how raw?
i wrote this with a straight face, as straight as i can manage anyway
This is a story about my mother who is disintegrating, and how it is, watching it happen. This writing contains no art, no metaphors, no style. This writing is a bone with all the meat, fat, gristle, cartilage cleaned off as if by sharp teeth and a hungry mouth. That bone is cracked open, and this is the marrow I sucked out of it for you; taste and see that it is good.
расплинути
My mother isn’t dying but she’s disappearing. In some ways I think I should be used to this; wasn’t she missing in some way, always, all my life? Of course this is different — where she would disappear before it was mainly physical, leaving too early for work, coming home and then after furiously making some kind of dinner barricading herself behind schoolwork that always needed doing until well past anyone’s bedtime, repeat repeat repeat. She is disappearing from herself now, her body is too weak to jump in a car and drive off like she used to do sometimes when everything was making her feel crazy, saying I might be back later I don’t know yet. In any case she can’t drive anymore.
obliviate
‘I don’t want to be alive anymore, I want to die’ she says, sometimes sadly, and sometimes almost girlishly, as though we are sharing confidences about our crushes. The blackest part, the bleakest part, the funniest part is that in this family we live into our nineties easily, only bullets knives or bare bloody hands take any of us out sooner. We’ve tested the hypothesis thoroughly, please take my word for it.
She’s taken to sleeping a lot, too much really - multiple naps through the day like a cat. If I recognise it it’s only because I’ve done it too, it’s a way of making time pass. What do you do when you are served something inedible but cut it into smaller pieces until you can choke them down.
заспати
I like to pretend that I have done a good portion of the grieving already, as though there is a definite portion of it which can be tackled like the pre-reading for some big assignment. What do you do with something inevitable but cut it into smaller pieces until you can choke them down.
Theres no point in talking to my father about the sleeping, he doesn’t see it as a problem. She’s fed, clean, and if she wants to sleep why push it? If she refuses to leave the apartment, why push it? If she is willing to sit in front of a television which plays interminable reruns of the 70s and 80s all day every day, why push it? If she’s happy to sit there in the same spot on the couch daily cutting paper into smaller and smaller pieces, why push it? I remember the visit when I saw her doing that for the first time. ‘I’m working, I’m so busy, I have so much to get through’ — the familiar refrains of my childhood. I don’t go over much anymore, I have her come over to me instead.
I don’t imagine I am fixing anything, or making it better. If I really concentrate I can almost remember a time when I thought either of those were things I could do. When she was first diagnosed I read up on treatments, therapies, what’s available in our area, what supports there are, and, well — in this family sometimes we love by doing everything, too much for a person, and sometimes by doing nothing at all. So she stays on the couch, or sleeps, and sleeps and sleeps.
срамота
I’m trying to find some kind of in between space where I love just enough, and I express the enough by making her comfortable and finding things I think she will like. I let her have whatever she wants, though she claims not to want anything. In this family we know that there is no point in wanting anything since you are almost certainly not going to get it. Fuck that, I say, and I really do say fuck that. I’m as coarse as you like and vulgar too, no better than I ought to be really, because it makes her laugh. The women of my family have always loved me best when I did whatever I wanted defiantly with no apology, even as it scandalised them. They loved to see me want, and not be ashamed of wanting.
hunger
Still, most times when I ask her what she fancies eating she says oh I don’t mind, I’ll eat anything, you know me. I do know her, and how hungry her childhood was, how they ate nettles, how they sometimes didn’t eat, how they never ate enough — I’ve seen her clean a bone of all meat, gristle, cartilage, everything and then crack it open for the marrow. She really will eat anything, but I want her to eat what gives her pleasure, not just whatever she can swallow. It’s a battle to get her to express anything like a preference but we are old and well beloved combatants and I’m in this for the long haul - I will use every stupid ruse or piece of intelligence I can clap hands on to defeat her indifference. Sometimes it works.
завршити
This is not making me a better person, all the shit you hear about a heart purified and refined through suffering is just that, shit. In this family we know that anything that claims to be for your own good is going to fuck you nine times sideways before it decides it’s through with you. Still, I don’t think it’s making me into a worse person, but it’s hard to tell from here.
At the end of every story my mother always finishes by looking at me very seriously and saying, ‘so there you go’ as though the phrase somehow seals everything that came before.
This isn’t finished but finishing, so there I go.