Last night I stumbled onto A Beautiful Mind on television, a film I had never seen. I wasn�t planning on watching the whole thing, but I got hooked fairly quickly. While I�m not sure it was A-List Oscar material, it was interesting, particularly for someone whose seen that kind of behavior up close.

My mom has two sisters, both quite a bit younger than she. They are the children of her mother and stepfather. My aunt M. S. was the youngest in the family. As a child I always loved seeing both of my aunts, but there was something a little strange about S. I never felt totally comfortable with her the way I felt with Aunt M., although I couldn�t pinpoint why.

But S. was always a font of information. When I asked most grownups questions about things I didn�t understand, they usually gave me somewhat simplified answers. My aunt S., however, did research. I remember one time asking about how jellyfish reproduce. The grownups all answered that they didn�t know, that I should look it up. But we were on vacation visiting my grandparents and I had no access to the library. I forgot about the problem.

A couple of weeks later, I received a fat letter from my aunt S. It was written in tiny script in blue pen on sheets of onion skin (do they even make this kind of paper any more?). She told the whole story about the life cycles of different kinds of jellyfish and illustrated it too, with long tendrils twisting down the margins and between the words. I still have the letter. It�s the last time I ever heard from her.

S. disappeared shortly after college, after she�d been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Like Nash in A Beautiful Mind, she did not like what the medication did to her and refused to take it. She disappeared or was thrown out, I�m not sure which. I was a child and was shielded from all of this. Although I do remember being pulled aside at one point to be told a sketchy version of S's story. My mother was worried that S. could be a danger to us and we were asked to tell them if she tried to contact us in any way. She never did. The family almost never talks of S. anymore. It is too painful, I�m sure for them.

But a few stories have come out since then. My mother remembered that when I was a baby, S. had been changing my diaper. My mother heard me crying and came running in. S. was standing there in a trance-like state, stabbing me repeatedly with a diaper pin.

And I overheard once that my grandparents had set up a bank account for S. where she had to withdraw money in person at the bank as a way to take care of her and make sure she was still okay.
I�ve been wondering what has happened now that my grandmother has moved. Is S. still on the left coast? Was the account even still there? I�ve been afraid to ask, but it�s been on my mind a lot.

The film A Beautiful Mind attempts to dramatize (using methods that are half Sybil and half The Sixth Sense) what it is like to be schizophrenic. I don�t know how accurate a picture it paints, but it is a compelling one. And I recognized a lot of the signs � the obsession over problems and with patterns, the muttering, the amassing of note-covered paper, the difficulty, even in the early stages, with normal social interaction. I remember fragments of these things from my childhood visits with my aunt.

Nevertheless, I found the most compelling story the untold one � that of Nash�s wife who is depicted in the film as being the only woman in her class at MIT in the �50s and one of the top students. She apparently gives up any intellectual aspirations to take care of her husband, who is not the man she married, and her son. I would be interested to see the movie remade from her point of view.

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After writing the above, on a whim I did a google search on my aunt's name. There was one hit -- the name of a committee member at a church. It seemed unlikely. But the church is in the town my grandmother just moved from. And the last name is uncommon. Maybe she's in recovery. I hope so.

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