Is it just me, or have we devolved in the past couple of months into something akin to our Neanderthal forebears? Has the noble WASP strayed too far from his isolated cluster and caught the bee virus? Whether we are Casper ghost pale, a delicate pearl pink, or a subtle tangerine hue, white people are devolving. Our Trailer Park Titanic, which spurred on our glorious exalted orange 70 year-old Adolf Adonis, has sprung a leak and is sinking faster than you can whistle ‘Dixie.’
Personally, I blame that black guy. Oh, it was all fun and games until all those Mexican Muslims infiltrated our electoral college and universities and got him elected. Eight years of Kumbaya, Kenya, and free phones, it was time for change. We fashioned a golden calf from a golden man and commenced to worship him, chanting our mantra, “Make America Great Again!” America is great, now, but something is missing. That black guy was nice. This guy, his magnificence is too bright, an amber wave of grain knocking against our collective blue eyes. I can’t see anymore.
The above was a vain attempt at satire. Seriously though, my fellow white Americans, what the freaking hell? Is this hell? Maybe in an alternate universe, this is the liberal version of the Left Behind series. Our messiah left us for Hawaii and only David Bowie, Prince, and Carrie Fisher got raptured. Guess who is the Anti-Christ?
My family hails from Appalachia. They are a homogenous group (inbred?), Republican all the way back to Lincoln, and had they known my mom and I were democrats, that was a disownable offense. My grandparents knew, but what can you do? Just don’t let my second cousins find out! It was bad enough knowing that my otherwise gentle grandfather would rather be “a knot on a dog’s dick than be a democrat.” Since I’m already disowned because of my mom not keeping in contact with them, my second cousins do not know whether I’m alive or dead. Good riddance, they said in ever such a kind way after Mom died, not rude, just evasive (it’s the southern way). Do they ever think of me? Like when members of their family croak? Oh wonder what happened to Pat’s mentally deficient daughter?
Anyway, I had a point to this last part. Because being abandoned even by people who barely know you sucks, that is why I don’t unfriend people on Facebook for different points of view, microaggressions, macroaggressions, racist remarks, homophobic, Islamophobic ,phobicphobic remarks. I think what does it feel like to be tossed away even online? What if you’re my second cousin fallen off the turnip truck and you just don’t know any better?
I try again on that red phone and this time we are allowed into the ICU. The third time is the charm. My mom is in room 14. The doctor I met in the ER asks me questions, the one with a European accent and wonderful bedside manner.
“We can keep the antibiotic drips going, which may let her live for a little while longer, but I’ve rarely seen anyone get better this far along. But it’s your decision.”
“How much difference would there be in time if I take her off the drips?” I ask.
“It’s hard to say. She could last a few hours or a few days.”
“But it’s near impossible for her to get better?”
“Less than a 1% chance, but if you say to keep going, we will keep pumping her with antibiotics and doing all we can.”
“I need to think about it a bit.”
He asks me about taking extraordinary measures to keep my mother alive, but I know my answer already. “No, my mother wouldn’t want that if she would be brain-dead. I’m certain I don’t want you to resuscitate and she’s told me before she wouldn’t want it.” Break my mother’s ribs so that she can be a dead woman breathing? No. NO.
“I don’t know if in her condition any of her organs could be used, but if they can, I want them to be donated. My mother wouldn’t mind. She had ‘organ donor’ on her driver’s license. It would be nice to know my mom hadn’t died completely in vain.”
They are going to do some other procedures to my mother, so Bestie and I go out to the waiting room again. Bestie is on the phone with her mom and telling her about my indecision in keeping Mama on the antibiotics. And of course Bestie’s mom wants to give me her sage advice in the matter. I politely listen.
“She’s your mom. You can’t give up on her.”
“Yes, you’re probably right,” I reply.
“What kind of insurance does your mother have?”
“Just Medicare.”
“Well, you know with people without anything but Medicare, they try to do as little as they can with them and get them out of there.”
I tell the doctor that he should keep the drips going just in case. Afterall, they are also keeping her on pain meds and sedation just in case. I probably would’ve made this decision anyway without the intervention of my bestie’s dear Mama, but…
I have to ask, though. How do you ask such a question without giving offense? “Um, I don’t believe this of course, you’ve all been so wonderful, but…my friend’s mother is a bit of a cynic, and she told me y’all don’t do everything for Medicare patients because of their insurance. Is there any truth in this?”
The doctor’s answer was no. “In fact, this is a teaching hospital, and most of the patients that come here don’t have any insurance at all, so we do everything we can for all our patients.”
Cool deal.
I decide to go home for some sleep. I am assured that the nurse would call me should my mother take a turn in the night. A nurse is attending my mom’s IV and I remark to him, This must be one depressing job.”
“It can be.”
“How much of the people who come in here live?”
“About 50 %.”
It is 10 pm when Bestie and I head home and I collapse into bed. I know no more until about 4 am when the phone rings.
“You might want to come now. She’s taken a turn for the worse,” says the doctor.
“Hearing the phone at this time of the night doesn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling,” says Bestie. She was sleeping on the couch and we go to the hospital in the quiet of the ear morning. This time I don’t have to wait when I pick up the red phone. I tell Bestie that I want some time with my mother alone at times, but would check on her in 20 minutes because my friend is an anxious soul too.
I tell my mother that I would understand if she has to go, that I would be fine, but if she could, please stay. I make myself not beg her to stay for the sake that if she can hear me, I don’t want her last thoughts to be worry over me not being OK without her.
I see the chaplain when offered. He is a young Episcopalian and we pray together. I like him so much I take his number in case I need someone to preach a funeral (my mom and I hadn’t been to church in a number of years). I even end up asking him if he thought my mom would be OK if cremated. My grandmother didn’t believe in cremation and I suddenly felt the need for reassurance from a man of God. “God is bigger than that”, was his answer. My mother felt cremation was fine and to rid myself of the ashes in the sea was what she wanted.
I even saw an old high school friend and he was a nurse there. Small world. The last time I’d seen him he was a server at one of those steakhouses where they think it’s a good idea to use roadkill as decor. I guess the road to the original Texas Roadhouse was fraught with many an animal.
Shortly before 8 am, September 13, 2011 my mother took her last breath. I couldn’t restrain my tears now. She was gone and I held it together as well as I could to not upset her. I tried to calm myself again for the Bestie to not upset her more than she was. Who was that woman that shoved anxiety ridden Lisa into a corner and took her place in my body those two days? It wasn’t the me who had dreaded this day for years and went to extremes to prevent her death. It was the Lisa that only comes out when I’m drowning and that Lisa swims.
I’m back home, but along with the clothes I quickly grabbed, I brought back more baggage than an airport in December. It’s getting better than it was when I got here, and I’m starting to feel happy more and uneasy less. But the uneasiness isn’t gone, the feeling that I’m merely a transient or at least a guest doesn’t go away. The day my mother died was the day I became displaced in a world where I belong nowhere. Before my mother left, I knew my place. She needed me from the day she realized she was pregnant as I told you long ago. My mother’s great love broke up with her, her two best friends died, and when her 6 month married life ended there I was. Even a therapist I once had told my mom that he didn’t know what would have happened to her if she hadn’t had me.
So where does that leave me today? Every person has a reason for being alive, but some of us find it harder than others to discover that reason. I suppose there’s a reason for me being here too. I’m not certain of much anymore. I don’t know who loves me or if I’m just one misstep away from finding myself alone in the world again. Yesterday, I went back to my therapist for the first time since I tried to play my swan song, and she was less than happy to see me.
“If they threw you out, what are you doing back there?”
“Soul Bro was able to convince The Partner to let me back,” I replied. She listened to my fears, to everything I could cram into 50 minutes. There’s a lot I just can’t say for fear of losing my Soul Bro, and looking back at my reasoning for trying to kill myself, I don’t ever want to risk losing him. I love him that much and am that terrified of being alone (this blog has gotten 10 shades more creeeeepy with this last paragraph. My bad). I am an orphan, a mental midgety one at that, and I don’t have relatives at all. Well, none that care whether I live or die, they made that more or less clear when I told them my mother was dead. Oh well, they were just cousins. Second cousins. I’ll get into that some other time.
I shouldn’t be admitting this junk, but I told my therapist stuff I’d never venture to say aloud (please don’t hate me, Bro, should you read this). I’m not saying he lies a bit, but he stretches the truth until that bitch screams, to make himself look better occasionally. I think. Maybe it’s me being paranoid.
I think he got mad at me for begging to come home and not being “proactive” enough in trying to be independent, so he did the worst thing anyone could do to me. I think he decided he was done with me until I was back on my feet, so he put most of my stuff in my storage unit (including my mother’s ashes), and took two of my three cats to the pound. I was able to get them out because my home health nurse saved them and they’re living with her for now…Soul Bro says I can ask to bring them home in June if The Partner agrees. My nurse told me the story they told the pound that their owner died in September and they had lived in a barn in a rural county.
Soul Bro told me on the phone that my three cats had been picked up by the pound with some strays and that he had mistaken the feelings he had for my mom with the feelings he had for me. Of course several days later he repented, because he is a good person. Perhaps it was a bipolar thing, but it was obvious whoever that other guy had been was gone.
I never told this to anyone, but if I had the opportunity to do it, I’d have tried to kill myself again. When I first came to Window Licker Hall, Millie, a middle aged perpetual cutter/suicidal woman told me if I really wanted to leave the rest home she had half a bottle of pain pills. I told her then, no thanks. Around the time my Soul Bro said he had cared for my mom, but me not so much, Millie came back from a few weeks vacation at a mental intstitution. I was frantic and asked her if she still had the pills. No, she didn’t. And so I was saved again. Now I know regardless what happens, no matter how low I get, I can’t kill myself. I promised my Soul Brother I wouldn’t ever again and I was never so serious in my life. He’s had enough shit to last ten lifetimes (and at least one day of Lifetime Television programming).
Yes, my therapist ain’t happy, but I am. My Soul Bro is the joy and light of my life. To me he is a gay god, almost perfect. He keeps me laughing, except when I worry I’ll mess up. I imagine him thinking awful things about me. If anything goes missing I imagine him thinking I stole whatever it is. I fear he’ll think I’m on drugs, and I worry that I will never be what everyone expects of me. If I mess up in the slightess way the lack of perfection drives me crazy. One day I messed up and used the bathroom and bathed with his cell phone there. He accused me of taking it and even said that a lot of stuff went missing while I lived there before. I had to swear on my mom’s ashes that I hadn’t touched it. I forgive, but I don’t forget. I could say my theory on who stole stuff, but I will refrain from naming anyone. Soul Bro realized he was wrong and wrote out a note saying I couldn’t be thrown out for any reason, but I think some of the power belongs with The Partner, so who knows? All i can say is I ain’t a thief.
One last confession paragraph before I stop, I now pay about twice what I paid in rent the last time, but I’d pay more to be with my Soul Bro. My therapist thinks I’m being hosed and I don’t care! I think it was The Partner who came up with the sum. The only thing really marring my happiness is not having my cats, which makes me not want to face the plastic box holding my mother. I don’t think I can remove her from the storage unit until I get them back.
If my nurse hadn’t rescued Dondee, the pound would have killed my Mom’s
It’s not been a good 24 hours. I’m anxious and feel as though my life is over, which is stupid …I hope. All I can think of is “What if he doesn’t forgive me?”
My Soul Brother has two Chinese pugs. One is an ‘unaltered’ black male pug. He likes me A LOT. I’ll call him Stan to protect his dog anonymity. My first encounter with Stan after my mother’s death resulted in him trying to make love to me via my arm. His good lady wife, I’ll call her Maude, was in heat and it gave Stan an affection for her and every living thing around her. It was actually a good bit of comic relief from my terror and grief (it was a week after my mom went to the Great Beyond). Thankfully, once Maude ‘cooled’ he stopped. But he always wanted to be with me. At the time I thought it was my award-winning personality.
Later, when I moved in, I was sure I was going to be put back out when Soul Bro told me I shouldn’t be letting his dog sleep with me in case he started marking. But I wasn’t put out.
The other day, Soul Bro approached me again and told me to push Stan away for a couple of weeks and finally admitted why the dog liked me so much.
“It’s your feminine odor, but it’s the same with any female.”
Ugh. Great. So I resolved to rebuff Stan getting near me for exactly two weeks. But that didn’t last too long, because later that day I got upset by something The Partner did. The Partner is Soul Bro’s partner, a man who dislikes me, but the feeling is mutual. Soul Bro, being the dear soul he is, relaxed the rules so I could cry on Stan’s wrinkled shoulder so to speak.
The next day I asked if I should start pushing Stan away. “Nah, he’s OK. He’s a smart dog.”
But Stan’s behavior continued. and the night before last, Stan started to whimper when I wouldn’t pay him mind. I should have known pushing Stan away was back when Soul Bro took him back to his bedroom and shut himself up with the dog. I should have known, but I’m so ignorant.
So yesterday, sigh, Stan was beside me again and Soul Bro called him to go lay down with him (Soul Bro wasn’t feeling well). I quickly pushed the dog down when Stan refused to go with his master. Right back up there, Stan jumped, so I pushed him right back down. But it was too late. Soul Bro was angry at me. “See? This was what I was trying to tell you if you EVER let him sit beside you!” And he slammed his bedroom door.
I was afraid. Soul Bro has told me before that short of me killing him, there was nothing I could do to make him not want to be my friend. But I’m so scared. He’s my only family now and if he stays mad, what will I do? I love him so much, so I always try to please him, but I honestly didn’t mean to do anything. I hate myself. I even hate my vagina. This has made me Chaz Bono!
So like I used to, I went to bed and slept to get away from my problems. I dreamed about my mom giving me a beautiful Christmas Barbie doll. Then my mom died, I went to the Appalachians and was rejected by relatives. But then I look for dolls in a flea market, find out that Dolly Parton is my real mom, and she has the same Barbie that my mom gave me except in a different colored dress. Then I dream I’m peeing blood. The end.
At one point, I heard Soul Bro and The Partner up at midnight. I went and got a hello from both when I spoke, but as soon as the show was over, Soul Bro left without a word. I’m terrified he’s still mad and will want me to move when the lease is up. I don’t want to even imagine life without my Soul Brother.
1. Decide to have a self-hosted blog in addition to my regular blog. Get money!
2. Decide self-hosting ain’t worth the trouble after my mom gives up the ghost (look out for posts coming here that were written there. You may not have seen ’em.
3. Watch my mother go from having a simple cold to being cold dead in the morgue in three weeks. I don’t recommend it.
4. Come to the fabulous conclusion that I am an orphan in every way, as my family tells me in a nice way to F off. Thanks Mom for alienating us, but whatever. I don’t recommend not having blood relations though, I really don’t.
5. Find that my “soul brother,” the kindred spirit that I always yearned for lived just down the hall.
6. Having my life possibly saved by being invited to live in his apartment with my three cats. If I had to give up my mom AND my cats that would have been the knot in my noose. My mother loved those cats so much that I got my reason to live in caring for them. ( Talk about needing to get a life.)
9. I tried pot, tried pot, tried, tried…I try it every time I can. It numbs the sense of being in limbo that is my constant companion… My mom wouldn’t approve, but pretty sure my dad would.
10. I had a date, a genuine adult date for the first time in my life.
11. I didn’t know it was a date until the guy walked me to my door, reached out for a hug but planted his lips on mine. Then, what do you know, but I felt his tongue trying to get in. I gave it a thought, thought “Ah, what the hell” and opened my mouth. I let my tongue stay where the good Lord put it, because I was shy and stunned. Still counts as my first experience in the French tongue, non? A lady never tells, but I’m a blogger, so…
I’m sorry to everyone I haven’t responded to. Life has been hectic. It’s been bad, good, and definitely different. Stay tuned!
I want to go to the parade tomorrow alone, but I’m worried what might happen to me or my mom once I’m set out to fend for myself.
Nightmare Scenario I: I go to the parade, but as my mother is driving home from dumping me, she has the misfortune of:
a.) being run down by a Mack truck
b.)having a heart attack
c.) being murdered
You choose the scenario you like the best, but the point is she is deceased…and it all could’ve been prevented had I just gone to the parade with her less than enthusiastic self in tow.
I am alone. I can’t even afford to bury or cremate my mom. There is no money except my $674.00 every month, and the cats and I are soon hungry and evicted. My friend takes me and the cats in,thankfully, but I yearn to live on my own for the first time. I give up thoughts of love and all my dreams. There is nothing to live for but my cats, because my friends and everyone might not need me. I am a burden.
Fin
Nightmare Scenario II: I fall dead.
Fin
But I so want to go alone! If I do I’ll let you know…If I don’t, well, guess you’ll know too!
Ophelia: O woe! If only outrageous fortune spared me from Parade’s earthly delight and I knew whither I goest toward danger or iniquity. Harsh, bitter, agonizing fate! Mayhap I ought to not frolic among Danish princes, either, given their penchant to be douches. O woe, I die!
Here is my latest post for http:// jinglepoetry.blogspot.com. This week’s theme is emotions. So I began writing this poem, the emotion: frustration, and before I knew it I wrote an extremely depressing version of this poem, superbly self-loathing and terribly annoying. So I took my literary jujitsu knife and cut, cut. Even I hated the emo trash which had sprung forth from my brain’s murky depths. Hope y’all like this version. My grandma and I didn’t get along so well the last 13 years of her life , which I feel guilty over 9 years later. I was never good enough, and great, I’ve started the violins playing again, but that’s the poem’s back story.
Oh and another thing, I have the final episode of Rumors of My Death finished and just editing and tweaking this masterpiece. Look for it really soon if you’re big into 2500 word tomes on kidney infections in soap opera/melodrama format. Good times!
It’s a perfectly good frame, thought the old woman, and I can still see my reflection through it. Gently she lifted the frame. It’s too heavy to carry home.
Lucretia McDonald, age 79, sat by her window and watched the goings on at the trash can in front of her house. “It’s that Smith woman again,” she said to her cat. General Lee sat in Lucretia’s lap, a chubby white house cat with gray patches. General Lee seemed not to care, his eyes almost shut as she stroked behind his ears. Lucretia rocked in her chair and continued to watch. “Seems like she could leave folks’ trash alone, crazy old thing….Oh look she’s giving up maybe.”
But no, Tessie Smith didn’t give up, for within 10 minutes she returned, rusted out wheelbarrow bumping down the sidewalk in front of her. Once again, the woman lifted up her treasure, sitting it in the wheelbarrow with the carefulness one would show an infant being placed in a carriage. There. There now, it will do nicely on the wall somewhere. It only has a couple cracks and if I’m careful the glass won’t shatter.
“General Lee, will you look at that? She’s doing it again! That talking to nobody. Tsk. Back when I was a gal they locked you up in the sanitarium for such as that.” General Lee twitched his ear in his sleep in acknowledgement. “Wish I could hear what she was a’ saying.”
“You didn’t forget our anniversary, did you, Harry? I knew you wouldn’t! You wanted me to find this, didn’t you? My present…eh, sitting by a garbage pail, but romantic none the less and no less appreciated to be sure!” And with that, Tessie and her present set off for home.
Tessie Smith looked the part of a bag lady in her faded floral dress with small tears, oddly marched tube socks, and worn out shoes. Her gray hair was a mess of tangles and split ends, which cradled a careworn face in thick glasses that slipped down her nose at frequent intervals. Bag lady, however, she was not. Her husband left a sizeable fortune when he died two years ago. Tessie just saw no reason to spend it much.
“We aren’t in as good a shape as we used to be, are we, Harry?” Tessie puffed as she opened the iron gate and pushed the wheelbarrow through it. The yard was immaculately cut, a neighborhood boy being paid handsomely to keep it so lest she be given trouble by the historic association. The Victorian mansion, the biggest in the district. was also kept up outside. Not a chip of paint was off a shutter, but no one knew what the inside looked like since her husband died in his sleep and the ambulance came to collect his body
Tessie brought the wheelbarrow up to the porch steps. She eased herself down on the middle step and began to pull the mirror upward as she sat until she was able to place the yard long mirror on the porch. Resting a few minutes before attempting to reach the porch herself, she finally was able to get up and take the mirror inside. When Harry was alive, Tessie had kept her ‘collecting’ to a minimal, one spare room utilized for putting everything she collected. It had been enough in those days. But then Harry died and she tried to fill in the great chasm in her heart with things. Books, lots of them, stacked high as a man. Newspapers and magazines people had thrown out in case something important was inside for future reference. A doll with a missing leg because you wouldn’t throw a real baby away for only having one leg.
Tessie now lived downstairs exclusively, the upstairs preserved from Tessie’s collections. She made her way through the hall to a sitting room she made into her bedroom and laid the mirror on her bed. Looking through the cracked mirror , she saw her husband behind her, but as he was many years ago. She fancied she saw herself through the cracked mirror too as she was in the 1940s, a young wife.
She carries this image of herself in her mind and becomes her as she make the anniversary dinner. During dinner she looked up from her steak over at young Harry. Sometimes she believed Harry was really there, not just the elaborate fantasy she made herself after he died. If not physically, maybe in spirit. Tessie looked over at the place setting and said, “Harry, when we went to go get my present, I think I saw the curtain move at old Lucretia McDonald’s place. You know her, remember? Talks about her cat like its her child.? I think she’s a bit off.”
Ramblings about my life, my mental health & my physical rehabilitation following my suicide attempt. “They say don’t look back, but sometimes it’s important to see how far you’ve come.”
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