I Am, They Are

16 Oct 2022 2 Comments

by Denise in Alzheimer, anger, Family, loneliness Tags: , , , , ,

During the summer my brother and I, after speaking with my mother’s doctors, took her car away. There was no choice in this. She is 90 and has Alzheimer’s. She was getting lost driving to places she’d been going for years, she would park her car and forget where it was. That was the least of it. Driving is deadly dangerous for her and anyone who might come in contact with her. And though we needed no proof, when my brother pulled her car out of the garage the driver’s side fender was bashed in from something she hit, and hit hard. The other side of the fender was also banged up. When asked, my mother didn’t know how it happened.

Back then I was enlisting the help of Uncle M. At 88, he is her younger brother, one of two who remain alive. My mom worked for him for years and he had been giving her $1500 a month for a long time, money that went a long way toward supplementing her social security and the small pension left to her since my dad died nine years ago. Uncle M was also the only uncle I felt close to. For years I’d dreamt of what my life would have been like if only he’d been my dad. When we had to take my mom’s car away, I told him we’d set up car service and Uber on her phone, asked if he’d help out, maybe take her to her weekly hair appointment on Fridays. Of course I will, he said.

Except that a few days later he called to say that my mother is an excellent driver, and really, we shouldn’t take her car away. I explained – again – that there wasn’t a choice. We had it on her doctors’ authority, but common sense alone dictated. This only agitated my uncle who insisted that if we take her car away, we were going to kill her. “She will be dead if you do this,” he said. He went on to say that he wouldn’t have to take her to hair appointment because if we took her car away, she would be dead by the time Friday rolled around. My last shot was to explain that she could not only hurt herself if she kept driving, she could hurt, maybe kill, other people. “That is not my concern,” he informed me. “My sister is my concern. And if you take her car away, you will kill her.”

It was after that that he stopped giving her money. I can make no sense of this except that he is angry at both my brother and me, so he stopped giving money to my mom…to spite us? Since the summer, we have had to find an aide to go to my mom’s house as she needs company and she needs help getting around now that she has no car. My mother has to pay for this aide. I tried to appeal to my uncle to keep giving her that money as things are very tight for her without it. His answer was that she should spend all the money she has and then we will talk. “All the money she has?” My mom has next to nothing. There’s a reverse mortgage on her house which is mostly spent. There’s a small amount in her savings which isn’t going to stave off much of anything. I wasn’t asking anything of my uncle except to keep doing what he’d been doing. And I would add that my uncle is a wealthy, single man with no children.

I would like to say I see how sick my uncle is – I have seen this for years, but never had it directed at me. I would like to say that, seeing him as sick, I treated him with empathy. But that would be a lie. I told him exactly what I thought about this craziness and then some. I said things to him that others could not believe I said when I repeated the conversation. Nothing that wasn’t true, but things designed to hit below the belt. Things that, according to any 12-step program, I should be making amends for, because my intent was to hurt, to wound, to scar.

I have taken a good look at all this. I have written about my resentments, I have tried to see my part (it always takes two), I have spoken about this to others. I have asked Philip to help me let go of this damn resentment because it only hurts me. Then last week I found out my uncle took my mom out to dinner and I had a moment of grace. Because instead of seeing my uncle as the enemy, I saw two elderly people going out for an early dinner. I wondered what they talked about, what they were thinking about. I wondered if my uncle was watching my mother, who’d taken care of him in so many ways since he was a child, slipping away. My uncle is a recluse, does not have many people in his life. He’s gone from five brothers to now only one – the one he doesn’t get along with – and my mom is just not who she was. My heart hurt for all of it, for inevitability and what often seems the impossibility of life. And I decided I’d rather my heart break than live in rage and resentment. 

Which lasted a couple days until my sister-in-law called to tell me that my uncle had my mother drive to dinner. He what? Your mother told me, she said. He had her drive to dinner and back. Re-enter eye-popping, jaw-clenching, stomach-churning outrage.

My impulse was to call him and chew him out, or call my cousin Maria to have her chew him out. Get her on my side, once and for all. My uncle calls Maria when he wants to know about my mom. I have asked her multiple times to tell him to call either me or my brother (he is angry at both of us) if he wants information. And I have believed my cousin would do that. Except that over the summer, I was there when my uncle called her for just that reason. Her phone rang, her eyes widened when she who it was, she looked at me, looked back at the phone, back at me and said in a strangled voice, “It’s him.” I’m right here, I told her. If he asks about my mom, tell him I’m here and I’ll speak with him. 

Except she couldn’t. She stuttered and mumbled, and wound up saying that I was there but I was in the other room, did he want her to get me? His answer was shouted loud enough for me to hear. I could not understand – how could she betray me, how could she let him off the hook? Are you afraid of him, I asked when she hung up? She shrugged. No – he just yells and yells and then I can ’t think straight.

I have to wonder how long I will continue to look for love and acceptance where it cannot be found, why I have not yet learned that no matter how hard I squeeze a stone not a single drop of blood will flow. As furious as I was, that was the moment the shift began. My anger, my sense of “betrayal” was born of my refusal to open my eyes to who I was dealing with, something I should have learned a long, long time ago. Insisting anyone behave the way I want is exercising a control I do not have. Being smart about someone is knowing who they are and understanding what to expect. It is not only smart, it’s the only way to take care of myself. I was raised in a family prone to outrage and drama. I have distanced myself from them. Yet when I’m with them, there go I. Just because I indulge less does not absolve me from behavior I abhor in others.

I have suffered this. I have reeked of self-pity. I have seesawed between believing I am “better” than they to being unfit to grace the bottom of their shoes. And I am lonely because they all get along, don’t see as I do, and I feel invisible. It’s past time to get my head on straight. In truth I haven’t much in common with any of them. I have a romantic notion of how it was growing up in this big, loud, boisterous Italian family with our every-Sunday dinners and wasn’t it wonderful to have all of us together? But it wasn’t always so wonderful. Even then I didn’t feel I belonged and since I didn’t yet have the ability to reason why, I blamed a big part of it on my dad. All my cousins had the same last name, but since my mom was the only female, she changed her name when she married, black-and-white proof of my difference.

Truth is, I am, they are. Given my mother’s condition, there will be times I’m forced to deal with my family. Like when I found out Uncle M let my mom drive. Something had to be done, no? So I did it. I breathed, then I breathed some more. I spoke to my sister-in-law, to my brother. We agreed there was nothing we could do about it, that screaming at my Uncle would upset us and probably satisfy him.  I cannot control this. I cannot make my Uncle see the danger, I cannot make my mother understand. And I sure as hell can’t sit and seethe with resentment over something I can do nothing about. 

© 2022 Denise Smyth

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Undone

08 Oct 2022 3 Comments

by Denise in Addiction, Death, Death of a Child, Faith, God, Religion, Spirituality Tags: , , , , , ,

I find no comfort in God. Nor am I an atheist. And maybe what I believe is what one would call God, or some form of it. But the idea of some being greater than ourselves who requires rules or rituals or ceremonies or has caused us to be born with a sin we need be delivered from…a God who requires specifics which exclude those who don’t adhere to them…I find that a form of insanity. I find people -relatives – who fear that certain of their behaviors will bring the wrath of the Almighty upon them yet their blatant disregard of those who are different is baffling, if not cruel.

A couple weeks ago, Natalie and I brought our shih-tzu Zoe to the vet. She was nearly 15 and ailing. Natalie moved out in July and took Zoe with her. I was happy to let her go – Zoe was in need of more attention than I could give her. I believed Zoe’s time was up, Natalie did not. We were a long while at the vet that day, Natalie, Zoe and Dr. K on the floor of the exam room, me on a stool, mostly observing. Zoe walked in circles, bumped into walls (she’s blind), panted, was unable to relax or orient herself. Dr. K did not tell us what to do. She asked Natalie questions, she spoke of Zoe’s quality of life, her spirit. Her happiness vs unhappiness. Until Natalie looked at Dr. K and said, “When she is not sleeping, she is agitated. I think…I think…it’s time.”

Zoe had always been “my” dog. I raised her from a pup and I was the one she sought out. Until some point last year when she had an episode which changed her, which she never fully recovered from. I kept thinking how I was going to fall apart when she died, but I did not. Natalie cried and cried. Then she cried more. I withdrew. I saw it, could do nothing about it. I have been withdrawn for a long time. A combination of the complete cessation of any mood medication I was taking, the stress of my mother’s Alzheimer’s and the family dynamics I’ve been thrust into since has helped bring me somewhat back to life. At least, to feeling, even though much of it has been difficult. So I was able to catch myself shutting down. My thought was to write.

We hadn’t planned on putting Zoe down that afternoon – we thought we’d discuss, go home and discuss some more, call back and make the final appointment. But we were the last ones in the office and better we did it then. Better, other than the fact that the next day we were going to a wake for my dear friend C’s son B, also Natalie’s friend, who had died on September 18th from the addiction he’d battled for years. I do not know all the details. He had been sober for four years, but five months ago something called him back and now he is gone and his family is devastated.

C is one of the people who saved my life after Philip died. A few years ago she sold her NJ home and moved to NYC, but when Philip died she and her three boys lived 5 minutes away from me and Natalie and I spent much time at their house, something Natalie was already used to as the boys were her friends long before and she’d already considered C her second mom. With my blessing, I might add. I spent the first Thanksgiving and Christmas after Philip’s death at her house, sleeping there, cooking with her, and it became what we did every year for 6 or 7 years until she moved. 

Saturday the 24th I found myself in church with C and all those who came to grieve. Philip, too, had had a funeral mass, was rolled down the aisle in a casket covered by a white cloth with a gold cross on top, stopped in the aisle next to the pews toward the front. C looked worn and tender and fragile and all I could think was how this could not be undone. And how much she would have to go through before that became a reality she could recognize and live with. She has two other children, they are who she lives for now. For a while, it might not be enough.

At mass, I listened to what the priest said. I remember two things from the priests at Philip’s wake and mass. At the wake, the priest said, “They say time heals all wounds. It doesn’t.” And I was grateful for this truth. At at the mass, when the priest said, “Please kneel,” he looked directly at me and said, “If you can.” A kindness I did not expect. So I sat until my mother’s disapproving finger poked me so hard from behind that I sank to my knees. 

I couldn’t say what the priest talked about during Philip’s mass. I’d never found comfort in anything to do with church and the only thing that existed then, all that my senses were aware of, was that Philip was dead, was lying in that coffin, was never to be as I had known him. But at B’s funeral I listened. The priest was a nice looking man with a short grayish beard, somewhat young for a priest, with a clear and earnest voice. So sure of himself as he asked us to remember the most important day of B’s – the day he was baptized. For that, you see, opened him up to the other sacraments and assured his place in heaven next our lord and savior. And we were to take comfort in knowing that that was where, even as he spoke, B was.

A glance at Natalie that was returned by her told me we were thinking the same thoughts. I do hope there were those who could take comfort in those words because there is nothing worse than losing a loved one – a child – and I know when Philip died I found comfort in nothing. But were we to understand that B is now is with the lord, which is where one wants to be in death (?) but that the only way one could get there was by being baptized? So where did one wind up if one wasn’t baptized? Did believing your loved one was a member of the right club make it all better?

I was fuming and in that, I might be missing much. This argument is old for me. The first time I came across it was when my four-year-old niece was dying and my brother was, for a time anyway, born again. He’d told me only those who accepted Jesus Christ as their savior would go to heaven. “Well,” I answered, “what about…oh, I don’t know – what about Chinese people?” “Ignorance is no excuse,” he answered.

And what about YOUR ignorance, I wanted to scream? It’s religion that does itself in with it’s rules, cruelties and inconsistencies. It is religion that causes me to turn from God, and I am not alone. The path to God need not be marked so. It cannot be marked so, not if it holds love, tolerance and compassion within. And if not love, tolerance, compassion, what is it for? So many will say, “I am spiritual, not religious” to distance themselves from what religion is teaching. So many will suggest calling God something else – Higher Power. What I recognize as the power, the force greater than myself is what I call Life. And when I need to talk to Life, I call on Philip, who might’ve been taken from me in body, but never, not ever, in spirit.

© 2022 Denise Smyth