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AI: Well, now, at this time also, you had mentioned earlier that your mother's health was declining, that she was having these little strokes, and that sometimes she wasn't herself.

PB: Yes. She was having hallucinations, and she was getting more and more paranoid, and it was reverting back to our experience previous to the war when people started being really antagonistic to us. And then my mother began to think that everybody was calling her "Stinky Jap, Stinky Jap," and the children would be playing baseball, and she'd say, "See, they're calling me 'Stinky Jap.'" We tried to convince her, but she wouldn't listen. She had her own interpretation of everything they said, and even when we'd go in a car, she'd say people were under the car and they were calling her names. Or if they airplanes went up, she'd say, "See, their airplanes are calling me names." So we had a very difficult time with her, and then she got so she would go for walks and wouldn't come home, and we'd have to go looking for her. So my sister and I were constantly going out and looking for her, because she'd just wander off. And she'd just walk into anybody's place, and there was one neighbor that was, oh, maybe five or six blocks away, but they had the same name, and she'd go over there and she'd say, "Well, we're related. We're family." And she'd be over there and they wouldn't know who she was and we wouldn't know she was over there, so we'd have to just keep going and looking for her until we found her.

AI: So finally, what did you, what did you do?

PB: Well finally, Dad said that he just couldn't do that anymore and we were spending so much time looking for her... it was dangerous because she'd walk down the middle of the street, and I said to her, "Well, you could get run over." And she said, "Oh no, they always stop for me." And she says, "Sure, they honk their horn, but they always stop for me." And I said, "That's not the way you're supposed to do it. You're supposed to not walk in the street." So we finally decided that maybe we'll have to have her committed for a while, so we did. After a lot of consultation with all the family members, and most of 'em was for it, but I was totally against it. I just couldn't see putting her in an institution, and I was totally against it. But finally decided that that would be the best way, and then we would take turns and visit her.

AI: That must have been really hard.

PB: Yes, it was very hard, but we did commit her, and we took turns going out to see her. And once in a while we'd get her out and bring her home, then we'd have difficulty getting her back in the car to take her back, 'course, she didn't want to go. But she was acting quite different than what normal person would act.

<End Segment 65> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.