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About Us
Today, June 17th, is my sister's birthday - Happy Birthday Karen! You are a great sister and one of the funniest people I know! I can't wait until you start a blog of your own so I can read it and weep with laughter. Thanks for being in my life and for keeping me going during the darkest days of my life, the time we were children together.
When Karen and I were growing up we bonded like only two prisoners can in a desperate bid for survival. Our parents weren't mean to us, just to each other, and our mother's mental illness cast a long dark shadow over our entire childhood and beyond.
My maternal grandmother became despondent after the sudden death of my grandfather and killed herself in what was probably a menopausal and/or manic depression induced moment of despair. Or perhaps she loved her husband the way Amy and I love each other and didn't want to live without him. Only thing, she had three teenage children, 16, 17, and 19 whom she had apparently loved until she killed herself and that kind of selfishness is only found in the mentally ill. To me, selfishness is a part of mental illness.
How my grandfather died, I don't know; I never got a straight answer out of the vault of secrets whose door locked shut whenever Karen or I asked anything about them. Those with suicide in their family know the special silence, a hole in the general conversation that is as odd as it is impenetrable. Those of you who recognize this odd behavior but who don't know you have suicide in your family, you very well may have.
I heard that my grandfather, who was working in the garment business pressing pants when he died, had been hit in the head during a fight to unionize the garment industry in New York City. I was proud of him for that. Then years later I heard something about a garden variety heart attack, hardening of the arteries that made him seem crazy, or the blow to the head made him seem crazy. He begged my grandmother to get him out of the hospital but she moved to late and he was dead by the time she tried and so she blamed herself and hung herself from her shower curtain rod, leaving her body to be found our mother who was never the same.
Our mother was a positive person, I'm told, because she wasn't positive when we were alive. She was depressed to the point of being suicidal but she decided that she wasn't going to do to us what her mother did to her. That took a lot of courage and inner strength, but she always thought that she was weak just because she had the depression and suicidal tendencies.
I know what you're thinking. The only time I've ever felt suicidal was at the senseless hit-and-run death of little Angel Lacey, Zane's calico sister and the sweetest cat to ever grace my life (and the most amazing climber for such a scaredy cat!) As I think I said in a previous blog, I cried like an Arabic woman, I wanted to die and I sounded like it. It seemed like a good idea at the time to end the pain and perhaps that is what my grandmother felt like.
I don't ever want to know what it feels like to lose Amy and I hope she never finds out what it feels like to lose me. We are together almost all the time and one of the reasons is that we want to go together. So many "spiritual" books talk about how you shouldn't fear death and you shouldn't have fear but that's like saying you shouldn't want to keep breathing - we have our limbic brains and our autonomous nervous system that doesn't want to know about anything other than to keep us alive and satiated.
Karen and I basically raised ourselves. If it wasn't for the help of our crazy aunt Rosie, who was actually our savior, I don't know what we would have done. Actually, Rosie seemed to have either hated our father or dug him too much and so she hated him - who knows, we're dealing with some wacky people here just like Karen and I dealt with them.
When I was seven and Karen was five, our mother developed what is called a "Wry Neck." Her neck turned to the right and stayed there. Now I know she was subconsciously signaling to our father and us and anyone who would listen that she had seen a hanging, because that's how her neck looked, like she had hung herself. She was also very depressed, suicidal, and was hospitalized by ambulance because she was, she told us, "nervous."
I now know that she didn't want to hurt herself or us and so she checked into the relative safety of the mental hospital, the best of which are frightening places. She was in and out of them a lot during our formative years. She wasn't the best cook or cleaner and how could she be in that state?
Her husband was a rookie NYPD and in those days they made shit money and had to buy their own uniforms and guns. My mother, who was well educated, though she dropped out of getting her college teaching degree to work after her mother's suicide, went on some quiz show and won $5,000 to buy all of my father's gear. I'm sure that must have bonded them, but my mother was ill-equipped mentally to have children and I'm sure the physical pain and the overwhelming amount of work children are was too much for her fragile mental state.
One fateful day, her psychiatrist discovered the truth using hypnosis on her, which much have just given her an excuse to divulge the truth to someone, anyone, and he gave her a post-hypnotic suggestion to tell my father the whole story. She told him to pull the car over, when he did she spilled the beans and rather than feel compassion for her suffering and pain, keeping this secret during two pregnancies (which is probably why I often feel like I have to investigate secrets and share them with the world). No compassion from my father, who was keeping his own father's alcoholism and drug addiction secret from my mother. Nope, he hated her from that moment onward and looked at my sister and me like ticking time bombs, crazies who would get crazier and crazier. I didn't disappoint those expectations when I became a rock musician and later a metaphysical expert and author.
I'm getting the disturbing feeling that I've blogged about this before. We've got to make these blogs searchable, the way our brand new searchable Store and More is! Check it out. I'm going to go use it to buy my sister a birthday present! If I haven't written about this before, I'll come back some other time and finish this, as if it will ever end until we do. I know that our story is mild as can be compared to many people's stories. As that show, Naked City, used to say: "There are eight million stories in the naked city, and this has been one of them!"
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