The Land of Endless Benderville

She didn't move much, having no patience for locomotion. He had no appetite for 'bon voyage' himself anymore, even if it simply meant stumbling to his precious toilet to "pray" (mixing bowls were now the exclusive receptacle for his reverence). A couple truly in harmony as they drifted into the third decade of marriage. Mom and Dad.

To be fair, each of these two frozen peas in their bath robed pods were crippled with disabilities by that point in their lives, he with the effects of prolonged alcoholism and she the aftermath of a stroke (followed by some sustained hard drinking of her own). As such, getting around was tricky for them, especially as the day wore on and their wheels got greasier. What's one to do when travel turns the stomach? Why take up camp in our living room, of course! Poised catty corner from one another on their respective sofa/caskets, they floated amidst a rich nicotine cloud while swilling their livers into banana cream pie.

Each day, the stench of death wrapped its gums further around those front room walls as I passed through, a kid just crawling into his teens made to play the proactive undertaker, prepping these cadavers perhaps a bit early. As it turns out, 35 years and counting too soon for her; only a handful of months for him. (His banana cream pie exploded relatively quickly thanks to the extreme temperatures of the distilled fuel cooking it; hers continues slower roasting on hops, barley and grape of the vine.) Of course, the difference between the two is just semantics to me: she's been dead nearly as long as he has, the body just hasn't played its part quickly enough for my liking. That reads harsher than it's meant to: I wish the woman no harm but simply yearn for the sort of closure I can only imagine her passing might bring. She's lived in Ireland pretty much since the early 80s and I've had no contact with her since that time. My sister keeps in touch and regularly sends her money even as Mom continues to needle her in ways she thinks are so sly yet are jackhammer brutal, about as subtle as a chainsaw to the chest. I can picture her smirk across 25 years apart as if I'd just seen it five minutes ago. Mother dearest is a hard person to like but challenging to forget.

I must admit I have a burning anger and resentment toward my mother that knows no bounds; that much is patently obvious to you, I'm sure. It goes well beyond the rational and as an adult I should be able to put it behind me. I know rationally that she did the best she thought she could and wasn't equipped emotionally or physically to do more. I'm aware factually that she had one helluva drunk for a husband and life certainly slipped her a mickey in the form of a debilitating stroke smack dab in the prime of her life. But the emotions I feel are nonetheless very real and rawly primal. I am trying to exorcise these demons in therapy - and on the pages of this blog - but they remain fresh as ever some 30 years after they first consciously surfaced (and some 48 years after they began to germinate in the recesses of my psyche).

Anyway, let's get back to the main stage: our living room circa 1975. I've illustrated the details of its ambience elsewhere on these pages so we'll focus instead on the corpses themselves; in particular, let's perform a sort of sociological autopsy, making our 'Y' incision back into time, circumstance, and personality. Of course, with my faulty memory full of mostly holes and well defended barriers, we won't be traveling all that far. Nor will I be reeling off facts like so many baseball box scores. The best I can hope for is "truthiness."

I've written elsewhere that my parents wanted more than anything for us to at least appear to be a successful family. You know the image for the time: Don and Betty Draper, before their divorce. Dad certainly drank like Don (and then some). Mom often dolled herself up Betty-style, if only in case she was seen by the neighbors. Of course, this was in the fifties and sixties when they were still mobile and made the occasional social call, back when they still had visitors over to the house who weren't necessarily also raging alcoholics stopping by for a taste of free booze.

My folks liked to fancy our brood a modern spin on Father Knows Best but internally we were more a precursor to Rodney Dangerfield's family in Natural Born Killers. And by the time the 70s boogied on in things were unraveling despite our best efforts at juggling shiny "we're normal" props to keep outsiders distracted from the spreading chaos. Mom was still socially active in the neighborhood at the dawn of 1972, going so far as to act the role of Den Mother for my Cub Scouts troop. But it was a taut-to-tearing tension-filled facade around a rotting core.

Then June of that year rolled around when the facade came crashing down and the rot permeated through to the surface, smothering us all.

June of 1972 rushed steaming into the Seattle area, unusual for early summer in the Pacific northwest. The first day of the month found my mother spending a number of hours out in the swelter, planting flowers or pruning shrubs; I clearly remember that she was pretty tuckered out that evening. Sometime in the pre-dawn hours of the next morning an errant clot which had formed broke free from its bonds and drifted up the blood stream until it lodged into a main artery neck-high, blocking off a good bit of oxygen to her brain as she slept. No one is sure exactly when this process began or how long her grey matter had been deprived of life's necessities but the condition wasn't noticed until my Dad awoke to her flailing about and turning blue. I remember the ambulance arriving and the subsequent panic I felt as they raced her away. It would be several weeks before she was back home again, after a lengthy stay at Northwest Hospital for physical therapy. She'd go back for several additional extended stays over the next couple of years.

The stroke took its toll on my mother physically (she was partially paralyzed down her right side and had to learn to speak and walk again). Had she stuck with physical therapy she'd probably have made a near complete recovery over time but she preferred to wallow in her misery. Certainly understandable initially, but she never made the swim back up to the surface again. The negative tendencies of her personality that had tinged the edges of her being - selfishness, vindictiveness, paranoia - were magnified by the stroke, making their way front and center. Her positive qualities - humor, streaks of generosity - seemingly disappeared, never to be seen again (well, her humor re-surfaced, curdled into viciously hateful jabs at whomever happened to wander into her sights). She always drank socially but that changed once she came back from the hospital: she took a nose dive into a gallon jug of table vino and has remained forever offshore in this noxious red sea. Well, that's likely not true; probably she's switched swimming pools out of necessity living in the land of the shamrock shakes, plunging instead into the black sea that is Guinness. She doesn't consider this drinking because beer and wine don't count (the mathematics of denial at work; I myself earned a Ph.D in the field). Mom eventually got somewhat better physically, though she seemingly fought any recovery tooth and nail and has herself refused to acknowledge progress. She can walk with a cane, but prefers - in fact, relishes - using a wheel chair. I liken her in this regard to a less funny variation on SCTV's Guy Caballero, who openly used a wheelchair "for respect!"

On the paternal side of the house, my mother's stroke could have sent Dad down one of two paths: 1.) toward the enlightened siren of sobriety so that he could deal with all the additional responsibilities something like this brings to bear on a family or 2.) down the tubes into the Land of Endless Benderville. Wanna guess which direction ol' Dad chose? Well, in the beginning he tried reaching for the summit of sobriety's semblance before very quickly slipping off the crevice into his own personal bottled abyss for good, putting the onus of family obligations on my sister's shoulders while I ran and hid in my head (a very dark cavern indeed but my mind's eye has since grown used to the perpetual twilight within).

My sister was 17 when Mom had her stroke and I was a few months shy of 10. Sis had just finished her junior year of high school and yet was thrust into very adult responsibilities, not that this type of thing was new to her: as soon as she got her driver's license on her sweet sixteenth, Mom started sending her off to go drag Dad out of the bar and drive his ass back home. She was just a kid but was nonetheless the only one in the family with a steady job (working the register after school at a local pharmacy). My sister did her best to live in two worlds, one where she could be a typical early 70's teenager spending as much time out of the house as she could and the other where she acted as a sort of caregiver to parents still in their forties and a nearly psychotic baby brother.

Some parental background:

Dad was born in 1924 to an English mother and Irish father. Like me, he was raised with an older sister. We visited my aunt quite a bit growing up and I both liked and feared her (she had a caustic personality that held nothing back). Dad's father died just six months after his birth, so he ended up being raised by his Mom and step father. Pop apparently had quite the contentious relationship with his "new dad" (so it seems did most everyone else from all I've heard about the SOB). I have vague memories of visiting with my paternal grandmother and her husband once or twice as a kid (we weren't allowed to call him grandfather, which gives you a clue to his makeup). This grandmother (we referred to her as "Seattle Grandma") died when I was fairly young, though I don't recall exactly when. Dad married very young and had twin daughters, a son and a third girl with his first wife. His heavy boozing was already well underway even as a teenager and it left deep scars through this family just as it would the sequel I was to be part of. Marriage take 1 ended in large part because of an affair my father had begun with the woman who would become my mother. Mom and Dad married in June of 1952 and my sister was born 3 years later, followed 7 years hence by yours truly. I wasn't to learn of my half brother and sisters from his first marriage until I was older because of the circumstances surrounding ... well everything.

Mom was born in 1929 to a Norwegian couple who had recently immigrated from off the fjords outside Bergen (in fact, I believe my mother was conceived in the 'old country' though she was born here). Mom had a brother nine years her senior and by all accounts as the baby of the family, she was spoiled by the folks and big bro. I got the feeling my mother was quite embarrassed by her foreign-born parents: she always had a burning need to fit in and they were "different." My maternal grandfather died before I was born and my uncle passed away from a heart attack when I was not yet 3, so I have no first hand memories of them, but word is that both were fun loving guys. I did have a chance to get to know my grandmother as a child and visited her often. She was a very old fashioned woman but very warm. She most definitely disapproved of my father and of my parents' lifestyle in general (drinking, smoking, etc.). She had definite ideas on the concepts of heaven and hell and made it clear to me as to the direction Mom and Dad were headed. This was sort of disconcerting to a seven year old kid and I really didn't know how to take it (I had started formulating my own opinions on matters of religion which didn't jive with grandma's but I wisely kept them to myself around her). She terrified my father on several levels, I think. I'm told that Dad was on a several days in the making bender at a local dive hotel when my mom went into labor with me, so Grandma marched down to this fine establishment and dragged him out and up to the hospital by his ear like a naughty schoolboy. Or at least something to that effect. Grandma died of bone cancer in 1971.

Mom converted to Catholicism not long after the stroke. Actually, this process might have started before then, probably around the time my grandmother died (she would have had a fit over such a thing, a staunch Norwegian Lutheran turned born-again Jehovah's Witness; Catholics were barely above Satan Worshippers in her "enlightened" worldview). My mother was obsessed with all things Irish and the stroke accentuated these compulsions. In the end, once Dad died, she went the rest of the route in this transformation: changing her last name to Finnegan and moving to the far western edges of the Emerald Isle, attempting to live out the stories in her favorite novels. More power to her. Her dream was to become a writer herself, and she did pound out a good chunk of a novel back in the 70s that I imagine is still "in progress." It was a pretty funny read from the pages I had a chance to see, though sadly that was not the intent. Mom had been a "homemaker" most of her life, with some minor bookkeeping work here and there - in fact, she'd never even learned to drive - so how did she/does she make ends meet? Between my father's social security, whatever she's managed to wring from the Irish government, the charity of the families she's "rented" rooms from over the years, and my sister's contribution to the cause, she makes do. The fact that she's still alive at 81 years of age given close to 40 years of chronic alcoholism and chain smoking is a minor medical miracle and demonstrates the sheer power of denial over physics and biology. I learned at the knee of the master.

I realize I've been going on and on here without much of a point. Which means the post fits in with the rest of my "stories." And so, dear reader, with that I bid you adieu.