“I haven’t lost all my marbles.” After a pause, I add, “Yet.” I chuckle at my corny joke, a response to a co-worker asking about the colorful marbles I display in a box on my desk.
My collection of 34 marbles includes a few large boulders, an old clay marble, my favorite swirly shooter, a few aggies, several cat’s-eyes, and a handful of plainsies. I wish I still had a steelie. I’ve carried them from job to job over the past couple of decades as my personal inside joke when things get stressful. Their significance has changed over the years.
When you come from a family line of generational mental illness on both sides, the reference to “losing your marbles” might feel insensitive. My mom always had a great sense of humor—despite her bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and years of cycling in and out of mental institutions—and I’m sure she’d approve. She often joked about our family’s “good genes” when referring to mental health. Her laughter filled rooms.
At 16, doctors prescribed Valium for her emotional outbursts. In the late 70s, while institutionalized, she underwent shock therapy. None of the early treatments helped. Years later, modern medication brought stability, if she took it.
Some marbles in my box came from my mom’s childhood. I found them in my great-grandparents’ house, tucked away in one of the many saved Imperial margarine containers my Depression-surviving great-grandma couldn’t bear to throw away. Every time I hold her marbles, I think of the little girl playing in the same backyard my brother and I played in.
My brother and I visited her in mental institutions and group homes, and sometimes she came over for the holidays. He and I were close. Throughout our childhood, it was always “Chris and Michele” or “Michele and Chris,” like a single, fluid name. Whether we were in foster care, hanging out at our great-grandparents’ house, visiting our grandmother in California, or living with our grandfather, we were almost always together. Born only 14 months apart, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel that it was my role to take care of him.
But I wasn’t able to keep him safe.
Some marbles are from my childhood collection. Chris and I would dig small ditches in the dirt next to the garage at our grandpa’s house and play for hours. We’d each toss in the same number of marbles. But if the game was “for keepsies,” I didn’t use my favorite milky green swirly marble, for fear of losing it. Belly down in the dirt, thumb cocked against our index finger, we’d take turns hitting our chosen shooter into the pit, hoping to knock the others out and add to our collection.
When the voices he heard after smoking PCP-laced marijuana when he was 16 didn’t stop, Chris was sent to a psychiatric unit. I was devastated, and he was never the same. He was released with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia he never fully accepted, even into his forties. He’d vacillate between taking his medications and, when he started feeling better, stopping taking them. More than once, I received a call from him after he left everything behind—his belongings and his apartment—because he believed someone was after him and he needed a place to stay. The invisible enemies were hard to escape when the voices were loud.
The middle of the night emergency calls surprised me occasionally, when they both were still alive. Mom called, cycling after days of no sleep, to accuse me of stealing an inheritance—which didn’t exist—from her mother, or of sleeping with my stepdad. The voices played tricks on her mind. She died in 2013, her COPD taking her without warning. I wish I hadn’t let her last call go to voicemail.
My brother sometimes called me a fucking bitch because he thought I was laughing at him. The voices always lied, and I knew it. He died from complications of the COVID-19 virus in 2021, while I sat with him and reminded him of all the things we did together, including our hours of playing marbles in the dirt.
I miss them both.
Some days at work, I open my wooden box and roll a marble between my fingers. They’re bright and cool, unchanged by the hands which have held them. My mother’s. My brother’s. Mine.
The three of us shared much of the same DNA, yet the mental illness skipped me. Sometimes I feel guilty about that. But I ended up being the one who reminded them to get some sleep, eat healthy, and take their medications. I was their safe place to land. The one who buried them both and was left alone in the end, holding all the marbles.
When I say I haven’t lost all my marbles, it’s true.
I keep the ones I have in a small box on my desk to remind me of the ones I’ve lost.
Michele Peters writes from the heart with a goal of bringing light into dark places. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, USA, and discovered the power of her voice and stories when she read live for the nationally syndicated show Listen to Your Mother in Spokane, Washington in 2022. Her work appears in So God Made a Grandma (March 2025) and The Loss of a Lifetime: Grieving Siblings Share Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope (June 2025), and at Short-Reads.org. Michele is currently writing a coming-of-age memoir and regularly shares nonfiction essays at Light into Dark Places on Substack.
Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.
Recommended reading on possessions:
“MY MOTHER’S NAIL FILE” by Dorothy Barnhouse, The Keepthings
“Melanie Masarin’s Most Prized Possession” by Emilia Petrarca, Shop Rat
“My Collection of Historical Hair” by Adam Starr, My Collection Of
“Walking in Her Shoes” by Alison Damast Dolinger, Short Reads
“The 1969 Pyrex Pattern Collectors Dream Of Finding At A Thrift Store” by Becky Britton, Yahoo! Life
This is beautifully written and hits close to home . My great aunt was institutionalized and my mom suffered bipolar and anxiety although she had plenty of reason to have issues . She died young of emphysema. My sister and I both have anxiety and panic attacks . My kids all have different forms of anxiety, one ocd, another anxiety etc . I’m still keeping it together but there are some days I sit and think of how much the generations before suffered. My mom too was prescribed Valium. Mental health is a challenge for sure. Thanks for a great read. Jennifer
Lovely and it brings back my own memories of playing marbles in the schoolyard.