Brothers’ remains return from asylum

GRANGEVILLE, Idaho – For more than six decades, the cremated remains of brothers Robin and Wade Graham were stored in anonymous little copper canisters on shelves of the crumbling Oregon psychiatric hospital made famous as the movie set of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

The Grahams were finally buried next to their parents in Grangeville’s Prairie View Cemetery, after a service Sunday attended by more than 20 family members – some of whom never knew the two existed – after their years in exile at the former Oregon State Hospital in Salem.

The weekend burial in this northcentral Idaho town comes after Oregon lawmakers in April passed a law making it easier for families of patients who died at the mental hospital to reclaim their ashes. The unclaimed bodies of 3,600 mental patients were cremated and the remains put in copper canisters from the early 1900s to the 1970s.

“We just want those remains taken care of in a respectful, dignified way,” Lewiston resident Marilou Graham, the wife of Norman Graham, a nephew of the brothers, told the Lewiston Tribune. “(Sunday) is kind of a celebration. They are no longer in the basement of that mental institution – that’s no place for them to be.”

The hospital in Salem was built in 1883 as the Oregon State Insane Asylum.

By the time Robin and Wade Graham were committed in 1922 – the family lived in Oregon at the time – the facility was known as the State Institution for Feeble-Minded.

Wade Graham was 23 when he died in 1934. Robin was 27 when he died in 1941. According to a death certificate, the cause of death was “spastic paraplegia.” Contributing factors were also listed: “idiot, cerebral atrophy.”

In April, when the Oregon Legislature passed the new law to disclose the identities of former patients stored in the copper canisters, it was an attempt to make it easier for families to reclaim them.

For years, many had hidden that their relatives were patients at the hospital out of shame, but the remains finally got attention as the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories in the Oregonian newspaper in 2005.

Once members of the Graham family learned of the brothers’ resting place in Oregon several weeks ago, they sent William Snyder to retrieve the remains at the hospital. His mother was the boys’ sister and took care of them until she married in 1919.

Snyder, 73, said he was carrying out what he believes would have been his mother’s wish.

Although the boys were one of the family’s hidden secrets for many years, old letters that have been found in family records make reference to them shortly after they were sent to the hospital 82 years ago.

The letters to Adda Graham, the boys’ mother, were from her father, W.A. Worstell, of Bremerton, Wash.

“(I) went out to see the little boys, and I don’t think they could be better cared for than they are,” Worstell wrote in the June 15, 1922, letter. “I do not know of course, but Wade seemed to know me. His eyes followed me wherever I went and he smiled all of the time I was there.”

Now, the two have granite headstones, each chiseled with his name.