Memorial for David Walker Wilkinson
David had the run of a neighborhood that included woods up behind Proctor high school, past the playing fields and hill side that served as bleachers for baseball games. The woods passed the skating rink, log cabin warming house, rope tow and a road closed off in winter for a quarter mile of sledding. A stream suited to children’s hydraulic experiments came down the same slope.
Southward the woods ran up towards the swimming pool, a tree-ringed, engineered pool with cat tails, beach, docks, diving boards, strings of men’s and women’s changing cubes. Further east, the rutted trails ran up East Mountain, somewhere along which hid the town reservoir he’d encountered on a hike with our dad.
David wasn’t given a boundary for play and adventures, solo or in a gang of brothers, in and up through those woods. Out the back yard though and up the hill we encountered the steep edge of Otter Creek’s meanders, with different and bigger trees, no conifers, and floods that left little underbrush. Until much later, we were officially forbidden to go further than a twisting ridge along the embankment, barred from exploring the river’s edge.
While we did seem to have the run of the town, we were expected to listen for our mother’s distinctive long distance whistle (wee-oh-weee-ohhhhh) or her holler and to return home without delay.
Here are the echos of her’s and our father’s voices from letters mailed a few years before the onset of David’s schizophrenia
Remembrance of fun in 1976
I’m trying to get Dad to start looking for a woodlot – My biggest concern is that he have something of interest to do when he retires or he’ll give up and die like his father. I don’t feel that he’s old – or nearly old enough to retire. (58 ½) Dad went to see a grown up (with trees) old farm in Washington town. Dave and Colonel (the dog) and I went with him and it rained and rained. We tramped and saw a grown up old farm and got stuck and [pushed, and got stuck and pushed and got stuck in the mud and pushed and after looking in the rain he looked at his map and directions and decided it wasn’t the right place after all.
When Karen, Sara, Dad and I visited David before mom’s funeral, he had the obituary in his room and said “she really touched a lot of people.” This was great because it's hard to know how much he followed of what was happening in the world outside his wildly “creative” brain.
He did know that she had worries about him and she had hopes for him.
My dad wrote in July 1976
Your brothers here, except David, are giving your mother a hard time – me too, but I’m not around home so much.( Brothers, please clarify - You gave Dad a hard time or Dad gave Mom a hard time?) They don’t have enough to do so and certainly are not anxious to be helpful. David is “at sea”. No jobs or prospects at present. I do not see him succeeding at Johnson & Wales and we have about decided to abandon that. :
Here mom wrote in 1976 - this was great news and was one of the best things of David’s adult life.
David’s rehab counselor called Thurs . He had arranged a job interview at Norwich Univ. kitchen for David. Apprentice meat cutter. 7 til 3, 5 days a week. $2.40 an hour to start, 2 weeks vacation, sick leave, Blue Cross etc. I told them Dave is not retarded but slow motioned etc. Seems a wonderful chance for him to learn while he earns…. Everyone there will help him I feel.
And they did. As you may know, only a few years later, David had to quit driving his VW bug from Barre to Northfield for work as he was convinced his co-workers were drug dealers who threatened his life.
VN described better than anyone how David’s kind of psychosis explodes:
He imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him.
His in-most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.
All around him, there are spies. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things.
If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not!
The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.
With this fall into the abyss of brain dysfunction, David’s external life crashed and from what we could tell, his interior life was no better.
What tragedy.
While he lived many decades of misfortune, he did have some good luck. His couple years of work at Norwich gave him access to Social Security disability benefits and slightly better public welfare. He never hurt himself or anyone or got in trouble with the law. He did not get into alcohol and other drugs. Our parents and then Jon and Deb were devoted to making sure that he was safe and cared for. Advocates at Vt Legal Aid were working to make sure that the state had a broad range of living options for people with severe disabilities. Staff at his final home, Brownway, worked hard for all the residents but must surely, over the 20 years there, have had to put up with some very trying interactions with David.
We thank them all.
As Jo-Ann wrote, David has taught us a lot about ourselves, our society and humanity. Let us remember these things and commemorate them throughout our own lives. Thank you.
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