She’s dying “in the next two days,” according to her. Eighty-nine years old, shambling toward the end, supposedly. But who can tell for sure?
The old woman is in the hospital now, recovering from a urinary tract infection, this after being up all night from not taking her anti-psychotic medicine. The “voices” won’t let her sleep, though this somehow doesn’t slow her down. I don’t know where she gets the strength, retaining just enough lucidity to pass the routine psychiatric tests whenever she’s admitted, omitting any mention of the voices! Because she knows she’d be committed? Sent to a nursing home?? I have no idea. I don’t know anything any more when it comes to Helen. The Mystery of the end of life combined with madness, how is one to deal?
The mental health authorities say the family needs a “plan.” [snort] Yet she absolutely refuses home care or a nursing home, the mere mention of which can send her into a rage like nothing most of you have ever witnessed. I don’t care how detached you are, none of us can take it. A “plan”? How completely backwards: we need mental health assistance, not our mother! The laws are an abomination, useless, without compassion, forcing us to sit by until she breaks a hip or kills someone. I hate Arizona with a fury, for there is nothing decent one can do.
In our case, only this: go to Tucson, stay up all night, be viciously attacked, run for your life!
As a matter of personal survival, you have to flee. She hasn’t been sane for decades, maybe all her life. Outsiders, even blood relations, have no idea. “We saw her back in such-and-such, and she was fine!” No, she wasn’t. I’m sorry, that’s just not true. It never has been, you finally realize if you’ve been close. Do I still care? OH YES, I DO! A miracle in itself, after all the endless, fucking bullshit. But let the clan be called to Tucson, stand around, screaming, crying, just like three years ago? No thanks. (The things I’ve had to learn, in most biologically and spiritually broken circumstances imaginable…) Nor will I ever let this be swept under the rug, like families often do. The truth is necessary for our healing, so that each of us can make repairs.
We have a plan, all right. The plan is to survive a little longer until it’s over. Come together, remember the good things, tend the garden. Life is, after all, remarkably and fabulously good.
(No shit!)
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That note of redemption is one to hold on to amidst the chaos. Not everyone with such a parent can do that. My best friend had a relationship with his mother approximately like the one you describe with yours, though possibly even worse. She too was mentally ill. When she died a few years ago and someone offered condolences, I heard him say, “Don’t be sorry, I never liked her and I’m glad she’s gone.” I haven’t walked in his shoes, of course, but I know enough about that family (two of his brothers are also friends of mine) to know that the mother, whom I never met, had by her behavior and even her personality scarred all her children (four sons) in different ways. The actuality of the case was probably not of the apocalyptic magnitude suggested by the family myth, but it is myth, not facts, which rule in family matters. But whatever the rights and wrongs of the past, which can never be straightened out or known completely, my friend’s implacable rejection and hatred of his mother are continuing to scar him in the present and into the future, perpetuating the scars of the past.
I’m a card-carrying agnostic, but I say we all stand in need of forgiveness. That’s true of you and me and everyone more or less normal, but even more so of the mentally ill.
Believe me, hatred doesn’t enter into this at all. Oddly or not, neither does forgiveness! One calls a spade a spade, but the spade has done no “wrong,” ergo nothing to forgive.
The danger lies on a deeper level, where the psyche seeks its missing pieces. That’s why objectification is required: “Not from THAT source, sir, but elsewhere!” Broader, deeper, universal. That’s how we roll.
My own hunch, as one never analyzed, is that the particulars of one’s own personal case is where everything begins and ends and has to be made right. Universals and objective truths and the whole external non-personal world radiate out from that source. Blake hated universals; he thought they were the death of the true life of imagination. I don’t quite go that far, but I do say that nowhere in this great wide world of thought, feeling and beauty can one escape one’s own personal history – and I wonder why anyone would want to: these things have meaning only in relation to us, each in our finite existence. Even the painful stuff, in my experience, shapes you and makes you what you are. Keats’ idea of life on this earth as “the vale of soul-making” seems just the perfect formulation.
Be that as it may, brother Farr, we both like calling spades what they are – spades. But that’s just a metaphor, and metaphors have their limitations.
What I was trying to say is that a child’s experience of universal love comes through its mother. A man without that can go through his entire life without ever realizing what is wrong, although he unconsciously tries to find it, over and over, in relationships with other women. This also has ramifications in every conceivable activity in life.
The only solution is to discover self-love on his own and make it his. Numinous experiences help by revealing the existence of a force he shares. No one has to go through life wearing the same old hair-shirt.
My own poor batshit mother passed away over ten years ago, and I almost never miss her. She treated me and others around her terribly, and even though she was responsible IT WASN’T HER FAULT.
I loved her (like a mother!) and there were some good times I remember fondly, but I never did LIKE her very much, and thinking back on it, I still don’t. I am scarred to a degree by her neglect and unwitting abuse, but I’m an adult now, and however I let those scars rule me today is MY OWN responsibility.
John, it doesn’t sound like you’re letting this get under your skin, at least like it has in the past, and I wish you well, and ongoing strength. Sometimes others who don’t understand will try to guilt you on this shit, and I trust you won’t even bat an eye when it comes to that. Rock on, my brother.
John, you and Chipper and my best friend Al have one kind of mother problem; I have another. I never doubted my mother’s love, but I rebelled against her idea of what I should be, rejected her even, hurt her. The hurt would have healed, no doubt, had there been time for that to happen. But then she died, long before she should have, at a much younger age than I myself have now reached and before I was able to tell her the things I should have told her. I live with a sense of unexpiated guiltiness. I have something to atone for and yet will never be able to atone.
This is not a sweepstakes in the mother-and-son reminiscence derby. Just saying that there’s more than one way for a mother and son to mess things up. Is it better to be the sinner or the one sinned against? On some days I wish I could blame my mother, but I really can’t, only myself. That’s not a burden you or Chipper have to bear.