Please prepare yourself for a stereotypical diary entry, full of angst or whatever. Really a downer. Just so you are fully warned before proceeding…..
Throcky’s cat is being euthanized today. I read her latest entry and my heart fell into my stomach. I felt so bad, felt her hurt so much. The hell that I went through with Pookie was unbearable. Esteban’s pain still is continual. It has taken six years for him to be able to think about Pookie and smile, rather than become depressed.
I never really had a death in our family or to anyone close to us. When my favorite Uncle died, I was not allowed to go to the funeral because my mother “didn’t want me to miss school”. I didn’t understand why he was gone. I knew that he’d been in the hospital for a long time (cancer due to the agent orange he was exposed to in Korea) but I didn’t know why. I hadn’t been allowed to see him. He died in my great-grandmother’s arms. His last words were “I’m going home” because he was delusional and was trying to get up and leave the hospital to actually go home. My grandma tried to stop him and that’s when he went.
My mother has always been emotionally distant. I don’t know why. Perhaps because she had me when she was fairly young (two months shy of 20) and she divorced my father when I was two. My mother is fabulous, smart, funny, beautiful and very cool, but our relationship has never been right. I was constantly bitter, even as a child, that she was not being a parent.
Thus, I spent much time with my great-grandparents. My great-grandfather died in 1985 and my grandma was then living in her house. I moved in with her for an entire summer.
When my grandfather died, it was sad but in the same way, very distant. Like a dream or a television show. I was more upset for my grandmother than anything.
My great-grandmother never cried. Her daughter (“Mafia Grandma”) never cried. My mother only cries when she gets drunk. Only children get hugs in our family. I don’t really remember ever getting hugged as a child, other than by my grandma. She’d hug me and read me stories and tell me that I looked pretty and that I was smart. In comparison, I heard that I was fat and lazy and loud and obnoxious and a pain and a horrible child from my mother. Honestly, I’m not trying to paint a bad picture of her. I think that she was dealing with a lot of bad stuff, raising two children by herself (with the exception of the long stretch when she was with Paul, she was for the most part a single mom living on a waitress’ income). There are many things that I am extremely thankful for in the way that my mother raised me: she raised me to have excellent table manners, excellent grammar, a large vocabulary, and an appreciation of the more elegant side of life. But she had a lot on her plate and it is her nature to be emotionally distant. For this, in some ways, I blame Mafia Grandma. I’m sure that there’s a whole chain of dysfunction going on there but I’m not going to really get into it.
My Uncle Bill (M-G’s younger brother) with my Great-Grandmother in front of her home
