I am a mean horrible person some days.
No, not in the snarky way that I often write about, not in the ways I insist I am going to hell. No. I am ashamed.
I made someone I love very much cry this weekend. Sometimes it is not so much what you say but what you don’t say that curses you to hate yourself. I also was unkind to family members, unwilling to participate in their various niceties.
I also had a temper tantrum, feeling it more important to drive through Starbucks rather than make a funeral on time. It was for someone we had never met, the relative of a friend, but still.
Coffee. Final respects. Horrible person.
Also, Esteban’s grandmother Gen ate Easter dinner with us yesterday, (the meal in which I over pineapple-fluffed). She’s had a stroke and has speech aphasia and what is more, a brain tumor is pressing against her frontal lobes. It presents an awful lot like Alzheimer’s Disease, only she’s not mad and she’s not taking off her clothes for delivery men. She’s just a bit confused.
Esteban’s family is very upset, understandably so, but in my mind, I can only think of MY great-grandmother, of how bad it got, of how bad it WILL get, and I can only think ‘This is not so bad. You have no idea. You have no idea. You will never have any idea. This is not so bad.’
At dinner, it seemed like I was the only one who understood what she wanted when she asked for a Kleenex by pointing to her nose and saying ‘Runner. Loose.’ The rest of the family was just upset, couldn’t clear the hurdle of nonsensical phrases and kept treating her like a child. She’s not a child. She just wanted to wipe her nose. She’s not hitting anyone. She’s not cussing like a sailor. She’s just sad and angry at the balls of cotton that have appeared where her thoughts used to be.
Someone asked her how old she was and she said ‘Thirty six’ or seven’ and the parents all nodded as though this confirmed that she was losing her mind. I suspect that it wasn’t so much that she thinks she’s only in her thirties, but rather that she tried to make the words happen, tried to pull forth from that jumbled haystack of language inside her brain and struggled until she finally found something that at least made sense, even if it wasn’t entirely accurate.
I just couldn’t help but be mad at everyone. Everyone. Everyone for not appreciating that this is not so bad. I want to yell, ‘Just wait. Just wait until she tries to strike you. Just wait until she asks you why dead people haven’t come to visit her. Just wait until she learns that her mother is dead and then again tomorrow asks you where her mother is and then again tomorrow, and every day will be the day her mother died. Or her father or her husband. Every day. Just wait. Just wait.’
That makes me hate myself too.
When my great-grandmother was in the final stage of Alzheimer’s, she did not know who I was. Mine was actually the final name to slip from her loosening grasp on reality, then I became ‘that nice girl’ or ‘that good girl’. Everyone else ‘others’ or ‘cats’. She didn’t like cats. The actual cats were ‘kids’. She would get one word caught in her throat for days at a time, using it interchangeably for everything. The world. Need some world. Where’s my world? Not that world, this one. My world hurts’ hurts! World. The word would lose meaning with repetition. Whirled. Worried. Wordled. Were Eld. She would speak with such conviction that it almost seemed as though she were speaking a language no one had yet deciphered. The language of flowers. The songs of earthworms. Things your attic would say to you if you would only listen.
I was similarly mad at my Mafia Grandmother, my great-grandmother’s daughter and caretaker. She took everything at face value, though my great-grandmother actually thought that the cats were people and that people were cats. She just didn’t understand, couldn’t fathom the cell her mother was locked inside. Most likely, none of us ever could.
I didn’t stop at Starbucks for coffee, by the way, despite my tantrum, but probably only because I wasn’t driving the car. I shouldn’t have been thinking about coffee at such a time. I am a bad person.
The funeral was awful, but such is the nature of funerals. It felt really lovely to be singing in church again, though. There is just something about singing in church that makes me feel eight years old. My great-grandparents always dressed me sweetly and carted me off to church every Sunday. They included two of the hymns that I had picked out for my great-grandmother’s funeral, and I flipped through the hymnal and reread my great-grandmother’s favorite hymn. I play a little trick with myself each time. I always think that it is Hymn 388, but it isn’t. Then I try Hymn 338, but it’s not that one either. It’s Hymn 397, or at least in that synod’s hymnal. I’m not sure where my brain decided that it played a little number trick, but I remember trying to find it in our synod’s hymnal and being similarly stymied. I think it plays hide and seek with me, chiding me for not attending regular services.
In other news, I will be hanging out with my niece Abigail later this week while Mo is on a business trip. This will be fun. I’ve already promised her that we will make our own pizzas and watch DVDs and talk with our mouths full and end sentences with prepositions and run with scissors and laugh even after someone loses an eye or a limb. Good times that.
