Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Mother
Physically she's still on this earth of course. At this moment in hospital to recover from her being badly treated at the nursing home for the extremely demented. Of course that's what this is about, dementia. Her greatest fear and ultimately her downfall.
She'd been falling down for years and explaining it away with her 'dicky hip'. What is more likely now is that she'd been having strokes. Starting small and getting larger each time. Leaving her disoriented and alone on the floor unable to get back up again. The last time, we think, for days. But she wasn't, and probably eventually couldn't, tell anyone that something more was happening than just losing her balance. For the last thing she wanted was to be put into a hospital, close second on her list of greatest fears.
No one in England is telling us what is exactly wrong with her, mostly because they don't know, but its probably vascular dementia. Perfectly treatable if caught early on. There's the irony. Her fear of hospitals is probably the reason why she didn't ring the alarm bells sooner, thereby letting the strokes increase in strength and severity until the dementia was full blown and untreatable let alone reversible.
She used her fears as father used his to control my brother and I.
Father told me that I was to blame that mother's mother developed premature dementia, my accident triggering the process. My first night in hospital was with mother in the next bed after she'd passed out upon seeing me.
But they're both gone now. Father for good, burnt and scattered. Mother's brain in much the same state.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Parents
It was later. "Gimme a call when you've got time. It's your brother."
"hallo Martin. What's up?"
Then follows a conversation that even now I'm having trouble placing into perspective. He'd spoken to our mother about my wedding. She'd admitted hanging up on me when I told her. She told him the reason was because of, you know, father and Wolverhampton.
Wolverhampton? What of father in Wolverhampton? When? Martin said she thought we knew … knew what?! The arrest for soliciting for sex in a public toilet, when father got arrested and it was in the papers, and how everyone at church knew it … and how he tried to kill himself with pills but she'd stopped him and told him to pull himself together and how that was just before he died, or a year or two before or so.
My world just collapsed a little. A lot. My childhood. My father. My mother. I know none of it any more. It was all a lie.
… and I was the one who got punished for being queer.
I'm trembling with emotion but I'm not quite sure which one, which ones.
I feel trampled on and free at the same time.
Sent from my iPhone