My brother, who may or may not have prostate cancer, has an appointment with a urologist at the VA hospital in Tucson tomorrow, but he doesn’t have a car.
The only way he can go anywhere is to borrow my mother’s car, and for whatever reason, she told him he can’t have it. (She doesn’t drive.) He rides an old golf cart over to her trailer every day to see if she’s still alive, takes her car to buy her groceries and so on. But something he said to her today made her respond by telling him he couldn’t use her car to go to the doctor. A man with no other means of support, a son who might have CANCER, needs to go to the doctor, and his mother thinks herself wronged to the extent that she would cause medical support to be withheld…
Ah, family. If I ever published the whole sordid saga, including what’s happened on my father’s side, you’d all be going back to Maryland to smash some tombstones! They need to be smashed, I swear to God. It really is that bad. What’s more, it always was that bad, even when we kids thought it was “normal.” But it was never normal. It was never even remotely sane. Not once, not ever. And yet, nobody realized. Nobody “went there.”
My brother called me this evening, shaking with rage. He’d just come from her place, where he’d smashed a lamp by throwing it onto the floor. I told him how sorry I was. As for the doctor’s appointment, “Just TAKE the goddamned car,” I said. She can’t stop him. She can hardly walk. For his birthday last month, she let him have the car overnight. He took himself to a casino and blew a bunch of money. All by himself, you may be sure. What kind of a birthday is that?
I come from a long line of people with a pile of old newspapers in place of a heart. See that you do better, or I’ll have to smash your tombstones, too.
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