My sisters husband sent me a text message last weekend, saying that she’d had a stroke due to the trial medication she’s on, had been in hospital for a week but is now out and ‘fully recovered’. I’m of the opinion that, if doctors are putting her on trial medication, this indicates that they’re just doing whatever they can to extend her life. I think that either none of my siblings talk to mum and dad, or none of them even talk to each other. That’s no big tragedy; not many families survive adulthood, it’s just a sad surprise when it happens to your own. Anyway, mum’s info is along the lines of ‘everything is ok, no panic, she’s not making end-of-life plans’, but I suspect that my sister knows full well what’s coming and she knows better than to bring it up with mum.
I still don’t have a lot of contact with mum and dad, I try to avoid it because it usually goes pretty badly and I can’t handle the circular nature of every conversation; it always ends up being about a stupid thing that happened ten years ago re this person not talking to that person in quite the right way. The way she clings onto that issue convinces me that she’s slightly crazy. I feel a sense of responsibility towards them, but not enough to put myself through the anxiety of talking to them very often. They’re monumentally depressed but insist they’re happy. They want to talk about it but then pretend they don’t care. They want us to make them a part of our lives but if we mess that up in some small way there are consequences for years.
Sorry, I’m on a rant because I emailed mum this week; I have neglected that a bit lately, I was trying to get into the habit of keeping them up-to-date with small events in our lives via email so she doesn’t have to hide a phone call from me and if it happens to be a bad mood day we don’t have to work through it. Anyway; in a couple of months it’s her mum’s 80th birthday – my Nan. Mum’s sister told me about it, and I love the idea of surprising her, partly because I love Nan and Pop and partly because of all the xmases and birthdays we’ve shunned over the years. We’ve been back to my hometown two years in a row now, mostly just to see them, and we see mum and dad if they’re in the mood. This year I was disinclined to go because of my sister going through all this; it’s just so awkward and hard on everybody. But hearing about my Nan’s birthday party threw all that out the window. There isn’t enough to celebrate in life, but 80 is a big deal. So I needed to tell Mum that we’d be going and we’d be going to the birthday party, and it just got complex and ugly the way it does.
I’m getting better at it all though; these days when I get some vicious email from her I remind myself that we don’t really know how far gone she is, and if all I do is make her feel useful or needed or wanted or loved for some insignificant amount of time, that’s an achievement. I also asked her how she’d feel about taking my nan and my sister to a day spa for a girls day, on me, and nobody needs to know who it’s from. Yeah that really didn’t go well. Unfortunately I also took the bait on some ugly stuff she said, but hopefully there’s enough else going on that she’ll just file it away in her great big cabinet of misdemeanours and it will get lost.
I’m disappointed that with my sister looking down the barrel of the worlds biggest disease, mum can’t let the past go and just be nice. I think she doesn’t have it in her anymore. She was always tough, upfront, blunt, and demanded nothing but the best from everybody. It’s morphed into something bitter, scared, unkind, and blind to how people see her, and it’s driven everybody away. I’m not taking the blame for that.
I’m still preparing for two possibilities; my sister makes it or my sister dies. My plan either way was to try to do something, anything, for her to try to give her a bit of pleasantness. I was thinking a weekend at a nice resort every now and then, or some time with a beautician, whatever. Clearly Mum’s not going to want to help, but maybe her non-JW sisters will. My quandary is whether I should care that it embarrasses mum when non-witnesses hear how messed up our supposedly good-christian family is.