Some will mourn and some will cheer, but fear not, psychic voyeurs.

As a friend emailed recently, “I don’t know what makes you bleed your life all over the internet, but it’s compelled me to read what you have had to say since 1998.” Well, I do what I do. No doubt there will continue to be blood in the Intertubes for quite some time. But I seem to be done with the chronicles themselves for now. I’m sure there’s lots more to write about, and I will. There has to be at least one more, no matter what.

Meanwhile, I spontaneously wrote this month’s Horse Fly column on the very same subject. There’s something very satisfying about having this in print all over northern New Mexico, boy howdy. It was a challenge distilling 11 lengthy blog posts into an 800-word newspaper column, but I did it, and it’s even funny. Excellent transmutation too, if I do say myself. For those of you who havent read any of the chronicles, the following is the safest way to get caught up:

THE DEVIL ON KINNEY ROAD
by John H. Farr

Just before my birthday, my 87-year-old mother called me from the hospital in Tucson to say that she was “dying.” Figuring that if she could use the phone, the end might not be so near, I played it cool:

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

“COME DOWN AND HAVE ME CREMATED!” she yelled, “and DON’T FORGET THE COUPON!”

She had a discount coupon for cremation, I remembered, from the same funeral home that had turned the old man into a shoebox full of cinders. (Burn one, get one free?! Arizona at the gates of hell…)

“All right, all right. You just try and take it easy. And let me talk to Mary.”

My younger sister Mary, a registered nurse, had driven to Tucson from L.A. the night before, after hearing of Helen’s hospitalization for severe pneumonia. I learned a lot of things, and none of them were good. The old woman had been in terrible pain for at least a week, refusing to let my brother take her to the emergency room. But on Monday, the cleaning lady arrived: “My God, Helen, you have to go to the hospital!” So boom, off they went. Not only did she have pneumonia, but something else, a hardened mass of crud inside her chest that kept her lungs constricted. The surgeon wanted to operate and chisel it away, but Mary and my mother nixed that: no extraordinary measures, not at her age.

“Well?? It’s bad, but is she really dying?”

Apparently this was something of a crapshoot, since no one could say. The immediate crisis, however, was that Helen had been trying to escape until they locked her in. Furthermore, since my sister was there for an indefinite stay and my brother lived a block away, the hospital wanted to release her into home care (us). I asked if it was time for me to come. “Maybe you’d better,” she said. “I don’t know how much longer I can handle this.”

That was the high point of the next 10 days. The following afternoon, I headed down to the Paseo and signed up for a rental car, a little Chevy Cobalt painted black. Naturally, I balked.

“I have to go to Tucson, Arizona in the middle of August, and all you have is BLACK?!”

”I can get you something else if you want to wait,” the helpful management trainee said. I looked around the office. There were two other people sitting at desks behind the counter reading newspapers. Somewhere a fan was blowing noisily, and a fly kept trying to seek shelter in my nose. Back in Tucson, Helen was sitting in a rotten little trailer with an IV in her arm, and overnight my sister had emailed me that by the way, they’d also diagnosed her with dementia. Big surprise there, but now it was official. I knew I was utterly doomed.

“No, no. I’ll take it,” I said, rolling my eyes.

Ten minutes later I was back: the right front tire had 58 pounds of air (!) and the wheel cover was on crooked, blocking the valve. I let everyone know how pleased I was—they fixed the tire, and I was on my way.

When I rolled into Tucson at midnight, it was 92 degrees. I bedded down in a spare room in another mobile home my mother owned, expecting to check in on Helen in the morning. At 6:30 a.m., my cell phone rang. It was my dear wife, back in Taos:

“Sweetie, I know you’re not up yet, and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I just looked at my email, and Mary has left.”

AAGHHH!

It was true. One day at home with Helen had been too much, and my sister had bugged out at four in the morning, heading back to California in a suicidal guilty fit. It was also her birthday! I understood completely, having stayed away from Tucson for at least two years myself, but this was a major disaster, or so I thought. The real calamity, as it turned out, was Helen, batshit crazy and mean as hell, refusing to go to a nursing home. That afternoon, it hit 103.

* * *

Ten days later, I was back in Taos after Helen threw me out.

A week after that, I was still a wreck, sitting in the back yard drunk at 2:00 p.m. on Labor Day, playing a song I’d just written on my bouzouki over and over for three hours straight: “Mother Don’t Kill Me,” it’s called, quite the little Appalachian death-stomp ditty. It won’t help Helen, but it might help me.

(I ain’t NEVER goin’ back, of course, unless that coupon is still valid.)