I haven't written, let alone posted anything in a long while. I've written a couple of babbling idiocies, but nothing I'd be willing to share publicly. Not much of anything cohesive since December 30th, when my mom passed. She's screaming at me now, I know it, telling me to get off my ass and compose. She knew the therapeutic value of writing, though she apparently didn't do much of it herself. It could be that that's what drove her over the edge; an inability to excise her demons on paper. Perhaps she is warning me of the off-ramp to insanity that looms when one has no way to talk about stuff.
As much as I hate to say, I allowed my mother to stay isolated. For a long time, I would ask her about church, or going to the senior center, or just some way of getting out, every time I picked her up. After a couple of years, I'd only ask once a week; by the end it was rarely. I don't know what I could have done; she didn't want to do anything but exercise class, commissary, hair appointment. Tuesday, Wednsday, Thursday, the routine never varried, until I got the Wednsday's off when she quit going to exercise class. After that it was commissary every other Tuesday, and hair on Thursday, plus any of a hundred different appointments I'd find out about when I didn't show up to take her to an appointment she'd never told me about. OK, I'm rambling already, admittedly there are a few left-over guilt issues, but it was totally her choice.
You know there's trouble when Jackie wasn't talking. Dad used to say, "She could talk the paint off a fire plug if it would stay still long enough." Mom was a talker. That was her release. One never had a "short" phone call from her, nor can many recall a time when she wasn't yapping about something or another. I'm not "disrespecting" her, she was a talker. If you didn't know that, you never spent five minutes next to her in any number of lines, gatherings, etc. The woman talked. Until 2009, anyway. After Dad died, she chose to give into depression, and really lost her desire to live. It just took three years nine months for the darkness to swallow her.
See, that's grim. It's stuff they used to use on "Twilight Zone," or something. A tale that ends in a lonely death, made possible by the main character's choices, and we never see it coming. Never.
I've had a recent brush with "the dark side," a misunderstanding turned ugly, and I yearned for an easy way out. Fortunately, I am married to the most wonderful woman, who prayed for me, and listened when I said things that cut her deeply, but who stood by me, and helped get us together to fix a minor problem. I know when that dark-half is wrestling for control; I just have to find a thought, or a memory to grab onto, and pull myself out of the slime of self-pity. Some times it takes a while to find something, because I'm an idiot, because it always turns out to be one thing, one person. Some would like it if I said it was Jesus; others would prefer me to say Mary, but I'm here to tell you that one is the same as the other, because they both lead me to the same place.
No conversation about deity can happen with out me thinking of Mary, and vice versa. It's usually Mary that I grab onto. She's weathered enough of these storms to be a pro.
I have to write, or face losing my, oops, dang, *sound of marbles rolling off*, ummm, I'll have to, ummm, get back to you, OK?
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