'She fell on Tuesday and broke her hip. They're not going to operate because her heart can't take it. So they'll have her on morphine and eventually her legs will become blotchy and...she has DAYS...'
'John & Sis showed up today and asked a lot of questions. Dilly didn't tell her kids about it and they're pissed. Rob & Sonja came to visit Saturday and Sonja tried to feed her yogurt while she was sleeping. What a bonehead.'
She'd been in hospice since early April and had a doctor, nurse, aide, social worker and activities/spiritual person assigned to her.
Hospice isn't a word I take lightly. My grandmother worked in hospice for years. It would be an inevitable decline.
"Hi Jenny - your dad's trying to get ahold of you but said your voicemail is not set up. He asked if I would contact you and ask that you give him a call on the home phone. I'm always glad to oblige"
I had just made the most beautiful salad with shredded chicken, cucumber, grape tomatoes...a torrent of french dressing. I'd eaten half of it when I got this text from my Auntie SOM. And now I was going to throw all of it up.
She died on Wednesday. I found out Friday. What was Wednesday in my world? Two days ago...what was I wearing? I worked. Oh. I made lasagna. That's all I remember from Wednesday and it was two fucking days ago. Usually finding out my mom had DIED 2 days AGO would have sent me into a snit but I wasn't mad about it. I don't think I wanted anyone to ever call me and let me know. I don't pay attention to my phone. Ever. I miss landlines.
Numbness is interesting. Emotionally speaking. It all went from such raw and intense emotion from the early days of abuse, secrets I kept even from myself, insanity I was temporarily rescued from at 16 by God -- to complete dismay and bewilderment at my mother's reaction when depression caused by Depo-Provera shots led to my ultimate revelation of all of it.
Mocking. Abandonment. Talking behind my back. She knew me too well to do that. The sensitivity I possess in spades for better or for worse, blessings and her personal curses heard through grapevines. She knew what she was doing to me. To face it and me would be too powerfully hurtful for a woman who'd grown up fat and ridiculed since she was 8 years old. A woman who'd make fun of herself on that front before anyone could beat her to it, much like I dumped all of my paramours before heartache fueled by a younger man's rebellion due to my controlling ways would lead them to reject me. Always younger. Couldn't trust older guys. They were sneaky and knew too much about the world and took advantage of young girls in my fragile and conditioned mind. The trade-offs when in a state of naivete on repeat didn't seem to change that pattern of mine. Ruts were formed. Self-exploitation ensued. Abuse suffered at my own hands like some full-grown branch of just going with that familiar flow.
'You're not good with change, Jenny.' I know, Mother. Who is?
'She always wanted to be cremated so...I had that done and picked up her ashes and brought them home. And I told her 'you're home now' cuz she always wanted to go home.' Dad trailed off, weeping in his thick and changing voice. He loved her more than was reasonable for how she treated him. He loved her so much. I watched her shit on him for years, 'men are stupid.' It created an armor within me defending the gender who had not only always been my perpetrators of horrific sexual and psychological abuse but also the truest and most transparent human beings I'd ever known. Men don't wear warpaint to work. Men don't gossip about other men obsessively in bathrooms on lunch breaks. I didn't identify with women much. Had one friend at a time in school, probably because I didn't trust people. I wasn't girly but that didn't mean I was a tomboy. She was awful to him in front of me and my brothers. We all witnessed the emasculation attempts.
She's already cremated? She's already in an urn on a shelf? She's already all the way gone? Erased.
The place where God knit me together was already dead, disappeared, deleted, cancelled, wind...
Gone, gone, gone. All the way totally gone.
It was almost like cremation was the shocking point and not her death.
I had only seen her twice in 10 years. Once in fall of 2016 in the hospital for her hysterectomy. She held my hand the entire visit and called me her Angel. Said that I saved her from her alcoholism at 28 by being born. 'It was either change your diaper or have another drink.' She never told me she was an alcoholic til I was knee-deep in my own alcoholism.
Visiting your mother in a nursing home is daunting. She was on Town Boards, she commandeered audiences, she was so incredibly talented at crafts, anything to do with her hands, baking, sewing...the things she could do, the weddings she completely decorated replete with bridesmaids dresses, cakes, bouquets, boutonnieres...she did it all. Effortlessly. More patterns, had been knitting since she was 8. Two years ago started forgetting how to.
Nursing homes. They forget to do things like put on her fucking compression stockings. Seeing her swollen calves beyond what you'd think the human form, her skin -- could TAKE. It made me nauseous. She had sores all over them and didn't care. She's been scratching the tight flesh understandably. God, she was different. They weren't taking care of her correctly. Seeing her at the mercy of other people who didn't fucking get it was scary. Had I cared more about our relationship for the last 14 years I would have been overly devastated. But there was the cutting off cuz I couldn't play the 'Life' game and go to Sunday dinners anymore. And with the cutting off, SEVERING of your familial relationships, there HAS TO BE numbness. Or you feel until you explode. You ache. It would hurt quite a bit to KNOW in your body that your family is asleep and unaffected by hurtful truths, twisty, sick ones. Well I was very much affected. I do not suffer fools gladly. I opted out.
I cried last night sometime in the early morning on the porch in the dark and strangely warm air. In my robe, smoking a cigarette and talking to her as if she could be a better friend now. Like she now knew everything, as if death revealed all of the secrets. I no longer knew if that was the case. I used to think I did. But I could now speak freely. As if she was my friend again. Like I got my friend back. It doesn't hurt that I can't physically say 'I love you' to her anymore. Lots of people get broken up about that. I knew in October when we took her to the lunchroom at the 'home' and she turned to me from 10 feet away in her cute Yoda shirt and looked through my entire soul as if she knew everything about me yet couldn't remember who the fuck I was...hard...that it would be the last time I'd see her. Thank you, God. He tells me things sometimes. He 'feels' me things sometimes.
I forgave her the best I could while being a Truther and wanting to understand why she struggled so much with the truth of what happened to her family, why she struggled being there for me. Why she struggled with showing me her emotions about it. I wanted some anger from her. Some fury, some wrath unleashed. I expected as much if I'd told her wayyyy back when. She hid it from me like she hid crying in the shower from us when she thought she had breast cancer, and when I heard her crying in the shower while she took care of my dying grandmother. No one would help her. Now I'm the disappeared family member who didn't take care of her. Guilt-free from being guilt-free about it, too.
I don't FEEL much about the death of my mother. And I don't think that's going to come. I don't think it's rolled up somewhere in my subconscious waiting to become a torrential rainfall of tears. I pre-mourn lots of things. There will be moments. A foundation just shifted beneath me a little bit. The cemetery across the street has a different feel to it now. Almost some type of reverence instead of where I find peace.
She was great at giving advice to other people. They lined up for it. Extroverted almost to an egotistical fault. 'Shy' wasn't a word I would ever, ever apply to my mother.
She hunted and killed my Dad when they met at Target in the '70's. The marriage proposal was from her and went like this:
'I suppose we should get married.' She came onto him at her Halloween party at her trailer behind Target at the time. He brought a date. She told him that he was 'with the wrong girl.' He went from his overbeareing and physically and DRASTICALLY psychologically abusive father's house--to the army--the navy--to my mom's house. He's never been allowed to truly make his own decisions. Hunted and killed. She TRIED to kill him. He's going to Live.
I will miss her laugh, which I've inherited/adopted portions of in the last ten years that didn't exist before then.
The things that you end up becoming that you witnessed and once abhorred within your parents that eventually sprout out of yourself without your permission or knowledge later...incredible.
I don't know how to end this. Maybe it never really does end. Maybe that's the lesson.