RIP Irene. Having personal experience with Schizophrenic and bi-polar relatives, my heart goes out to her and her family. It is a huge cross for families to bear. The thought of institutionalizing a relative seems harsh, but in many cases, it's the only option.
Well, I had grat difficulty trying to fanthom 72 years, and still haven't.
Of course it's a sad story, but besides the unusual length of time, two other things stick out; surely the woman must have been born with extraordinary endurance, which implies character, and even after all that time, she still had multitudinous family members (considerably younger than her, for obvious reasons) who still cared about her.
The Norfolk Regional Center is actually a small place, as far as such institutions go; out in the country, in a park, surrounded by vast lawns and covered with trees, no fences or walls or guard-stations.
One assumes it's probably not as great as living out in the wide real world, but because it's a small place, one also assumes that conditions have always been better there than, for example, the Hell-Holes of blue states and blue cities, such as Boston or California or Cleveland or Illinois.
Nineteen thirty-six was the height of the Dust Bowl and the depression--please notice the family had moved from Nebraska to Oregon back to Nebraska again, which was a common migration-route of the time, when people were desperate for work, and for water. Times were hard, and one is sure that all concerned did all they could, in good faith.
The reason this caught my eye was that until reading it, the only other similar case of which I was aware, was mentioned by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in one of his three massive works describing the prison camps of the socialists (and "no" to the nocturnally foul one here; I am not about to plough through all of that again, just to find a certain paragraph).
Somewhere in all those vast works is mention of a prisoner in a camp in Siberia, who as late as 1958 was still there. The guy had originally been sent to Siberia in.....1888, under the tsars. Of course, under the tsars, such conditions were more tolerable than under the later socialists; one was just sent to Siberia to make out the best he could on his own, he just wasn't allowed back into European Russia, nothing more (such as what happened with the many of the primitive icons).
Under the socialists, beginning in 1918, it got different, and, uh, worse. The socialists actually built labor camps and worked prisoners to death. That this guy had lasted 40 years under such conditions, and another 30 years previously under more-endurable but still harsh conditions, was really remarkable, if not unique.
Surely such people, with their demonstration of extraordinary strength and fortitude, find favor with God.
