KINGSVIEW

SHE WAS MY HERO

Michael A. King

These reflections were shared at the May 3, 2001 memorial service for Angela King held at Lindale Mennonite Church, Linville, Virginia. As noted in the editorial introducing this issue of DSM, Angela was mentally ill. One night in early April 2001, in a fit of bewildered pain, she jumped out the second floor window of her apartment. She died several weeks later of meningitis that may have gained a foothold due to the trauma of her fall. In the article following this one, she herself speaks.

My family asked me to offer initial thoughts on the Angela we remember; then others of us will likely also share a few memories.

First just a word about guilt and regret, for my own sake and that of any of us who loved Angela, because many of us struggle with feeling that no matter what we did, we could have done more. Certainly I was no perfect brother. As deeply as I now feel a sorrow beyond any I was prepared for, my relationship with Angela was erratic. There are times I think back to that I regret. When my own family and personal and professional demands grew strong, I’d go long periods without close contact with her.

I’d guess always when there’s no more chance to offer love, you wish you’d given more, especially when death takes away the parts of relating that were hard and leaves you with only the memories of what you can longer touch. So I was no perfect brother, and I do feel guilt and regret.

But other times we related closely, sometimes almost as soulmates. Especially as I grew older, and trusted my own sanity enough that my feeling of kinship with Angela no longer made me worry I might be crazy, I delighted sensing how much commonality there was in how we saw the world and how similarly intertwined in each of our souls were our wrestlings with the shadows as well as our longings for the joys and beauties of not only things visible but also the “conviction of things not seen,” as Hebrews 11 puts it. This only made it harder when her mind twisted into places where truly the wild things are and I didn’t know how to follow.

Then there’s the fact that Angela’s dynamics included explosive potential, which seemed, if anything, to be rising. We were uncertain what she herself might have come to regret if she had lived. So it’s from that combination of feeling myself both Angela’s soulmate and a stranger to the hardest parts of her journey that I remember her. My hope is to remember her in all her complexity, not flinching from the shadows even as today I hope most of all to celebrate her grandeur.

The Angela I remember was mentally ill, almost from the start, I’d guess, looking back. She was seven years younger than I, and I was about ten and she three the night I had a bad dream. At the time we lived in a house in Mexico City that had a flat roof you could go up on to do your laundry and if you were young have some fine adventures. In the dream Angela ended up on that roof and somehow fell or jumped and died. I feel yet the horrified grief that hit me in the dream. When I woke I was relieved, yet I remember also lying in bed a long time, the nightmare still somehow not quite lifting.

Many of us remember the day Angela, about five, cut off all the hair on one side of her head. After the rest of her hair was trimmed to match, it wasn’t that bad, yet what had happened felt strange and sad.

I remember how often, from childhood on, she was in the background, listening to music or reading a book. As she got older she’d walk with her head down, shrouded with hair. She’d make herself so invisible you’d feel she wasn’t there.

Sometime in her teens things changed. Now she was there, only it was a terrifying “there.” I remember the day Titus and Ann Bender and I took her to her first major hospitalization. She was wild in ways I won’t detail because I’m not sure what she’d want. She liked shaking things up, so she might have enjoyed my telling more, but she’s not here to decide.

Yet though the wild stories about Angela could go on and on, because she was chronically troubled and nearly made hospitals her home in recent times, she was my hero, and I’ll tell you why. She had more hell going on in her brain than any person I’ve been close to, which is why finally this week life fled her. But she strode through it like a giant.

She was searingly honest. If you put our family IQs side-by-side, she was also I’d guess, smartest of all. Put those two together, and she could make you feel dumb indeed, because she saw through all society’s polite conventions and called you on it faster than you could think if you said something to be nice instead of tell the truth. Her best biting ironies and sarcasms would leave David Letterman in the dust.

I have no idea how she held the demons enough at bay to achieve what she did. She graduated from college. Going back to work again and again after breakdowns, she lived independently and largely supported herself throughout her adult life. She was a skilled and passionate musician.

Last year she began to work for my publishing company as a copy editor. She polished a book by J. Denny Weaver, who once wrote to criticize a book I had edited. After Angela did one of the best jobs I’ve ever seen, a delighted Denny had nothing to offer but praise. She could hardly wait to start her current assignment, which was going to be What Does the Bible Really Say About Hell? I assigned it to her because I knew this was the kind of topic she loved, and one of her delights after she recently left Western State Hospital was my assurance that the book was waiting for her.

She yearned for God but struggled to find her own way to worship God, a quest which took her through the Catholic church. There she found fresh air, even as she continued to honor her own Mennonite tradition.

Even if she kept forgetting to check the car oil and usually stayed near home, she was a fine driver. A wonderful memory is the day last year we had a family reunion at my house, five hours from Angela’s home. She was supposed to come with parents. So we were terrified to hear from an Angela on her car phone that she was already en route alone. She couldn’t talk long, she said, because she had paid for just a few minutes on the phone, but could I tell her how to get to my house?

Hours later she phoned once more. Close but lost. Phone time nearly out. Night time. I nearly fainted but gave directions. Then another ring. Still lost. I raced to orient myself to where she was now, before the phone died.

In half an hour Angela “Lindbergh” King strode into a cheering crowd of siblings.

And so over this past weekend, as we felt her death nearing and just as she died, I sensed her spirit going past. What I saw in my mind, and maybe even in some way truly, was this passionate brilliant giant of a woman, a fierce and wild and wonderful smile on her face, on her way to make a ruckus in a heaven that will finally be big enough for her. That’s why the Angela I remember is my hero.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is the oldest brother of Angela J. King.