[If you’re new here, the backstory is this: I grew up with a very difficult, damaging, verbally abusive mother, estranged myself from her for nearly 8 years, then returned in 2017 upon realizing I could not live with myself if I didn’t try to reconnect before she died. I wouldn’t say there was a “reconciliation” but there was something of value in my return. Her health, never great, took a dramatic downturn in July 2021, six months after I’d left my marriage, and while I was in the midst of other hard emotional transitions. I ended up having to travel out to California four times in the second half of the year, and another four times in 2022. At first, I first bewildered, distraught, and enraged all over again, and found myself caught as both her primary helper and the person directly in the line of fire again for her fear, paranoia, and belligerence. I hit a terrible low point this past fall. Then…something changed. I somehow snapped out of it, all at once. The first two parts of this extemporized story can be found here (Part One)and here (Part Two).]
TRANSCRIPT:
Look at me! I’m home.
And I'm here to present part 3 of "An atheist gins up some Grace,” and wrap up this part of what has turned out to be a fascinatingly multi-part and reverberant story that will carry me through this blog, both Tuesdays and Fridays for the rest of the year, and might even land me in something called a "B....(letter, letter) K."
I'm working on a project, that's all I'm going to say.
But for now, the end of this three-part story—which I could not have predicted when I started it way back when—and I talked about this wild and weird and meaningful-seeming therapy session in which I seem to have let go of a lot of built-up rage and resentment and grief, by labeling certain small hits as mini-traumas; by insisting I was DONE with certain kinds of hurtful situations in my life; by getting a beautiful, forgiving acceptance and affirmation from my therapist; and then somehow over the course of the next few days, finding that I had shouted away some demons. So to speak.
And when I began that story, I had no idea that this is how it was going to end.
So, to wrap it up I'm going to read what I wrote in an email to a friend of mine who asked how I was doing.
This is a couple weeks ago.
"I'm actually fine even though it has been one of the roughest periods of my life, a full month plus away from home, although at least it was in beautiful Southern California. I went to fix a banking problem and to check in with my mother's doctor, then I realized she was not being adequately cared for in her assisted living facility, then I found her a new small place to live”—a beautiful facility, quite expensive, but she could have afforded it, a six-bed Board and Care Facility with a cute dog and a cat and lovely people that she would have been… it would have been nice...
But then she got pneumonia and ended up in a skilled nursing facility and then we expected for her to move after she cleared the pneumonia out to the new place. But then one thing happened after another...
The upshot is that after many weeks, she's now in steep decline and will have to spend the rest of her days, weeks, months… I don't know?… in the Skilled Nursing Facility. Actually, it's the place she needs to be. She is safe. She's getting appropriate medical care and they're treating her nicely and it's not how she wanted to go. She wanted to die in her bed, in her sleep peacefully like we all dream.
Maybe not all of us but...
This is not so bad in comparison.
“But I spent the month making and unmaking plans, dealing with one fuck-up and contingency after another, extending my hotel and car rental one time, two times, ultimately five times."
Yeah and I canceled and re-booked my flight home four times. It was exhausting.
"My mother is greatly diminished, really just on death's door and I had to come home anyway."
I did that about a week before Christmas.
“Yet, I'm in this unbelievably strong and centered place. I think part of it is that I'm two years out since leaving my marriage and the empowerment phase has set in."
I said that to this friend in particular for a reason. She's one of four people I happen to know right now--men and women--who are going through something similar to what I went through two years ago, which is deciding to unwind a marriage that was no longer working well and hadn't been for a while and did not seem fixable and I didn’t do it in full confidence. I was afraid. I hedged, I was not at all cavalier. We tried to work things out.
But it was finally me who made the decision and it was scary, but two years hence I can say it was the right decision. Not just for what it has done for the three of us—my ex and my son and I all get along pretty well--much better than we were when we were all living under the same roof. So, it's worked out in the end for the best.
We're all growing and changing in good ways.
But more to the point, the reason it's a part of this story is that I now understand that I had to make that change so that I would be forced to face the death of my mother entirely in solitude. And have a reckoning about it with myself in order to be the effective, nimble, agile, flexible, responsive, parent of my parent and also to feel genuine love and care for her...such as I have not felt. Maybe not ever.
And that's what came of whatever that weird moment was. This huge capacity to be forgiving and loving. And also to spend the month mostly by myself. My sister was out for a few days but it was mostly by myself. Had a few social events in between here and there. And the further reckoning was realizing how much I'm like her. And how some of the mistakes I've made in my life, some of the decisions I've made, some of the impulsive behaviors I've regretted, some of the hurtful things I've done...or the hurts I've allowed into my life… are right out of the Maxwellin Asirvatham playbook.
God damn.
So in facing those things, over the course of this year and a half about myself, and deciding, Well, I'm not going to go back to the days when I hated myself. I don't feel that way anymore. I like who I am. If I like who I am and I still know I can do some fucked-up things, all right, well...we do fucked up things.
We do fucked up things sometimes, especially if our role models were doing fucked-up things all the time!
But the point is that I came to a place of forgiveness for her that coincided with my forgiveness for myself,
and also, an abrading, like in a good sense, like a peeling off of another layer of bullshit.
So the Grace is really also a dose of Truth.
I'm grateful for it.
I did not like leaving my mother in the state she's in. Laboring to breathe, sometimes alert, sometimes not alert. It could be any day. It could be months from now. I may be there. I may not. She's safe. She has accepted that *that's* where she is. This is a woman who's never had dementia, although she does have memory loss, and she's gotten confused at times. She hasn't really lost orientation. She still knows, basically, what day of the week it is, and who's President and stuff like that.
So yeah.
In that way she's more oriented then a lot of the people who will be celebrating their almost coup today. The anniversary. Two-year anniversary already? Oh shit. I've lost track of the years.
In any case, I am somehow in a place of grace and effectiveness and reconciliation…reckoning…revival...and totally grateful for it all.
What a privilege.
What a privilege.
An atheist gins up some Grace, Part 3 of 3