Why tragedy brings us together
In 2005, I came back to be with my family and found that my life erupted and my family dispersed and so I was left, a shadow of my former family self. My main reason for coming was my mother, whose health had been fragile since she took her first serious downturn back in 2001 – a big year for events if you recall. A black year for me personally – that’s when the bow broke and I let the heart ache in, whose sorry now? (Okay enough Streisand).
As I’ve been here for mom, she’s spun around in a circle that has grown smaller and smaller, making sure that no one gets in except very few.
It has been a full week since I took her into the emergency room and what began as a withdrawal from the abrupt stopping of Cymbalta (her doctor’s orders) and then suddenly became a cardiac emergency (advanced alcoholism, possible Cymbalta, and who knows what else) then grew into “classic DTs” as her profound psychiatrist told me, and from there we have moved into a similar sequence of events that almost mimics 2001 exactly – can’t breathe, fluid fills the lungs, incoherent – and then last night, she fell face down and broke bones in her face and her nose and now is on a ventilator in the ICU.
Until a few days ago I hadn’t called anyone except my sister (her symbiotic twin) and my mother’s siblings (who have always been there for her). But today, I walked into the ICU and saw my sister-in-law leaning over my mother with tears running down her eyes, and I realized that people can love you deeply but at the same time be unable to suffer your self destruction. My nieces stood on the other side, also teary eyed, one of them named for my mother.
My first thought when the family started rallying was where have you been? But as they have filed in one by one, surrounding her bedside, the oceans that divided us have shrunk to a deep well of sadness we all feel for a woman who has had so much love in her heart and yet she has drawn an iron curtain around herself because of the reality she could not suffer.
There is a text book I read a long time ago that says alcoholic parents can never truly love their children because they are so sick with their addiction. I don’t believe that. Today, again as my mother always seems to be able to do, under the sedation and a tube going down her throat to help her breathe, she whispered to me, “I love you.”