See this picture? I can’t ever walk past a “Win This Car!” banner without at least inquiring as to the price of the raffle tickets. In this case a chance to win the 2008 Nissan Versa being given away a month from now by The Rock Christian Fellowship of Española cost $20, so I jumped on it. Who doesn’t need another car, especially one that gets 38 mpg?

Need not be present to win!

My ticket is number 1813, so they’ve sold a bunch of ‘em. But that’s not the point of this post. Rather, the way the car is described and equipped is. Española is pretty much the center of lowrider culture in New Mexico, and these guys love their wheels. This may be a church raffle, but the little Nissan economy car already has aftermarket mag wheels and extra-dark tinted windows, har. What’s more, the ticket describes the vehicle as “fully loaded…”

So I know I’m in good hands. If anyone can turn a Versa into a car freak’s object of desire, the dudes I bought my ticket from can. Now all I have to do is win!

It’s a crazy-making vortex. There’s no way to “win,” it can’t be defeated. Anyone who gets involved risks serious damage. The old woman is choosing to die by going straight out of her mind. That’s why she moved into a living grave. I could get her into the fanciest nursing home in Tucson or Austin if she’d only agree, but no hope there, apparently. She’s also practiced her litany of imagined offenses against her so many times that she can tell it to strangers and sound halfway sane.

Astonishing, isn’t it?

The old woman wouldn’t budge and wasn’t so far gone she couldn’t fool a social worker. Never mind “the voices” and losing $2,500 in cash. Never mind paying too much for an awful trailer she didn’t need with 50 grand she needed to keep. Never mind the permanent reduced breathing capacity and a history of “minor” strokes. Never mind that she’d moved from a beautiful home with room for live-in help to a pathetic dark hole where nothing would ever work. Never mind that she was living out her own worst nightmare but had no self-awareness. Never mind, never mind. She could live on stale fig newtons if she wanted, there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t believe how far gone she was, and that her doctors wouldn’t help me.

It seems so bloody obvious. She can hardly walk, she wets the bed, her dentures are worn and make her look like hell. SHE HEARS VOICES. SHE GETS BATSHIT CRAZY MEAN WITH RAZOR BLADES. She thinks she has things fixed up “just the way I want them” when someone else’s pictures are still hanging on the wall, and she can’t take a real bath ’cause the tub is way too small.

If she wouldn’t accept help, though, there was no way for her to have it. I was letting go, and in this found a measure of compassion. Hopeless or not, maybe her wish to keep her “independence” rated more respect. Giving it up had to be a horrendous prospect, even if her material circumstances would be much improved. Maybe she had a right to go to hell in front of everyone and die unhappy. She’d be unhappy (or much worse), no matter what. Maybe there was something deeper going on that I was meant to watch and learn from.

At any rate, I finally went to see her. Her house was locked, and at first she wouldn’t let me in. I could see her sitting on the sofa while I knocked on the glass, and after a minute or two, she relented and let me in through the kitchen door. I got her a glass of water and sat down next to her on the dead man’s sofa.

“WHY DID YOU COME?” she asked, loudly and bitterly (the high point of the visit).

I told her I was deeply sorry for raising my voice against her the day before and trying to make her go into a nursing home. I told her she could stay in her trailer as long as she wanted, but that all five of her children believed she should be somewhere where she’d be looked after. I told her how worried we were and how much we cared. I told her she had taught me a lot about growing old,and I meant it.

“I DON’T WANT TO HEAR THAT MUSHY STUFF!” she shouted, livid with rage.

Amazingly, I was still detached and told her how my brother and sister in Austin had found a couple of very nice nursing homes she might like. I said I wanted her to come to Taos, but I knew she wouldn’t like the cold, and that we all thought it best if she would move to Austin.

“WHY WOULD I GO WHERE THERE’S NO ONE TO VISIT ME?”

Patiently, I pointed out my two siblings and their spouses in Austin, enough that someone would be able to visit almost every day.

“I DON’T WANT THAT!”

She then proceeded to excoriate and damn every one of my siblings. She said we’d never come to visit her in Tucson (not true), that no one cared, especially me, and that I never gave a damn about my father, either. I was witnessing a breathtakingly alien torrent of anger and hatred. There was nothing maternal at all to this entity, whoever or whatever it was, inhabiting the almost 87-year-old body of my mother. The dark wild thing was now off my shoulders and fully manifested in her. I felt released but in great danger and suddenly rose to leave. “I’m going back to Taos tomorrow, Mother,” I said.

“GOOD!” she snapped. I bent down to kiss her on the forehead, then opened the door. As I walked down the steps, she shouted after me, “I DON’T NEED YOU, JOHNNY!”

I drove back to her old home where I was staying, literally shaking from the impact of what had just happened. My solar plexus was throbbing. I called my wife and paced for two hours until I calmed down. In 63 years of relating to Helen, I’d never experienced anything this stark or clearly dangerous, but I also felt a hint of something unmistakably good. After all, my conscience was finally clear…

The elation I’ve felt since is not unlike the newfound appreciation for life that welled up some days after watching my father die some 20 years ago. It washed over me at the time like a healing flood. The energy is similar now, only deeper, and this involves release.

I couldn’t believe how beautiful the stupid rutted dirt road looked when I finally hit the last turn before our house. I couldn’t believe how stunning my wife was or how perfect the air felt. I couldn’t believe how happy I was to be home.

My honey says I’m different. I’m still disoriented and exhausted, but basically good. I may be standing straighter, and I’ll bet I’ve lost a little weight.

Caffeine and comfort

It’s on the edge of town in an old adobe home. The proprietress has a huge Rastafarian mound of multi-colored hair (at least four colors) and maybe two dozen bracelets. I’m listening to the Grateful Dead on the in-house sound system and enjoying my latte in a small reading room with a sofa and a Queen Anne’s chair. I’m surrounded by potted geraniums, and no one is bothering me. Jerry Garcia aside, it’s quiet here — and I sure don’t mind Jerry!

And BTW, this is the only town in New Mexico (and maybe the U.S.) to have a highway named after a yogi. No kidding: as soon as I walk out the door and get in the car, two minutes later I’ll cross the Yogi Bhajan Memorial Highway. Make that a second or third reason I love this place.

Onward…

How it turned out that in my advanced decreptitude I’ve finally found friends who not only share many of my own predilections and cultural underpinnings but also take care of each other is mildly astounding to me. I say “mildly” because I always figured it was possible to live like that, but the actualization seemed to elude me. Probably I was too fucked up myself, not to put too fine a point on it. If that’s the case, then I must have evolved in recent years, or else I just hit the jackpot. Call it grace and good luck.

But these two fine companions, both outstanding musicians, having followed my recent travails as best they could from my raging emails, wanted to give me a chance to vent. I was invited to a night of therapeutic drinking and gentlemanly pursuits — well, mostly drinking — and vent I did. First I sang them a song I’d written yesterday afternoon, one that you’ll be able to hear soon. [See below*] In the course of the evening, we finished a fifth of Cuervo 1800 and I got dog hair all over my clothes. That would be from Popeye, the resident terrier (?). Much hilarity ensued after the venting, and I even got fed. I also heard an earful about another mother, and it shook me to the bone.

(How did we ever survive???)

When I got back to the run-down adobe on the side of the hill and sat down at my MacBook to catch up on my emails before crawling into bed, there was a message from my brother Rob. It was a beautiful message in many ways and ended with the declaration that the next time, we would both go to Tucson. That remains to be seen, of course, since I’ve said I won’t go back unless Helen is dead or in protective custody, but if she’s really out of it (say, crawling around in circles on the floor and drooling), then a guardianship hearing might prove productive. Time will tell.

What hit me hardest in the email, however, were a few sentences summarizing what life had been like at home in Houston during my younger siblings’ high school years, a period I knew little about. At that time I was at UT-Austin learning where to put it and getting my hippie credentials, so I hardly ever went “home” at all. Guana santo, man!

Remember, I was down in Houston living the hellhouse - ruled by an hourly cycle of shouting fights despite counseling and over God knows what while Mom was going for shock treatments and then the brain tumor. Back then I was hoping they’d divorce and I could move in with Dad. (Dad may have had his issues, but at least he seemed reasonable to me, and I now understand how he got so frustrated when I couldn’t grok his attempts to tutor me in Algebra II).

I got into bike riding back then as a means of staying detached from the madness at home. B____ stayed home and cried a lot. M____ practiced her saxophone and we both spent as much time at school as we could. Band, we called it. B____, not so lucky. He stuck around stuffing his face with chips while attempting to drown out the madness with a television set.

I had literally no idea. Dear God in heaven.

* Oh yes, the song. It’s the first one I’ve written in years, and the rest of the lyrics will fall into place shortly. This is all I have so far, but it sounds great accompanied by my resophonic bouzouki in Appalachian death-stomp mode. In a few days, I hope to have a recording posted here, so keep your eyes and ears open. In the meantime, here’s what I have so far. The title of this piece is [ahem], “Mother Don’t Kill Me,” and it’s a sure-fire hit in hell:

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

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

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

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

Transmutation, chilluns!

This would be during the early years of rock & roll, 1958, when Buddy Holly was still alive. I single him out because we lived close to Lubbock, his home town, and to everyone in Abilene, Buddy was still a local hero. His music had a huge impact on me, because after Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, and Fats Domino, listening to Buddy Holly was like listening to a slightly older version of myself. Rock & roll in general was the total antidote to every restrictive guilty pain I’d ever felt when growing up, the sheer joy a healing balm. I grasped the music with both hands and a willing heart, even though from inside my family (and elsewhere) came the darkly-hinted sense that something was “wrong” about letting go and feeling good.

For now this reference is a footnote, one I’ll expand later. In the context of the Helen Chronicles and my immersion into unholy hell in Tucson, it’s important, though: I remember where the ugly started… and it’s been going on for quite a while. Toward the end of my rolling nervous breakdown in Tucson, I happened to email my favorite cousin, almost exactly the same age as I am, with the observation that I thought Helen had probably been mentally ill for her whole life. Her reply was startling:

Absolutely true! I thought you already knew that she had this problem. I remember my parents speaking about an incident or two that happened when your family was visiting Granny. I guess she was never medicated/treated for it?

So everyone else knew except for her own children? If you don’t think this is monumental — and liberating — for a 63-year-old man to absorb, you haven’t been paying attention. Helen does have dementia, but I doubt it’s Alzheimer’s. Even if it is, there’s something else that’s in the mix, and it’s always been there: I remembered the first time my sister T_______ and I visited my folks in Tucson, back in ‘76. It was a Christmas visit, and while opening our presents there was such a horrible outpouring of hate from Helen that my sister and I immediately fled, driving up to the top of Mt. Lemmon outside of Tucson to sit on a rock, smoke dope, and watch the buzzards ride the thermals. Merry Xmas, y’all…

Oh my God

The truth is, I was completely possessed in Tucson. The pressure was unbearable. I couldn’t speak a single sentence without crying. My rage was all-encompassing, too. On the worst day of all, near the end, I cursed out both my brothers and a commenter on this site who’s very much like a brother. That was the day I initiated guardianship proceedings against Helen, so that I could force her into some kind of protective situation for her own good. A nursing home, assisted living, an asylum, who knows? The lawyers agreed that I had an emergency on my hands and had to act. Seven hundred fifty dollars later, phone calls had been made, appointments scheduled. I had a social worker visit Helen for a preliminary interview, and that’s where things began to look unsteady.

According to the social worker, Helen “presented well.” So much for social science, eh? I wonder what Helen was actually asked. Not about the voices, certainly, or the fact that she’d already forgotten that she’d asked me to come to Tucson to have her cremated and sell the properties! (She was dying, remember.) But this was a definite yellow flag as far as an emergency court hearing to obtain guardianship was concerned. Usually such proceedings aren’t undertaken unless there isn’t any doubt, and once again, the authorities were throwing up a roadblock. If I proceeded with the legal action, there would be a fight, and I would end up testifying in court against my mother. Naturally, I balked.

The next thing was that I finally included a younger brother in the deliberations, and he had reservations, too. I could see this wasn’t going to work, even though the alternative was the previously unthinkable one of just leaving Helen be. Leave her there in a rotten, sharp-edged, dirty, dingy trailer with no railing on the outside kitchen steps, no way to wash her soiled linens, no place to store her things. Leave her there in stinking, humid, white-hot Arizona with only one sibling and the cleaning lady to visit her. Leave her like she said she wanted to be left, losing checkbooks, missing $2500 cash, buying trailers she didn’t need with money set aside for taking care of her. Leave her with the voices talking about her in the night, needing dentures, glasses, and good food in the cupboard. Just leave her, like the laws of Arizona say she had a right to be, left alone to live like a crazy, sick, old lady who had no friends and no one to look after her. Just leave her there and go away… If that’s the way she wanted it, crazy or not, then…

Refusing all assistance

But all at once I felt a little loosening, a glimmer of hope for me. That morning I also had a long-distance talk with a Jungian analyst I’ve known for several years. She talked about the “dark, wild thing” that I had taken on myself by coming to Tucson and was clearly worried for my own safety. We both saw then that if I continued with the legal action, the dark, wild thing would still be on my shoulders. I knew I had to drop everything and leave.

Immediately thereafter, I called the lawyers and killed the process. (They agreed!) I told my siblings I was going home. I gathered up the checkbooks and credit cards I’d taken from Helen’s trailer and prepared to take them back to her. Already I felt like I was released from prison, even though I had the major hurdle of confronting Helen to apologize and comfort her.

Alas, my good intentions did not come to pass. What happened next requires another chapter, in fact, the most unbelievable of all. (Part V, coming up…)

This came in handy, because as I once figured out, we went through over 40 moves before I graduated from high school. Many of those were within the same community, of course. Arriving in Abilene, Texas for instance, we lived for a time in a motel with a kitchenette, then a rental house in the middle of town. I went to Lincoln Junior High School and had the requisite school jacket. After a while, we moved onto the air base for a while. When Helen decided the house was too small, my parents bought a brick rancher in a new subdivision on the edge of town. (I then attended Jefferson Jr. High and couldn’t wear my jacket.) That was where we stayed the longest — with me now at Cooper Jr./Sr. High School — until at last they sold it just before our move to Massapequa, New York (!). What with one delay after another, we then had to make another rented house our home for almost six months before finally leaving town. If you haven’t been keeping count, that adds up to five moves in less than four years!

Helen’s residence until a long month ago was the place I knew as the “family home” in Tucson. She’d lived there for over twenty years alone and outfitted it very nicely for a desert double-wide. It’s where I stayed this time and will likely stay again, when I come back to sign papers and dispose of everything. (IF I come back, I should say. More on that later.) The place has got to be one of the best-landscaped and situated properties in Tucson Estates, the so-called mobile home community for residents over 55 on the southwest edge of town. It’s adjacent to an arroyo where coyotes and javelinas go. There are mature trees and garden areas with a large paved patio. You can sit in a big screened porch and watch the doves and hummingbirds. Inside, it’s filled with Helen’s paintings and many beautiful keepsakes. The carpeting is plush and soft. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. There’s also a big carport and a separate art studio.

A recurring theme in Helen’s last few years, however, was how she hated the responsibility of maintaining the place and yearned for a smaller, simpler home. On the face of it, this sounded sane to me. It was easy to imagine being 86 years old and not wanting to worry about the plumbing. The trouble was, practical concerns like that weren’t on her mind. She either couldn’t stand to simply let things be or couldn’t face the crisis of making choices and wanted somebody else to “take care of things.” This would invariably be one of us five siblings, and earlier this year she’d again floated the absurdist fantasy that my wife and I should take over the old place and be neighbors with her in Tucson Estates. In typical fashion, however, the thrust of this offer was that I would never be able to obtain a nicer home for us, being an artistic ne’er-do-well, and that my wife deserved far better than my forcing her to live in Taos. (Always the carrot and the baseball bat, together.)

In any case, I never figured she would do it. How can an 86-year-old woman take that kind of disruption in her life? But if she did, I knew or hoped that I could count on her to buy something decent. She’d actually pulled this stunt once before, a few years back, and eventually been convinced by sister M____ and others to move back to the double-wide. What I mean is, I just assumed she’d learned her lesson. Extremely naive on my part, for sure. I also think one sometimes manufactures hope to cover up the pain.

But she did it, and she did it badly. Very badly indeed. For one thing, she paid way too much and wasted precious cash for something she didn’t need. (My gently pointing this out resulted in my being attacked for never supporting her decisions.) For another, well, let’s start with a look at the old residence:

Old house: large screened porch

This is where you want to be except when it’s god-awful hot. From here you can watch the birds and look at your gardens. There’s tons of room and comfortable chaise lounges that are easy to nap on. I love it out there. The evening sun sets on the other side of the house, too, so it’s cooler here. Now contrast this with the screened porch on the “new” trailer Helen moved into a few weeks ago:

New house: narrow, hot, and ugly

Yes, that’s an apartment-sized washer & dryer in the background — Helen wets the bed every now and then, and that machine is too small to wash her blankets. (There are big, matched Maytag machines back at the old place.) This porch is much narrower and looks out on the side of the single-wide next door. What’s more, it’s on the sunny side of the house! In Arizona, that can be a death sentence. No one will ever want to sit out here.

Old house: just part of the landscaping

The shot above shows a little of the outdoor space beside the screened porch at the previous residence. Why give up what had always been a source of comfort and joy? The plantings and nearby wildlife almost made staying at Helen’s bearable, in fact.

Old house: carport, arroyo to the right

Helen’s studio is at the back. The steps to the house are specially-built, wide and shallow, easy for old legs to manage. The trees are full of birds all day. But take a look at this shot of where she lives now:

New house: rear of carport

That’s it, that’s all there is. The view isn’t a fair comparison, but you get the idea. This carport isn’t wide enough for the Chevy Cobalt I rented, and the steps to the kitchen door [not shown] are narrow and steep.

The sink in the tiny kitchen of the new place isn’t big enough to hold a frying pan, and there isn’t any dishwasher like Helen had before. The “bottom shelf” in the lower cabinets is the floor itself, and the counters all have very sharp edges. Dark brown fake wood paneling is everywhere. The previous owner’s dishes are still in the cupboards, and she uses them. I could go on and on and on: the bathroom in her old place was custom-designed with a soaking tub for old folks, special handholds and all. There’s even a walk-in closet. In the new place, the bathroom is so small that if someone were on the toilet when you opened the door, you’d hit them on the knee. The bathtub is horrible and slippery — Helen can only sit in a chair and take a sponge bath. There’s hardly any storage space at all.

This, however, is perhaps most telling of all:

New house: view across the road

Okay, ready now? The following is what it looks like across the street from the OLD house!

A little light in hell

My photos don’t necessarily convey the real differences, so you’ll have to take my word for it. The thing is, it’s just not like her, not like the woman who decorated the old place. No gardens to enjoy, no views, no birds or animals to watch, no porch to sit on. No beauty whatsoever, and someone else’s pictures are still on the walls. The new trailer is narrow, leaky, damp, and dark. My God, I realized: just like a grave!

It makes a kind of sense, this living death, but it’s very hard to take and very stupid. Helen needs live-in care, at least, and in the old home there were extra bedrooms where someone could easily have lived with her. Not so here! What’s more, the old woman paid cash for this, at least $50,000, money she could have used to pay for care. That would make it a tragedy, except that this is Helen’s chronicle. As we shall see, the last move of her life is actually her chosen way to die, as if she had no one to care for her and there were no other choice.

So be it, then, and on with the show.

The dynamic is this: Helen is too sick to realize she can’t take care of herself and refuses to go to a nursing home — in this circumstance, however, every authority supports her instead of me. it’s as if you take your dearest loved one bleeding to a hospital and the security guards immediately start beating YOU with their nightsticks. I would say more, but a vital process is in motion. The fact is that no one can legally force another, not even a sick old woman, to accept care. As unbelievable as that sounds, it’s absolutely true. You can’t make them go to a nursing home or anywhere else, especially not her.

For the record, I was with her when she shit her pants in public, and she regularly pisses the bed. She moved into a dump, lost $2,500 in cash she had withdrawn, can’t really cook, can’t take a real bath, left most of her makeup and jewelry at the old house, needs new dentures and eyeglasses, and can’t walk farther than a few yards without resting. That didn’t stop her from cursing me and yelling for the police outside the doctor’s office this a.m. while trying to hit me with her cane.

You would think the above is evidence enough to get help for her, but you would be wrong. Not if she doesn’t want it. I broke down in the doctor’s office this morning because the doctor refused to do anything except recommend family counseling, and then she said: “I think YOU’RE a danger to your mother!”

Subsequently, I learned that the doctor had alerted Adult Protective Services about me! As I had an appointment with the lawyer I absolutely needed to keep, I packed all my clothes and things into the rental car and got the hell out of the house so no one could find and detain me. My attorney told me later that if APS did come around, they’d only ask questions first. But of course, I couldn’t have known that…

Her eyes turn black when she’s raving: small, shiny black eyes with a frightened fox-in-a-snare look. It’s like something is trying to escape, as if her soul is trying to leave her body but can’t get all the way out. I was able to talk to her about this, believe it or not, assuring her she wasn’t crazy but “different.” I told her that I wanted her to come to Taos with me (to a nursing home, of course), where I could visit her every day. She won’t come, though. She wants to stay in the grave of her dingy dead man’s trailer.

There are other solutions than nursing homes, but she would still have to agree, and there is no one to manage her care in Tucson unless I leave her in the hands of strangers — and she would have to agree, which she will not do. After this morning’s horror show in the doctor’s office, I’m not seeing her for a while. Who wants to talk to the police?

I will do what I can, EVERYTHING I can, and as completely as I can. I will follow through. I love her still, no matter what, even though she rejects me in her sickness, and I will not let her die alone if I can help it.