I can be proud, too proud at times. There are skills I know I have and do well with but life can take me down a few notches when it kicks my ass and then I realize I had deficits in that skill set all along. My problem is losing the sight of the forest through the trees. If you’re in a situation long enough, a rut or whatever, you don’t noticed the insidious creep it does, like ivy slowly growing up your legs to fully engulf you in leaves eventually, even blinding you.
I do notice it too late though at times. Usually when I have been freed of it and months go by and I look back, with a now clear eyes and see just how thoroughly saturated I was by it and how it ruled my thoughts, decisions and happiness.
**
I’ve spoken about it before, the life long mental illness my Mom had to endure before they managed, rather late, to control with better meds.
I used to think that her illness never effected me as a kid but it did because even then, say at 7 or 8, I refused to invite friends into my house lest they witness...her! It wasn’t that she thought she was Napoleon but depression has it’s outer effects, like never cleaning the house for weeks on end. I wasn’t about to let anyone figure out our family dynamics with a personal tour of the place.
Everyone, families, maintain a public face and it better bespeak of normality
So I hid her.
I did admit to myself that she effected me after my father’s death. He was her support and it vanished when he died. She now had to run this household and she was in no condition to do it.
My brother, who couldn’t stand her fled as much as he could from the house (physically and psychologically) and that left me, at 14, to be Dad.
This included gathering the mail, sorting the bills, forging her name on checks to pay for these bills and doing a shit job of cleaning the house because I was at 14 boy. I kept an eye out for growing piles of laundry and became more aware of the other household duties she could not care less for.
Due to her depression, which makes you push the world away and any friends, she leaned on me for support as she had no one else. I also did free therapy sessions that lasted to 2AM as we sat in the kitchen as she spelled out her gloom and related worry about everything. So, I countered that with my 14 years of wisdom that amounted to nothing than a pep talk.
This went on for years in one form or another and I propped her up when she fell into deeper despairing episodes. I did know being “nurse” could cramp my life sometimes but I had no clue as to the extent at the time. I was deep within the forest with no perspective. Also, I had grown up under these conditions so it was always like this. If she were stable and calm for a few months, these were the “good” time.
In 1994 to 1996 I was working and going to school full time, both. I worked or was in school seven days a week for two years straight. If anyone ever accuses me of being lazy, I ought to take a hockey stick upside their head! Pile upon that caring for her as the breast cancer and emphysema grew worse. She had been diagnosed with both in ‘94.
I know the following to be true as I lived it. Those with chronic or terminal illness have a tendency to ramp up the worst of their personality traits. Life becomes harder with no hope of resolution and that stress can make them lash out to the ones nearest to them. So, I ate any reaction to that knowing why it happened.
Her diseases progressed fairly rapidly and I did what I could and then one day it was over, the illness took her.
**
I took a week off from work and school to manage the funeral, line up a lawyer, dig up documents and that week raced by. Those seven days later, on a Saturday, I returned to school, getting back to my regular life.
It was 5AM, Saturday, and I had the stereo on, listening to it as that would probably be my only twenty minutes I would have to myself that day. I had on Paul Simon’s “Live Rhymin’ when the CD player cued up El Condor Pasa, which I have heard a thousand times before without much reacting to it in any way.
There is a line in it in which, for the first time, I realized how plaintively Simon sung it.
Away, I'd rather sail away
Like a swan, that's here and gone.
A man gets tied up to the ground
He gives the world, its saddest sound
Its saddest sound.
Not to rip off Marlon Brando from Apocalypse Now but I swear I “was shot with a diamond bullet straight in the forehead” when I heard those lines. The thought that hit me, with full realization, was that I was free of her, her illnesses and everything that had gone before. That the whole situation was undoubtedly over and the song, which instantly became shockingly relevant to me, was like Moses’s coming off the mountain with a message from God. Hyperbole? Over-stated? I don’t think by much, because I was struck at how the song suddenly made sense now. And it was right.
Another thought came: “God..that’s a mercenary thing to think, you’re supposed to put others before yourself.” No, I did have a desire for myself the whole time I played Dad to her.
“Away, I’d rather sail away…” I had to admit I had that awfully quiet wish to be done with it all but it had been buried in the forest of my continual “nursing others” career. Looking back, with hindsight, I didn’t recognize then how another life could so permeate my own and control how I could live it. It’s amazing what you will do for other people, even if you have just a shred of empathy.
I didn’t get my entire life back that Saturday though, having been freed of it all.
There is an interesting thing that happens to land when it’s had a mile thick glacial ice sheet sit on it for 20,000 years or so, the weight of it pushes the land down hundreds of feet. When it melts, the land rebounds, slowly, but it rises again. Norway, Sweden, to this day, are still rising up inch by inch as measured by satellites.
When summer arrived several months after her death, I had been rising too the whole time w/o really trying. Slowly at first and then with greater speed as time went on. I had lost weight without putting too much effort into it. I bought slimmer white pants to wear! I was cruising around the state in my convertible and one night, had met Roberta at the Last Call Saloon. With me in tow, she returned me to the beaches and Block Island and spent some syrupy humid summer nights on the Scituate dam, her and me trying to see aurora in the sky. She literally lived around the corner of that dam in fact. That area is very dense with stands of pine trees which suffuse the air with that piquant earthy scent. I swear that fragrance can get into your clothes with time. I being raised in a city, smelling that Scituate air by the dam and her home was remarkable to me.
If my nose picks up that scent today somewhere, I flashback back to those nights.
By the end of that autumn, I had picked my degree from J&W and started a new career. I had emptied this house of the past and made it my own. To top it all off, in a weird (perhaps lucky?) astronomical portent, the Hale-Bopp comet had returned and was visible for months. I knew things were changing for the better.
El Condor Pasa didn’t change me. I did that. But the song just woke me up and quite surprisingly too. In a short time after, I bolted to freedom like a slave running north.
There are a few other songs that have struck me acutely when their relevance, or rather, my awareness of a connection became apparent.
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