In memoriam

Sunday last was an unusual day, and it's taken me this long to get my head around it.

My mother, a sweet if indelibly broken individual, has long collected other broken people around her. She's a caring heart, and a bit of a soft touch, so her menagerie of unusual human beings is always a bit of a circus. One of the fixtures in her life for the past twenty years has been a woman names Erica Brown. That's her real name, dear readers, not some sort of code-- and the tale unfolding is no unkind fiction. That's the hardest part for me to comprehend.

Erica was a brilliant chef, made master chef at 17 and married by 19, I believe. She made absolutely beautiful food and was utterly incapable of simply following a recipe. I remember her bringing pots of the world's most delicious potato chowder (made largely with the world's supply of heavy cream) when my youngest sister was born. Specatular gingerbread snowflakes, braised roasts, her kitchen was always whirling with bubbling pots and stacked with dirty dishes. The last time I saw her she was making delicate filigree horn cookies with a fluffy maple filling which she packed us off home with and I ate with gleeful abandon. The things she made were always delicious and her freeness with them bespoke her freeness of spirit, of generosity.

That spirit, however, was broken. Then generosity was always for others and not herself. Or perhaps too much for herself, I don't know. Six children, too close together for her health, and a continuing battle with her weight and self image proved a terrible cross. When, as a result of a botched bit of anaesthetics, she was diagnosed with tic douloureux (or trigeminal neuralgia) which left her with constant, electric facial agony for years, things really began to fall apart. There were pills to deal with the pain, pills to overcome the fog of the pills for the pain, pills for nausea, pills for more pain... they carved out the person we knew as Erica one gel-capsule-ful at a time.

Then her husband was less of a support to her than he should have been. He and their kids were her life, and he threatened to cut her out if it. I would like to say that I can't blame him, that her self-destructive cycle was understandably too much, but I just can't. But I wasn't there. He was unfaithful, she took him back. He threw her out of the house, she came crawling back. he threatened divorce, may actually have divorced her, she did his laundry and struggled to simply continue.

Their medical insurance was inconstant. A doctor would take her on, get her into a regimine and then speak to a previous doctor who would label her Erica a junkie and then the whole thing would fall apart, they'd stop dealing with her. And then there was the drink. I can't hold this against her, either-- to do so would make me a hypocrite. The comfort to be found in the bottom of a bottle, the temporary release, cost her so dearly but, in living with such unremitting pain, no, I can't fault her for seeking it.

This past year, Erica wasn't eating anymore. She lived on coffee and kool-aid. Sometimes she'd nibble something to appease her children. My mother begged her to hold on long enough to see her eldest son, a mild autistic boy with wide features, kind eyes, a shy smile and an unbelievable talent for the clarinet, graduate from high school. Her eldest daughter was denied the opportunity to go to University because her mother, her siblings all needed her at home, and now they need her more than ever.

My mother is relatively sure that it wasn't because Erica felt isolated or alone. They spoke on the phone, at least briefly, nearly every day for the past twenty years. My mother thinks it was more Erica's belief that she and her illness, her infirmity and distraction, were holding her family back. They'd be better off without her frail and trailing weight. This breaks my heart, even as I type it.

She'd tried to end her existence before. This time, she made sure it stuck. She got up from bed late last Saturday night, took 50 or 60 sleeping pills, sat down on the couch, drank a six-pack of beer and a pint of whiskey. Her eldest son found her hunched over on the couch in the morning. He tried to revive her before noticing that her face, hands and feet were blue and cold. She'd done it.



The memorial service is Saturday. My mother is supposed to speak but doesn't know what to say. She wants to blast the medical system which left her so unsupported and vulnerable, but this isn't the time. Unfortunately, I don't really know what this is the time for, in the end. The first thing I thought when my sister called to tell me the news was, "Well, shite. I never sent those chicken-flavoured crisps to her. Now I won't." It was something we'd talked about the last time I saw her, two christmas' ago. She'd mentioned being particularly partial to these chicken-flavoured crackers, Chicken in a Basket or something like that. Peculiar flavours of british crisps always being an amusing subject of conversation, I told her about walkers and whatnot and said I would send her a bag. But how the hell do you send a bag of crisps through the post?? So, I never got around to it. And now I never will. This is perhaps the most serious crisp-based guilt I've ever felt.

So, I clearly won't be at the memorial. Here's my offering to the cosmos in lieu of flowers:


Potato Chowder a la Erica
Ingredients:
Potatoes, peeled & diced
1 Onion, chopped
2 Links of kielbasa
1/2 c. Butter
1/2 c. Whole milk
1/2 c. Broth or potato water
2 Tbsp basil, dried
Cornstarch
Salt
Pepper

Boil potatoes and onions in a little water with cut up kielbasa. Cook until potatoes are tendre. Pour in whole milk (or half milk and half broth), butter, cornstarch and water to thicken. Season with salt, pepper and basil. Note: Add more milk for a bigger batch of soup.

Rest in peace, Erica. I hope you've found it. Finally.

Where to start...

... so, it's been a while. Let's move through this as quickly as possible:

I returned to the native land of snow and family-type quality time over the winter holiday season, returned to the Lovely Land of the Dean and found myself offered a job running a tutorial for the Film Department here at the University. Needless to say, me and my skint little wallet JUMPED on this opportunity. Funnily enough, I still haven't gotten paid for this position (paperwork issues) but I've found teaching my two sections of Intro to Film to be wildly, thoroughly and completely unexpectedly fulfilling. Who knew. I've tutorials that I lead on Friday mornings, a film screening in the afternoon, and compulsory lectures on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We show mostly decent, mainly interesting films like Apocalypse Now!, Vertigo, Once Upon a Time in the West and, (naturally) Braveheart. This last one I had managed to dodge seeing until this course. How is this possible, dear Miss Melville? you ask. Well, as I'm living in Scotland, I see no reason to muddy the waters with Mel Gibson's atrocious accent. I mean, really. Anyways... we'll talk about specific movies another time. My students run the gamut from Sid Vicious to Nancy Drew, but there are a few gems-- one young lad compares every (and I mean EVERY) film we watch to Die Hard. At first, I was mystified. Then, slightly annoyed. But then, honestly, it takes some work to draw the link between Rear Window and that Rickman classic. At this point, I figure it must have been a bet, and I'm totally giving him extra points for the legitimate effort and attention. I am now hip-deep in astonishingly sub-par essays and all of my grading is due in tomorrow... riiiiiiiight.

I'm still holding down my jobs with the Student Association and the Gentleman's Club. I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to guess which one I prefer. Again, more on these in separate posts.

Danger Muffin just got her acceptance letter to a masters' program at St. Andrews University yesterday, but I haven't seen her yet to take her out for a pint. I know, I'm an awful flatmate... This means I will be looking for a new flatmate for August, I'd imagine, but somehow I know that there will never be another quite like Danger Muffin.

And as for me... well, I turned 24 on Saturday last. It's strange, I don't know why this one is hitting me quite so hard. I've been aware, once or twice before, of the passing of time. Of wanting to slow it down to a bare minimum crawl-- looking at my parents, my siblings gathered in the kitchen, seeing how old we've all grown... it's strange. I tried explaining my feelings on the issue to Danger Muffin with the tired old perfume bottle metaphor: it's like you have a bottle of your very favorite perfume, you know full well that you will never acquire another bottle and yet you wear it every day because you love it so. And now you look at it and see the sum of all those little morning spritzes, liquid halfway up the little tube, the vacuum in the top of the bottle, and you know that it will never be full again, that you will reach the bottom. But you're going to wear it every day. See what I mean about a tired metaphor? I turned 23 on the 23rd last year and it was a bit of a show-- Kaypea was in town, it was quite the do. This year-- far more sedate. I don't feel like a kid anymore. I think, without consciously realizing it, I capped my youth and childhood with that Golden Birthday year, and now I'll never be 23 again. Not that I'm really lamenting this, not that I'd do anything differently with it. It's just the knowledge that I'll never have it back again. Strange. And a little disjointing.

That's enough for now. Ask me about Norway, the Club, the Dirty Diss, M3, Boston, the Almighty Mobile, fiction and Subliminal Unicorns in the near future.

Right-- On a Personal Note

So, it's a time of upheaval and indecision in the life of moi, and so I'm going to vent on here for just a minute. I know, I was doing so well being non-dramatic and anti-egocentric, but it looks like we're going to try to strike a balance here... imagine that.


My family are a right cast of characters, let me just lay that out first of all. The best way to describe Mutie is to admit that she's sweet, but broken. I think that there are several elements that went into breaking her, but that's another discussion. Regardless, she's a sweet, lovely, loving and old-fashioned mama and I do adore her. My father and I have a more combative history-- only recently have he and I been able to have a decent conversation about the weather without digging into each other. As it is, so long as we avoid religion, politics, ethics, economics and climate change, we're okay. Yeah... we're okay. That said, I'm experiencing a new set of emotions at the moment-- I feel sorry for my father.


My father has never been the sort to inspire sympathy. In fact, I've spent most of my life spiting him and doing everything I could to alienate him. Not that he helped matters, but we all begin to realize our errors as we age, right. Well, it looks like Dad's been let go by his employer of 15 years. And the severance package they offered him, an overweight, balding, slightly deaf 50-something white man? A percentage of his insurance.


Now, Dad is an automotive engineer in Michigan. Nobody's surprised that he's in this position, least of all him. He was just hoping against hope that he could stick it out just a few more years-- maybe until his middle daughter graduated from high school. My sister, Weasle, is a lovely, bright 17 year old with an eye for changing the world. Honestly, she's one of two people I know personally who I truly believe will change the face of humanity. However, she's currently staring down the barrel of campus visits and standardized tests and all those attendant costs. Then there's also Badger, my baby sister-- a charming 12 year old with a number of years left in a really expensive private school system. Ouch. So, Dad sticks it out and waves the pink slip aside, hoping to last out just one more year and then give it the old heave-ho? Well, there's one more complicating factor that needs some explanation.

My father is one of four children: his older brother, Vaughn, his younger sister, Ciotka, and then my godmother, Yenta. Now, Vaughn and Dad were only 14 months apart. I say were because Vaughn died of complications from his chronic lymphocytic leukemia three years ago. (*Holy shit, it's really been three years?) Now, both their parents had various forms of cancer, as did their grandparents. Bobcia and Jodic died in their early fifties, as did Vaughn. Dad's now pushing mid-fifties, and it's not like he's in peak physical condition. He's borderline diabetic, overweight, hypertension-ridden and has high cholesterol along with bleeding ulcers, high blood pressure and a bad back and knees. Well done, there. The kicker is that Yenta's just been diagnosed with the same variety of cancer that eventually laid Vaughn in the grave after a long and debilitating struggle.

Can he afford to gamble and keep his job with the possibility that he could be flat out let go in December and have no health insurance at all?

And yeah, I'm sure losing his job and finding out about Yenta within three days of each other has been great for his ulcers.

Like I said, I'm not used to feeling badly for my father, but this tips the hand, I think.