Not long before I left America, I was hospitalized by force of law, for posing to my daughter a theoretical image of myself pissing on my mother’s grave, while trying to explain to my daughter the reality of good and evil.

Soon after my harmless, theoretical proposition was texted to her, the police showed up at my door and took me by force to Broadlawns psychiatric hospital in Urbandale, Iowa.

I was no stranger to being committed. I had been in and out of psychiatric wards since I was nineteen years old, and told always from that time that I suffered from scizophrenia.

This time was not much different. I was locked in a room, without access to a toilet or drinking water; I was strapped to a bed at one point, after being thrown to the ground and tackled by a number of security guards. Later, I was again locked in a room, for praying the rosary. I was an animal in their eyes, though I harmed nobody.

I met a number of other patients, treated similarly to myself; we were all animals in the eyes of our doctors and nurses, not human.

I cannot recall his name, but one of the patients, a kind of leader among us, who often played a game of cards which he had named, “666,” he took a liking to me. We joked about being Nazis, or part of The Illuminati; and I said to him concerning sudoku, that if we told the Nazis that every time they solve one of those puzzles, a Jew dies, that we could turn their hatred into something which spends their time, without causing any tangible harm. I now understand that this is not in fact the case; I’ve come to understand that love and hatred are of themselves a very real force; and that though one may not commit murder with their hands, it is as real a murder to slay another with the heart.

This was the voice of this man, when I spent time in the hospital; he was in fact a murderer, and tried to incite me also to join him in his murders. In the soul, in the heart; this is where murder begins; but do not despair; here also is where healing, growth, and new life begin, if one but turns to Jesus and asks forgiveness out of the truth spoken in sorrow from the heart.

©2026 Maria Morisot

MARIA MORISOT
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