Temporary

TWELVE

When I was twelve years old, my mother went into surgery for the first time for her heart. This was the first time since my great grandmother had passed a few years earlier that I was confronted with the concept of mortality. Time and time again, I found myself in the same position, sitting in the back seat of the car on the two hour drive from Malone to Burlington trying not to focus on the reason for the road trip. This wasn’t to say that I was unaware of what was going on. I was educated about everything from both my mother and her doctors. I was the only 7th grader that had an actual angioplasty catheter and balloon to present at our school science fair.

The stress was something that I struggled with. Having to know all of these things on top of being a bullied child at school wasn’t easy. I began to condition myself the only way that I knew how. Knowing that the best way to cope with difficulties was to remind yourself that the hard times were only temporary, I began to convince myself that everything was temporary. The bullies, the stress, even people. This wasn’t easy, it wasn’t enjoyable, but it got me through the road trips month after month and year after year.

When I was a teenager and I was informed that my step-sister’s firstborn child had been beaten to death by her boyfriend in Colorado, the temporary theory was applied for the first time. I never got to meet my first nephew, and never would. A year and a half later, and my oldest step-sister was gone too, from a car accident caused by a mentally handicapped patient grabbing the steering wheel during transport. It hurt, and I didn’t know what to think, but I reminded myself of how temporary we can all be.

When I was twenty one and my grand parents began to fall, one by one, I reminded myself that they were only ever meant to be temporary, and that the grief that accompanied their passing would be temporary as well. And so it was. I was able to remind myself that their presence and now the lack of their presence was proof of the temporary nature of every one, and every thing, including the pain that I knew they were all in. The now decade old coping mechanism was proving its worth. It genuinely helped me through.

It’s only in recent years that I’ve come to realize how detrimental this had become. Difficulties maintaining friendships from college with more than a handful of people. Difficulties maintaining relationships for more than a few years. Difficulties in keeping in touch with relatives that I care about, my mother included, as much as I want to. I was aware of it the entire time. I knew that my conditioned belief that everyone is temporary extended to myself, and that I too was temporary.

When I moved away from my home town, that was part of the reason why. I felt the negativity stemming from thinking of myself as temporary, and knew it wasn’t healthy, so I followed my instincts and tried to change it, tried to find something, anything, that could be permanent and prove my theory wrong. Covid slammed the brakes on that idea, and losing motivation, I fell back into the same old patterns and the same old way of thinking.

Then we were all reminded of how temporary we can be by force. Seeing that the axiom applied to people beyond grandparents and parents was a challenge, and one that I’m still struggling with. Two years later, I’m back in the north, with an aunt that was murdered by her husband last year, and a mother who has been in the hospital for heart complications three times since I moved back.

Everyone is temporary, but that thought is no longer comforting. That thought is now an anchor around my neck ready to fall into the sea. Every time that a notification dings, I question if it will be the last. I find myself crippled with anxiety whenever I see a message on all platforms, direct, text, or otherwise, unable to make myself open them unless spurred to do so by an immediate need. Interacting in person is easier, but I find myself choosing not to all the same.

Everything is temporary until you know that it isn’t, one day I hope to make that realization permanent.

FIFTY TWO

When I was twelve years old, I began my enmity with God.  Make no mistake, I was no religious child before the age of twelve.  I felt there was a value to faith and belief, but despite attending a Catholic school from kindergarten until that point, I never felt any connection to God.  But that was when something was taken away from me that no child should ever have to have taken from them at that age: the illusion that my mother was immortal.

We all know as adults that our parents won’t always be around.  We know that eventually, death comes for all of us, and we come to terms with that.  And we accept that from a societal standpoint it ought to be far easier for us to say goodbye to our parents than for our parents to say goodbye to us.  But to have your eyes opened to this reality at an age where you haven’t even had your last growth spurt is an unfair twist for anyone.  But even this was not what made me swear an oath of loathing against the notion of God.

Far more unfair was learning the reality of the situation.  I learned around that age that my mother had been diagnosed with a rare medical condition, inherited, one in twenty five million people, and that she had been diagnosed while she was still a teenager.  I learned that my great aunt had also had this condition.  While I was learning about catheterizations and angioplasties, I was also learning that my mother was the third member of our family in her lifetime to have this condition, and that the other two had both passed away at the age of fifty-two.

When my mother was diagnosed, she became part of case studies in the early 1980s.  She also began seeking out therapy to prepare herself for what she saw as the inevitable.  Just as I was having to do by default of becoming increasingly aware of what was really going on, I learned that she had also been preparing for her end since she was a teenager.  She had come to terms with this years before I was even thought of.

While I learned of the history of God and Moses and Jesus and the Apostles, I also learned about lipodistrophy, family histories, hereditary conditions, cholesterol, triglycerides, and I couldn’t help but ask myself: If God is real and loves all of creation, how can He allow this to happen to the one person in my entire family that I could see no evil in?  There was no satisfactory answer.  Better still, looking at myself in the mirror and seeing the rage and anger and loathing within me, how could this hereditary curse land on her and not me?

It was a question from before conception.  There was a coin flip in the ether when I was born whether I would inherit this or not.  For years after I would joke about how I won that coin toss, about how lucky I was that it didn’t pass down to me.  Internally, I always asked myself why I even existed, why was I worth the risk?  I nearly wasn’t even born, as this family curse had previously created such horrible scar tissue that cutting me out was a feat for the doctors when I evidently chose to be born backwards.  Fitting that the insignificant inverted child would eventually choose to view God as his enemy, so insignificant that even the family curse God had levied upon us overlooked me.  The joke is on him, because I intend to never pass it down, the one mote of my insignificant rage whose efficacy I can be sure of.

After all, how does one win a one man war against a God that doesn’t even know he exists?

ONE-HALF

When I was twelve years old, I lost all respect for my father as a man.  Make no mistake, I was never close with my father as a child before that, either.  This was, however, the year where I realized that he was half the man that I thought he was.

I had already spent years with minimal interactions with my father.  My parents divorced before I had even turned a full year old.  I never knew the full extent of why they had split, but I did later learn that the last straw had been his attempt to drunkenly take my infant self to the bar with him and his father, something that I would later lament as I never got to have a drink with my grandfather.  He would re-marry a few years later.

One of my earliest memories is of a hallway inside of a hospital with my father while my stepmother was giving birth to my younger sister, cold green walls lit by the white flourescent overheads.  I was three at the time, but it remains vivid.  The next vivid memory with him would follow the same year, on my birthday, as I nearly drowned stepping off the stairs in my uncle’s pool while my family was busy having beers and grilling hot dogs.  The next would be my step-mother forcing me to sit at the dinner table until I finished a plate of dry, unseasoned ground beef, which my stubbornness outlasted and caused me to not try a hamburger until the age of 20 out of spite.

Contact with him that followed was sparse, but I remained close with my aunt and my grandfather.  I never had fond memories with my paternal grandmother, as all memories were outweighed by hearing her verbally berate my mother shortly before Christmas while I was sat in her living room, later being told of her alcoholism causing an argument at my parents’ wedding, and ultimately her final words to me as she laid in hospice care for pancreatic cancer which were “This is what it takes for you to visit me?”

Telling, then, that when I was twelve and my rage at growing up at a school where bullies were a constant strain led to me having to stay a night with my father.  I remember the first half of the night being pleasant, playing Super Nintendo with my little sister in the living room in his apartment.  But again, much of that was washed away when my now former step-mother arrived.  I was always observant as a child, and as they went into a hallway to argue, I overheard the words “If you see your son, you won’t see your daughter.”  I was never able to look at him the same way after that.  His lack of a defense against the words, his lack of a spine, I knew he couldn’t defend himself, and I knew that I didn’t want my sister to have the same disdain for our father that I did.  So I stayed away.

I would spend the next several years asking myself why my mother was struggling with all of these health problems – struggling to provide a decent life for me financially in the face of a disabling medical condition – while my father was able to live a normal and productive life on his own.  Work as a corrections officer is a comfortable life in the North Country, at least financially.  He would remarry a second time while I had nothing to do with him, and I asked myself, why couldn’t it be him that was suffering?  Why couldn’t it be him that I had to grow up knowing he wouldn’t be around forever?  It would have been so much easier for me.

Instead, I had to grow up knowing that the one person who kept me from following in my family’s footsteps, falling into a cycle of questionable behaviors and hard drug abuse and prejudicial beliefs, wasn’t going to be around forever.  Again, I reminded myself that at least my sister wasn’t living the same life that I was, though I knew that her mother would be placing a different burden on her future.  I knew that she felt the same loss when our first born nephew was murdered, and when our oldest sister passed away, but far more accutely as she was raised with them while I was raised alone, and she never had the false blessing of knowing that everything is temporary.

Who am I to wish for a bargain that would place that burden on someone else?

FORTY

When I was twelve years old, I told myself that everything would be alright.  Staring down turning forty this year, that was the greatest lie ever told.  A false promise to myself to try to make it all go away.  It took me twenty-seven years to recognize that nothing will ever make this alright.  Nothing will ever make this make sense, or feel fair, or be anything other than the reality of the situation.

I never took the same steps that my mother took to help process this.  I never sought counseling or therapy to take the edge off of what I knew was coming.  I never tried to make real sense of it, even though it had become the only reality that I knew.

I have had to say goodbye to a nephew I never met, a sister I barely knew, a grandfather that I respected, a grandmother that I cared for, a grandfather I only met twice, a grandmother that I resented, a classmate who shot himself, two friends in the span of two years, and countless creative idols.  And here I sit, knowing that my mother will soon join that long list, and I know that it is something I am not prepared for.

As we sit and discuss what she wants done with her belongings, and she asks me if I want to keep this, or keep that, or if I think that something else may be better delivered to the hands of another relative, all that I can do is try to pretend that we’re just sitting, watching television and watching movies, and talking about life and the world that seems to be a constant disappointment.

And in those moments, nothing else matters.

ZERO

When I was twelve years old

The spiral began to circle, never ending.

Nothing felt real. Time was an illusion.

Ignore it.

Push it all aside.

Leave it alone.

Run away from it.

Ignore it.

It can’t hurt you if you don’t let it.