Author’s vision compels a search for late ‘Nana’

For decades, the body of one Mildred Johnson lay nearly forgotten in a fallow field on the property of the New Mexico Behavioral Health Institute, formerly the New Mexico Insane Asylum at Las Vegas.

The 76-year-old had resided at the state hospital the final few years before her death in 1970, after struggling with sketchily documented ailments that likely ranged from dementia to the effects of alcoholism. But she was not alone; in the cemetery’s vast acreage, Johnson was surrounded by the remains of at least 2,500 other patients interred there since the hospital’s opening in 1889.

Their lives forgotten, their graves marked only by tin crosses and rods, crudely etched slabs of concrete or not at all, the patients were lost unto history. It seemed it would take a miracle for their lives and stories to be brought to light.

Enter Carol Wawrychuk, the La Cañada resident who’d simply known Johnson as “Nana” in her years growing up in Erie, Penn. Although the bond between grandmother and granddaughter was strong over the years, life intervened.

Wawrychuk was in college when her parents, who’d moved to New Mexico, decided to place Nana in the hospital. Back then, mental illness was something to hide, and state hospitals accommodated families’ fears of being found out.

“I didn’t want to have anything to do with a mental hospital, because it’s not a very nice place to visit,” Wawrychuk said of her grandmother’s time there. “It was too depressing to think she ended up there and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

After Johnson’s death, Wawrychuk said she mentally closed a door on that part of her life.

The story of what had happened to Nana threatened to remain a secret forever — until 2004, more than three decades after her grandmother’s death, when Wawrychuk visited a Glendale meditation center with a friend and had an other-worldly experience.

“Almost immediately, a vision of Nana came to me. I could see her plain as day,” she recalled. “She kept saying, ‘Take me home, Carol. Take me home.’”

That vision would lead Wawrychuk on a two-year mission to locate her grandmother’s remains and eventually restore the hospital’s overgrown, long-defunct patient cemetery into a place where loved ones could honor and commemorate the lives that had ended there years earlier.

Urged on by husband Bill, and aided by hospital employee Lisa Apodaca, Wawrychuk prodded New Mexico lawmakers and local media into taking up her cause. In 2005, then-Gov. Bill Richardson appointed a task force and earmarked funds for the renovation and memorial dedication of the grounds.

The task force used ground-penetrating radar to locate buried patients and cross-check them against aging record books. Since the hospital grounds had been declared a state historic site, none of the remains could be removed.

Wawrychuk sees today that perhaps Nana’s exhortation may not have been about relocating her body, but returning her memory to the clear light of day.

“I knew from the beginning I was going to be taking a leap of faith. I was going to be telling my story, and I was going to be letting out family secrets,” Wawrychuk said of her own growth process. “I had to be vulnerable about who I really am and who my family is — I knew I was being called to do this.”

On Thursday, Wawrychuk’s journey brings her closer to home, as she reads from and signs copies of “Taking Nana Home,” a true account of her experience, at Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Proceeds from the sales of the book will go to the New Mexico Behavioral Health Patient Foundation, a nonprofit established to bring patients cheer through holiday and birthday celebrations. Contributing to the organization is only part of what the Wawrychuks have done in the past decade.

Larger, and more noticeable, is the visible difference they have made to the cemetery.

“As we go back there, you see more and more headstones, which is really kind of neat,” Bill Wawrychuk said. “It’s families acknowledging somebody was alive and had a life. People had relatives there who were actually loved.”

Apodaca, who works as a public relations coordinator for the hospital, says she’s now able to do more than sympathize with people who come looking for their own loved ones.

“Now I can tell them for sure, with all the data and information I have, that yes, your great-grandmother is buried in this area. And at least they have a place for closure,” Apodaca said. “I think that’s what Carol wanted, closure.”

Today, in a section of Cemetery B, where Johnson’s remains are interred, a modest tombstone honors the woman Wawrychuk has only ever known as Nana. On it is a small inscription inspired by the Bible’s book of Jeremiah, chapter 29, verse 13:

“Seek me and find me,” it reads.

FYI

Thursday’s reading and book signing of “Taking Nana Home” is at 7 p.m. at Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 1010 Foothill Blvd., La Cañada. For more information, call (818) 790-0717.