My mother was deflated amid the myriad monuments and scattered mourners. Even her hair had lost its wave. She was taking Ativan, I think. She held two or three out in her hand to reveal them to me. I was stunned at the changes that had taken place during our separation. I told my father that I was alarmed at how she had deteriorated. We don't tend to notice the daily, incremental changes that visit those closest to us as do those who have not seen them in some time. I was alarmed. And it seems like it was just a matter of months until the diagnosis was in hand. Alzheimer's. Irreversible. Permanent. Terminal.
My mother had been targeted by the random movement of time and space and live matter to suffer from a particularly merciless form of the disease. A form replete with emotionally traumatic spells that create suffering unimaginable to anyone else. Suffering that is not assuaged by morphine sulfate. Suffering that is not assuaged by chemical compounds. Suffering that thrives and boasts that it can strike its ruinous blow at any time of the day or night and it laughs that there's not a goddamn thing that anyone can do about it. Suffering that begins with an itch on the scalp. Then, suddenly, a thousand more appear like stars. Invisible stars that fester, tease, menace, torture, and then step aside in order to allow room for the monster to enter the stage and devastate what's left of my mother's mental health.
The preacher, who will utter her eulogy, never met her when she was at her best, and it is his loss. When her sense of humor was ignited hot and entertaining enough for battalions of homesick troops. When she could dance without looking like a withered fool. When she could lay before her all visible matter and arrange and adjust it so that the epitome of the artform was indeed met, and met admirably. How she could present herself. How she could present her home. How she could present her sons.
So, let's see how I can make this my fault. It's no coincidence that she went down rapidly during that same swath of time that I elected to separate myself from her altogether. My children imploring me, "you should call her some time, Dad." But, I didn't. It was Nani who in death brought us together. And as soon as I saw her I knew that the separation had to end. Whatever she did to earn my distance was rendered moot when I saw her in dry weather looking as if she had been left out in the rain. It was Nani, my adoptive grandmother who, in her nineties, unintentionally mediated our reunion.
Did I have this effect on her? Am I powerful? Am I valued for some goddamned reason that escapes me altogether? Did I mean something after all? After all the hatred and argument and polar differences? Did I have the right to distance her from me on account of her dislike for my wife, or her distaste for me? Did I have the right to free myself from the tangle that she created so exactly at my feet and then deftly left for me to negotiate my way out of? Don't I have the right to protect myself from toxicity?
I think that everything affects everything else even if the effect cannot be measured by humans and their gadgets. But this one is different. I won't kid myself about it. I affected my mother by absenting myself from her for many, many months. It was no coincidence that our reunion revealed a broken fragment of the woman who was once that imperishable vixen who stayed one step ahead of everything her entire life. "It was no coincidence, Greg. It was your fault." And remember, you don't have to "make" this your fault at all. It is objectively your fault. You triggered all that was dormant and allowed the dam to burst and signal the slow and merciless death of your mother.
I can growl my way out of this. If I fused my molars together so tight that my upper body begins to shake and then contain the impending blast of emotional ice that rises within me, a growl would result. A growl like the growl of a mad dog. A growl that normally has with it the full display of gums and dogsteeth. A growl like the growl of a man who is drowning in a muddy river where echoes bounce off rock bluffs.
I can claw my way out of this. If I place my hands around my own neck and squeeze, can I choke myself back to homeostatic health. If I place my hands in the face of another man in order to offend him and start a fight can I claw him until he bleeds me back to a homeostatic plane where, from which I can get up, drink coffee, shower, dress, enter the cabin of my little car, and go to work where I'll be guaranteed to hear horror stories from abortions and their loved ones.
I can compare my way out of this. But what a chickenshit way to make one feel better about one's station in this carbon-based increment of life! It's always worse. It gets better. This too shall pass. Or my favorite symbols of idiocy: "It's All Good!". What a shit-filled chasm of garbage! Who wrote that?! I must plot his death. I stand outside of his house, fully prepared to hit him so hard with my Louisville Slugger that some of the brain matter will never be located because it actually fused into the wood fibers located in the sweet spot fat of the bat. How the sound of those thuds will never quite live up to their authentic, singular, clinical, acute template unto which the fast, bloody, blunt, gargling emanations of all subsequent batting deaths should strive to copy for the balance of human time. It's all good. It's all bad, too. It's both, too, you goddamn abortion of a human clot. Enough about him. He's already dead to me, whoever he is. Dead to me like I fooled myself into believing my mother was dead to me. But she wasn't. She was festering inside my heart like a viral anomaly. At Nani's funeral the fever broke. All was immediately forgiven on the spot.
She would say it was my fault. It would make the entire complex universe of factors coalesce into a single culprit. But she would say it behind my back imploring the recipients not to tell. That is her way. That has always been her enabling way.
I know, I can dredge up all of the negative memories that I've stored about her and chew this smorgasbord of data in order to quell the icy pain that I feel emerging from my control centers. I can remember the looks she gave me that communicated to me that she hated everything about me. That I was a living artifact that connected her to the past she so passionately wanted to forget. She was better than the rest. And she really was. But even that didn't keep her from getting knocked up by a stupid boy in the back of a car in the hollows of an ignorant Appalachia that seemed immune from the TVA social-industrial experiment. An Appalachia where it was expected for our girls to start expecting their first child just after their Senior year of High School. Even Aunt Jo couldn't fix that one, so she was saddled with an organic reminder of the stone cold fact that she did not make it entirely out of Appalachia.
Although she would never again crack a brown egg in her lifetime, she would be constantly reminded of the one she carried full term that neither looked like her nor her new family, and which was flawed so deeply that the malformation could not be fully detected by science in either 1961 or in 2020.
