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.)

Every bathtub needs a window.

Like with the adobe cottage we rented for a while in San Cristobal, the bathroom in this old adobe has a smallish window high up on the wall beside the tub. When I stand up to take a shower, I can look out to see sunshine and mountains, or feel the breeze on my face. This evening as I lay back and settled in for a long soak, I heard them through the screen: crickets, thank God!

Something had made me want to turn in early. My wife was away in Colorado, and I had pretty much run out of enthusiasm for much of anything by around 9:00 p.m. That’s usually when I start to come awake, but it had been a strange day all around. I felt as if I had a lot of inner sorting-out to do, not the kind you work at consciously, though. This was more a case of feeling that I simply had to stop. Just stop, and let the anxiety settle down. I also had a sense of needing to be reprogrammed from on high, as it were, an intuited directive to await further instructions. Very unusual for one so previously guilt-driven as myself, to just lie down and trust the universe. I live for long hot baths that transition into bedtime, so that was what I did.

These crickets were loud. Probably right outside in the lilac bush, I figured.

As I lay there in the dark — my favorite way to take a bath — I remembered how the crickets back home in Maryland, three million light-years away, helped set me on my current path way back in ‘98. I was standing in the backyard in the twilight, probably after having closed the garage, when I noticed that the crickets had suddenly disappeared, or had they? Turning toward the house, I was startled to hear the sounds returning. I stopped in my tracks and slowly turned my head, first one way and then the other: oh Jesus, it was me! High-frequency hearing loss in one ear or the other made the crickets’ music fall or rise, depending on the orientation of my head. As the first undeniable proof of irreversible physical decline, this hit me like a two-by-four. I felt so sorry for myself, I even cried.

Considering that I was already 53 years old, you’d think I’d have had a more enlightened outlook, but that “immortality” thing dies hard. Later on, when I was wrestling with the unbearable fear associated with breaking up our old life to move to New Mexico, I’d recall “the crickets,” or rather the absence of them in my ears, to bolster my resolve: if not now, when? I had to do this NOW, because my body was shutting down. I had to take the risk.

That was 10 long years ago. I don’t know who that person was who did such crazy things, can’t get inside his head for love or money. I remember that my wife was burning out professionally and that our lives were falling apart. I didn’t want to cut the grass any more. I didn’t want to clean the basement. I didn’t even want to drive to town, I just wanted to flee.

So there I was last night, 10 years later, lying in the bathtub. One cricket singing through the open window was especially loud, and I found this oddly soothing in a way I’d never quite experienced before. I felt that all I was meant to do, at that moment and maybe for the rest of my life, was lie there and listen. It was like the good part of being in a church. Just listen and be saved. BECOME the sound of the cricket, dissolve into the ocean of life.

I went to bed soon afterwards. Alone, of course, and way before the normal hour. There was nothing on my mind. Six hours later I woke up and sat down to write this post at 4:00 a.m. I knew I’d been dreaming, dense unremembered dreams, the kind that make you wake up tired, as if you’d been walking all night long instead of sleeping.

It’s almost quarter to six now, and I’m crawling back between the cool clean sheets. I need to go a little farther, and maybe when I wake up, I’ll remember where I’ve been.

UPDATE: There’s a book that fills in a lot of what happened after I found my hearing was shot. How we came to be here, etc. Buffalo Lights: Maryland to New Mexico. Buy a copy and feel better right away.

Be not afraid, the light is growing.

My sweetie has embraced “process,” and so, remarkably, have I. This is big. She has a studio now where she can place her baby grand as soon as Mayflower gets its act together and trucks it down here from Dubuque. There’s even a bathroom of sorts, with an actual toilet. When she steps out the door, she can see for 90 miles or more. But all her music and books are still packed in boxes, a terrible frustration for a scholar like herself. What’s more, our actual housing situation remains in limbo. With all the work involved in outfitting the studio, it’s likely to remain so through the end of the year. Everything’s a process, nothing ever finished — the actual way of the world, of course, now proudly loved for what it is. There was a time when nothing would do but closets and sidewalks, neither of which is to be had in our rented piece of “old Taos.” (No overhead lights, wall switches, or flat floors, either.) We are, eventually, “so out of here,” as she said the other day, but only as it flows along with all the rest.

And I’ve become a 63-year-old blank slate, each day completely open in a personal sense. Oh, I have my tasks and stable-cleaning obligations to myself, but what I’ll actually do from here on out is up for grabs. Nothing to prove, nothing to atone for. I used to have “issues” with my wife chattering on about things I thought I didn’t are about, and now I hang on every word and gesture. Every second is a precious eternity.

When my cell phone rings, if it isn’t her, I may not answer.

Sunday was Helen’s 87th birthday. It was also the the first time I can remember that I didn’t send a card, or flowers, or a present, or make a phone call. But no, I didn’t feel guilty. Just incredibly, impossibly sad…

The sadness of Helen is overpowering. She has no friends at all. She hasn’t communicated with her own family back East for years. She’s effectively driven her own children away. Just TV, naps, and stale Fig Newtons. Tick, tock, tick, tock… Imagining her there in that miserable excuse for a trailer she now occupies is horrible, so I try not to. Her other home where I’d been staying, luxurious by comparison, is falling into slow decay: beautiful mementos gathering dust, trees and bushes dying for lack of water, pots of flowers turning brown in the Arizona sun.

Doves in the old carport

You can’t help her, no one can. Nowhere in the whole insane mess is anything resembling a thread of sense or possibility of healing. It’s like watching an old blind whale beach itself on broken glass. There isn’t going to be another birthday. No way, no how. She belongs in a nursing home but will not go, too bad: Arizona law protects the right of lunatics to die in misery, their families be damned.

My wife’s mother died in the agony of full-blown Alzheimer’s, too sad to bear, yet she was a cosmic engine of love. Her children miss her every day. She cried when told she had to move to nursing care (“Oh no, NOT Stonehill!”), but she went. Her son in Atlanta sent her roses every week, and her daughters visited regularly until the end.

Helen’s fall will be the final unconscious cruelty to my siblings. I wonder when it will hit them that way, how by descending into self-destructive isolation, she’s closing off all possibility of sharing her last days on earth. Even considering our beat-up wreck of a family, there could have been some kind of closure or at least a little dignity.

I have to write her brother soon — whatever will I say?

That’s 11:46 A.M., America, and I’m still unshaven, unwashed, sitting in my bathrobe! Hah! Take that, you stinking Dominionist idiots!

Time to take the newspaper into the bathroom

Okay, okay. My wife is off practicing for a performance, all right? I’m not as stupid as I look.

What was the last thing that scared me with Helen? That she would disinherit me. No, really. I can hardly believe that actually bothered me, but of course it did. What the hell is THAT all about, and where did it come from?

It’s a very real possibility, although she’d have to stay sane enough to see her attorney, who would try to talk her out of it. But my automatic reaction, coming at the tail end of this last episode in Tucson, was the catalyst for what could modestly be called a thundering herd-of-elephants epiphany. Much too simply put (considering the ramifications) — and as I’ve mentioned before — if you take away the money, what is there?

[...crickets...]

Without the eventual reward of divvying up a couple hundred grand (the Dow Jones and nursing home accounting offices willing), why would I or any of us have kept calling or visiting over the last 30 years? Heck, the last 40 years.

To get a taste of those great Xmas cookies?
To reminisce about fun family times in days gone by?
To help with chores around the homestead?
To share good news and unload burdens?
To bask in the comfort of home?
To share each other’s love and affection?

Help me out here, I’m trying as hard as I can. But I swear to God, none of those apply. Maybe a little bit, here and there — nothing is ever all bad — but mostly not. She didn’t bake, either. Or even celebrate Christmas, except back in the early years. Or want to go anywhere, or even want to listen.

For as long as I can remember, even going back to puberty, coming face-to-face with Helen was a tense drill of raising inner shields, especially in the last 20 years. Share my innermost thoughts? (NOT ON YOUR LIFE!) Reveal my hopes and dreams? (ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND???) The same thing applied to dealing with the old man, of course, who had his emotional marching orders.

I know I’ve told this before, but the time in ‘76 or ‘77 when my sister T. and I showed up in Tucson was a horrible experience. I had a really nice Martin 12-string guitar with me that I’d bought from a new friend in Maryland and was sitting in the kitchen tuning up when my father ambled in. I’d already played a solo gig back home, singing all my own material, and I proudly piped up and told him that I’d decided to make it as a songwriter. He stopped dead in his tracks, uncharacteristically at a loss for words, and looked at me as if I’d just said I was going to suck dicks in a carnival sideshow. It was that bad, and it hit my 31-year-old heart like a skidding semi. I must have said something appropriate, and he left the room. A few minutes later he came back, his head hung low with guilt, to tell me that “Your mother and I just don’t want you to be disappointed…”

That was over 30 years ago, and I kept coming back. What did I know? I had a mother and a father. That’s what people do, right? That’s how parents talk to their kids, yes?? The terrible thing is that this incident is only one of hundreds. I can’t think of a single instance where I was encouraged to do something I loved. And when I succeeded on my own, regardless, it never did pass muster. They thought I “wasn’t right” because I was good at art and did so well in school but wouldn’t try out for Little League. I remember once in summer camp I made a wallet and produced a couple of not-bad paintings, winning first-place prizes and two engraved silver-plated cups. The upshot of that was that I came away feeling I’d done something unclean. They never knew what to do with me, I guess, and as a boy, I never understood why everyone but my parents thought I was hot shit. I know my siblings had to push against similar headwinds: we’re all alive, and each of us has in our own way accomplished quite a lot, done remarkable things, etc. — in one brother’s case, just surviving rates a ton of kudos — but no one is a CEO or has a PhD, and while nobody’s starving, not one of us is what you’d call well off.

I honestly wonder if I would have come back this last time, with Helen supposedly on her deathbed (again!), if I would have subjected myself to all the anticipatory stress (never mind the actual psycho-drama) without the underlying motive of wanting to keep enough of a lid on things to make sure the eventual transfer of the damn “estate” proceeded smoothly? The goddamn money, the constant reminders about it, the insidious little monologue inside my head that told me how much I needed it because I wasn’t any goddamn good and couldn’t earn it on my own…

Of course I wasn’t any goddamn good. How would I ever have learned otherwise?!?

Ironically, adjusting to the possibility of being disinherited helped tip the boulder over the edge. Now everything is different. I mean utterly different. I can’t emphasize that enough. Here’s just one example: over the last 72 hours, there’s been this strange thing happening inside me. Whenever something happens or I have a thought that makes me feel bad (dirty, uncomfortable, anxious, sad, or wronged), this automatic self-diagnostic program pops up in my head and asks me if the feeling came from Helen! So far, every single instance has, and then I sit back, letting go of the emotion, and the program checks my own resources: is there a reason for this state of mind? And so far, no! NO! No reason at all. And then I keep going, a little disoriented but not half bad at all.

I’m saying this as plainly and ineloquently as I can to make it stick. The guilt is gone. The thing that carved the ruts into my psyche just isn’t present any more. For someone who’s had a lifelong guilty conscience, this is monumental. I have 63 years worth of training to let go of. Everything in my life is directly affected, especially my relationship to my wife (and everyone else).

I stood by the kitchen window yesterday as I was getting ready to cook supper. The wind was blowing through the leaves of the big elm tree, causing thousands of vibrating shadows in the evening light. The air and everything in it shimmered: the outdoors was alive. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with emotion, because I finally knew that I was all right. My God, THERE’S NOTHING “WRONG” WITH ME AT ALL!

(No guilt.)

Who knew?

No, nobody died, at least not in the way you think, but the current focus of the chronicles are over with this installment. What a ride.

Most of the posts in this series are extremely emotional, somewhat overblown, and very dark. They’re also at least five times too long: if I could edit it down to 20% of what’s there now, we’d all be better off. But the literary flaws mirror the stress of these last few weeks quite clearly, reminding me of the whirlpool that sucked me under and still grabs me in the heart. (Biology is compelling, even in a lie.) There haven’t been many comments, though, probably most people have an intuitive appreciation of sorts, and whether from embarrassment or respect, one feels reluctant to speak up. That’s fine. What would I have to say to a friend who’d just lost an arm in a car crash, for example? The difference, however, is that the Helen Chronicles are revelatory for me, not crippling . The disability comes before, not after.

Without more exposition, one might make the mistake of thinking that the recent period represents a sudden personality change, the kind so many face when aging parents disintegrate before their eyes. There’s that, all right (the decline into an unsustainable state), but this wasn’t really sudden. Helen was always fragile, irrational, and deadly mean when hurting. In between, when growing up, I thought I had a mother and that everyone’s was like her: love ‘em when they’re good and leave ‘em when they’re bad. Affection that had to be earned, in other words. Think about that. What would be left of the emotion by the time it turned up as a temporary ration? Love reduced to doggie biscuits. And if that’s what you have, as lacking as they are, you still learn what to do to get the next one, because you’re always hungry.

So it was in the beginning and then got worse. Progressively, over time, a way of “dealing with it” grew alongside the rising emotional violence. This could be described as learning to expect the worst on any given visit, for example — only, why then go at all? Consciously, because that’s what good sons do, look after their dear old mothers, unconsciously, because I had to be good to get my biscuit, get that mother-love stamped in little Johnny’s passport. You can’t say that I was in control at all, really, continually revisiting the scene of the crime. We’re biologically hard-wired to love our mothers anyway: whatever the dance was, it seemed to fit the bill.

And then there was the money, I realize. Ultimately, always, the money, the great big bag of doggie biscuits in the sky. If she mentioned it once, she brought it up a thousand times: what would happen when she died, who would get what, who wouldn’t. On every single visit, every phone call. If I wouldn’t discuss it and pledge allegiance to the creed, there’d be an ugly, crazy-making breakdown in the next ten minutes. On every single visit for over 30 years, at least, though it wasn’t always due to my heartless reluctance to wallow in the “family” muck of greed and fear and counting pennies. A minor therapeutic sarcasm could grow in Helen’s mind into a slight, a slur, a vicious ingratitude for all she’d ever done. Soon I’d be “just like your father” and there’d be nowhere to escape: she’d follow me or my wife from room to room, spewing toxins. You had to take part in the combat or become a mortal enemy. It was for her or against her, or else you ran away and stayed away until the guilt built up enough to make you go back and renew your membership.

Madness upon madness, cranking, grinding, tearing, mindless pain and horror, always though within the “family,” because we were one, sort of, and this was just what “families” did, except they didn’t. Not all of them. And you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to accept this larger, non-approved, alternative truth. (Just ask my wife.) I know now that a mother’s unconditional love reflects a child’s soul back to him or her, and that is how we know we have one. Absent that, it takes whatever passes for divine intervention. Grace, luck, mystery… I don’t know how my siblings and I are still alive, considering.

But the nightmare I found in Tucson finally blew the doors off: that buggy is dead in the middle of the road. I know this, but I still can’t adequately put my reaction into words. This is monumental. Everything I’ve ever done, or dreamed, or tried to do, was corrupted by the greatest lie that ever was. Fundamentally, I never really had a mother. I never got my ticket punched, not for over 60 years! My God, chilluns. My God, my God.

This realization is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m still substantially in shock, but I also feel a kind of liberation, like I’ve been rescued after having been raised by aliens on another planet. So I’m a human being, after all — who knew?! — and I can do what humans do and follow my heart. I CAN DO WHAT I WANT! How can this be? Because I DO have a mother, and I finally know I have a soul.

After growing slowly in my awareness all along, it’s here now in the nick of time. I’m talking about the Big Momma, chilluns, the all-enfolding love of all Creation. MOTHER NATURE, Mother Earth, the stuff my body’s made of, the thing we can’t define or do without, the ultimate redemption: Goddess loves me, this I know, for my tears, they tell me so. (Put it any way you want.) I have the rest of my life, be it long or short, to do things differently and start again. Stunning and disorienting. Life-altering. Absolutely, totally, completely, mind-numbingly huge.

I feel like I need to go climb a mountain, curl up under a ponderosa pine, cry for a week, then sleep for a thousand years…

See, this is why it’s good to be an adaptable, creative fellow.

I thought things were going pretty well, until I went ballistic on a mailing list and sent people here who don’t need to see these things. VERY unprofessional, shows how serious this is for me and how much I need to take care of myself. Moment to moment, I forget that I just had a piano dropped on my stomach. (That’s the third body region I’ve tried with that metaphor, the best one yet.) Now people can tell stories about me, if they already don’t, or I can take lessons from my mother in how to think they are. These have not been my favorite two-and-a-half weeks on the planet.

Just amazing, isn’t it? This is 1945…

Accordingly, I decided to do more processing, spending a few hours working on my latest song. You have no idea what a relief it is to realize that writing-wise, nothing is taboo any longer. (If it were, I’d have to violate taboo to breathe.) Anyway, here are the most current lyrics. I tried recording this today, but that’s just not working — probably wasn’t done yet. Here we go, then. Transmutation through art, remember:

MOTHER DON’T KILL ME
© 2008 John H. Farr

Well I came ‘cause you said you were dyin’
I came ‘cause my siblings were scared
but the nightmare I found down in Tucson
was worse than I ever had dared

—————————-

(Chorus)
Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t put me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

—————————-

You gave up on gardens and painting
abandoned your beautiful home
and pretended that nobody loved you
now you live in a world all your own

(Chorus)

I know that you’ve always been hurtin’
I realize you never were whole
now I know how the best parts went missin’
and I’m busy backfillin’ my soul

(Chorus)

Well I thought we could make a connectiion
in the middle where nobody goes
but that’s just a little boy’s longing
maybe this time the door’s gonna close

(Chorus)

Then I’d take you on back to Kent County
put you down in the ground next to Dad
there’d be no more abusin’ and fightin’
be the best time that I ever had

(Chorus)

Quite the exercise, dealing with my own personal hurricane. I hope someone learns something from this. (Ask me later.)

The latest word on the Helen front is that the old woman wants “the metal box,” the one with the will. Since she’s already declared that I’m “not part of the family,” you can guess where this is going. I really shouldn’t speculate, but it’s so hard not to: the grooves are so well worn.

She’s always used money to control. What makes it work is withholding affection, because that makes for hungry children. Generosity in love, as with finances, shows irresponsibility in the giver. Never lend out more than you receive! Love, like money, is finite in the false world where transcendance is a lie.

As a family lender of last resort, she’d always given out the checks. Need to buy a used car to get to work? Go to Helen if you dare. Over the years, it devolved into a ritual of madness. When she set up her very modest little trust eight years ago, she had figures in mind for how much each of our shares of the “inheritance” should be reduced for gifts of money already handed out. With the Helen loans, everyone started out in a hole. I never put much credence in her figures, but she had them codified in the trust documents. If Helen ever died, as successor trustee, I’d have to start by shorting all the heirs according to this nonsense. Unfortunately, that was just the beginning.

Helen’s attorney made it clear that there were to be no more individual gifts that might upset the “equalized” amounts as stated in the trust. The attorney also drew up a plan for yearly giving that’s in there too, so Helen could help her grownup kids with supplemental income. That’s how she thought of it at the time, but we’re only talking only small amounts: a hundred here, $200 there… And it never was that regular. There was lots more given out occasionally, several thousand here, another thousand there: “to even things out,” but not for everyone. If you hadn’t asked for any recently, then you were “good” and got rewarded. She did give me money once to help pay for my hernia surgery, but only after I asked for it — which made me “bad,” so subsequently I missed out. She never stuck to her attorney’s directions, in other words, which was fine as far as my siblings and I were concerned. But she was erratic and inconsistent, stirring up the muck and pitting one against the other.

To make things even worse, she kept records of it all in a lunatic’s diary, an evil green notebook stuffed with scraps of yellow paper where this gift or that was written down. Her intention was that when she died, the one in charge (presumably me) would add it all up and follow her commandment to cut so-and-so’s allotment by a specified amount. Whenever Helen brought it up, i.e. within the first hour of any visit and in every phone call, I had to promise to faithfully fulfill her wishes. All this was outside the trust, however, and subject to various interpretations. I thought the whole idea was absurd.

The notebook still exists, of course. I saw it when my brother brought it to me early in my final week of hell in Tucson. I know what he wanted me to do, to go through the crumpled hen-scratchings and add everything up, so I could tell him what the bottom line would be. That’s not quite the way it sounds: this brother and middle child, more damaged in some ways than any of us but with a solid loving heart, had long ago literally traded his independence for a symbiotic relationship with Helen that none of us understood or could have weathered. For years Helen had been telling him and anyone else who’d listen that “Johnny has gotten more money than anyone else,” something he wanted to see me confirm. I recognized this as fear that he’d be left out, for he was the hungriest of all.

It was always my intention to follow the letter of the law, according to the will — sorry, you get $20,000 less than she does, etc., etc. — and then to follow up by using property outside the trust to even up the piles, after which I’d liquidate the trust and divide it five ways, just the same for everybody It was the only way to balance the family karma: give everyone as much as I possibly could, in equal shares. If anyone objected because of what the damn green notebook said, I’d let them try to sort through all the mess and come up with adjusted figures, knowing that the exercise would quickly prove my point.

But the whole thing was disgusting and pathetic. You withhold love, because you never got it. And when someone needs a hand, you make them pay. (She’d even started counting birthday and Christmas gifts against our shares.) Every time she raised the subject, I felt I needed purifying afterwards: all this carping, abuse, and fear over an individual fortune roughly equivalent to the cost of a nice car and some dental bills. It was all she ever wanted to talk about, enough to send me screaming down the road.

And now I’m the villain for trying to help. Helen may even disinherit me, such as it is. More than anything, that’s the final punishment in her view, in mine the last gasp of a game to make me shoulder guilt and feel unworthy. Love is money, so being left out = abandonment, which in a child’s heart means he must have done something wrong and should be punished. But I’m different now, and there’s nothing of the guilty son in this equation.

And that, dear reader, is the gold down in the guano…

I’ve been back from Arizona for a week now, still exhausted, sometimes reeling from the backwash.

What’s happened is a terribly difficult thing to accept, because we’re biologically hard-wired to love our mothers. Few can probably even conceive of a situation where the reverse isn’t automatically true, but it happens. With Helen, I realize, the contract has always been broken: she doesn’t love her children… That’s the chilling thing, the part that terrifies a child and stops a grownup in his tracks. It isn’t natural. It’s a denial of who we are. It really isn’t completely human.

With relish and conviction, she tells my brother in Tucson: “Johnny will be investigated, you’ll be investigated, you’ll ALL be investigated!” Us? We who by all rights should never had made it this far? What for?

For looking in on her virtually every day for years? For coming from the grocery store with fruit and frozen Chinese dinners so she’ll have something in the house to eat? For walking her calmly out of the bank with a shit stain spreading on her skirt? For driving 600 miles to pick up the pieces and getting chased out of town?

It’s like looking at a huge crippled insect, pincers waving in the air.

So don’t mutter platitudes at me or judge. I’ve been there and I know different. I AM there, and now I understand my father better: what do you do, when you find out, when you’re an Air Force officer in the ’50s and you feel the fear? What does it take to hold it all together? What kind of life do you retreat to? He took the coward’s way out, with booze and womanizing in his own little world where kids were a distraction. But at least I understand, a little.

The mystery is that I am whole — the question, then, is why?