July 8, 2014
Doggle gets a very generous annual allowance in our budget, something of a reminder-to-self that it’s an expensive prospect having pets [just ask Funny About Money about her Ruby!]. At this point, I suppose you really could indeed put a price on all the hugs and kisses I force on the hapless, long-suffering Doggle.
We actually rarely spend the amount set aside for him, but overspending in other categories [ahem. food. lots of food. travel.] tends to eat into the unspent allowance so the annual spend sort of evens out. This year, however, we literally cannot afford to do that.
Our routine visit to the vet turned into anything but. I opted to do the full senior package: exam, bloodwork, urinalysis, fecal test. I normally would have passed on it but we needed the bloodwork anyway in anticipation of having his teeth cleaned, and we were a bit concerned about whether he had another issue going on. The senior package came with a 15% discount for follow-up labwork, and considering the possible follow-ups we’d need to do, I decided to go with it. $333 later, we found…
He didn’t have a chronic gland problem but instead we found an asymptomatic infection so we’ve been treating that to the tune of $317 for a two week supply of antibiotics. *faint* I immediately compared the clinic pharmacy price to the cost online and found that we weren’t being seriously overcharged, we would have paid very close to that price if I’d ordered from say, 1-800-petmeds.
Two weeks of exhausted Doggle on meds later, our follow-up labwork ($130) showed that he STILL had an infection. On the merest brighter side of the ledger, I insisted that the receptionist follow up with the vet to confirm that the 15% discount should have applied to that charge, so we scraped back a whole $19.50. Much good that’ll do us in the face of a second round of antibiotics ($150) and another lab test after that. At least we’ll save another $19.59 on the third test. *skeptical brow*
When we finally lick this infection, we’ll then fork over nearly $1000 for his dental. He’s in dire need of a really good cleaning, probably never having had one, as his teeth look dodgy, breath smells worse, and I am pretty sure there are broken teeth that need checking. He’s going to love that. And probably will have to have yet another round of antibiotics if the teeth have to come out.
Where are we, that’s about $2000? Well. Of course, that’s not the end of the story – why would it be?
But I think I’ll have to save that for another post. This one just takes the wind out of my sails as it is.
December 15, 2013
As we pass the 2nd anniversary of Mom’s passing, I’ve been sitting with a good friend who has recently lost her mother, discussing grief and the process of grieving.
In some ways, it’s not a simple thing, not an easy progression of steps, nor a checklist you can tick off one bit at a time and arrive at an end.
In other ways, it really is quite simple to understand the gauntlet once you’ve gone through it.
“I was fine at her memorial. I was smiling and talking to people. It didn’t look like her. It didn’t feel like she was gone.”
Yes. I remember that feeling of surreal unreality.
“I’ve cried every day since burying her. I still can’t go into the same stores that I used to shop.”
Me neither. I’d run, crying, out of a grocery store because the memories were just too much. It wasn’t even one that we visited together. It was the visceral memory of a childhood habit that gripped my heart and wouldn’t let go.
“I keep asking myself why I didn’t take her to X, why did I choose to do Y instead of Z? Why didn’t I ..”
I’ve second guessed every decision I made in the last twelve years. Constantly. I’m convinced that I was the worst daughter ever because the end, ultimate, result was that she died, never having recovered from her illness.
You could float on the sea of “if onlys” and “what ifs” that we create, in our grief, treading and retreading our memories.
Hindsight, as they say, is 20-20.
But is it really? Is it really so much clearer now that events have irrevocably transpired?
A truth I’ve had to learn is that the other choice always seems like it would have been better only because I already know the outcome of the choices I did make. I have no idea what would have happened had I gone somewhere else for undergrad, if I had pursued a Masters or Doctorate. Maybe I would have had to drop out and be even less prepared to do the basics of supporting the family.
There’s a song by Little Texas that gets me EVERY time I hear it.
That knowledge doesn’t stop me feeling bone-deep regret for not pursuing a white collar profession where I could have earned enough to buy her health insurance outright (even though that would have taken years), or for being angry with her, not just her disease, as she became more ill and less mentally competent. I couldn’t take the step back at the time, it was easier to be angry than to accept and understand that I was losing her.
What might have been
In the aftermath, even after nominally accepting that I, mostly, did the best I could, and failed, I wonder what could have been done differently. And I wonder how much of my choices, and non-choices, affected this family.
Before carrying me to term, Mom had a few miscarriages.
What would have happened if I hadn’t been the one to make it?
What if my brother had a brother like he wanted?
Or what if he had grown up as an only child, with all the attention he clearly needed, without a “weak” (but meaner than a pit of crocs) little sister to take care of and be bitten for his efforts?
What if he hadn’t had me to practice his machinations and manipulations on?
What if he didn’t have a “follower” sibling with my personality and strong inclinations to academic achievement to contend with and push against in his attempts to lead me? Would he have actually reached to do something with his abilities instead of playing the comparison game and not even trying?
It’s part of the family lore that after a few days (or weeks, I forget) of getting to know me, my sibling picked me up and suggested they return to the hospital to trade me in for a better model. Unfortunately for him, hospitals didn’t accept returns at the time or I’m sure he would have just taken me himself. Kids feel that sort of thing all the time, but I wonder whether they all really would have been better off without me?
Without an extra mouth to feed, a second child to clothe, educate and worry about, would my parents have been less stressed, and more able to save? Did their circumstances dictate the outcome, or would their actions have been much the same?
Would my sibling have been the productive citizen and son that my parents prayed for? Would he have learned to use his copious people skills and talents towards a job or career, would he have felt the unbearable weight of responsibility that I grew up with, or would that still have eluded him?
Was it my fault, my existing, that played a key role in his failure to thrive? Is his failure to find a niche where he would excel attributable to my combative and competitive nature?
These are intertwined but I can’t help but realize that, like the butterfly flapping its wings, my very existence changed things.
Was it for the better?
I can’t know. I do know that as the surviving fetus, as the kid who did come along second, eventually, whatever ill my coming boded, I always felt a pressing weight. I knew fairly early on about Mom’s miscarriages. I know about the bigger than usual gap in years between my sibling and myself. Where other kids were two years apart like clockwork, we were about 3 years apart and, oh, the strength of will it must have taken for her not to smother me mid-scream in the first nine months I spent crying my lungs out.
It always seemed like I lost the genetic lottery: as the scrawny, untalented (no eye for art, terrible ear for music, only Doggle matches my astounding level of clumsiness), not terribly smart, really a bit of drifter with no dreams, youngest child, I only knew that I had to compensate and overcompensate to justify having made it.
The ghosts of those other babies, the ones my parents never met, haunted me a little. What could they have done with the gift of life? Would they have had the talent? Would they have inherited Mom’s gift with numbers, Dad’s ability to dream for the future? Would he or she, or they, have been the charmers, able to mingle and make friends everywhere they went? I certainly didn’t get any of that, so was that lost with them, leaving me with only remnants of determination and a strange love of containers to work with?
Sometimes it feels like all I have are questions, a sense of those nearly siblings’ unfulfilled potential, the uncomfortable prickles of something like guilt.
Without dwelling on the macabre, there are some studies that suggest that the influence of a sibling, past a certain point in life, is a stronger force in the development of an individual than even that of a parent. Anecdotally, I could see this. I learned from my parents, authoritatively, but I viscerally reacted to my sibling. At a much deeper level, I absorbed what I know of human nature from my interactions with him, by growing up next to him, and observing his experiences. By following my big brother. And I can’t know how my existence, my following, and my watching affected him. A bit like Schrodinger’s Cat, I guess.
Having made it this far, it feels like it’s my job to make good, to redeem the family name. I can’t change the past, I can only work toward the future.
I try not to think about
What might have been
‘Cause that was then
And we have taken different roads
We can’t go back again
There’s no use giving in
And there’s no way to know
What might have been
April 10, 2013
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
–The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
I’m absolutely prepared to swear that I’m not the one who snores. [Admission: I used to sleepwalk, sleeptalk and sleep fought back against nightmarish intruders that have turned out to be … PiC. Oops. In my defense … well ok, he didn’t even notice so do I need a defense?]
PiC and I have put a lot of money into a fantastic new mattress, bigger and better than ever!, and really need to replace our pillows. But every so often PiC wonders if we should have gone our separate ways for sleeping since his snoring keeps me up or wakes me so many times in the night.
Katie recently asked this same question about Separate Bedrooms.
The thing is, except for those nights when a literal earthquake couldn’t wake me for the exhaustion, my body’s become attuned to having him around and startles awake if he’s not there. This probably stems from those many nights when he’d have one or another thing to do before bed and would end up falling asleep where he sat. Around 2 or 4 am, something would trigger in my brain and I’d get up to fetch him. Can’t win for losing!
It’s like Mind-Reading (but worse)
While cooking the other day, I heard the scrape-scrape-scrape of the dog food container we’d just gotten to prevent any bug infestations. Not a problem now and not a problem ever, we hope.
Unhappily, the touted stackable container that should hold greater than 40 lbs appears to have all it can do to hold about 25. Other than that, though, we quite like the container. Until I heard PiC’s cursing: “why can’t I close t— oh. Never mind ….. ”
“Because you were turning it the wrong way?”
“YES. How did you know?”
simultaneously: You/I just did that!
*burst out laughing*
Learning to make the best of things
Talking to my dad about trying to start to plan a wedding reception has uncovered a whole pot of simmering tensions. He’s holding firm on some pretty unreasonable expectations, in my opinion, and basing it on fairly illogical logic. *sigh* It’s hard to say how we’re going to navigate to the other side on this but I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around how, frankly, selfish he’s being about this.
I’ve willingly sacrificed pretty much everything I wanted in the past ten years for them. And now when it comes to the wedding, instead of working together to figure out how to compromise, he wants his way or no way at all for the sake of his reputation. Those are my choices. I can have all the family he “has” to invite, or none of them. Which is no choice at all in my book. And utterly ridiculous when he keeps insisting that we have to have 300-400 family members minimum, before we even look at non-family we would choose to have there for either side.
By virtue of distance alone, we won’t be able to return the invitation to a great many people he feels he “owes” an invitation to (by the backwards logic of “they expect to return his wedding gift to them or their children”), a great number of our family are overseas… and a great number are in SoCal too. Based on the criteria “because I have to save face”, there are still a hell of a lot of people who can’t be invited. So why is it we can’t just invite the family that I actually know, keep in touch with or care about, and include a reasonable number of his-choice invites? That’s still a large number by itself.
This has me quite annoyed on principle. Quite frankly, his priorities shouldn’t only be his standing in the community or how he looks. This isn’t entirely, 100%, about him. He’s not paying for one cent of this and saying “don’t worry about it, I’ll handle all the details” doesn’t make it better. You can’t just push me out of a core part of our wedding and expect that I’ll be ok with that. I’m all about including his input, but I am NOT about rolling over and giving him everything he wants.
I’ve lived my whole adult life focusing on what would be best for my parents, isn’t it time he stepped up and cooperated?
/rant.
So I asked a pretty-exasperated PiC what he’d like. Guest list and other BS aside, what would he actually LIKE?
An Enchantment Under the Sea, a la Back to the Future theme, says he.
[headsplosion] Seriously??
Yes. {starts singing the song}
[hilarity ensues]
We can’t have a DeLorean because if no flux capacitor, then no DeLorean. Authenticity dammit!
Costumes? Sure. But for other people.
Wonder if we can get the local high school gym?
{text old high school friend who still FBs with high school administrators}
We’ll see!
How about Enchantment Under the Sea in the gym, and luau outside?
ROAST PIG. YES.
This could be expensive.
Or … not? Hm. Yes. It could be. If we’re going to do it, I’d like it to be cool, not slapdash. Also, I stipulate that I must have Wolverine something. If we’re going geek, I want something of mine represented.
Deal.
Being married and getting married. Two strange states of being when cast simultaneously.
March 5, 2013
Sometimes I think the world needs to hear this a little more often.
This is a bit of a follow-on thought from the Marissa Mayer post, and partly inspired by a comment I absolutely agreed with from Cloud’s post, bold emphasis mine.
Laura Vanderkam said “I get annoyed with the carping at successful women for reasons of privilege, etc. When Donald Trump writes a book on success, no one says “well, that’s easy for him to say because someone else is cleaning his bathrooms” or “of course he’s successful because he can afford a nanny.” People who reach the top often have interesting things to say about what it takes to reach the top. Sometimes it’s helpful to listen or read without judging, and if you decide it’s wrong for you, fine. But if a strategy is wrong for you, that doesn’t make someone who used it, ipso facto, a bad person. Yes, I’m referring to the Sheryl Sandberg backlash, but this mindset is out there a lot.”
This is the thing that underlies my frustration with the tearing down of women in specific and people in general when they’re successful. The whiny, self crippling, justifications of why we can’t possibly be “like that” because we’re not privileged.
Many kinds of privilege exists. Absolutely. And in some places, the privilege is truly crippling, I’m not disputing that.
What I am tired of is that the vast majority of people complaining tend to be at least capable, competent of mind and body, and have access to first world amenities that are potential tools. Instead, they dwell on why that won’t work for them.
It makes me think of a story …
…my dad used to tell me of the poor region where he grew up. He was one of the few privileged back then but he clearly recognized the privations that were the norm for the majority of people as recently as 30 years ago, even 15 years ago. He told us this story many, many times.
“Most of the people were so poor that they had one change of clothing a year. If they made enough money to buy fabric, and could afford a needle and thread to sew, they could make a new pair of pants for themselves. Maybe with pockets. Probably not. But, pants.
Their families didn’t have enough money for three meals a day for everyone, they could have one full meal a day. But they were hungry for education. They couldn’t afford books, paper, pens or pencils. Still, they were determined to learn. And unlike here in the U.S., education was not a right. It was a privilege.
The students were so desperate for the chance to learn that they would walk upwards of ten miles to school, and the classes were so big that the students wouldn’t fit into the classroom. So they opened the doors and windows, and the students would sit outside on the ground and listen. They couldn’t take notes, there was no paper, so they memorized the lectures. They had to review the lessons orally.
They had to study this hard because there was an annual exam to pass each grade. If you didn’t memorize everything, you were dropped out of school. And the exam covered everything that was taught through the year. With the limited resources, there was no such thing as grading on a curve, the students who failed would leave the school and have to figure out how to make a living with a grade school education, or however far they got. This was high stakes.
With no tools, with no aids, many of these students – your mother was among them – managed to learn math, science, reading, writing, language at each progressively more difficult level.
No pens, no paper, no computers. But they found a way to learn anyway. What do you need to learn and prosper?
If those people in our generation can figure out how to learn, progress and make successful lives with literally no resources but a sparing food ration, time during the day, their minds and their motivation, can you honestly say there’s anything you truly can’t do?”
No Dad, I couldn’t say that. If I don’t make something of myself, it sure won’t ever be blamed on a lack of privilege.
I was never the smartest kid around but I could damn well try to be the hardest working. With that kind of heritage, that kind of cultural past, I could hardly cop out by making excuses, could I?
I’ve written about my mom as my motivation more than once. I realized that my dad hasn’t gotten as much airtime. Where Mom was the tower of strength and capability in all things, teaching us language in her “spare time, and demonstrating work ethic alongside Dad, Dad was the storyteller in the family, the one who made the past live again for us, linking us to the family and cultural histories.
What’s your inspiration?
December 3, 2012
Since Mom’s been gone, Dad’s compensating, and overcompensating, for the loss and the guilt of having relied on my support for so long by throwing himself into his work, a new project that’s labor intensive, and wholly dependent on his presence.
While I understand the need, and the need to fill the void, I have, for lack of better description, so many feelings, over the sense that he’s shutting out the present because he’s so intent on fixing past sins in search of redemption.
At first, I fought it, trying to draw him out and keep him in the present with me, to move forward with me, but our mutual pain flared and repelled each other. He needed to accept her loss as fact and talk about it as given; he couldn’t bear my tears even so long as a week after the burial and he’d shut down meaningful communication trying to shelter me. His coping and mine were like magnets pushing against each other.
So I backed away and kept my peace. My pain only triggered his need to protect me; his reactions exacerbated mine, the silences triggered a ticking time-bomb feeling where I wondered when something terrible would happen and I no longer had a reliable way to find out when and what. Mom always understood that even if I couldn’t fix all the problems, I needed to know what was happening; Dad could never accept that sheltering me from the hard truth was the quickest way to an ambush. Not the best way to deal with a daughter who only has a Fight or Fight reaction.
Over the weeks and months, we’ve held a detente of sorts. He tries to convince me that he’s fine. I don’t believe him but try not to lecture, just reminding him that he’s the only family I have left so he needs to take care of himself. He’s more important than money.
I respect the things he won’t say: he needs to earn his own living to get back his sense of stability, identity, and self respect. He needs to feel responsible for his own life again, not being supported solely by his daughter while living to keep his wife alive under the most trying circumstances, a tightrope walk that stretches anyone’s sanity.
I’m giving him his space to do that, and hold my worry back as much as possible.
He’s asked to see some of the household bills since I’d taken them over and gone online with them, with the promise that if they become too onerous, he’ll let me know.
Quite honestly, I don’t believe that promise. He is my dad, after all. We have a history. The only thing I’ve never been able to trust him to do, and ever fought with him about, is to tell me when he needs help and not after it’s too late. But I can make the bills not paperless anymore while retaining online access, and keep an eye on them from afar. It’s a slightly better compromise than any other one I’ve made even if I do keep wondering whether he’s going to keep workaholic hours, just like in the old days.
As it is, he works just about every day, for 12 to 14 hours. I know he’s injured himself several times and hasn’t gained back the 12 pounds he lost since last year. I can take some small comfort in knowing that his siblings check in on him to make sure he has food enough once in a while, though I certainly see where I get the inattention to meals from, now.
We’re too alike, he and me. Just as, in many ways, Mom and I were alike.
Workaholics, stoic and foolishly so. Tamping emotions down to some subconscious and primal level where we don’t have to acknowledge their existence. Neither of us ever could ask for help without choking on the words; more than one friend knew I’d let an arm fall off before I’d ask. We have to prove more to ourselves than to anyone else in the world, before we can face ourselves, before we can face our families. Our families are incredibly important to us but at the core, we’re self reliant personalities and because of that, we have to know that our foundations, our identities however we see ourselves are true, first and foremost. So we will push even our families away if we need to in the pursuit of, in the proving of, that truth. It’s a flaw. A gaping maw in our armors some days.
I refuse to let those similarities drive us apart, but in the doing I have to consciously keep some small distance while we figure things out. While we develop a new relationship around our family, our money, and our individual selves so that we don’t chafe each other raw.
It’s not easy. But perhaps we’re making some progress. We’ll see down at the end of the long road.
November 28, 2012
Many people mark dates. Anniversaries, milestones, important events. I rarely have, dates mean little to my mind. More than ever, now. My mom is gone.
Only the general passage of time, in weeks or months, years maybe, and flashes of memory register. And then the recollections become realizations, visceral, and acidic.
Mere days after my wedding during which I can’t even be sure she was lucid, she suddenly died.
It’s been over a year since her passing and I haven’t been able to write a memorium post. I keep thinking to do one, on a milestone date, and they keep passing by. And I sit, empty. I can’t write, because as important as everyone else I’ve memorialized here has been to me, she was the most important loss of all. I can’t eulogize her when I still haven’t forgiven myself for losing her. For failing her so remarkably.
A memorium would be as much for me letting her go as to memorialize her, and I haven’t found that peace.
~
I don’t know why I picked up the phone that night.
I’m ashamed to say that calls from home by that point had begun to spark an adrenaline rush, a flood of fear and trepidation, a “what’s wrong now?” reaction that I coped with, tamped down, by putting time and space between myself and the call before I could connect. The needing, the bad news and the “can you fix this.” They pulled at the scar tissue, picked away my scabs.
After a long workday, usually a hard one, my emotional reserves were dregs and so, more often than I like to admit, I’d let myself return the call later.
Not this night.
There couldn’t have been any reason for it. I had no sense, no feeling of anything, except a question mark in my mind about the timing of the call. And that lasted for as long as it took to raise the phone to my ear.
2…1….
His voice half firm, spiralling and tottering to an end, a sentence spilled out that broke sense and language and life for me. Your mom has died.
It couldn’t be….and yet never in my life had I heard tears in Dad’s voice. Only losing his wife could move him to cry. As much as the words, his voice seized my breath.
Selfishly: this was the beginning of the end. Selfishly: if it was true, we didn’t have to worry about her every waking and sleeping moment. She couldn’t hurt or be hurt anymore.
A minute passed, I needed to know…. A minute passed, he needed to call back….
I had to tell my new husband of less than a week. I had to say it out loud to begin to understand the world fracturing around me.
A coward’s way out – I texted a friend instead. Texting, testing the waters, testing the edges of my sanity. My new reality.
I stood there in the station, back to the street, leaning against a pillar, sightless, unsure what to do next. Unsure of breathing.
~
They say weddings and funerals bring out the most in people. I couldn’t manage a wedding during her illness, but the funeral showcased the Best of the Worst of her family. The offers to pay for the funeral expenses as a show of their love, after years of abuse and neglect were clumsy at best, and insulting in the main.
Even hadn’t I the cash ready to pay for the funeral, I would have gone into debt before I allowed them that gesture. Such is money and emotion. But it’s been many a year since money was a leash attached to my collar.
That week was rough shod practicality. Making the funeral arrangements, running errands, contacting family and friends, hunkering down, holding my breath.
They waged warfare, her family, those who had treated her so sneeringly, and far worse, at the end. She never did see her mother one last time, before she passed, though her desire was only fueled by fear for her mom’s advanced age. My paternal aunts quietly wished that she’d reserved her strength for herself; my maternal grandmother had been in no danger, well preserved by spite and malice. I clung to my last remnants of civility at her funeral, under provocation, for her sake.
Even Dad’s famous patience frayed around the edges with the innumerable calls from her father to pressure us.
~
In a haze of incense, Buddhist chants and the murmur of relatives, we honored my mother as we laid her to rest. Across the altar, my new husband and my father’s new son, PiC stood up for my mom, to her relatives, greeting our guests in a tradition new to us, courtesy of my paternal aunts’ arrangements. They may not have always been her family, but in the end, they were. She would have appreciated that.
My brother, in a new iteration of his usual fashion, couldn’t be relied on to stay in through the first day of viewing and didn’t show up for the second. His spiral into wherever he was headed, now ever more unchecked, couldn’t be held back for love or money.
~
She wasn’t suffering anymore. This was a release from a long, slow, painful, and humiliating degeneration to which I’d been losing my mother and friend, confidante and ally, beloved hero and mentor for the past seven years.
I should be grateful she wasn’t living in fear and pain, worry, doubt and regret during her few lucid moments between the long stretches of mania and childish regression.
I should be grateful for Dad’s relief from long years, endless hours, days on end of caretaking for his lifemate long without respite, without the daily fear that she’d slipped away from him, without bending or breaking under her illness’s capricious moods.
I should be grateful for the freedom from watching my mother slowly slip from my grasp no matter how hard I held on; for the ability to make some decisions for myself and not entirely around how it would affect their lives; not to live in fear of the sound of my phone ringing lest it bear bad news, of a fall, of an illness, of an injury.
I am, for the painful parts. But for lost days, I can’t. Because I bore always in me the hope we’d find a way to bring her back from the dark, to lure back that spark to the flame I adored.
~
When she became ill, I took up her standard. And when I lost her, I didn’t just lose my mother, I lost my way. We lost the foundation of our family.
I mourned my matriarch, grieved over our lost future, regretted my decisions that failed her, my choices that led to a life lacking redemption.
I mourned my mom. I mourned for her, the mourning she only allowed to creep in, in her last, her never-loved days, for the childhood she never had. For her life with parents who beat and abused her, wishing she’d never been born, siblings whose selfishness reached beyond her death and etched themselves even unto her funeral day as grasping and ignorant souls. For her fears, real and realized, of a family slowly falling apart.
I grieved, alone. The person who loved me unconditionally, a gift she was never given, the one I could rely on to tell me the truth as she saw it. My mother, become a friend, become a soul and mind wandering in shadows and darks I couldn’t reach, swallowing daggers and poison, lost. My last ten years spent in fruitless attempts to save my family, all for naught. Our jokes, our possibilities, our plans, gone.
A life I once led without fear was now filled with regret: why hadn’t I done differently, better, been stronger, or smarter? How had I failed so badly to spare her that pain and this early demise?
~
No slow healing of wounds, no steady grieving process for me. Instead, the months and weeks of self-examination gathered up loose threads of guilt, accusation, failure and missed opportunities. I hadn’t loved her well enough and made the wrong choices. If only I’d done this differently, if I had made a different decision in that year.
Bit by bit, I unravel the past seven, ten, twelve years of our lives, questioning where it had finally irrevocably come apart, when had I steered us completely off course, how each little misstep led to a larger misstep, how my indecision or my inability to see more clearly had cost her more suffering.
Why didn’t I know sooner about her dental problems? She couldn’t have hidden her eating discomfort if I’d been more patient with her, more present.
Why didn’t I go with her to more, to all, of her doctor’s appointments – what was I doing that was so important? I should have kept better track of all the diagnoses (or lack thereof), of the treatments and medications like I had managed her diet after her surgery.
Why didn’t I choose more carefully my career or school? Which of those had I gone more wrong with? A millenia ago, it felt like I was lucky to have parents who encouraged me to pursue what I loved, not money, status or prestige, but now, what hubris, what lack of foresight was that for me to think that I’d make anything work?
Could her depression, anxiety, the panic attacks that compounded her myriad other health problems have been alleviated if I had taken a different path?
Would their business decisions have been different if I had made different choices of schools early enough?
How did I end up such an utter failure that at 30 I’ve managed to lose one of the most important people in my life, with my family basically disintegrating?
~
We buried her and I returned to a professional life, all personal life in a box, and climbed back into a competitive saddle. I was immediately interviewing for a promotion against people with twenty years more experience. Mom would have wanted me to get it together. She simply expected me to win out. That’s the adamantine she put in me.
~
I went home for the weekend, a year after her passing. Not to remember, there isn’t time to forget; not to commemorate, all’s too raw to bear fanfare, but to …. simply be there. Be home, where it feels I should have been more and better, somehow.
Coming home, it was clear that Dad’s immersed himself in work and projects as much as I have, more so without a partner to keep living for, leaving all the niceties of civilized life to slide away. It was no more than I expected, and yet the state of the house rang so hollowly, reflecting, resonating to my core, it was only by the labor of my hands that my head didn’t sink forever to my knees with new loss, renewed grief.
The essentials function. The plumbing flushes; the hot water is hot, the cold is cold. There is electricity. But throughout the neglect is draped.The toilet is jury-rigged, sinks and walls grimed over, clutter crowding shelves, boxes stand half full.
Looking around, it’s clear. Scour a wall, clear the boxes. It’ll make no difference. The soul of our family has been torn away and only ragged bits of us remain.
October 19, 2012