In the presence of evil

While my husband was in the hospital, I asked my sister in law to email the woman who handles the church bulletins to add him to the long term prayer list. Linda cc'ed me on the mail so I know it was done, but it did not appear in the bulletin two weeks after the request was made ( Now when Pop was alive the bulletin was my job and any parishoner who was ill or having a tough time was an automatic listing no one had to ask.).
After services last Sunday, I approached this woman, and kindly asked her to add his name to the list. Her response was " Stop getting up in my sh&*! Step off before I have to hit you." She began to hurl invectives at me about things I knew that the woman knew nothing about. Her own nature is sarcastic and passive aggressive, not psychotic. I was not talking to someone, but it wasn't her. I think I was in presence of evil and I stood my ground refusing to step off while remaining polite while she ran away from me and out of the church, still yelling about me and my family.

Message in a Bottle

Back in May, I sent a paper hand back into past to retrieve what has been forgotten or misremembered before it was too late. Much of my life has been about too late, and the power of forgiveness as well as the pain of holding a grudge too tight to your heart that it breaks.

Today, my answer came in a plain white envelope with all too familiar handwriting even after close to thirty years of angry silence. Instead of answers, I am left with more questions than answers. I still don't know my father's side of the story as to why he left us other than infidelity and noncommunication were the causes. Since I have heard accusations that my mother cheated on my father with our babysitter, who was our minister's son, and with my father's friend, who later became my stepfather for a while, during the divorce and my mother's claims that she found letters that he cheated on her with his students and the woman who became his second wife afterwards, I have no clue as to what happened. I need details. I feel I have the right to know the truth or at least everyone's version of it.

Their divorce and the aftermath bent and shaped my psyche. I can lay my fear of abandonment at the feet of those who abandoned me first, my parents.

A month from tonight

    During the past two years, I have made  more than friends, but soul sisters  from the women I have been writing and workshopping with at Rowan. A month from tonight, it comes to an end. 

    My regalia including my black gown with batwing sleeves and a brown and gold hood sit in a dresser drawer waiting for their chance to be worn. I will receive my honor cords next week along with my pin as a new member of Alpha Epsilon Lambda, the honor society for graduate and professional students. I am moving from Masters Candidate to having a Master of Arts Degree in Writing.

    I already feel us pulling apart as the time draws nearer. Kellie lives in Cape May and can't get up here as much as she wants. Jaimie and her fiancé are getting ready to move to Mercer County after they graduate. I don't want everything to  change again.

    When I graduated twenty years ago from high school, I felt none of this loss. I hated high school and couldn't wait to leave. I was dating a twenty-one year old at the time which seemed so old to me even though I was barely seventeen. I was spending more time with his friends then my own friends who had deserted me by then. Not because of Chris, but because of my brother. He was dating one of them. When she broke up with him, the group broke up with me so she didn't have to see him again. Going friendless to my senior prom even with a date was lonely. I couldn't wait to leave. I didn't even go down the shore afterward. We went right home.

    I am not going to my high school reunion, because I have nothing left to say. There is only one person I would talk to from that time in my life and she won't be there.

    Leslie was my best friend, but circumstances beyond our control pulled us apart. When I wrote about it as an undergrad to show that the struggle for the civil rights can be reduced to the individual level and that national and institutional efforts have hindered rather than helped. My professor disagreed and gave me a B+ which I rebutted to an A-. The only time I rebutted a  grade, and did so privately.

    Leslie and I have not spoken in seventeen years and there is not a day goes by that I don't think of her. Does she ever think of me?

While I have been gone

    I have spent a great deal of emotional and physical energy on my relationship with my mother. In part, because it is the subtext of my master's thesis. The rest is that I currently facing a life without her.

 

    Hours after celebrating her 68th birthday with us back in January, she woke up unable to breathe. We called 911 and she was rushed to my local emergency room. I was pushed out of her room when she crashed the first time. The doctors and nurses stabilized her and she was admitted to ICU. At the time, they thought she had had a heart attack. They found a blockage and did a heart catheterization which revealed she needed an angioplasty to clear a 90 percent blockage.

    She was transferred to Cooper up in Camden where they did the angioplasty, put in three stents and everything according to them was fine. They released her the next day and in her words- " She lost her mind on 295." She had developed an infection while she was there and they released her anyway. By the time I got home from work, she was running a 104 degree fever. By the time I got her readmitted to my local under her cardiologist's service, she was out of her head and according to the ER docs becoming septic. they pushed heavy duty antibiotics and tried to get a helicopter from Cooper to bring her back. They called my husband  to sit with me after he arranged for close family/friends to watch our son.

    Cooper did send an ambulance, and we drove from Salem to Cooper Hospital in Camden in 15 minutes. They admitted her right to ICU, which must  have been modeled after Bedlam in London for the dark and gloomy chaos that rules that overcrowded space. Once she was out of ICU, John had her sent back to Salem for the rest of her recovery. From there she stepped down to a nursing home, and came back to us.

    Mom and I were supposed to go up to Outcalt to check on her house and get some things when she decided she couldn't wait and asked John to take her.

    They had stopped at the Shop Rite in Spotswood when she started to hemorrhage from where they went in for the angioplasty. John wanted to drive her immediately to Old Bridge Regional's Emergency Room. She wanted to call 911 and get an ambulance. John drove her to the hospital. ER docs there said that if she had waited for an ambulance she would have bled out.

She was there for another week while they got her hemoglobin back up and everybody is trying to tell me everything is fine except she she cannot live two hours away from family anymore.

I tell Mom that she cannot live with me, but she can live near me within walking distance.

    Then all this emotional bilge pours out of her. She falsely accused me of stealing my grandmother's china  and silver. She says nasty and hateful things about my husband, myself and my son. She tell me that she would rather live with my brother in VA.

I called my brother and told him to come get her. My sister in law came up and took her back the end of February. She never even acknowledged my son's fourth birthday.

    From then until yesterday, I have not spoken to my mother. She had not called me nor I her. My husband convinced me that in the spirit of holiday I should call her and wish her a Happy Easter as she would probably be in C-ville with my brother and his in laws.

    Frank answered and told me how my mother was doing so much better since Mom came to live with them. I ended the call politely before I said something spiteful.

    Half hour later my mother called me using her cell phone and told me the truth without telling me the truth. The stats she read off to me tell me that her heart is in fact failing. She is dying of Congestive Heart Failure and there is nothing to be done. She will not see me graduate with honors from Rowan. She will not be at my son's baptism scheduled for June. She is slowly and carefully being edited out of my life entirely.

    I am struggling to maintain homeostasis while I finish my thesis and go through recontracting. And you wonder why I have been quiet.