Slipping

October 09, 2024

Til’ death do us was always part of the agreement. I watched the monitor in her hospice room. Not today was my only thought.

Not today.

She lay peacefully on her new pillow and crisp linens. Her blood pressure was 60 over 30. Her pulse was 32. Last hour, both were higher.

Last hour, she told me she was feeling fine.

We had planned for this day, although I hoped it would never come. I was to go first. I was the oldest. I worked jobs that should have killed me. She lived the life of the Queen she was (in my mind). No harm would come to her.

No harm ever did.

But, time did instead.

Slowly, ever so slowly, time crept, in plain sight, upon her.

Today, it began its sprint.

Her BP dropped a few more points. Not enough to erase the smile on her face, but drop it did.

I smoothed her silky, gray hair for the last time. I did not need a machine to tell me her breathing was erratic. Her DNR meant we would not be disturbed.

She would pass quietly.

That is what she wanted.

When I heard the flatline of the monitor, I closed her eyes.

She died without pain.

That is what I wanted.

I never thought of death as scary; life on the other hand…life is terrifying. Life is where every bit of suffering is.

September 2023. Introduction.

I was shamefully middling in my reaction for it wasn't the first time someone woke me in hysterics to the news of a relative’s traumatic passing. It also wasn't the first time I didn't respond as well as I should have to the grief of others. If any at all, my response was annoyed how the information was publicized, as much as when and where else it was publicized.

As I’ve gotten older, deaths in my family have become an overdramatization of situations. With each untimely funeral, we become more chagrined, more irrational (believing in curses and such), and more selfish.

It has since become my belief that many traumatic deaths were preventable and have been teetering on the ledge of the very same precipice for so long that most of us had either grown impatient in our watch, moved on, and/or accepted the foreseeable well before it ever happened; the shock, if any, was present simply because it hadn’t happened sooner.

And though there were a lot of cyclic conditions and responses here, I did have one that was a first: I didn't attend Scott's funeral—it was the first family funeral I hadn’t attended.

Truthfully, I had many reasons for not attending, both monetary and logistically. I also had my best friend in state—a trip that had been planned for months, almost cancelled due to COVID then last minute it was resurrected due to new information and regulations; however, these were not the responses that she wanted. My sister was angry. She was angry without saying why she was angry. She had made assumptions as to why I wasn’t there. She felt her trust had been broken by me a few times now.

"You were his favorite cousin!” It was more of an accusation than she had originally intended. I heard the shock in her own voice that she had said it, but they weren’t getting the apology from me that they wanted—the apology I am no longer capable of. Blame it on the 150mg of Venlafaxine I have been taking since the pandemic and my divorce, or the years of emotional, sometimes, physical damage that led up to that dosage that without, I would certainly still be having daily panic attacks, suicidal ideation, with the occasional nervous breakdown/life-spiral where I burn everything down with full intention of not coming back from it…and, of course, the deep well of depression that, at times, appears too daunting to emerge from.

It all wasn’t gone, by any means, and I knew it was there—waiting just below the surface like a Kraken ready to rise from its slumber within mere hours of a missed dose, and with titan power, could destroy everything stable achieved this far. It was that swift—the withdrawal.

Unlike the medications I had taken before this, which would take time to have negative effects in the event that a pill was to be missed; I was absolutely at the will of this supposedly non-addictive chem-cocktail. Being thirteen years without chemical dependency until now, I recognize the hypocrisy the old-timers had warned us of; I had traded one addiction for another—but I found the risk in my case worth it even with the obvious pitfalls should I become less than diligent. But at the age of forty-three I had arrived at a place where all things had found balance, and my thoughts were manageable. I had finally found a numb that was ‘comfortable’.

“You should have been there!" It was a text, but I heard the desperation regardless. She wanted me the feel ashamed. I didn’t. How do you tell someone that you had already grieved this person? This person who, by all standards, was still considered alive but hadn’t really existed for so long?

I had a flashback of my mother's funeral in 1994. I stood stiffly by watching the array of reactions, trying to figure out where I fit in—how I should be feeling in this moment. They later would call it shock, but I was aware. This was before medication, before booze, drugs, any chemicals (unless you count chugging Dimetapp and eating handfuls of Flintstone Vitamins—gee, who knew I’d become an addict?). Confused. Scared. Yet fully aware of the situation, I was.

I scanned each face; some were unfamiliar, though they seemed to have more of a connection with my own mother than I—at least in this moment.

My eyes met my cousin Scott's—blue eyes striking against the redness. His wet face appearing more angry than sad to me. He was a few years my senior and I feared him. He was not tentative about what he felt, nor would he hesitate to speak his mind or share his opinion—unlike me—who was so very quiet and timid outside of my conscious self; yet whose survivalist brain was never still long enough to allow myself to just experience a feeling.

"Why aren't you crying? Don't you even care that your mom is dead? What's wrong with you?" Scott's words wounded. Wounded me enough to carry that memory to this day; still lodged somewhere between the residuum of shame and the scar tissue of acceptance, like a neuropathic pain that reminds me it exists when the season is right.

I looked up to Scott as much as I was afraid of him. I wish I could have been as passionate and disappointed about ‘all of this’ as much as he was.

"You were his favorite cousin!"

"What's wrong with you?" That's what she really meant. What was wrong with me that I didn’t attend my cousin’s funeral. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t cry at my own mother’s. What was wrong with me that I didn’t experience loss the same way as they did. What was wrong with me that I didn’t understand how she felt. That was what she wasn’t saying. And the truth? Burial is for the living.

In my family, we’d rather be blindsided with grief instead of steadily awaiting the worst. That’s the reality of it though. For most humans in general, I suspect it is. As people we tend to turn our faces away from the constant heart break, feigning ignorance of even the most inevitable outcomes, or wastefully rushing through our emptions so we can just get on with it and our empty fucking lives where everything looks great. We do with hope that when the loss does occur, we will feel some of that devastation we shelved for a later occasion—grief we bottled and tucked away somewhere secret even from ourselves, that if found, we’d be surprised…rather than having been dragged through the insipid furtherance of heartache all along which tends to leave us apathetic in the end. Like me. ‘Ignorance is bliss.’

Call me callous, for it’s true, but it has long since been my experience that—if you’re paying attention—most tragedies these days are expected (normal even) and for those of us who’ve had it the worst—we want to hurt. We want to feel something akin to pain, so that we don’t have to instead feel shame at a time we’re more vulnerable to it. Creeping up on us at night when we question ‘meaning’ and such nonsense. We’re not monsters, per se, we’ve simply become so familiar with loss that we now realize everything is lost even before it begins…we’ve become accustomed to mourning existence.

I couldn't go to Scott's funeral because I couldn't mourn a death that was more of a mercy than the life he left, then watch the ritual of posturing that pretended it wasn’t. Such is shame and our own fear of being forgotten that it leads us to these eccentricities—but then again, I’ve been described as eccentric myself. My sister wouldn’t talk to me for months after, furthering my belief that none of us truly know what we’re doing with our time. Maybe it’d be different if I had gone to live with my sister all those years ago, after mom’s funeral, when given the choice. Maybe I would be different. Thoughts like these have a habit of consuming me of late.

June 1994. Part 1. The Sister.

It was two days before my thirteenth birthday. I had asked Mom if I could go with Maxine’s family back to Nebraska for the summer. I was eager to get to know my older sister better. She had long since been my favorite sibling, sixteen years my senior. I hadn’t been around Maxi much, not since I was five, when we left California. Having had a hand in keeping me ‘alive’ those early years in California, she was like a second mother to me, and I was excited that she had suggested Logan and I live with them. And though I knew we’d be safe there and probably loved; I wasn’t sure that was enough anymore. I needed a schema of what life there would look/feel like because things were much different for her now than they were when we were younger. Maxi was just starting a family of her own. I feared we wouldn’t be a priority. I felt that way with all my family those days. Except him.

My aunt and uncle, who were fostering us at this point, they were in disagreement with the plan to summer in Nebraska; mostly because we had become my uncle’s ‘project’. He hoped that we would stay with him and possibly he feared that this time away would break any of the principles he had instilled in us. Quick to manipulation, my survival tactic of choice back then, I knew that if I favored to asking my mother instead that he would not be able to contend with the wishes of a woman dying of cancer—not with all her immediate family around and having more say in our lives than he, though seemingly wanted none of it. This is how all my older siblings had come to here in the first place—all 6 of us gathered together for the first time since fleeing Modesto, to say their goodbyes to our mother.

1986. California.

Years earlier when we were still in California with John (my dad), it was essential to move regularly for his “job”. We moved often and sometimes we even moved without Dad; he’d have to show up later when it was “safe”.

My mom was swept off her feet when she first met my dad. He blew into town driving a yellow corvette (my mom’s favorite color), introduced to her by the town sheriff in that little Nebraska town. He was dropping off another shipment of Mexico’s finest sugar. He brought the party, and my Mom ate it up. She had spent the last year in a bedroom painted black, mourning her husband’s suicide. She had been married and a mother since she was eighteen years old now that she was thirty, she wanted to explore the parts of life she forfeited being the cheerleader, the good daughter, the smart one. She wanted to live dangerously. And she got to.

Other times we moved without Dad because he was the one who wasn’t safe to be around. Usually for only a night or so after he was having a particularly bad episode. I think Mom was less scared of Dad’s unpredictability and more scared of the certainty that one of her teenage sons would eventually kill him if the abuse continued. Both Owen and Shamus had pulled John’s own revolver on him multiple times by now. The same revolver he used to make holes in nearly every room in whatever house we were hiding out in at the time; the nights he had convinced himself that the shadows in his drug-decayed mind told him were real and coming to get him or take what was his.

I remember one night sitting barefoot sobbing on the stairs of a tavern between the top and bottom floor, men at the bar glancing uncomfortably up at my five-year-old self in my baby blue, flannel nightie. I watched Mom across the mountain road, snow flurries and wind ripping at her robe, crying into a payphone as her teenage children tried to convince her to come back inside and away from the call that would lead her back to him. I was scared because she seemed so far away in that moment, and I felt paralyzed there.

We’d all suffered John’s chaos in more ways than one, but the worst of which was how he had sucked the life out of her. He’d broken her in ways only she knew. Eventually, it took my sister Maxi and her partner Jack to get us out of there. Jack was a master mechanic who worked for my dad’s “front”—a wrecking yard in Modesto that John had bought with their inheritance— the money Mom had gotten from the death of my half-siblings father.

Jack traded work for a Chevette from my dad and rebuilt it as a project car. One day when my dad was away or maybe in a heroin coma, Jack handed my mom the keys and said, “grab everything you can in 30 minutes and go”. I watched from the dirty glass of the hatchback as he stood, arms crossed, leaning in the doorway as we drove away. A sentry standing guard.

I felt that too—and there have been plenty of times in my years when I felt everything inside of me say, “grab everything you can and go”.

June 1994. Part 2. The Pity Party.

Mom stared vacantly at me, or rather, the shell that vaguely resembled my mother did. Sallow, crêpey, soft, thin skin so smooth to the touch in was like the slickness of snake or tanned ostrich. Once rich, auburn hair that had lost all its “burn”—now dull, dry, breaking—like everything else about her. Her eyes so large and deep-set in their sockets that when her pupils shivered it was as though they were wild, starved animals pressing themselves in accord to the backs of dens.

My mother no longer responded in human language to us. The consistent pain, insomnia, starvation wouldn’t allow it. If her voice, mouth, and mind did work together it was saved for brief, banshee wails that no parent should have to hear in the depths of the night—that haunting cry of their child; not that of infant for mother’s milk or life, but their fifty-two-year-old daughter begging for their mercy and peace.

And here I was a vapid child who had grown so utterly numb of suffering that I thought this poor creature could still provide for my self-intent from their hollowed being. Her ribs were but a cage for me to escape—to get away from this…from them…from her.

Certainly, some wouldn’t blame me. For any child to be wanting of a normal childhood, an ordinary child’s birthday, a stable home environment with basic child and human needs met—that should be available by default.

I remember sitting at the dinner table eating what I realize now was “dish sink” dinners and ignoring my mother go on about children starving in other countries while we were being ungrateful, turning down food stamps because someone else needed them more, working herself sick. Even to this day, writing about this experience I feel privileged, selfish, ungrateful, and ashamed to be writing this at all. I question whether my experience is valid or if I’m just another poor-me in an entire country of self-pitying, snow-white ingrates.

The point being, I knew so little of stability, consistency, or normalcy at that time that when I had a transitory perception of it given by someone recognizing and addressing my needs, regardless if it was for their own self-satisfaction to feel charitable and nothing to do with genuine compassion, I was so overcome with greed that I was dead-set on keeping it…even as it advanced my apathy toward the more nurturing side of necessity. Nature was winning. I could live without love if it meant a full stomach and the occasional frivolity as well. As for the secret horror that I had been suppressing until now and only bringing to the front of my thoughts in the deep of night, was that if I were free of her—I had a chance.

The thought of not ever having those things— “normal” things like consistent meals, clean clothes, shelter and then going back to merely surviving as we had for the last thirteen years minus two days, this chance passing me by…I felt trapped. I felt trapped by my mother’s illness. By adults with selfish aims or ideas of what, how, or who I should be after she was gone—not just where. And I had no reference points for what was good and safe and loving… “happy”. I don’t remember feeling any of those things as a child. I remember strongly appreciating brief intervals of beauty and accomplishment. Of a job well-done. But that’s the proselytization again perhaps. That if I wasn’t putting effort into the things the adults around me thought I should be, then I wasn’t worthy. Knowing I deserved nurture—those parts of me just weren’t born or awake yet back then. They hadn’t had time to be. The person who would have given them to me had been dying since I knew her.

My Grandmother at least attempted a birthday by baking an angel food cake. She had forgotten, then was angry. She seemed angry with me. She always seemed angry with me. So, despite the heavy mephitis of death overshadowing the occasion, slowly permeating every memory made up to this time spent on that four-season porch. The hospice nurse looked over at those of us gathered around a small table with the makeshift birthday in full swing with a dour expression that matched both my own and my grandmother’s. My grandmother had often referred to me a such— “a dour child”—not realizing it likely was innate to her own genes. All the while the nurse was taking my mother’s blood pressure on the worst pullout couch-bed to survive 70s. That stiff, cream velvet with dark brown depictions of farmers and millers and pilgrims or some shit, I remember well. It wasn’t soft like most velvet but prickly and stiff and all over the couch was hard. “It’s made well.” My grandfather defended every piece of furniture they owned with such a clause. Essentially, if it didn’t outlast the aesthetic of the era, what value was it? In any case, they weren’t comfortable couches, and they certainly weren’t comfortable beds.

My older siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles—gathered there solely for my mother’s last days—sang the birthday song to me. I am not certain my mother knew what was happening as she lay there staring far through us—through me in my stupid fucking cone hat that made chubby cheeks on an otherwise slip of a child, look even more misplaced. And my thoughts? My thoughts were the same that year as any other…that every year I asked for a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, but every year I got angel food with white frosting and pink lettering. I hated pink. Ironically enough, my favorite cake as an adult is angel food with white buttercream frosting, I am allergic to chocolate, and now accepting of pink. It’s no black, but pink has its place. Maybe it’s psychosomatic? An atonement? Comfort? Maybe it reminds me of when we were, if not normal, at least whole. All the missing pieces still in place. Or maybe it’s residual indoctrination of what “a young lady should like”.

In any case, received no answer from my mother other than a strained whimper—a solicitation of sort, whether it was begging me to stay or relief that if I leave, then so too could she. Maybe my mom and I were not so distant or different from each other even then.

1993. Christmas.

It was to be, that my brother and I were selected by the school to partake in a program where teacher escorts (discreetly) took kids shopping for Christmas at Walmart. We were hand-selected by teachers to participate and given $500. The teacher would help us with the cart, do math, and make suggestions. I argued with my teacher until she gave in, allowing me to take some portion of that money (meant for clothing, toys, etc. for myself) and spend it on the most basic of provisions of food, socks, underwear, but also a “boombox” for Mom, who could no longer enjoy the entertainment system located in the living room far from her bed in our apartment. Mrs. Thompson started crying and as she had always been fairly stern with me during 5th grade English, I wasn’t sure at the time, but now I understand that she was crying for me.

Mom and I would listen to that boombox as I laid on her floor next to her bed. I couldn’t sleep next to her because at the time she scared me. I had watched Pet Semetary too many times not to associate her with the sister, Zelda. I even had a dream where Mom’s skeletal frame chased me down the narrow, windowless hallway of our apartment that led to her room. I felt ashamed and I hadn’t admitted it to anyone. She asked me before to snuggle with her, a rarity and treat in the past as she wasn’t an affection sort of woman in my memories of her. We’d drift off to her whale sounds, or ocean waves, sometimes Enya if she was feeling spicy. As soon as she was asleep, I’d unwind from her skeletal grasp and go back to sleeping on red shag carpeting, collecting all the Good and Plenty’s she dropped, making piles to pass the time. It was the only candy she could have to herself because there was no way we’d eat that shit. Christmas. It was to be, that my brother and I were selected by the school to partake in a program where teacher escorts (discreetly) took kids shopping for Christmas at Walmart. We were hand-selected by teachers to participate and given $500. The teacher would help us with the cart, do math, and make suggestions. I argued with my teacher until she gave in, allowing me to take some portion of that money (meant for clothing, toys, etc. for myself) and spend it on the most basic of provisions of food, socks, underwear, but also a “boombox” for Mom, who could no longer enjoy the entertainment system located in the living room far from her bed in our apartment. Mrs. Thompson started crying and as she had always been fairly stern with me during 5th grade English, I wasn’t sure at the time, but now I understand that she was crying for me.

Mom and I would listen to that boombox as I laid on her floor next to her bed. I couldn’t sleep next to her because at the time she scared me. I had watched Pet Semetary too many times not to associate her with the sister, Zelda. I even had a dream where Mom’s skeletal frame chased me down the narrow, windowless hallway of our apartment that led to her room. I felt ashamed and I hadn’t admitted it to anyone. She asked me before to snuggle with her, a rarity and treat in the past as she wasn’t an affection sort of woman in my memories of her. We’d drift off to her whale sounds, or ocean waves, sometimes Enya if she was feeling spicy. As soon as she was asleep, I’d unwind from her skeletal grasp and go back to sleeping on red shag carpeting, collecting all the Good and Plenty’s she dropped, making piles to pass the time. It was the only candy she could have to herself because there was no way we’d eat that shit.

No adult was around for us at the time. My brother Shamus lived in the apartment above us, but he was going through a volatile divorce and had his own five children to look after. Mom was so ill—so ill that I would help her to the restroom, check her breath at night, try to feed her condiments because it’s all we had. I was sleeping on her floor every night for a while. This is how it came to be that she was taken from us: my grandmother came to visit, not having been able to reach my mother by landline as our phone bill hadn’t gotten paid. I thought I had done something wrong. She opened the door and immediately she was yelling at me, at Mom. Grabbing things from the closet and shoving them in a bag. Then she left. Next thing I remember she was back with my aunt; Grandpa was carrying Mom one way, and I was being dragged the other.

1994. January. Everything hurts.

The next time I saw Mom was in January. She had said, “everything hurts” in response to me inquiry as to why she was pacing back and forth (this was when she could pace back and forth, or simply stand). We were speaking in the shadows of the four-season porch at my grandparent’s lake house. Christmas lights up and blinking on the tree in the corner. She loved bubble-lights—the dangerous ones that boiled water. The porch was second story and overlooked the lake cove. I think she always felt an attachment to water in general—the sound, smell, the sight of it. It’s where she wanted to be her last days—watching the birds at the feeders in front of the windows, cursing the selfishness of squirrels with the lake as a backdrop. She couldn’t have been more than 100lbs at this time, but she wore that awful muumuu anyway, looking like she was on a Florida vacation instead of dying in the heart of Arkansas. “Everything hurts—sitting, walking, standing, laying, being touched, being. So why not keep moving?” The ugly jewel tone, color block linen swished about her creaking ankles (a family thing—all of the women in our family seem to have ankles that “click”). She stopped to smile at me. It wasn’t a real smile, but it was still rare and the only time I remember looking each other directly in the eyes as we spoke and not because I was stealing Flintstone vitamins from the cupboard or something again. “I’m okay. I’m getting better.

1989. Stranger in the Driver’s Seat.

I was terrified of my uncle from the start. We met him as I was turning nine and my brother ten. In the middle of the night, my mom turned off the ignition of the van—the exposed foam of her bucket seat dry and crumbling as she exited the van. I was awoken by the sound of the door closing. I can still remember how loud those heavy doors were when they were slammed. The smell of gasoline, Virginia Slims, spilled Pepsi. The van was rust-red with the remnants of a blue and white, terribly chipping Navajo band all the way around the body. It had only the two bucket seats and the rest of the inside was royal blue velvet, plush walls and the most grotesque yellow, orange, but predominantly avocado green shag carpeted floor you’d ever seen. Not only did it look like vomit, it also closely resembled it in smell too; it was because of this that we occasionally added our own brand to the mélange. She bought the van for the sole-purpose of moving out of Nebraska, but when asked “where to,” she simply said it was “a surprise”. We didn’t think much of it. We were used to moving.

A man replaced mom in the driver seat—this long-haired, long-bearded, long-in-the-tooth snarling hippie (who could’ve been anyone and Adam but also maybe someone who knew our dad)— we timidly began our inquiries. Immediately we were told to “shut up and go back to sleep!” And no sooner had he put that creaky, rusted-out van into gear, driving for what seemed like miles, that he solidified himself as being someone to fear for years to come after.

They had found Christ in each other, my aunt and uncle, living in a community of displaced adults with all their children and her own two sons of a previous marriage. It was a lifestyle that suited them at that time and grown adults shirking responsibility in the 70s wasn’t anything original; in fact, it was a fairly redundant story for my aunt, though I imagine she was more level-headed than my uncle, wishing to use that hard-earned medical degree of hers and return to society at some point. For now, after her divorce from the boys’ father and the recent rejection of a woman whom she was madly in love with—this made sense to her…accepting the fate that had drawn them together.

My aunt was the third daughter (right after my mother) in an “honest” Catholic family of 4 girls and 1 boy, whom she didn’t seem to feel much attachment toward apart from competing for the role of “the good daughter”. She always had her own agendas and interests and placed those above her other siblings. Most of my mother and aunt’s side of my family had settled in the Midwest, the closest being a 15-hour drive from Arkansas, and my uncle liked it like that way, for it’s one thing to be a pretentious self-aggrandizer for a day or two out of a year for holidays and such—quite another to be capable of proving your superiority as a routine…but now we were ruining that for him.

My uncle, on the other hand, he was a drifter from Florida who dodged the draft by purposefully pissing himself. Son of a single mother with one brother. I don’t recall ever hearing of or seeing evidence that he had any former employment to speak of—he did not acknowledge the authority of anyone other than himself. He was a well-read, unsociable, disparaging man, especially towards his wife’s family: railroad workers, strong and outspoken career women, loud Midwesterners—a melting pot of commonsense, tell-you-how-it-is, salt-of-the-earth folk who couldn’t be duped by my uncle’s self-important, patronizing displays to which he lowered himself to their intellectual level for the sake of counterfeit comradery. They despised him often commenting, “There’s something about him that doesn’t sit right”.

My uncle, on the other hand, he was a drifter from Florida who dodged the draft by purposefully pissing himself. Son of a single mother with one brother. I don’t recall ever hearing of or seeing evidence that he had any former employment to speak of—he did not acknowledge the authority of anyone other than himself. He was a well-read, unsociable, disparaging man, especially towards his wife’s family: railroad workers, strong and outspoken career women, loud Midwesterners—a melting pot of commonsense, tell-you-how-it-is, salt-of-the-earth folk who couldn’t be duped by my uncle’s self-important, patronizing displays to which he lowered himself to their intellectual level for the sake of counterfeit comradery. They despised him often commenting, “There’s something about him that doesn’t sit right”.

He met my aunt at just such a time that a person of his nature would be appealing to someone of hers—he was younger, fun (or so she claimed), and there was a danger about him—perhaps what didn’t “sit right” with the rest of us is exactly what appealed to her…the sociopath. I am uncertain of whether she knew, but he would eventually confide in myself (at the time a young woman of fourteen) that he had attempted to murder his younger brother, leaving the boy brain damaged for life. I would hope that my aunt didn’t know, but two narcissists in a codependent relationship coming out of a final acid trip with both claiming to have seen God and to have been bequeathed with the most holy of hosts anointing upon them—told to go forth spreading his knowledge…I doubt that red flags could have been seen as anything other than just another sign that they were on the right track.

I imagine when my uncle was awoken in the middle of the night to fetch his wife’s heathen sister—recently pulled from the armpit of California and freshly out of a year of hiding in Nebraska from the drug trafficker that spawned her two-wildling children, randomly shows up in his town of Huntsville, Arkansas—to stay under his roof that his wife paid every penny for…I imagine he was pissed.

Not only did he have to host us for a few months, but we’d continue to stay with my aunt and uncle on occasion, mostly days when mom was in or recovering from chemotherapy or radiation treatment; then more often as her illness progressed—all the while against my uncle’s wishes. It took a while, but he did soften; it was gradual, but as he realized we were pliable young minds ever seeking approval, ready to work for it, and not just hellions sent to torture him—he did take special interest in us. We responded well to the reward-system he imposed. Having never won or gained anything in our short lives from compliant behavior alone, our little survival instincts had us all the more eager to please him. Coins, treats, praise… My uncle was doing a good job making us reliant on him, if nothing else. I think it gave him purpose; albeit he was a highly intelligent man, he was often running his social and scholastic coffers dry. He believed the world owed him something without effort or sacrifice—thus giving up his eternal track-switching, lifelong college student career while living off my aunt’s salary and obsequiousness to become our “tutor”. That last acid trip with holy ghost was bearing fruit at last.

June 1994. Part 3. The Funeral.

We left for Nebraska the next morning, my brother and I, along with our older sister. I remember how immediately uncomfortable I was there. My sister Maxi was a new mom, things smelled like urine from potty-training, there were small children which made anxious, and anxiety always makes me feel as though I’ve done a thing wrong even to this day.

My brother and I slept in bucket chairs in the living room. I was miserable. I laid awake most of the night feeling as though I had made a huge mistake. I’ve always been a particular child with separation anxiety and feeling no particular attachment to any one person any longer with this newborn apathy. What a conundrum, right? I’ve spent most of my life choosing, being and feeling alone. Despite being in a relationship or crowd of people, I can still feel completely outside of everything and at times this can either be a superpower or kryptonite. Even with my siblings, who have rarely invested much of themselves into me since Mom’s passing. Mostly they’ve just bailed me out of situations, never sharing their own thoughts or feelings, tribulations, what’s made them happy or upset—the things that round a person out. My siblings have always been 2D, and our mother—basically, a stranger to us all, she never offered false witness, but she certainly concealed much of herself from us; yet, because of how I am, I probably know her best in some ways, because in a lot of ways, I am her—having inherited that omnipresent and duplicitous character she maintained even upon her deathbed.

The phone rang early that next morning, and I already knew.

“Not on my birthday!” I shouted toward the kitchen where Maxi leaned on the doorframe, back toward me in her denim tuxedo, head bent down, hand clasped over mouth. I could tell by her stance. “Not on my birthday!” I screamed it again to make sure she heard me. As soon as my sister returned the phone to the wall, she rushed to me and kneeled like I deserved her attention more than she deserved a moment to mourn—the moment I stole from her.

“No, baby girl! No, it’s not on your birthday! Your birthday is tomorrow!” she wept. I had been so caught up in my selfishness that I forgot what day it was.

I was…I am…so selfish.

When Scott said, "What's wrong with you?"

I suddenly started to sob. Scott couldn't have possibly known that just on the way here, our uncle had told me that crying would be questioning God's will and ultimately a sin; however, that's not why I didn't cry until Scott’s accusation. I was crying because it was the first time someone had said it out loud.

After years of being misled, told God would heal her, that the cancer was in remission, that she was getting better, then going through even more chemo, even more radiation, that we we’re not praying hard enough, that mom was an unbeliever, more starvation, more disassociation, more nausea, begging her to eat, hearing her cry at night, isolation, from family, from friends, abandonment, being pitied, being bullied at school, being told “if your mom hadn’t met your dad, none of this would’ve happened”. After four years, someone said it out loud. That she was dead. And I was relieved.

J.M.Liles ©️2024