the elbows and knees. Or was he focused on the child in front of him who now began to pick at the rough upholstery on the chair?
“We have completed the tests on Robert. He has a mental deficiency. He is in the category of feeble-minded.”
“What does that mean?” Margaret asked. Morris looked at her. He would have preferred her to wait to let the doctor finish his diagnosis.
“Robert will never grow up. He will always be like this, never develop more, always be around the mental age of three. He will get bigger, grow stronger and be hard to handle. We recommend placement at the Faribault School for the Feeble-Minded where he will receive the expert care he needs. You will know you have done the right thing for your family. You must protect your other children, the babies who will be here soon. In situations like this we recommend that you put the child out of your mind. Forget that he exists.”
Margaret felt the twins kicking. She felt her face turn red. “No.” she said. “I will not send my child away. I will work harder with him. I can teach him. You can’t take him away.”
Morris was embarrassed by her outburst.
“The doctor has told us what to do, Margaret dear. We must do as he says.”
At that moment, perhaps feeling his mother’s disturbance, perhaps bored or hungry, Robert began to scream. And Morris slapped him, right there in the doctor’s office with the blonde young doctor sitting across the desk in his white coat, judging them, blaming her.
Robert stopped screaming. He glared at his father, blue eyes blazing, filled with hatred. Perhaps, it wasn’t the babies who needed protection but Robert, from his father with his slaps, his mother who pretended to love him but wished he had never been born.
THIS IS THE SCENE I envision ninety years later. They are all dead, my grandparents, the doctor I have imagined, the uncle I never knew.
This year I have added his name to the Yahrzeit list at my synagogue. I will stand with the rest of the congregation and say Kaddish. I will go to the pond at Lakewood Cemetery and lay a stone on the shore, toss another into the water and watch as the ripples fade away.
Laura Chauss Savin is a lifelong writer who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
