Poetic License

Yesterday at around four a.m., my ex-husband’s mother, Diane, died. Over the last forty-three years, both sets of our parents have died, one after the other, until now we are both orphans. Like my father, his father died prematurely. His father died of a heart attack; mine died of lung cancer. Our mothers lived longer. Mine died of heart disease, lupus, and diabetes a month after her seventy-sixth birthday, on the eve of what would have been her fifty-ninth wedding anniversary with my father, had they both been alive and still married.

His mother was eighty-two and in poor health because she didn’t trust doctors and refused to take care of herself. A diabetic, she was mostly blind. Sometime late last week or early in the weekend, she suffered a heart attack at home and did nothing about it. When her daughter, Candy, came over the next day, she told her she wasn’t feeling well. They went to the emergency room. According to my ex-husband, Paul, it still took the doctors a couple of days to determine she had suffered a heart attack, and then they they found, additionally, a blood clot in her intestines. They gave her forty-eight to seventy-two hours to live. Her heart was too weak for her to survive surgery. As I found out with my own mother at the end, doctors will not operate on you if they don’t think you will survive it.

First do no harm.

By the time anyone called Paul, she was hours or days from death. I urged him to go to Atlanta to say goodbye. He said his wife told him the same thing. But he said he and his mother no longer had any kind of close relationship and that what they did have hadn’t been a positive one for years. I knew. We had many conversations about how stupid she was about her health, ignoring doctors’ advice, refusing medication, and believing every conspiracy theory that came down the pike. No matter what the doctors prescribed, she claimed it made her legs hurt. She’d been in the hospital multiple times over the last ten years of her life, but she still refused to comply with treatment, although in the last year or so, he said she finally started taking medication for her diabetes.

Politics were the other part of the reason their relationship fell apart. Paul’s family drank the Trump Kool-Aid and used any conversation with Paul to twist the knife. He tried to let it go, but they would not. In fact the last conversation he had with his brother David about their mother’s impending death veered sharply into right-wing propaganda, steered there by David. He wouldn’t even set politics aside with their mother dying. Their family has been deeply divided since the George W. Bush years. (Similarly, one of my brothers no longer speaks to me, because we disagree on politics, as well as gender and human rights, all the things that are important to me.)

By the time he learned about her final illness, things had deteriorated to the point at which Paul called his mother only on her birthday and on holidays. At least he did that, which is probably more than she deserved. He has nothing to feel bad about. His mother was a narcissist. Everything, always, was about her and her wants and needs. He says she was a good mother once upon a time, when he was very young. He tells me something happened when they were living in Pilot Mountain, NC. Everything changed. Suddenly, it was all about her. He is fairly certain that his father, who was a lothario, had an affair with the woman who lived next door. And then the woman’s husband found out. I understand why Diane would be angry and humiliated, but she took it out – not just on her husband – on her children.

By the time I met Paul in high school, when he was sixteen, she was in a full-blown rage most of the time. She reminded me of my father, but in one thing she was different. My father was a good provider. But to her, everything belonged to her. There was good food in her refrigerator, but the kids were not allowed to have any of it. It was for her Weight Watchers diet, Paul told me. The irony of it! Her kids were starving, but she was on a diet to lose the fat she had put on since leaving the Dodge factory where she and her husband had worked in Detroit. They had left Detroit to come to Houston – nicknamed “boomtown” at that time – for opportunity and warmer weather.

Her kids were existing on mostly rice when I met them, which they learned to season up with packets from restaurants – soy sauce, duck sauce, honey, mustard, salr, and pepper – that found their way home in their mother’s handbag. After learning this firsthand, when I nearly grabbed some orange juice from the refrigerator, I remember them all flying up off the couch and the floor in the living room, yelling, “No!”

After this, I felt so bad for them all. I would buy them pizza with money earned from my job at the local movie theater. Paul and his brother, Jim, got jobs at McDonald’s in Humble (we lived in Kingwood) as soon as they were old enough, walking there after school and sometimes having to walk ten miles home along the highway in the dark afterwards, sleeping a few hours before they had to be ready for school. Their paychecks from McDonalds went to their mother, but at least they could eat a meal at work. That was worth something.

When Paul hit puberty, his mother told him she would “cut his dick off ” if she found out he was having sex before marriage, so naturally she hated me, though Paul and I weren’t having sex. We were best friends, which she could simply not understand. When he told me about what she had said to him and his brothers, I was mortified. What kind of mother would say such a thing to her son?

But I saw the absolute worst of her during that time. I believed she had said that – and more – to Paul.

Over time, she gradually came to accept me, but only after Paul and I got married, which we did immediately after he graduated from Marine Corps boot camp. His family and I all went to his graduation, which occurred on his birthday in 1983. Two weeks later Paul and I were married. A year later we had our daughter. Nearly four years after that, we had our son.

Paul told me his mother was not always the way she had been since I’d known her. He said said more recently he and his mother had a conversation about her changed behavior when he was a child. She had wanted to “dig in” and figure out why she and Paul no longer had a relationship. She told him, “I think we can get to the bottom of this.” To that, he said, “Okay, tell me about what happened in Pilot Mountain.” She refused to talk about that, he said, and she never tried to “dig in” again.

So much anger.

So many hurt feelings.

So much unresolved trauma.

Is it any wonder that he and I struggled through our twenty-seven years together? I came from a different kind of trauma than he did, but our families of origin were incredibly dysfunctional. Later I learned, through life and through psychology classes, just how dysfunctional. A friend of mine remembers their mother leaving when they were a pre-teen. They and their brother were left with their father who, like many fathers of that time, lacked the ability to express love. They simply never talked about why the mother left without a word. When that kind of damage comes from a mother, it leaves lasting repercussions. The child grows up and believes they are not worthy of love, and they repeat the pattern over and over in their adult lives. If they are lucky, they sort it out and are able to form a lasting love relationship. If not, they are doomed to a cycle of death before death.

Paul found out his mother had died when he called yesterday to check on how she was doing. He thought she was probably heavily medicated. Perhaps in a coma. One of his brothers was supposed to have called him to tell him she passed, but he never got around to it, so she had been dead for almost twelve hours by the time Paul learned of it. He decided not to even try to go to the funeral. Our son is there with him in Delaware, visiting for Thanksgiving, and his stepdaughters will be coming into town from NYC in time for the big meal. All that would happen if Paul went to Atlanta is that he would end up getting into a political argument with his siblings, and he would miss out on being with the people who love him.

Thanksgiving in Paul’s family has been fraught with angst and depression since 1987, when their father, Dan, died the Saturday after the holiday. We drove down to Atlanta from Jacksonville, NC, where Paul was stationed. We had our new baby with us, Sean, whom we had dressed in a Santa onesie, complete with the red cap. Stephanie, on whom Dan always doted, hung on him as much as she could. Dan cooked the entire meal that day, except for the Honey-Baked Ham, but as he hurried around the kitchen, trying to get the food to the table, a large bowl of mashed potatoes slipped out of his hands and fell to the floor in the kitchen with a loud crash. Paul’s mother flew into a rage, berating him for being clumsy and stupid. He took it all from her, as he had become accustomed to doing. He got down and cleaned the mess and broken bowl off the floor. We went without potatoes.

That night when we went to bed, Paul said, “Dad looks so gray, you know, in his face.”

A couple of years before, Dan had a heart attack when he, Diane, and Candy were living in Portugal, selling resort vacations there. (If Dan had only had the confidence to sit for a real estate exam, he would have been brilliant at it, but he had an abnormal fear of tests.) Paul and Jim, both in the Marines, flew to Portugal to be with their father. Dan, of course, blew the whole thing off as though they were all worried about him for nothing. If the doctor told him anything, he hid it. Instead, he checked out of the hospital and drove his visiting sons around Portugal and Gibraltar in a Mini Cooper. Paul has fond memories of that trip. At the time, maybe he even believed his father.

At Thanksgiving of 1987, Dan was barely forty-six years old, having had a birthday less than two weeks earlier. The day after we shared that holiday together, he drove back to Alabama, where he had a job selling timeshare. Paul offered to go with him, but his dad told him to stay and enjoy the family, to relax.

On Saturday, Dan called in sick to work, which almost never happened in his entire life. He said he just didn’t feel right, when he called Diane. She decided later that day that she would drive to Alabama to check on him. She and David took Dan to the hospital to get checked out, because he was very tired and still feeling unwell. The hospital did not detect the impending heart attack but admitted him for observation anyway. Sometime in the middle of the night, Dan’s pain grew markedly worse. Medical personnel rushed into his room. He tried to fight them off. He was out of his mind with pain. And then he died of a massive heart attack right in front of them. We found out the next morning when Diane called home at six a.m. Candy answered the phone, and then she woke us all up.

At the funeral, which was small – immediate family and coworkers – our little girl wondered what was wrong with her Grandpa. He was in a dark blue suit, lying in his coffin. I went up to pay my respects, putting a hand on his hard, cold arm. It shocked me, because I had never touched a dead body. When my grandmother Evans died, I don’t remember even walking up to the coffin, and I was only four when my grandfather died. I thought then that they all felt that way, so I determined in that moment that I would be cremated. I never wanted my family to see my stiff, embalmed body lying in a coffin.

Dan was cremated after the funeral, and Diane put his ashes into a decorative urn that she lined with the wrapper from the Honey-Baked Ham he had served at Thanksgiving. Some years later, she and David traveled to Magen’s Bay, St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., to scatter Dan’s ashes in the ocean. It was one of the places Dan had loved, though no one wanted to admit it was because he had met a woman and had an affair while working there. He wanted to end his marriage to Diane so he could marry that other woman, but Diane instead became suicidal, or so she protested she was. Killing herself would have been contrary to her narcissistic nature, though. She really only wanted to force Dan to come home to her and continue to be beholden to her.

In the process, she inadvertently caused Paul to miss his deployment to Grenada, where he was due to go in support of Reagan’s “Operation Urgent Fury,” designed to oust the Communist military government who had taken over the island by coup d’etat. Instead, the Marines replaced Paul with another marine from 2nd Battalion/8th Marines. Paul was reassigned to the legal office, where he would serve as a clerk and, later, as a driver for officers. It was a far cry from his training as an infantryman and machine gunner. He remained in country, something for which I was grateful, since we were just a few months from having our first baby. He was not as grateful. He saw it as a dereliction of his duty. He believed in the mission.

He was the law clerk on duty when the messages came across the wire about a grenade attack on his old squadron. The marine who had replaced Paul was killed in that attack. He was identified by his glasses, which were embedded into his face by the blast. He had also been an expectant father. Paul suffered survivor’s guilt from that incident forward, and his feelings toward his mother darkened.

After his father died, Paul developed an anxiety disorder that, in truth, had been brewing since Grenada. In the days that followed his father’s death, though, it got very bad, to the point at which he once made me pull the car over to the side of the freeway so he could leave the car. He took off, walking down the exit ramp as though driven by a purpose. I followed in our Chevette, our children in the back wondering why Daddy was walking on the freeway. Eventually, I coaxed him back into the car by the time we reached the road at the end of the exit ramp. At his mother’s insistence, I took him to a local hospital to get checked out. Paul was convinced he was having a heart attack just like his father. He was just twenty-four years old, though. He was fine. It was an anxiety attack, the first of many over the years.

When Paul turned forty-six, he felt as though he had won the lottery because he lived through the age that took his father. It wasn’t his year to die, however; it was Stephanie’s. She died just a couple of months after Paul’s 46th birthday, at the age of twenty-five. Our beautiful girl, who had loved her grandfather so much, was gone.

Paul still thinks he will die like his father, of a sudden and massive heart attack, writhing on the bed in pain, but he is not his father. He has his own issues that are separate from his parents but are no less serious. I talk to him whenever I can. I worry about him. I’m sure that in the wake of his mother’s death, he is more convinced than ever that it is his heart that will kill him. I cannot convince him otherwise. I’m not sure anymore that he’s wrong.

Nurses have told me, during my own cancer treatment, that we only need look as far as our parents to discover whether cancer or heart disease will get us. My father died of cancer; my mother died of heart disease. For me, I guess, it’s a toss-up. But in reality, none of us knows what or who will come for us, or when. There are many ways to die – the proverbial bus, the mugger, the airplane or train or car. A ruptured appendix. A brain aneurysm. Death is waiting for us all, sometime, somehow. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot even keep King Charles from getting cancer. What hope have any of us?

I can imagine the emotions happening inside Paul today, as he begins his new reality with no parents in the world. Even though he and his mother were not close, you must have deep emotions to produce as much anger as he has kept inside. Men aren’t taught that emotions are valid and are okay to express. And he is a former marine. He has learned to deal with his feelings by burying them so deep that anyone on the outside sees scarcely a ripple. He is an atheist. He believes when we die, we cease to exist anywhere, so he has no thought of his mother somewhere in heaven with his father. His Catholic upbringing, though he shunned it years ago, instilled in him the idea that neither of his parents were worthy of heaven if there were such a place. He saw them as unrepentant people living in denial, who never asked for forgiveness from anyone, and who never made penance or peace. They just died.

My heart hurts for him, and for our son, who was never close with Diane. He only saw her as the elderly woman who had too many cats and never took care of them, who had dead cats in the freezer when he helped Paul’s family move her into the home where she lived at the end. She didn’t know what to do with them, she said. Our sensitive son has never gotten past that memory of her. She left quite a few living cats when she died, and from what I heard, her house reeks of piss. What a legacy to leave behind. What a life to have lived.

This morning I was peering out the window at my birdfeeder, which has a solar-powered camera installed. Is that a bluebird, I wondered. The light was hitting the bird such that I couldn’t tell if it was black or it was blue. After pulling up the camera, I saw it was a brown-headed cowbid, with the bronze feathers on its head and glossy black feathers covering the rest of it. It was the black feathers which had appeared so blue. Sometime I do see a bluebird. They will often come to the birdbath but will swoop away if they see me. I always feel special when they come. I always feel comforted.

Namaste, and happy holidays,
Jude