Coping

well, it's been over a week now.
it pretty much consumes my thoughts... trying to make sense of it, trying to understand.
it becomes real when i remember the words - Diana, your mother passed away today.
I hear them over and over and over in my head. And I remember the immediate disbelief, that it can't be, must be a mistake.....WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE PASSED AWAY TODAY????????

i've been trying to go along with life as 'normal' - have had dogs to watch, things to do.. and now I'm beginning to plan our trip to Indiana to see Larry, etc.
and even that is fraught with conflicting feelings... this trip that I had indeed already been planning for this year, sometime this spring or early summer in fact, to see mom, to hopefully have a good visit, and spend some time when she Wasn't in the hospital, as the last 2 times I saw her/went to visit, she was.
but now here we are, Michael and I both planning to drive out there, spend a full week, to spend time with Larry, maybe help him around the house some, bringing one of my dogs along....
this is exactly what mom so wanted me to do, and what i Wanted to do, for a long time.
i had just about resigned myself to the fact that I just wasn't going to get her here to visit me in RI, to see my home, where we've lived for 7 years now, to meet all my pets, to go to the shore, maybe even see a Broadway show in NYC.... so many things, so much to share, so much to ask, to tell.....
of course, $$ hasn't been great for either of us for awhile. literally living paycheck to paycheck doesn't allow for making vacation plans, or even a long weekend away, with everything fucking thing so fucking expensive. yes, i chose to live 1,000 miles away, but.....

but somehow this year I was going to figure it out and get there. i had just told her about a month ago, so she could mentally begin preparing for it, and give her something to look forward to.

now, it's a different story altogether.
i haven't even begun to process how it's going to feel to drive into my hometown, to walk into my childhood home, and know she's not there. she's not anywhere. she's not at the hospital for me to go visit. she is, in fact, in a cardboard urn, next to 2 of her beloved pets, Babi and ChooChoo, on a table in the living room. her body, her essence, all that made my mom who she was..... it's forever gone, leaving only memories, and i suppose a few mementos.
i have no other family.
she was it. the last of my blood relatives.
that i speak to anyway.
Popo died in 1980, at about age 62. Momo in 1994, at about age 74. Dad in 1995, at age 55. My dad's parents died in like 1987 and 1997 or something... oddly enough, my great-grandmother, Sally Hazel Williams, just died in 2000, at about 1 month shy of turning 100 years old.
i have no siblings.
i do have many many cousins, and aunts and uncles, but i am not in contact with any of them. with the exception of one family, my cousins Patty Donna and Michael, who i just lost touch with - the rest of them are by choice. My mother's side of the family betrayed her many many times. And my father's side completely betrayed me after his death, and I will never forgive.

so, for me, my mother was it, my only family.
and now, i have to absorb this fact, that she has left me. she just passed away, literally, in her sleep, with no notice, no goodbyes, no...nothing. just, gone. here on minute, and gone the next, without a word.
so yes, i feel like an orphan.
at the moment, i don't want to dishonour my mother by talking about how i've actually felt alone for a very long time now, with neither she nor my father actually parenting me the way i ever wanted or needed. because i know she did her best. she really did, with what she knew, and what she was capable of, she did the best she could muster.
i have no doubts that she loved me beyond measure.
i do have doubts that she knew "I" loved her beyond measure.
and it's those reasons that i do and will hold bitterness, that so many people utterly and completely hurt and betrayed and scarred my mother that ultimately, she stopped being able to recover.

Here's the big family secret - and frankly, I wish everyone who ever knew my mom could read this and know, so perhaps they'd have a better understanding of how fucked up her life was:

My father, who she married at age 18, and who she adored and worshipped and would have done ANYTHING for - he had an affair with my grandmother. My mother's mother. WHILE my grandmother was living with my parents. Literally behind my mother's back. And not just a one-time fuck either. A full blown actual affair.

This happened, apparently, shortly before I was born. She's actually told me the story many times, I'd asked her to repeat it over and over during the years, because for some reason my brain can't contain the details completely. The years and details and timing gets muddled. But I do know the facts very clearly.
On the advice of her psychiatrist at the time, she first told me when I was about 13. She was severely depressed, on sick leave from her horrid awful fucking factory job at General Motors (who can fucking blame her for that, the despicable working conditions she and everyone else had there)... I didn't know this at the time, but she had already tried to commit suicide a couple times by then. I think she tried ultimately 3 times. I did know she spent a considerable amount of time in the mental hospital. I suppose my babysitters at the time could fill in some of those hazy facts for me, as I stayed with them for long terms. And I was shuffled off to visit my father and grandparents during the summers, so perhaps it was then. I don't recall.

But she told me, so that I would have some sort of understanding why she was so sad, and had such trouble coping with life. It was the incestuous affair of her beloved mother and her husband that did her in. Not that my grandfather was a violent alcoholic. Not that my grandmother was already a harlot, having wanton affairs because my grandfather was injured in WWII and she had "needs". Not even that she suspected he was already cheating on her with other women. Which of course he was.
Momo told her one drunken night to assuage her guilt. She couldn't hold it in any longer and HAD to tell mom. That bitch. She should've taken it to her grave.

Of course, as a young girl, I had great difficulty processing this, as I dearly loved all people involved to that point.
Before learning this, I'd already suffered another great loss - the demise of my mother's second marriage, when I was aged 2-7. He too was an alcoholic, and while she remained in love with him til her dying day to some degree, she divorced him, and therefore I lost access to him and his family. Until my mother's death, I still referred to him as "Dad", because that's who he was to me. But part of my decision to not have any funeral service for mom was because I didn't want of these fucking people who hurt and betrayed my mother over the years - Bob Vance, Elaine Wall and all the others who know damn well who they are - didn't want them waltzing in to offer their condolences when they couldn't offer my mother one fucking word of anything while she was still here, and she surely could've used anyone's kind words or acts of kindness. Instead, she got shit on over and over again.

So... she told me this big revelation, and swore me to secrecy. I was to never EVER utter a word of this to either Momo or Dad, esp. Dad, because if he found out I knew, she feared he would literally hunt her down and kill her. And, I believed her. And frankly, I still don't doubt that could've happened. If my dad did anything, he lived in utter and complete hypocrisy and secrecy.
I still spent summers with both of the culprits. Mom didn't want to deny me relationships with them, even though they hurt her so badly.
If I had been in her shoes, I would've cut them both off from the git-go - too fucking bad for them. Them's the breaks!

Just to wrap this cute little story up - believe it or not, it wasn't Momo's confession that ended my mother's marriage to dad. Someone called mom up and told her to go to such and such house, because dad's car was in front. She'd already suspected he was whoring around the entire town of Anderson, and she finally was going to confront him. She drove over, walked in the house, and literally found them in bed together. She told me that despite all the things he'd done, it was not until that very moment, that second, that she immediately fell out of love with him and never looked back.
Their divorce was final when I was 11 months old.
Six months after that, she began working at General Motors and did so for the next 22 years.

She deserved so much better.

She did get better, in a way, when she met and married Larry. I was 18 when they began dating. About to go off to college, so for 13 years, it had just been the two of us, and our dogs. My mother then, the woman she was then, is something I will talk about later. That was the woman I held in my memory, who I wanted back, as she later began to ebb deeper and deeper into her depression. She lost sight of who "Carol" was, and that made me sad for both of us. She lost her essense, any wholeness she may have held onto.
But when she met Larry, she had just broken up with a man she dated for 4 years, who I thought she would marry. But guess what??!! HE betrayed her completely too - the entire time they dated, and when I say dated, I mean he was a REGULAR part of our lives and us in his life, with his parents, his grown children, his grandchildren.... all those years, he had another life with another woman who he ended up marrying after he left my mother. Thanks for nothing Bob Richardson! Sorry you had to wither away into death from Alzheimers. Not! Fuck you.

Larry however brought laughter back to my mother. Our house was tiny, and my room was right next to the bathroom, sharing the wall. He came over one night to help her re-tile the shower/bathtub. Maybe even put up wallpaper too, I don't recall. But I was in bed, on a school night, but they were keeping me awake with their laughing. I hadn't heard her laugh in years. YEARS. He made her laugh. And he made her happy. He worshipped and adored her - I was told he crushed on her for many years before this... and she had finally found someone to give her the love and respect she had done without her whole life.
So, for that, and so much more, I am eternally grateful to them. They dated 4 years, then marrying in 1988.... This April 17, 2010, would have been their 22 wedding anniversary.
Larry and I, and his family, will be together on that day, to celebrate her life, and their life together.

I know mom did have some friends.. most of them via email in these last years. And I am sorry for their loss, as I know what a great friend she could be. I am sorry for Larry's loss, as they were joined at the hip and so needed each other. And for Larry's family, who, despite her prickliness at times, considered her part of their family, their 'grandma'.... she loved the 3 grandchildren and would tell me how they gave such good hugs.

...... to everyone else who ever knew mom, and hurt, left, betrayed or spoke ill of my mother -
FUCK. YOU. Don't call me, don't say a fucking word. Don't bother Larry. He doesn't deserve your fakeness.
She needed you, she trusted you, she loved you... and what did she get in return. FUCKED OVER. So, FUCK YOU.

Was that clear?
Do I sound bitter? Yeah, I'm fucking bitter. You're goddamned right I am.
My mother got a shitty raw deal out of a LOT of her too-short life. And you fucking people know who you fucking are. And I'm including the vast majority of her goddamned fucking DOCTORS in Anderson, Indiana. You ruined my mother. And fuck you too.
You know what you did, how you treated her, and I hope you sit with this and it haunts you the rest of your days.