Marking Forgotten Lives
Old mental institution graves are named at last
Marjorie Mauren was an infant on that sultry summer day 80 years ago when her father was felled by heatstroke. Little was known about rehabilitation then, so Wilfred Denny was sent to live in a state institution for the mentally ill. Mauren's memories of him come from a few visits to see the melancholy man, who despaired over the loss of a normal life. He died the day after Christmas in 1951, and Mauren remembers his pine casket painted black, so cramped that his body could not lie straight. Even worse, as was standard for those who died in state hospitals, he was buried in an unmarked grave.
Earlier this year, Mauren, 81, and her brother, Ralph Denny, 87, huddled under an umbrella in a driving rain to watch as a shiny, new granite marker was placed over their father's tomb at Willmar State Hospital in Minnesota. "My prayers were answered that my father should be recognized," she said later.
That recognition is thanks to a national movement to remember hundreds of thousands of people who were buried over the past 150 years on the grounds of state institutions for people with mental illness and retardation. Family members like Mauren participate, but the campaign is led by people with mental illness and retardation. "If you can discard human beings as so much garbage, that's a statement about how we ex-patients are treated today," says Patricia Deegan, who, after stumbling across a decrepit graveyard at Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts, began raising money to restore it. She now has a small federal grant to travel the country to share the strategies of other activists like herself.
Remembering. Efforts to restore these potter's fields have popped up in at least 12 states. In Georgia, a state official recently offered an apology and a promise to refurbish the anonymous burial grounds of an estimated 22,000 to 30,000 residents of the former Georgia State Lunatic Asylum. In Canton, S.D., an annual memorial service is held at a small cemetery--now surrounded by a golf course--that belonged to the now-closed Hiawatha Insane Asylum. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's new exhibit on the disability civil rights movement features a small stone marker--with the number 7 etched in the top--from the cemetery of a Minnesota state hospital. That stone marked the grave of Bertha Flaten, who, like many of those buried in state facilities, would never have been institutionalized today. Flaten, who died in 1905 at the age of 30, had been forgotten after entering the hospital at 19 because she had epilepsy. Today her seizures would be treated easily with medication.
The Minnesota campaign was started by Advocating Change Together, a group of people with mental retardation. Their first hurdle: suing to get the state to release the names of those buried in the numbered graves. Officials argued they needed to honor long-ago promises of anonymity to families who placed loved ones in institutions. But Tina Schroeder, 33, of ACT doesn't buy that. She says, "We're just giving the person who passed away the dignity that they deserved."
This story appears in the October 9, 2000 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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