Fleeting hopes of fighting off the bullshit with Darling Odysseus

by tracymaetaylor

One of the main reasons I loved studying journalism was because I could write a ton and it didn’t have to be about me. In fact, I was encouraged to only write about other people’s thoughts and ideas and not my own. I could save my thoughts for the newsroom or for my questions. Being a spectator has always felt like a natural state for me, but when you fancy yourself a writer and you never write about yourself it kind of feels fake. It kind of makes me feel like I’m a spectator of my own life a lot of the time, especially when I know I’ve been given an unfortunate, but unique and specific set of perspective glasses. I always imagine my worldview to look like a pair of beat up Ray-Bans, personally.

Writing about myself is very frightening. In some ways yes, I am scared of, you know, baring it all. But, that’s not really my fear. My fear is putting a whole bunch of words out into the universe and they are really only a glimpse of the truth of who I am. My biggest fear with this blog is that it becomes pretentious and self-serving. I mean I feel like blogs in themselves are inherently pretentious. But then, when you have a blog that only talks about yourself and what you think it just makes me feel like Elvis Presley at an Elvis impersonator convention. I’m going to try my best not to put on the bedazzled jumpsuit.

Most of all, I just don’t want this to be another place for people to put their condolences, or tell me they can help me. I have had enough with condolences. I want this to be a place where people can be filled with one person’s experience with some things that I don’t think are talked about enough in the avenues of the world where people talk about stuff.

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When I can’t sleep – and I think this is true of a lot of people – that’s when a lot of self-degrading thoughts start flooding their way into my mind.

Like:

When you have dead parents there is a ton of bureaucratic, financial, and real estate gobbledygook that you are required to take care of apparently before you can resume your life to its fullest potential. This stuff can take a little bit of time or it can take years depending upon how many loose ends the folks left untied. Sometimes I lay awake making lists in my head of all the things I haven’t even started finishing yet. Then, I get overwhelmed. I start to feel inadequate and a slow and steady river of fear starts flowing through me. I fear that none of the gobbledygook is ever going to be completed and I am never going to have anything I ever wanted, aspired, or desired in life ever. I am just going to be a continual result of dead parents until I die. Cause and effect can be deceiving.

When people die, or at least when my people died, I was not told about the gobbledygook. I mean, everyone knows about the gobbledygook – life insurance policies, IRAs, house deeds, etc. – but not everyone knows just how consuming it can really be, especially to someone who was rewarded with A’s in her 9^th grade math class even though she waited till 6 a.m. the day of to do her homework. It puts a cork in your grief and never lets it bubble over the way it’s meant to. You see, that bottle of grief needs to be emptied, but all of the gobbledygook clogs it up. You feel like you can’t get to the grief until you deal with all the other world stuff before it.

When I’m lying in my bed – not sleeping – I usually feel pretty terrible because I know I am an awful adult orphan. Like, most adult orphans usually have a better understanding of all this gobbledygook. They have dealt with all of the adult stuff in their own lives somewhat so they know at least what’s entailed of their parents’ lives. I have yet to deal with adult stuff in my own life. Like, I don’t know about you, but I’m twenty-three and I do not have an IRA. Really, I have only a tinkerbell-esque*  (* means see definition below) understanding of what an IRA is. If you know more about what they are, please by all means, explain to me in the comments section.

These adequate adult orphans also probably had ‘The Conversation’ with their parents. What’s ‘The Conversation’ you ask? Well, it’s when the parent acknowledges that they are dying and know that they need to prepare their children for the world’s gobbledygook. In my head, they usually point out their ailing finger to a box. It’s usually metal and unassuming, but inside this box are all of the weapons that they need to fight off the bureaucratic, all encompassing, suffocating, gobbledygook, and dead parents’ stuff. The weapons are usually in nice manila folders, with labels, with typed out directions, up to date bank statements, there might even be a security box key. If I was being given this box of bullshit destruction today, I would hold it in wonder, I would caress it, I would give it the name of ‘Darling Odysseus,’ and we would go henceforth and fight the one-eyed, judgmental, monsters of the universe.

No, not that one…..

This one!!!!

When I say I am an awful adult orphan I mean that I feel completely inadequate to the task of doing all of this stuff I know I am supposed to do. Sell my mom’s house, set an example for my younger brother, pay a lawyer, pay a mortgage, fight off credit card companies who insist my mother is still alive (subsequently, yell at them on the phone and tell them if they really want to they can exhume her coffin if they need DNA proof), etc.

Now, as much as I would like to say that I was simply neglected of being given Darling Odysseus that is just not the case.

This is the story of how I missed my opportunity to be given my bullshit destruction weapons:

About two weeks before my mom died and a little over a year after my dad died my mother and I sat on the couch in the living room watching some sort of home improvement TV show. I had moved back home from school to take care of her because her illness was getting very punchy and unpredictable. Now, my mom was someone who never wanted to acknowledge her Stage IV breast cancer’s hold on her, she always bragged about how she was going to live to one hundred, and how she was a fighter. She was a fighter, and none of these acknowledgements she made were in any way negative. They were an excellent coping mechanism and most definitely helped her live a lot longer than she was supposed to – eight years longer to be exact. The problem was that death at the age of sixty-one with two kids under the age of twenty-three was not a relevant reality for her. Despite that her illness(es) had come to define who she was, it was her hobby and her life…but I’ll tell you more about that another time. To her, death was just not going to happen, she was willing to be sick forever. I knew it was going to happen, but I didn’t want to ruin her hopes, dreams, notions, goals, etc.

So, as we were sitting on the couch all of a sudden she turned to me as my brother came into the room and said, “Listen guys, there are some things we need to like, discuss.” It was weird. My mother never had such a pragmatic, clear-eyed expression on her face in all the time I could remember. Lets just say she wasn’t the most rational person, but that’s another thing I’ll get to at another time. But then, as soon as it came, the pragmatic, clear-eyed expression flushed away from her features. She started to look like she was in deep pain, and knowing exactly the ‘things’ to which she was referring, I thought to myself that it would be fine if she explained it a little later when she was feeling better, not knowing there wasn’t going to be a later. “It’s okay Mom. We’ll sit down and discuss it later,” I said. She looked at me, almost relieved that she didn’t have to acknowledge this death thing a little longer. She was the best kind of procrastinator, the chronic death procrastinator.

A couple of hours later we were still sitting in the living room. I looked at my mother and then she looked at me with this look of a baby who lost its favorite toy, that familiar safe thing that kept them in a semblance of sanity. “Tracy, I am so scared. Just please hold me,” she said. I did hold her. Then, my brother walked in and was like, “What is wrong?”  My brother, being angry that I was away for a lot of my mom’s cancer recurrence at school I guess was also angry that I was the one comforting my mother. (Like I said, I’ll fill you in on the gaps in future posts.) He started darting insults at me, which is a usual thing for him to do, and my mother started falling into the reality she glimpsed even more. She tried to defend me for a second to him, but then she just started to communicate more and more like the baby who was looking for its toy. From then on she only spoke the nonsensical language of a woman who is hearing death knocking. That night began the DBD (Death Bed Debacle*).

I don’t regret anything about that night. I wish I could say that that memory makes me emotional, but it does not. So much about the dying process no longer makes me emotional, dying people stuff has just become a part of the check lists that keep me up at night. Just more stuff I try with all my might to cross off my list.

Definitions of words I made up:

Tinkerbell-esque – when you know something is a real, tangible, thing, but it appears to you more like a fairy that you have to clap your hands to say you believe in.

Death Bed Debacle (DBD) – when someone is in their last days of taking oxygen into their lungs and exhaling carbon dioxide, and you need to figure out a place and a plan for them to take their last gasp of oxygen in a safe and comforting environment.

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