Forever Tainted

Last night while I dreamt I was shot in the head, twice. It didn’t hurt and as far as know, I didn’t die. I just had a gaping, bloody hole in the back of my head. It’s rare that I dream of being injured, so I thought that was worth mentioning.

At work yesterday, I took a call for the newsroom about a kidnapping of a 5-year-old boy from school that morning. Listening to the child’s aunt talk, I felt my own heart was ripped out of my chest and stomped on a little bit. Thinking of the amounts of ugly I get to listen to in a day, whether it be one drug dealer or another in the US trying to report another drug dealer, or a report of an 11-year-old girl’s rapist’s whereabouts being shared on the Crime Stoppers line because the caller is more interested in getting a reward than actually having the rapist caught, or just your average dick who thinks the women’s crisis line is there for his own personal entertainment and all the support workers are there just to prank call, or the Alcoholics Anonymous line where alcoholics need to find a meeting as soon as possible as they don’t have the personal strength within to stay sober one more minute without group support, I know that my issues are far smaller than so many other’s.

But, my mom’s been given 6 months to live if she doesn’t start taking care of herself. Should she clean herself up, stop drinking and start eating properly, she may have a few years. I don’t see that happening. The last time I saw her, I woke her up in the afternoon. Sleeping by her side was a new toy dog. She paid a thousand dollars for a dog the size of a rat, that’s better off at Paris Hilton’s side than my mom’s. This little thing is just a puppy. It can’t jump off the bed itself to eat or go to bathroom. The results are disturbing. The last time I saw my mom, she was sleeping on a bed that was covered in this dog’s urine and faeces and she didn’t care enough to clean it up or remove the dog. I’d been told that should my brother or father take the dog away to feed it or walk it, she accuses them of stealing it. They do it anyway, out of compassion for the little guy. And while I was there, I mentioned it was cute and all of the sudden my mother was rambling on about how I was fighting with my brother (who wasn’t at home and I hadn’t seen in weeks) about who gets to keep the dog.

My mom was pretty much lethargic. She was talking in circles, and I couldn’t get her out of bed let alone out to lunch. She had growths on the bottom of her feet the size of golf balls, and her mind clearly wasn’t there; every now and then a cheerful “Hi!” leaving her lips mid conversation, as if I had just walked into the room though I had been there close to an hour trying to get her up and out. Eventually, I had to leave as I had a ferry home to catch. It was heartbreaking. Everything that’s happening to her and that she is doing to herself is heartbreaking. And I’m no longer convinced it’s psychosis and alcoholism. I believe most of what she is today is purely alcohol related. She lost a few marbles before she started drinking as much as she does, sure. But what she is today isn’t my mom at all, and the irreparable damage drinking excess of a litre of Gin a day has done to her brain and body is beyond comprehension.

I miss my mom. And I can’t stand to see her this way. But I live my daily life and try to push the sad reality of what’s happening to the back of my head. And still, life is good for me. I have it so much better than so many others. And there’s literally nothing that can happen to me, or that I can do to myself that can change that.