The northlondonhippy

Archive for December 26th, 2008

On Christ­mas Eve, I found out my mother passed away. She would have been 79 next month.

She died the night of the 22nd, the cause of death was pneu­mo­nia. I’m told she died peace­fully, what­ever that means.

Long time read­ers of my site will prob­a­bly remem­ber that my mother had a severe stroke nearly seven years ago and never recov­ered from it. She was pretty much bed-bound, unable to walk or speak clearly. She could just about feed her­self and she needed help get­ting to the toilet.

More detail than you prob­a­bly need to know.

She went into the hos­pi­tal the pre­vi­ous week, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. Short of her dying, my state­side rel­a­tives had never got in touch before. This wasn’t the first time she’d gone into hos­pi­tal in the last few years and I wasn’t told.

The way I found out was less than ideal.

When I woke up at 8pm on Tues night, I had an email from a cousin I haven’t seen or spo­ken to in over 20 years, plus I’d had a cou­ple of inter­na­tional hang-ups on my landline.

I didn’t have to be a genius to work out the most likely rea­son behind this sud­den contact.

I also didn’t know what to do.

My cousin wanted me to phone him back because he had “some­thing impor­tant” to tell me. Instead, I spent the 45 min­utes before my depar­ture for work, doing what I always do, hav­ing a cof­fee, a cig­a­rette and a shower, before dress­ing and leaving.

I decided to email him back, let­ting him know I was work­ing and not in a posi­tion to phone him. Of course, I could have phoned if I wanted to, but I didn’t. I also told him to feel free to share the news via email and that I was braced for the worst.

Around seven hours later, I received his reply con­firm­ing my sus­pi­cions, that my mother was dead.

She’s not hav­ing a view­ing or a funeral, just a quick cre­ma­tion. It’s the same thing my father did. We’re not big on funer­als in my imme­di­ate fam­ily, but it means I don’t have to go rush­ing off to the states.

I don’t need to go at all.

I was sup­posed to work on xmas eve and xmas, but as you might expect I didn’t. I’m going back on Sun­day, though. What else would I do?

I loved my mother very much, but I let her down badly in the last few years of her life. When she had her stroke, I was in the states for a cou­ple of months, help­ing her and help­ing my father.

And then I came back to north Lon­don and broke apart into tiny lit­tle bits. For around 6 months, I cul­ti­vated a fairly impres­sive cocaine and cognac habit, with some E’s mixed in occa­sion­ally for good mea­sure. Not long after that, I fucked up my pre­vi­ous job.

It drove me nuts that I couldn’t do any­thing mean­ing­ful to help my par­ents in their old age.

And then my father got sick.

He spent the first year after my mother came home from the hos­pi­tal and rehab wor­ry­ing about what would hap­pen to my mother if he got sick. All the worry got him sick and less than a year after that, he passed away from cancer.

I didn’t go to visit.

I couldn’t risk it.

I’m a pussy.

I had planned to visit my mother after my father died, but she gave up her home and moved into a nurs­ing home, near one of her sis­ters. The one that was always the most evil aun­tie imaginable.

I warned my mother that it would all end in tears. It did, when my aunt decided it was all too much for her and she washed her hands of my mother and her finan­cial affairs about 6 months ago. A dis­tant rel­a­tive of my father’s stepped in to take care of things, but it left my mother in an area of the world where she had no one else.

Had my mother stayed put in her home, or chose a nurs­ing home near there, she would have had a con­stant stream of vis­i­tors as she had many friends who lived locally, but instead she gave all that up on my evil auntie’s insistence.

For the few years my mother lived in the nurs­ing home, she would com­plain about my aunt, even telling us that my aunt wouldn’t let her see cur­rent bank state­ments. I can’t prove any­thing, but my mother said she was nick­ing dosh.

Nice.

Just about every rel­a­tive I have, stole some­thing from my mother. One of my half-brother’s took money from her account and never returned it, other’s took keep­sakes and any­thing of value.

My younger brother went to see my mother, once, while she was in the nurs­ing home and my evil aun­tie made cer­tain his trip was mis­er­able. She treated him badly, but worse, treated my mother badly and dis­re­spect­fully in front of him.

Old evil aun­tie made a point of telling my mother, in front of my brother, that she threw away every pho­to­graph she found in my mother’s house when she was clear­ing it out in prepa­ra­tion for the move to the nurs­ing home. Every photo from my child­hood, plus 8mm home movies from the 60’s and 70’s was casu­ally tossed into a skip.

Imag­ine if some­one did that to your child­hood. What would you do?

What could I do?

This evil fuck­ing cunt took over my mother’s life and made her mis­er­able, though the last time my brother spoke to my mother, she said my aunt had vis­ited and tried to make peace. How nice for evil cunt auntie.

I know I’m not the only one with a trag­i­cally fucked up fam­ily, but now that my mother is gone, so is my very last con­nec­tion to them. Its just my brother and I, a cou­ple of middle-aged orphans from a deeply dys­func­tional family.

The other bless­ing to come out of all this is my mother is now no longer a pris­oner of her dam­aged and with­ered body. For nearly 7 years she’s been trapped inside a phys­i­cal form that wouldn’t and couldn’t bend to her will.

The night after my mother had her mas­sive stroke, the hos­pi­tal phoned my father and told him my mother was in a coma and couldn’t breathe on her own. They needed to put her on life-support or she would die.

My mother had an up-to-date liv­ing will, that clearly stated in such cir­cum­stances, no heroic efforts should be made to sus­tain her life, if her prospects for a full recov­ery were nil.

My father, des­per­ately afraid and ill-prepared to live life with­out my mother, took the chicken-shit option and told them to go ahead and put tubes down her throat, for breath­ing and feed­ing. He went com­pletely against her wishes.

My father was in denial; at the point, he wouldn’t and couldn’t accept that my mother wasn’t going to recover. Instead his fear and inabil­ity to deal with the truth of the sit­u­a­tion, con­demned my mother to an exis­tence I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

He thought he was doing the right thing and for months, he con­tin­ued to insist that my mother walked into the hos­pi­tal on her own and dammit, she would walk back out.

She never took another unaided step in her life.

When I read my cousin’s first email, I’d been awake around 30 sec­onds. It was deliv­ered to my iPhone and I saw it just after I turned the alarm on it off. In my bleary-eyed first read­ing of it, an image imme­di­ately flashed into my head.

It was both of my par­ents, together. And they were smiling.

I don’t believe in the after­life, but I knew in that instant that my mother really had finally joined my father and if I could build a heaven for the two of them, I surely would.

Rest in sweet peace, Mom.