61-Wherever I Went, There I Was
I did not travel down the highway to my brother and sister-in-law’s house after the funeral. My emotions were too high, for one thing. I’d steeled myself to not slip back into position when I saw my mother—and I didn’t—but I also didn’t know how long I could stay in her perimeter without ripping myself to shreds. Besides, there were extenuating circumstances. A number of my own friends had come to support me, and I knew they would not be welcome at the reception, especially the Black ones. Or the gentiles. Certainly my daughter and T were not about to pretend all’s-well-that-ends-in-death with my mother. My only Jewish friend had come a long way for the service, which meant she had a long drive home. So we gathered at a donut shop down the street, where a few mentioned Mom’s eulogy. Apparently, I hadn’t been the only one who noticed its central thesis, but ya know, writers pick up on stuff like that.
Tellingly, at no time did I ever say anything to Mom or family about the revelations that had been creeping into my consciousness, my rude exit from the house eight months earlier, Dad’s postmortem visit, or, especially, the catalyst letter I’d sent, which one of serial therapists said had given him permission to leave.
Gee, that sounded nice, but I bet not. Therapists have their scripts, just like the rest of us.
Why I decided to visit my mother in her new digs a few Sundays later eludes me to this day. I found the place easily enough, a big, modern structure, tiered to accommodate its hill foundation. Did T go with me, or was that the second visit? Memory non-serves. Mom was sitting in a new recliner that matched the one Dad must have used, across from a big screen TV resting on the floor and just inside the balcony where someone had carefully arranged her children—the ceramic figurines from her atrium—in the small space available.
That “someone” was her current caregiver, such a lovely girl, a godsend really. Mom didn’t know what she’d do without her.
What did we talk about after all that no-contact? She’d been telling everyone I hadn’t been around because I was so busy, the same excuse I’d heard all my life about, well, everyone, especially my brother. As if naught had occurred, eight months had non-transpired. She’d made it all go away, ala other non-discussible topics. So I followed her course: no apologies, no explanations.
Mom had been reduced, her “big hair” chopped short—which she hated—with bangs, ditto, and dyed black. I didn’t ask why. Was she medicated or simply wrung out? A nursing-school mantra murmured in my ear: “Mobilize anxiety in the patient to ensure compliance.” Take the picture, fellas, you’ll never see a more perfect depiction.
She showed me a photo of Dad just before he died. He looked just like himself, as the old joke goes, although in my vision, he’d been instantly recognizable but not as I’d known him in corporeal life. She kept that photo next to her, her figurines within sight, a plant or two, I seem to recall, as if to recreate the sanctuary she’d had for forty-some-odd years, the one Dad had wanted to stay in until he died. The one she’d so brilliantly arranged, it hit me as I sat there, to take away from him.
Purposely, with malice aforethought. Like my brother’s bass guitar and my kitten and my daughter’s ball, which she’d snatched away from my four-year-old because she thought Baby had stolen something from her that she later found in a pants pocket when sorting laundry. Then as now, no apology, no explanation.
But as I sat and listened to her malarky, sans heat rising in my chest or having to stomp down retorts I knew better than to utter, I felt no satisfaction, no triumph over her condition. Adding the candy I’d brought to the untouched pile in her fridge, I could see how little of Mom had made it into this new, cramped living space. Oh, it was all her stuff, but my sister-in-law’s tasteful, pragmatic touch shone everywhere. That made perfect sense since she’d been the one who recommended the facility in the first place, as it appealed to everything she’d want for herself. But to my eyes—and, I could feel, to my mother’s—Mom had been warehoused.
I’d envied sis-in-law’s confidence from the day I met her—so like my love sister’s, and, for that matter, every relative, client, student, friend, frenemy, and casual acquaintance I’d ever encountered. They were all extraordinarily (to me) certain that their perspective was right/best, their motivations true/pure, their agendas and actions justified.[1]
Mom non-heard my reply when she asked how I was as a matter of conversation, and segued, as if this were now her life, to talk about the mean, ugly girl inside her who did terrible things. She’d been wearing a mask all her life, a mask of nice and friendly, but she was really a horrible, horrible person. I reassured her without missing a beat, as if nothing had ever come between us, and she waved my input away, as usual. Why had I come to see her?
“Take anything you want,” she said, in preface to dismissal. “I don’t need anything anymore.”
So I took my father’s elephant paperweight and retrieved the Kabuki dancer I’d needlepointed for her from the artwork stacked in Dad’s closet—residency in these rooms here being temporary at best. I couldn’t find Daughter’s Betty Boop but asked not if it had been sold, taken as a keepsake, or dumped. Some things are best left unknown.
Daughter stayed in the car the next week when T and I came to visit. She’d inherited her paternal grandmother’s streak, the one of sand lines and hard-stop cut-offs. Nana had grown up in Kansas and played organ at the local church until her father got wind of it and made her stop. Did he think she was going to convert because she loved the music? Ah, the things we do to our children in the name of… I don’t know what. Fear? Control? Ignorance?
Put me down for that last one.
I took my friend the next Sunday, and we wheeled Mom out to my car, then into one of mine and my sister’s favorite brunch spots, where the croissants were enormous, baked on site, and still warm when they came to the table. I believe that was the last visit. T told me I was hurting Baby by seeing Mom, so I just stopped—no apology, no explanation. Just relief.
And no guilt, or so I thought. In fact, I thought I’d done a hellova good job forgiving, releasing, and moving on without actually, ya know, facing. But all the crap I’d stored in my turtle shell, the sudden realization here, the recovered memory there, had not yet begun to fight my over-half-a-century’s hide/deny system. Even though I was determined to heal myself, I expected to non-confront any painful emotions by writing affirmations, reciting mantras, visioning health, wealth, and happiness, blessing-and-releasing, gracing-and-forgiving, and all those other powerful positive thinkings.
Dumbasfuck.
The first fall happened when I tried to bring in the garbage bins. I was wearing a pair of shoes meant for walking, the kind that’s curved on the bottom instead of flat, the better to propel one’s forward stride. Not walking all that well anymore—
I hadn’t been walking all that well for, oh, three or four decades, but that didn’t stop me from telling myself I was just out of shape, I just had to push myself a little harder, I just had to.. just had to… just had to…
Like an excruciating game of Chutes and Ladders®, every chute took longer to recover from than the last, every ladder was harder to climb than the previous, but I dumbasfuck believed everything I read and listened to and watched exhorting, “Exercise! Exercise! Exercise!”
… I’d gotten myself a desk-top platform that would let me stand, sit, stand, sit at my desk, and was determined that this time I would finally get in shape, lose weight, and be able to run again.[2] I’d decided to retrieve the bins because I was tired of standing, and transitioning from up to down (or down to up) was muted-screaming painful. My knees could take it, but my lower back hated my guts and didn’t understand why I didn’t understand that my work day couldn’t be as long as I claimed it was.
That was 2017, fully six years ago, and I’m just now realizing that I’d been having this same argument with myself since three, maybe five years before my sister moved to New Mexico back at the turn of the century. It’s not a new thing.
I remember getting a treatment from a wonderful man who could sense chi—or qi or however it’s spelled—and told me point blank that my legs were weak and not likely to get any stronger. I dismissed that diagnosis, of course, for all the reasons detailed from Chapter One, Page one on.
Okay, fine, enough! I admit it! I’m never going to get back to the state of fitness I never had! There, I said it! Are you satisfied now, you fleshy me? You/I win; I/you lose.
Long story short, I ended up sprawled on the street so dramatically that our mail carrier backed his truck up to come running, cars stopped in the middle of our street, and a former marine— “I used to be a marine, ma’am, I can help”—made a U-turn and jumped out to try and lift me. It wasn’t so much that I felt like an idiot… I felt like an idiot… as I couldn’t catch a breath and didn’t want anyone to touch—ow, ow, ow, don’t touch, don’t touch—me. Somebody pounded on our front door, Daughter came running out and talked me through getting my feet on the ground, then walked… well, shuffled… me into the house.
Hmmm. How did she know how to do that? Had we danced to this tune before and I didn’t/still don’t remember it?[3] Or had T done the same for her without me being aware? Prying minds want to know…
Hurting, hurting, hurting with every breath, I called my HMO to find out which facility to go to and was told not to bother. “You’ve either broken or bruised your ribs. It’ll be too painful to take x-rays, but that doesn’t matter. We don’t tape up ribs anymore. Just rest and use ice. It’ll take three or four weeks to heal.”
Three or four weeks? I had to work through this pain for three or four weeks? (No, I wasn’t going to not work.) I iced, I whimpered, I had a heck of a time getting up and down, on and off, in and out (chair, chamber pot, bed), eating, sleeping, and breathing. But everything else was fine. Hurt to use the cane; hurt to not. But I was much better in three or four months (not weeks), which gave me plenty of time, while lying stock still because moving hurt like a sonofabitch, for unacknowledged, unexamined memories to dive-bomb into my dreams, side-swipe me in the middle of work, and T-bone me as I tried to drift away and relax.
I non-recall how I got through it other than knowing it was on the backs of Daughter, T, D&D, and N. Thanks to Tom and Baby’s prophetic cahooting, my ass—if not my ribs—was covered.
[1] Video 2-12 Plot & Characters, slides 12-25, Ghostwriting Professional Designation Program, Claudia Suzanne, 2017.
[2] See Chapter 30; I had never been able to run.
[3] See Chapter 48. “Memory problems getting worse.”