Flung on the Rocks Survivor
Sep 04
“I couldn’t feel so I learned how to touch” Leonard Cohen Hallelujah
The heart’s interpretation by a flung on the rocks survivor.
I always end up in War Museums whenever I’m lost in Europe. The Royal Academy of War in London, past BLy’s birthplace, or the Hotel of the Infirm in Paris. I think like a man. I love men. Yet my sexuality is deeply feminine. To feel feminine, connected rythyms of womb, life, tantric awakened sex is the best treat in life. And a necessity for women in my tribe.
I think my tribe began with my mother, but she hid her sexuality well, until her plunge into Alzheimer’s. I was always at odds with her growing up, perhaps too much alike, perhaps I threatened or challenged her, or sometimes stole the show, or at least my father’s attention. IT was only in the final stages of Alzheimer’s that she dropped her punishing eyes and I was able to approach her and we felt each other’s love.
My elder brother and sister, Truman and Suzanne never could bring themselves to relate to her. They feared those eyes of condemnation and punishment. It shook them to the core. Even when they had to visit, and they saw her childlike innocence and lack of ego and persona, Truman, an IBM exec, 67, with a wife of nearly 50 years who plays senior softball and volunteers at old folks homes, admitted how scary it was, that at any time he feared that the critical, judgmental eyes would return .
When my mother plunged, it was irrevocable. Irrevocable. the doctor’s continued reaapearance through the beige metal hospital door,after my own wreck taught me that word. Say it. Irrevocable.
Diamond shaped small window in a hospital door would reveal his sillouette, and then he’d be in front of me, just the facts, ma’am, with another set of x-rays, terse faced, explaining the compound fracture of one leg, (Irrevocble. Oh no. I would never be a nationally ranked in perfect physical form human, again.) spiral fracture of the other, severed arteries in foot and bleeding liver, with lopped off lobe. Emergency surgery. Irrevocable.
Mother’s irrevocable event was horrifying on a slower , more subtle, less acute level. But horrifying it was, in a sublime sense. IT would put fear in modern day sorority girls at LSU, or JR. League wives who would never be caught wearing white shoes before Easter or after Labor day. My mother entered the dining room of the Demeter Assisted Living center barefooted and without her matinee length pearls. The soft, kind voiced manager made the call. “Your mother just isn’t herself, Christine. I don’t want you to be upset, she’s OK, and we’re taking good care of her, but she came to dinner without her shoes, and her speech is slurred slightly.”
I immediately assumed “stroke,” and let the staff know I’d be there to take her to the hospital. Not all TIA’s show up, and mother’s plunge could not be clearly attributable to bleeding in the brain. But she never recoverd. And she began hallucinating. And ten seconds with her was exhausting, more so than labor, more so than court with a child’s future in the balance, more so than the most tedious of impasses with a spouse. She required so much and took me catapulting across generations, from my children she saw on riding lawn mowers with kittens to WWII and being lost, on the wrong train, separated from her husband and child. It was so painful, yet it wasn’t about me, it was about comforting my mother and keeping a close eye out so she didn’t steal the car keys from the vehicle she’d given to my middle son (and forgotten) and escape. She had almost been successful in that gambit the night before. I sat down on the couch with my husband for ten minutes, and she had gotten out of bed, and done a summersault in the iris trying to lope toward the car although she’d been slow as molasses on her walker for weeks due to a strained back. She was laying in the irises, looking amazed. As we got her back in bed, she gazed at the Jimmy Hendricks black light poster in Ian’s room and commented that she didn’t know he (Ian) smoked.
I tried to keep her at home. I enlisted the help of others who had experience in hiring and managing round the clock care. I called contractors about remodeling, priced modular buildings, pictured hundreds of times the help falling asleep and mother being found in the waters of Sibley Lake, off of our peninsula. I felt so thoroughly responsible for my mother, a quick on her feet supposed semi-invalid who saw and communicated, constantly, a world with out sequence, a world without cognition, consciousness running amuck and incessant chatter in which I took an interest. Maybe perverse, certainly curious, as mother had always kept everything, from family history to finances top secret, I was eager to hear strands of stories that would illuminate her world, my world of childhood. I listened, enrapt, and obcessed. A forensic voyeur. Maybe I’d hear the missing parts, the tale of a boyfriend, the man in the pictures, to explain how she possibly cound have had an abortion when her first born was 18 months old. It’s the only secret she ever revealed this abortion, and it was a kind gesture, an openness which superceded her intense need for privacy, because it was something which, at that moment, she believed could alleviate my pain. My sister would later say it was mother interjecting herself, her stories, because she had to be the center of attention, and that she was jealous when I was, but I think it was a clear case of compassion, with shock as the catalyst.
My parents were shocked that I had gotten pregnant and had an abortion, at 16. “Even the garbage man will never know” my father stated. “We burned the birth control pills they gave you.”
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Thanks for the comments.
So annoying.
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Julia, in a cornfield down Cane River. Now she lives in Ibiza.
