The working title might be: Suicide Isn't Painless

Please don't read it if you're looking for an upbeat read; I can guarantee you this isn't it.

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 I updated (re-wrote) Part III; you may have to Refresh it; I don't know how it works for sure.

Parts I and II are here.

After some time in the Cuckoo's Nest, they moved my mum to a half-way house, then to an apartment on her own.  It wasn't clear why she chose to stay in Denver, rather than coming to Boulder where she'd be closer to me.  She had a car, I didn't, so visiting her would be difficult.  Bus service in the area sucked; hitchhiking was easier, but not very reliable.

Her prognosis was unclear, if indeed there had been any evaluation as to 'better' or 'stable,'  or anything.  She had been advised to write out her life story, her grievances, her hopes, her fears.  She did, and what she read to me was painful to hear in its bitterness and condemnation of my father.  Maybe not so much therapeutic, but what did I know of self-revelatory writing?

She at least had escaped ECT, though many of her co-patients hadn't.  I discovered that in a sincerely awkward way one day; while I was visiting them all in the common room after Group Therapy, the women were yakking about their lives; who was getting better, and who wasn't so much, swapping minor life vignettes.

"At least they don't give electro-shock any more," I chirped.  The room went silent for a few dozen ticks (you could count: one-awkward, two-awkward, three-glance-glance...), then a few bashfully admitted to receiving it on a regular basis.  Fucking beautiful faux pas, there Wendy; got any more?  At least I didn't try, "At least they don't give lobotomies any longer..."

  Once more my mum took pills.  It was just after a visit from my father, apparently there to see about a divorce.  When I got to the hospital (I can't remember if it were a different wing of Saint Joe's, or a new one, really), there was my mother, swollen up like a giant baby bird, as helpless and featherless as she could be.  Whoever had removed her stomach-pump tube had done it roughly; she could scarcely speak.  She was so angry at finding herself still alive.  "Why can't you all just let me die?" she rasped. 

  I don't even remember now who found her that time; it must have been my pop.  The hospital wasn't having any more of this crap; they wanted her Out.  I don't know if it may have been an insurance issue, or the Good Catholics being judgmental, or what.  But, out she'd go, and we needed a plan.

  I was worn out.  My older sister was never part of the equation of any of these plans; I can only guess why.  How queer is it none of us ever questioned it, or asked for her help?

  The plan we settled on was to take her back to Ohio, where she'd lived most of her life; she and her sister were close, so it made sense.  We embarked on another cross-country drive, this time to Ohio and the welcoming arms of her sister, a dear woman full of love, but self-saddled with the care of too many children and grandchildren.  We found her an apartment, and I went back to Colorado to string my life back together.  Perhaps her almost-goofily optimistic sister could help her find a purpose in life again.

  My father died a few months later, which was very hard.  We'd had bitter rows over Viet Nam, my quitting college, and the fact that I'd cut off my options.  (Pop was big on options.)  My sister was an MBA, moved to Atlanta because she and her husband had determined it was the area in the US to make the most money.  Pop approved of her options, if not her personality, maybe. 

My pop and I had never had the occasion to forgive each other, and his death made dreams the only possible venue for me to communicate with him.  And dream him I did, quite often, and found him smiling in approval and acceptance of me and my life: at last!  (Ah, Sigmund; you may have gotten it right on the 'wish fulfillment principle, at least!)

  I had been building balconies for faux-Tyrolean apartments in Breckenridge, Colorado, and once they were finished, my now-husband, our dog Lincoln and I embarked on a hitch-hiking odyssey.  We first headed to Poland, Ohio to visit my mother, and to and 'do something with my dad's cremated remains.  No one seemed to want to touch them; God knows why.

  We drove to our old stomping-grounds near Kent; Twin Lakes really, walked to his favorite golf hole, and sprinkled his ashes and bone fragments there.  A huge, smiling papa-face filled my mind; I imagined everyone could see his radiant smile as it seemed to fill the sky.  Bye, pop; God, I love you.

  After our marriage, my husband I did some traveling, searching for a new place to call home.  We lived in Truchas, New Mexico, for a few months, but left after some scary occurrences.  1973 was toward the tail end of the Spanish-Anglo wars, and we just weren't cut out to be desperados, so we packed up our '56 Ford pickup truck, and went in search of a safe place to live.  A place where the police were more likely to be on your side as long as you weren't breaking any laws.

  Back in Colorado, toward evening, we came over a big hill not far from Mesa Verde National Park, and spotted the edges of a tiny town: it was raining lightly, the clouds were just parting, and those spears of light that remind you of heaven, all gold and blue with a tinge of peach pointed down at the town, sort of a Eureka! moment.  It looked safe, and small and rural; the topography was inspiring in every way:  red rock mesas, Silver Mountains (La Platas), verdant valleys; it looked wonderful.

Inside my fifthe grade geography book was a reproduced painting of a striated, red rock formation labeled 'Tabletop Mesa, Southwest Desert.'  God, the wonder of that!  I'd find myself flipping to that page often, adding ponies and Indians to the painting in my mind.  And here one was, on the doorstep of the place we decided in a snap to call home now.

  We found a funky old house that came with a farm/ranch job, and settled in, put in a garden; I started substitute teaching and...

  Then it was time to go get mumsy again; her sister and her family had decided to move to Florida, leaving her, of course, behind.  No, not really.  Aw, come on.  Cripes.  Okay then. 

  I flew to Ohio, and off we went again, in my mum's Oldsmobile '98; man, did I put the miles on that car!  I'd discovered on the trips from California that it could do 110 on the Nevada Salt Flats!

  We got her a little apartment in town, a shabby little place, fixed it up, and she did make the best of it.  She was so crippled now that I had to do all her shopping, cleaning and laundry; she could still cook, and loved to make good dinners for us.  She had a television; we didn't, so it was nice to watch with her some evenings.  We were watching the night Richard Nixon resigned.  Wow; "Your President is not a crook."  We played endless games of Scrabble, and she was killer at it.  "Eighty-seven points," she might crow once in awhile. 

  It grew more evident that Lady (I forget why we started calling her that) was not enjoying life.  We didn't have as much time to spend with as she'd have liked, and she was drinking more, and still had plenty of pain pills.  She could pick fights over any nonsense, and there was always the edginess of wondering if she would end the fights via suicide. 

  I guess she had given herself X amount of time to either get better or give it up, and that time must have been up.  When she'd talk about ending it all, we'd try so very hard to tell her all the reasons we wanted her to stay alive, but her pain and the burden and she felt herself to be must have outweighed our entreaties.

  One morning, we got a call from a friend who was living in our tipi in the back orchard.  She had arranged with him to come over that morning to do some little chore for her; it was her infernally clever way of being considerate of us... sparing us. 

  When he got there, he let himself in, and found her dead in her bed, a note explaining things, and telling us what clothes she wanted to be cremated in, who to give her clothes to, etc.  She'd had me take her to an attorney to make her will months earlier, and her note reminded us where it was. 

  Unattended death in Colorado has to be checked by the police; I called them.  When we got to her apartment, two local police cars were there, plus a county Sheriff, and the County DA.  I folded onto the front stoop of her apartment.

  I couldn't go in; I just fucking couldn't face seeing her dead.  The night before we'd borrowed her car to take some friends to the county fair.  Steve had taken the keys in to her and said goodnight; I'd gotten into the truck without a last goodbye. 

  The asshat DA and the Sheriff came out to question me.  I don't know where he'd been headed when he gotten the call, but the DA was wearing shorts and a cheesy navy sleeveless tank top with yellow binding, all his bristly red chest hair springing out at me; I could scarcely look at him.  He and the Sheriff got a little intense about their questions.  Huh?  I finally twigged to the fact that the DA was there!

  Wait a minute--DA's do Crime!  It turned out that one of the geniuses thought I might have murdered my mom; her note might have been a forgery; brilliant, boys; just what we needed right then was a little bit more sick irony in our lives.  "Did she use a cane?  Who did she leave her money to?"  I guess I should have been grateful that the Meatheads didn't arrest me.

  The funeral home sent the wagon, they took her away, and we went home.  Here now was that shocky-underwater thing again, but at least we had each other, Steve and I.  There was a finality to this that hadn't been available all the other times, though it was hard to internalize the meaning just then.

  We forgot for a few days how to do life.  We made it through the unspeakable horror of making arrangements at the funeral home ("Surely you wouldn't want your dear mother buried in that cheap casket, would you?  We'd have to special-order that one..."), and fed the spaniels (by now we had two).  But we forgot how to eat, really.  And cook.  We had made a dozen or so friends in the valley, and they knew of my mother's death through that small-town grapevine you hear about.  And they stayed away.  I guess we'd been tainted by death and they couldn't overcome their discomfort with it to reach out.  They didn't bring food, which I now know helps the shock and can fill some of the empty places; the Jewish mothers sure got that part right.

  The secretary of the school I worked for brought a meal on the third day; we were speechless with gratitude.  It taught me to always take food to our bereaved friends.  To paraphrase Scarlett O'Hara:  "as God is my witness, I will never let anyone go hungry again."

  By and by I sorted out my feelings: the loss, the grief of discovering it was impossible to provide another with the desire to live; the idea of being an orphan, even an adult orphan.  I felt the everyday missing, which includes the forgetting; the oh-I-can't-wait-to-tell-Lady-this moments, only to be brought up short with the forgotten realization of her permanent absence.

  All that, plus the hardest one of all:  the admission of Relief: I would never have to go through those episodes again--the fear, the anguish, the Next Steps.  It was over.  We would have a ceremony and sing some songs, and spread her ashes in our rented apple orchard, and be able to breathe better now.  We never would have wished for this, but the Relief Factor was considerable.

  Goodbye, Lady.  God, I loved you; we loved you, even the dogs loved you; and how I wish our kids could have known you.  We told them all their lives how much you would have loved them.  They loved to hear about that.