Helen Chronicles

All the family can do is wait for Helen to end up in a hospital for some reason (hair on fire, wandering the streets), and then we can corral her. She’s like an exhausted, deranged water buffalo with a police escort. So long as she’s on her feet, I can’t touch her.

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It has come to my attention that some of us characterize the Helen Chronicles posts as “rants.” Not so, grasshopper(s)!
They may be many things, but not “rants”: testimony, transmutation, therapy, LIBERATION perhaps, but not incoherent babbling. (That I leave to others.) They are how I turn shit into gold. If you could see me before, [...]

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The woman who panicked the other day because she couldn’t get the cap off a Metamucil bottle is riding high on the adrenalin of revenge, vowing to “never” allow any of us to take care of her. It’s fearsome to behold when this occurs: the babbling stops, the voice deepens and steadies, and the measured syllables of doom roll off the tongue like 10-pound blocks of ice dropping down on baby bunny rabbits in the clover.

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Helen didn’t like it that I elected not to argue yesterday. She said she thought I had to come down to Tucson because we needed to get some things settled (?), then in the same breath said she’d “had it” with all of us (me and my four siblings) and was going to see a lawyer and sue for abuse! Is everybody’s mother like this?

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In the last few weeks, I’ve had three phone calls from the scene of the crime. She tells me my brother isn’t in his right mind, and he says the same of her. I can’t take anything she says for truth, although she could drive a statue into permanent psychosis, so one never knows. She’s talking about putting more money into the rathole where she lives, while a perfectly good home sits vacant several blocks away, with cockroaches roaming over abandoned family mementos.

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Another phone call from hell (Tucson, Arizona). I don’t know what to do except blog about it. There wasn’t even any reason to call me. My mother and my brother were just yelling at each other and decided to bring me into the loop. I listened for 10 minutes and hung up.
Oh Lord.
My 88-year-old mother [...]

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This is for anyone appalled by my letting it all hang out vis-a-vis my family: know ye that the kids are all right, so to speak.
My brother, for example, ended his last phone call to me the way he always does, by saying “I love you.” How many of you have brothers in their 50s [...]

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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 [...]

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Some will mourn and some will cheer, but fear not, psychic voyeurs.
As a friend emailed recently, “I don’t know what makes you bleed your life all over the internet, but it’s compelled me to read what you have had to say since 1998.” Well, I do what I do. No doubt there will continue to [...]

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Sunday was Helen’s 87th birthday. It was also the the first time I can remember that I didn’t send a card, or flowers, or a present, or make a phone call. But no, I didn’t feel guilty. Just incredibly, impossibly sad…
The sadness of Helen is overpowering. She has no friends at all. She hasn’t communicated [...]

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