"Yes, I still remember everything.” Thus begins my grandmother’s autobiography. At age 89, she is proud of her detailed memory, but she is also cursed by it.
My grandmother’s name is Susan. When she was 19, she was taken with her mother to the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women in Northern Germany.
From there, she was taken to a factory in a town called Chemnitz and forced to work long hours with little food.
Here is an excerpt from her story, published in the Sun Sentinel:
“One fellow worker had hidden her pregnancy successfully and gave birth in their barracks in secret. However, ‘the woman didn’t have milk,’ and the baby cried, giving its presence away. ‘An SS woman came in, got the child, grabbed it by its legs, and hit it against the wall, killing it. They shot the mother just after the baby was killed.’”
A lack of breast milk indicates severe malnourishment.
When my grandmother escaped with her mother, she tells us she said the same thing as Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind” — “I’m never going to be hungry again.”
Today, Susan wishes she could be a little bit hungry again.
Another short anecdote that my grandmother often shares is her prediction of the future. As a child, she loved to read. Eating, to her, meant spending time away from her books. She dreamed of a future in which all our meals could be consumed in pill form, freeing us up for reading, or whatever people of the future would do with their time.
Today, she jokes that her dream has come true. A motley assortment of pills have become a staple of her diet, and she is able to eat little else. Appetite suppression is just one side effect of her sleeping pills. Yet she has to take the sleeping pills, because otherwise she stays up all night thinking. Insomnia is just one side effect of her anxiety medication.
Yet she has to take her anxiety medication, because otherwise she’ll panic about the Holocaust, the drugs she’s become dependent on, or her debilitating pain...ad nauseam.
I’m voting yes on Amendment 2, not because marijuana is a magic pill that will cure all ailments.
Marijuana is a plant that can cure some ailments and liberate my grandmother from some of those more expensive and more dangerous drugs, which she takes as much to balance the drugs out as to balance herself out.
According to the FDA, 100,000 Americans die each year from the known side effects of prescription drugs. However, no one has ever died from a marijuana overdose. Enough with the “reefer madness.”
Maybe if my grandmother had a pot brownie, she would become more forgetful.
But having lived through hate, hunger and violence, maybe forgetfulness wouldn’t be so bad.
Alex Ronay is a UF English and philosophy senior.
[A version of this story ran on page 7 on 10/24/2014]
