Remember those good old days when I could write five to seven decent posts in a day, all readable and at least marginally interesting? Neither can I.
I feel like someone has ripped the tongue out of my mouth lately, have lost the compunction to narrate, preach, kibbitz, share, declaim, perorate, soapbox, you can pick your own verb if you wish.
Not feeling it.
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My heart is fine, got the doctor's okay this morning. However mother is now spiraling down on morphine, I swear it is finally the final descent, but she has surprised us so many times before. Barbara is there at the hospice, I feel guilty for not being there myself. Maybe days, though I hesitate; I have been wrong so often before. Who spends nine months in hospice? She said she wanted to go but she was too strong, flinty strong, evidently not yet ready to depart.
So much is left unresolved personally, will never be resolved, often we were collateral damage in her wake, her odd choices and occasional utter selfishness balanced by brilliance and genuine love. Her erratic twists and turns helped temper and harden my steel, cured me like a bird left to fend in the nest too early, the choice to either fly or perish. But maybe it made me a little brittle too. Slightly broken, but who isn't?
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She first put me out on the street at 14, or tried to anyway, her dutch revolutionary partner at the time said that that was the time a young comrade should fend for himself. I fought with him, naked and protean, dare I say oedipal, breaking various of each other's bones for what seemed like at least an hour. Jack witnessed it, maybe I never could get over the hurt when I plainly saw which side she was really rooting for. Tony left and never came back.
There was a lot of violence directed at me, from several suitors and lovers, extreme violence, no need for a laundry list. When you are a kid and see your jailers behaving in such a depraved, toxic and brutal manner it is possible to start harboring strange feelings about those in authority, developed a lifelong chip on my shoulder, a real mistrust of hominids as well.
You draw a line in the sand and step over it at sometime in your life or you try to anyway. I tried. Forgiving is so much easier than forgetting, I know that.
Mom tried her best, definitely fed me, loved me I suppose, no she did, kept me alive on several occasions. Never relinquished the upper hand, never was honest about her life, always kept the guilt meter pegged, was always manipulating everybody within reach. Certainly wouldn't answer to me or anybody else really. But the most brilliant and accomplished person you could ever meet in whatever field she attempted.
I'm glad she was brilliant and crazy I guess. I could have been normal I suppose. She has great qualities, loved to pick up strays, loved animals too, taught that people were more important than things, never cared about the material too much.
She changed everybody she met, they loved her, just wasn't so easy to be her kid, for me anyway, from the hated middle position. Drug her out of the ocean twice after the phenobarbitol suicide overdoses, she had crossed the whole continent to chase an ex husband who now totally despised her. Trapped in a dark spiraling dance, lucky I was there to pick her up and shelter her. For a year after the total nervous breakdown. Maybe 15, 16 years old.
The woman loved her friends, cats, dogs and kids. Born the same day as Leslie, August twenty third.
Loved her but had a really hard time being within 2000 miles of her.
Love you mom.
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Some of you friends are in very exotic places, the San Juan Islands, Colombia, Macchu Pichu. Many of you promised to send pictures. Where are they?
Did get this from Brigitte in Cartagena today.
Spelled my name wrong but you were close, B. I never knew garza was a Spanish word for heron. Thank you.
9:02 p.m. postscript. Just got the phone call from Johnnie, my mother has passed.
