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Well, it’s May 1st. How. Did. This. Happen? We’re in May??? It seems like it was just last week that it was May, 2022 and my father was finally [temporarily] okay and I went off on my first trip anywhere in I don’t know how many months, driving up north to the Bay Area via Highway 101, staying in an Air BnB in Berkeley for a week.
And here we are now: 2023. Spring. Summer is approaching. Things in my family are feeling wild, anarchic, untethered, especially from an emotional perspective. My mom and I got in a big, explosive fight last week about her drinking; she got drunk a couple nights in a row (see the last diary entry #3) and made some mistakes regarding my father and just generally wasn’t in shape to deal with a potential emergency. Old wounds rose up, around her mental health and her drinking and me being, according to her, a “Nazi” about her and others’ drinking, despite the fact that I am incredibly careful to never mention other people’s drinking because, if anyone, God forbid, is an alcoholic, Lord knows they are sensitive as all Hell. (I am a sober alcoholic so it takes one to know one; the only difference between me and an active alcoholic is my self-awareness and almost 13 years’ worth of self-work and “tool” acquisition .)
Anyway. Before that—about a month ago—my mom and my older half-sister had gotten into a fight about my sister’s refusal to come see our father. My dad is not her biological father; my mom was married at 18, about a year after getting out of the psych ward she’d been in for two years in the late 1960s (READ HER BOOK HERE), had my sister at 19, got divorced around age 20/21, met my father around age 22, got married, and had me much later, at age 32, on New Year’s Eve, 1982, 1:11pm to be precise. (I was a hair under 10 pounds and broke my mother’s tailbone. As if flipping the World the bird from the word GO.)
Point being: My father raised my sister for all intents and purposes from the time she was three, around 1972/73. A long. Fucking. Time. And she lives in Thousand Oaks, an hour-ish south of Santa Barbara. And yet it was me, 3,000 miles away in New York City, my dream town, where I’d spent a year saving up and planning for, who had to come back and caretake for my father. Look, in many ways it makes sense: I’m younger; unmarried; no kids; freelance writer and book editor who can work from anywhere.
When my father was first diagnosed—early July, 2021—it was also only two months after my 16-year-old niece had attempted suicide by plowing her father’s car into a palm tree at 3am going 90MPH. She was lying in Children’s Hospital in Hollywood getting her pelvis reconstructed and on 24-hour suicide watch when my dad got the news from the doctor. So there were complexities. That said: I know my sister. Had everything been normal. Working not at all or only part-time, say, and my niece hadn’t done what she’d done: Even then I’d put the chance of her not helping out with my dad at 98%. It’s just how my sister is. She cares about herself and her immediate clan, meaning her husband (my brother-in-law) and their two kids, my niece and nephew. Anything outside of that purview is questionable.
So anyway: My mom a month ago finally broke and wrote a scathing email (I haven’t read it but I got the summary from both my mom and my sister separately) to my sister and brother-in-law about how they’ve been totally absent (maybe they’ve visited my father 5-6 times the past 18 months-ish?) during those whole process and how my mother and father have always been there for them, have loaned them money, supported them, supported my niece, etc. My sister immediately becomes resentful and starts texting me about what my mom said. But my sister and I are strangers; we’ve literally never had a sincere, genuine conversation in our lives. She’s 13 years older; 53 to my 40.
She thinks (I believe; I tell myself) I am a “loser,” or was one in the past, and doesn’t think much, I imagine, of my lifestyle: Constant moving; being a “writer”; being 40 and unmarried; etc. She thinks you only reach adulthood when you get married and, especially, have kids. This makes me laugh thunderously given the terrible parenting and mismanagement from herself towards her own kids. (She parented almost exactly the way my mother parented us: Domineering, controlling, strict yet coddling, obsessive, neurotic, narcissistic.)
But I digress. My sister started texting me and basically saying all the things about our mother that are really true about herself (my sister): Mom is not self-aware; Mom is narcissistic; Mom has never apologized for things she did in the past; Mom is out of line; etc. And I’m thinking, Yes, that’s all true…of both Mom and you. But how do you tell her that? So in the end I just said, Mom is struggling. She’s losing her husband of 50 years. We can discuss this stuff someday but for now we just need to focus on my father. She agreed. We both know that “conversation” will never happen.
So my mom and I had the big fight about her drinking. Mom and my sister are in a big fight about the nasty email. (Which was probably necessary; somebody had to say it.) My father has been home from his 19-day sojourn in the hospital for 10 days now. He spends all his time in the room, moving at times from the bed to a big white fluffy chair, and then going to the bathroom next door. He’s still of course on oxygen assistance. He hovers between 3-5%. Now he’s using a ventilator at night for better, safer sleep. Lots of coughing. Vomiting. Diarrhea. Since Mom and I are fighting she doesn’t want me staying there. I understand. I feel mixed about it though. A big part of me wants to be there for my father. I stayed the first 5-6 days when my dad first came home, then we got into the fight and I left. Since then I’ve come back maybe three times. I’m going down today. I plan to return three days a week and walk dogs (which I do on the side) when in town.
But a big part of me feels guilty, ashamed, confused, like I should be living there. He can’t have more than a month or two left alive, is my guess. Yet: We’ve been repeatedly wrong about things so many times during this whole year-and-a-half-plus. The man clearly has an iron will. And he has a quality of life, if limited. He hasn’t even gone into the rest of the house; not once. Not the other room (his old room; we switched him into the bigger master bedroom). Not the kitchen. Not the other bathroom (his old one). Not the living room. Not the dinner room. Not the back or front yards. Not the balcony or porches. Nothing. Just that room. And the bathroom next to it. His energy, ironically, is higher than before. He looks better and stronger. The health aid helped him take a shower the other day, and shave. He looks sprightly, even. But he’s weak. Tired. Very thin.
So anyway, in the midst of all of this my niece—now 19 and a freshman in college—tries to kill herself again. Well: She claims it was an “accident.” But 30 Tylenol pills all at once doesn’t seem like an accident. That sounds like intent. Maybe just a “cry for help.” Maybe. She says it was for terrible, nearly debilitating back pain which stemmed itself from her first suicide attempt in May, 2021. She wasn’t thinking straight, she says. Of course my sister being my sister I text her (she never talks on the phone) and she acts like everything’s normal and fine, no big deal. Meanwhile my mom is texting, getting the “real” deal from my sister and is saying my niece is in a locked psych unit and will likely be on a 14-day hold. I text my brother-in-law and he says it’s all bad; terrible in fact, and he doesn’t know what’s going on but he’s on a plane up there as we text.
Madness, people. Pure madness. My sister doesn’t know me or trust me or probably even like me. She shares nothing with me. In June, 2021, when I stayed with her and my brother-in-law right after my niece’s car crash, she didn’t have one single authentic chat with me. Not one. My mom told me about how my sister cried with her on the phone, texted with my mom constantly, etc. But me? Nothing. She’s afraid of me, terrified of my intensity, my sincerity, my sobriety, my desire to be close and get real and talk truth. I think all of that scares the living shit out of her. I am the embodiment of what horrifies her about people. I also have to constantly remind myself that our family on both sides is rife with alcoholism, clinical depression, denial, narcissism, family trauma. And that my sister has my mother’s DNA…but also her own biological father’s DNA, and he’s definitely fairly high up on the Autism spectrum. My sister has always been a very logical, very non-emotional, stoic person. (Like my own father.) I am the polar opposite of this. I am my mother, for better or worse, with all her gaudy, tempestuous drama, emotional intensity, and flair.