They Who Feed on Shadows - Episode 5

Sylvia Says

They Who Feed On Shadows - Episode 5: Sylvia Says

Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events and contains depictions of psychosis, patient-therapist boundary violations, and animal abuse. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some dialogue and details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.

Let’s talk about raccoons.

Your parents are supposed to know what they’re thinking. Especially if they are psychiatrists. Nonetheless, my father came home to the farm one October afternoon in 1980 with a pair of raccoon kits named Ajax and Athena.

These creatures were a gift for my brother, Bill. He was twelve. Bill had the same propensity for animal care as a child that I did for dishwasher maintenance. Outside of rabies and baylisascaris procyonis (raccoon roundworm), which generate eggs in the animals’ feces that can cause blindness and brain damage in humans, adopting coons is a terrible idea for a variety of reasons.
Raccoons are the urban wolverines of the apocalypse, scavenging locksmiths in fur coats, escape artists dressed as alley prophets. Nature handed them a mask and said, “Inherit the savagery of night.”

I was eight when I realized my mother had also inherited this savagery, though she wore no mask. She wore a gray pencil skirt, slingback pumps, pantyhose paired with a white blouse, and carried a Rolodex of masquerades in her purse.

Ajax and Athena were housed in an old chicken coop with a light and no windows. This, to make them as psychotic as possible. Bill lost interest in his pet raccoons after about 32 hours, so their care fell to my parents and me. Consuming a diet of puppy chow and isolation, they quickly grew to be abnormally large and unstable. By the spring of 1981, they had escaped multiple times, always to be found in a nearby tree finishing off a chicken or disemboweling a barn cat in our hay loft. Every time this happened, the creatures had to be live-trapped and returned to their chicken coop.

Ajax and Athena did a lot of snarling and snapping.
They terrified me.

Until their final escape, when something more terrifying replaced them.

My father had padlocked the coons inside over the weekend. It was a Monday morning before school when I discovered they had tunneled through the floor, seized a bantam rooster, and retreated 50’ up a massive oak that overlooked our driveway. My brother and father had already gone to school and work.

I rode with my mom on Mondays. No one was home but us. I fed the horses and goats, threw some scratch for the chickens, then ran to the house to report that Ajax and Athena had dug through a 3/4” sheet of plywood and were eating a rooster.

When my mother became angry, a placid silence drifted over her. Attired for the office, she marched outside and threw her heels in the grass. She rolled up the sleeves of her blouse and began to climb the tree at a superhuman speed wearing pantyhose.

I watched from below. I remember her body undulating up the trunk with a caterpillar-like fluidity. I remember feathers raining down and the red stain of rooster blood on bark as she approached. Ajax and Athena began to hiss and snipe. They were easily twenty pounds each, and I winced as one of them slashed the back of my mother’s hand.

Sylvia cried out.

Not in pain, but in preparation.

She climbed a step higher, wrapped her thighs around the top of the oak, fearlessly seized each raccoon by the scruff of the neck, and began mercilessly slamming their heads against the tree trunk. They got a few more scratches into her forearms with their rear claws, but soon were knocked unconscious. Sylvia kept slamming their faces against the trunk, seething through gritted teeth.

Until she let go.

The raccoons ricocheted down off the branches and landed in front of me as two bloody-brown heaps of fur with twisted necks. My mom shimmied back to Earth. She carefully gathered her heels, went inside, rinsed the blood off her forearms, changed her blouse, bandaged her hand, and came back out and put the bodies in the back of her Chevy Citation.

She then took my chin in her palm, turned my head to meet her eyes, and said, “Don’t cry, Jude. Your father made a mistake. They’re in a better place now. Get in the car.”

I got in the car.

We stopped halfway down Raventon Road. Sylvia got out, tossed Ajax and Athena into a ditch, and we drove away in silence.

I looked over at my mother’s bandaged hand on the steering wheel, and she smiled as we turned onto Elderpine Drive heading towards the city. “Now we can get you another kitten for the barn.”

To fully comprehend insanity, one must go a bit crazy. And to completely understand the origins of Dale Colgrave, one must embrace the realities of Dr. Sylvia Blackmoor.

This is my mother’s reply to Dale Colgrave’s letter, written twenty-two years after the vanishing of Ajax and Athena.

October 2003

“Dear Dale,

I wanted to answer tonight rather than wait for Claire to type this out on Monday. Your letter has stayed with me all day, and I couldn’t let my reply linger. Thank you for trusting me with your dream. I know that was not a light decision, and I would never consider any dream of yours silly or bothersome. Whatever you share with me I regard as special, and I take it seriously.

What struck me most was how accurate your unconscious seemed. When two people are on the same wavelength, I’ve long believed that truths can be shared between them, often before either one is even aware of it. If you were ever to come to my home office, you are one of the very few I might invite to sit outside in the grass beneath a tree, simply talking. You and I are both grass people, comfortable on the earth, attuned to it. And, of course, in such a dream, I would urge you to find more opportunities to share your own life and your quiet, unique observations with someone who can recognize their worth. I want that for you.

Your dream also touched something far more private. Over thirty-five years ago, I survived a car accident that left three vertebrae fractured. The pain is constant, though most days I hardly think of it. My husband always worried about my posture, insisted on endless examinations from the Mayo Clinic with the best neurosurgeons in the country. None could “fix” me, and so I learned to live with it. Perhaps you never noticed the bend in my thoracic spine, but it is permanent. Lately, with other chronic health challenges, the pain has flared again. Toxic medications take their toll, and there are days when Claire, my secretary, and Elena, who lives with her family in my home, have hovered like guardians, worried as I struggle even to drive. They are, I suspect, the assistants you saw in your dream. They watch me more closely than I like to admit, sometimes wishing they could call an ambulance.

Forgive me for burdening you with this detail, but your dream seemed to know it all already. That is why I feel compelled to validate its accuracy. Somehow you touched on what I thought was hidden.

Another detail: in your dream you saw books. In truth, I’ve written hundreds of poems over the years - I never set out to write them, they simply arrive. Claire has typed some of them. I think of them as a diary of who I am, my deepest feelings, moments of awareness. I had hoped to turn them into volumes for my sons. Perhaps that is why you dreamed of books, because they carry me in a way no analysis could.

It matters to you who I am beyond my professional role, and I respect that. I sense it is part of how you connect to others, by seeing not only the surface, but also what lies beneath. In this, I am complimented.

As for the mysteries of what you saw, I cannot explain them. There are forms of knowing not yet written into equations, a kind of energy that sometimes flows between those who value one another. Perhaps that is what visited you. Should I ever become gravely ill, I have no doubt my guardian angels would find a way to let you know, maybe even by sending you some of my poems. But I don’t think that time has quite come. My work here is not finished.

So thank you again, Dale, for giving me the gentle gift of your dream. It reminded me that even in my frailties, something of who I am matters, and that is no small comfort.

Take care of you,

Sylvia”

When you grow up surrounded by psychiatrists, you are subconsciously trained from birth to recognize the difference between therapy and transference, between professional care and personal disintegration. By the time this letter was written, my mother had been a psychiatrist for 39 years. If Dale’s letter was the predator’s probe, my mother’s reply was the breach, the moment the gate swung open.

This is a dissection of the five most egregious ways Sylvia dissolved the wall between herself and her patient.

“If you were ever to come to my home office, you are one of the very few I might invite to sit outside in the grass beneath a tree.” Translation: I see your fantasy and I like the pastoral hues you chose to paint it with. I sanction this intimacy. I want to invite you to my private spaces.

“Over thirty-five years ago, I survived a car accident… Perhaps you never noticed the bend in my thoracic spine, but it is permanent.” Translation: Here is my wound. Here is my private medical history. I know you’ll keep it safe. Your dream is prophetic and you are the oracle I have been waiting for.

“In truth, I’ve written hundreds of poems… I had hoped to turn them into volumes for my sons.” Translation: Want to see more of my secret self? This was meant for family but it’s now yours, along with the keys to my diary.

“It matters to you who I am beyond my professional role, and I respect that.” Translation: You see the real me. Transference has collapsed. You aren’t a patient, you are a confidant. Your manipulations are empathy. I choose you.

“Should I ever become gravely ill, I have no doubt my guardian angels would find a way to let you know, maybe even by sending you some of my poems.” Translation: I am braiding you into my identity by inviting you to my deathbed. This used to be a dream. Now it is a legacy, yours and mine.

Conclusion: This letter is not a doctor’s response. It is a breakdown. Dale’s manipulations grew in strength like a hurricane over warm waters because Sylvia reframed them as fragments of destiny. Here is my intimacy, my trauma, poetry, validation, and even my mortality. These gifts were the wind beneath Dale’s wings. His letter was a predator’s mask. Sylvia’s was the unbolted door, proof of how easily the madman’s script can turn a willing psychiatrist into the one who confesses, validates, and suckles.

Even the cutest of raccoons cannot be tamed. Wildness and escape are hardwired into their nature. In the end, Dale was no different from Ajax and Athena, tunneling through the floorboards of psychiatry until the walls that contained him gave way. My mother didn’t slam his head against the trunk. She opened the coop herself, invited him into the branches, and embraced his claws as kind affections.

Everything trickles down from this moment. Like bodies falling through branches.

To be continued…