So. Contending with my Mother's mortality hasn't been awesome in the 'trying to maintain my cool while unemployed during a very precedented heat-wave' side of things. There's a lot of poison to let out of that wound still, so much unfairness and pain.
Do I want to have a chance to say goodbye? I'm not so sure that I do, at this point. At first, there came this intractable terror at not being able to reconcile before she's gone. I think that has more to do with how I feel about Dad and how he died than anything to do with my relationship to Mom.
Dad died by suicide on my 25th birthday, months after his [horribly abusive] wife and [truly beloved] dog passed, and after many months of no-contact. There was no note. In hindsight, I'm impressed that he held out as long as he did after the dog went, because that's where all of his love was stored. I had run away from his home because I couldn't take his wife abusing me. We had lost contact, I had no idea how bad things had gotten. So it goes.
I still wonder about the timing. Obviously. How can I not?
One of the last times we spoke, Mom intimated to me that she'd encouraged him to do it. I don't know if it was another of her many, many lies, or if it was a true thing, and it really doesn't matter because it's a heinous thing to say to your grieving child. If it's a lie, it's a cruel one. If it's true, god damn.
I don't know how much I can put down of my own hurt to support my siblings, who had to live with her and her rotation of husbands ranging from okay-ish to awful, all dead now. They've been on the front lines for 30 years, I don't know if it's really my place to demand space when I've already been functionally orphaned for so long. I can't fix anything for them and I don't know that they'd want me to try.
Essentially, this boils down to the practical and the emotional holding hands with sad looks on their faces: I can afford a visit or the funeral. One or the other, not both.
A visit, in the very very best case scenario, will likely involve little more than being present while she declines. I can't do much to lighten the burden of care, and besides, she'll have professional home assistance through the duration. She's been barely present and on morphine for weeks due to a related injury. What lucidity there is, apparently, turns her mean or mischievous.
This feels like I'm cherry picking excuses to not go. But also, I don't drive, I have my own complicated medical needs, and I'd be another dependent on my already overtaxed siblings. I don't want to go because I know there will never be an apology for the pain and neglect, and even if there was what would it matter? What could it possibly change? There's no pain that can be soothed merely by acknowledgement.
My Sister said she can try and organize a phone call, though it's anyone's guess how that will go. Nowadays Mom is reportedly confused and upset by technology. Honestly... who could blame her.
The part of me that wants to visit is the part that wants this to be an elaborate, evil prank being pulled by the family at large to punish me for going no-contact after I came out.
[And also the part of me that misses the house, the river, the hills, that misses ranging over the Kentucky green. The selfish part that longs for the tranquility of the porch.]
It will have to be the funeral. I don't think it can be any other way.
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