Tag Archives: bpd

Another haunting

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Synchronicity is a gateway to faith and if not faith, then at least to the recognition that the world is more mysterious than we know, and isn’t that recognition a lot like faith?

Synchronicity can show up as a haunting or a miracle. Sometimes it’s funny. It’s always worthy of attention.

I’ve had three synchronous moments lately — one a haunting, one a sly joke, and one a gracious note from the dead (which of course is not the same as a haunting).

Today, I’ll relate the haunting. It’s about my sister. Of course it’s about my sister.

For our holiday meal, rather than clean up a half-finished jigsaw puzzle, we brought in a small oak table from the garage. This table has history. It was where my family sat and ate dinner for years — on Glen Terrace, Cypress Drive, Glory Drive, and Whitman Road. After my mother remarried, she brought it south with her to Lighthouse Point and then back north to Essex.

In the early years, my parents occupied either end. Sometimes the table was up against a wall, sometimes centered in a dining space. Either way, my sister sat on one of the long sides while my brother and I occupied the side opposite. I think it was probably this seating arrangement that inspired Noreen to learn how to pinch with her toes. Don’t laugh! She could really inflict some pain.

It’s also where my father used humor to drive home the difference between can I and may I. If you were to say, for instance, can I have the ketchup, he’d deadpan with yes you can or I don’t know, can you, and keep eating. He managed to make it funny. And we learned.

After my mother died, the table went to my sister. When my sister died, it came to me.

I didn’t think I was sentimental about the table until I was scraping off mold and cleaning the disgusting, nearly black gunk from between its center seams. Both gross. To look at the burns and stains scattered on its surface was to see my sister’s dysfunction made plain. Again. I found myself wondering what, exactly, prevented her from performing the simple tasks that make up a life. Was it so hard to wipe the table clean once in a while or slip a plate under a plant? For her, yes it was too much.

Or was it? Maybe it was just what she told herself. With Noreen it was impossible to tell and in the end, I realized it didn’t matter. The result was the same. A disordered life. A stained, ruined table.

Anyway, I managed to get a sliver. The sliver was almost impossible to see and took a magnifying glass and some real wrangling to remove. There were moments I thought I imagined it. This is when I said, Hello Noreen. The sliver might’ve been a bristle from a toothbrush I used to clean the tarry seams or it might’ve been a piece of the table itself.

Either way, my pinky got infected. It hurt. It turned bright red. For days, even after the splinter was out, I had to apply hot compresses, soak it in salty water and hydrogen peroxide and once, use a sterilized pin to poke out a blob of puss.

Not to belabor the point, but this is a pretty apt metaphor for being in relationship with my sister. Working hard to clean up one of her messes, a job I never signed up for, by the way, only to get shafted. Having to deal with the emotional wreckage after a visit for days. And even that hallucinatory quality — is this real or am I making it up — speaks to how convincing she could be with her narratives of blame. Maybe I was, in fact, a complete shit. Maybe I wickedly shortchanged her.

That inner dialogue occurred even as I knew that nothing was ever gonna be enough for my sister and even though I knew that withholding was a critical form of self-protection. She was forceful. She pinched me under the table with her toes.

So that’s the haunting. I’ll save the other two incidents for the next post. This is long enough.

By the way, in my sister’s papers I found reports from elementary school. Elementary school! One was a report about Alaska, another about bats. Around Halloween this year, I made a spooky paper collage and then digitally double-exposed it with the cover of her bat report. That’s one version, above. Another version, sans bats, is below.

Mercy and reflection

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In one of my sister’s closets, I found two bundles of letters, postmarks dating back to the early 80’s. There were: Easter cards from Sharon, all manner of holiday cards from Dot, a couple of letters from my father in his distinctive engineer’s script, lots of postcards from my brother as he traveled Europe as a young man. Many, many letters from me.

It was the letters from my mother that undid me — forced me to box it all up and stow them for another day. Maybe another year. Maybe never.

What a hearty correspondent my mother had been! Did I, too, receive so many missives over the years? Probably. But I don’t really remember and unlike my sister, I didn’t hang onto them.

There were letters from Provence full of exclamation points (“perfect tomatoes! perfect green herbs! perfect bean cassoulet!”), letters from Florida full of encouragement, letters acknowledging weight loss (more encouragement), letters enclosing checks, letters of explanation post-misunderstanding, letters of apology.

“My dear sweet Valentine, Noreen… ”

The letters reminded me how distorted and corrosive my sister’s narrative about my mother has been, never elastic or truthful enough to include the good, the positive, the well-meaning.

One letter came on the heels of some disastrous trip to Washington. Why had they gone? Was it an art-related treat offered by my mother, some attempt to connect?

Oh god, the paragraphs about my sister’s explosive response to some fairly innocent remark read like a summation of my last nine years. “I’m sorry for what I said, but I didn’t think it was THAT heinous…”

And then, my mother scribed these stunning words: “You give me too much power and offer up too little mercy.”

Here’s Gauthier’s “Mercy Now,” which has been one of my anthems of grief.

The letters reminded me that at one time, my sister seemed poised for normalcy. Just one more infusion of cash, one more sorting of twisted emotion, one more round of diet supports, a car, a business, and she’d be fine, right?

Retroactively applying new understandings, it’s been clear that disorder showed up at every stage. How harmed she was by ignorance about mental illness! And how effectively her chaos was camouflaged by the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. A rebellious phase, nothing more, surely?

As I rejiggered history, I lost sight of the younger, better version of my sister. Sorting her things has brought it back. Her flashes of brilliance, her capacity for understanding literature, her iconoclastic spirituality, her intuitive and stunning art. I remember that there was a time when I felt eclipsed not just by her shadow but by her strengths, too.

Family legend has it that my sister spoke in full paragraphs by the age of two, while my speech was so garbled only my mother could understand me until after the age of three. There was my sister’s nearly perfect score on the verbal SAT. Her voracious reading and gigantic vocabulary.

My sister read the LOTR every spring for years. As much as I loved Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, too (another of her favorites), I could barely get through the trilogy once and anyway, who’d want to read “The Two Towers” a second time? She devoured sweeping historical novels — Leon Uris, for instance (she may have read “Exodus” three times) and Michener (have you seen how long “The Source” is?) She adored the romances of Mary Stewart and the mysteries of James Lee Burke. Bindings gave way, covers taped and worn. I brought “This Rough Magic” to the nursing home, but it stayed in the drawer. She was going.

A lot to unpack here, but for now, not the letters.

Have you saved any correspondence from over the years? If so, why and do you ever look at it? I have the letters that K and I exchanged early on, which are precious but clearly not for the boys’ eyes.

In closing, let me leave you with the idea of things undone. A friend reminded me that in the Tibetan tradition, survivors attempt to tie up loose ends for the deceased over a period of 48 days. What has my sister left undone? And if the better question is, what didn’t she leave undone, is such a pursuit worthwhile? Is it even possible?

What will I leave undone? And you?

 

 

 

 

Delusion is the least of it

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She asks me to bring her a hat, gloves, and sneakers so she can catch a bus and go home.

Never mind the catheter or the fact that she can’t bend over to put shoes on and may not fit any of the pants I’ve tucked into her closet at the nursing home. Never mind the code at the exit door or the long hall to reach it.

But it may be that the hospice designation is wrong. What if she was concussed when she fell that Sunday? And what if the three lorazepam that she’s since admitted to taking afterwards made her loggy, incoherent, and depressed her respiratory function, leading the doctor to mistakenly conclude the next day that death was imminent?

Here’s a short list of immediate problems.

Who’s going to manage this transition?

You can’t get rehab while on hospice and dropping hospice would mean losing the care of that terrific team. The nursing home has yet to inspire confidence.

My sister doesn’t do PT. She just doesn’t — even to the point of turning professionals away at her door. I keep telling her she can’t go home until she can walk a little, but this makes no sense to her because she has barely walked for a long time and has kind of managed (not really, but).

Less critically, I started cleaning up her apartment. The newer hospital bed and oxygen equipment were picked up by the lenders immediately. K put the urine-soaked chair into the dumpster. I gave away some of her dishes and — this is big, really big — I filled four leaf waste bags with some (but not all) of her hoarded paper. Threw out: the collection of Kleenex boxes, thirty-plus truvia containers, stacks and stacks of clippings, travel brochures, coupons, and peapod order slips.

The disorder created by paper in her small spaces has been a major source of contention.

She was going to decoupage gifts, you see. I kept ordering her ModgePodge. Glue sticks. But the piles just grew and grew, like ice floes or delta deposits occupying more and more of her precious square footage. No gifts.

So her place is a little empty. A basis for controversy. A basis for more fucking work. You cannot believe how many chairs, hassocks, and stools we have supplied over the years. Her remaining hospital bed is one K and I obtained through the Freemason’s HELP program. She refuses to sleep in it. Has done nothing but complain about it.

I know she’s feeling better because the fiery temper is back. Her virulent projections. The lack of reason. The nasty assumptions and accusations.

If she’s not gonna die any time soon, I’ve got to rejigger this a bit. And maybe a lot. The thought of another major piece of advocacy comes at me like a tsunami.