Comforter

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I took mom's bedclothes out to the garage tonight, ready to donate to a place that helps women trying to escape abuse. Seeing them in a heap like that being discarded hurt more than most of what I've been having to lose. I held the blankets and cried some. I keep feeling as if mom is just gone out of town. It isn't sinking in because when it threatens to it overwhelms. I made a peanut butter pie a week ago and realized it's the last one I'll ever make in this house. I tried it with brown sugar this time. Wasn't strong enough to make a difference but either way mom wasn't here to try it.

I held mom's hand for a long time in the hospital. She was under sedation.  I told her when she sees a light, go to it.  . She had wanted me home, not there, so I left the hospital. I was told later what time she passed. It was during the ride home. During that ride, at the hour I was later told of, I'd had a sudden and vivid sense memory for a moment of holding her hand.

'Comforter' 18"x24", enamel and crayon on Masonite

Updated, color is more accurate in this shot, some details sharper except that the  whites are a bit snowed out.

Mom's hospice workers were named Claire and Tim.  Tim was Claire's assistant, being a teenager.  He spent a very long, careful time giving mom morphine.  When he finished, I thanked him for the care he'd given, and he looked surprised and embarrassed.  Claire was particularly kind.  They both were.

The one sister that lives here moved in about two years ago to help take care of my parents. She's not openly hostile to me most of the time but doesn't mind making things as difficult as possible, throwing up new roadblocks to me sorting my stuff while pushing me to get it done and passive-aggressively cutting me down...insisting we sell the house before I can ready a place to go is the worst part of it, scares the shit out of me and she knows it (doesn't care). The tension is there and some days worsens. The night after one of those damned 'family meetings' I dreamt that we had caused mom to retreat to her bed crying. We did that, we caused that.

Mom had had two children by her second husband before me. I was the one that lived. I had never heard of them from her and never knew until many years later. One, a girl, was told me by one of my sisters. The loss had put mom in a clinic. The other I learned of by accident when I was looking through some magazines being thrown out. Hidden among them had been a birth certificate for a brother born not much more than a year before I was. I never wanted to hurt mom by asking so I put the certificate back in hiding and soon it was gone. To my lasting shame I can't remember the name on the paper, what my brother's name was. I've never asked anyone else in the family and never will.

I remember my first Christmas - it had to be, because I remember not being able to walk, just crawl. I recall the living room in Vallejo, the tree towering in the corner with the blown-glass onion-shaped ornaments in all colors. I have an impression (but is it mis-shapen by what I have learned since?) of the many smiling adults who kept urging me to play with an arrangement of toys on the floor, and being reluctant to do so because I knew they weren't mine but belonged to another child. I was the only child there.

I had a nephew Tony, who was a year older than me. he died a few years ago after a troubled life of drug abuse and homelessness. I used to believe that he had visited us down there, but everyone swore up and down that he never left Portland. See, I thought Tony had been with us on this one occasion I remember of my father taking me to play at a park in Vallejo. I remember a structure with holes and tubes to climb through, which I and the other boy with me really enjoyed. He was only a little older than I was, about a year. I felt he was family somehow - why not, as he rode in the car home with us? But everyone swears that I was the only child on that trip.

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The above is the bulk of a slightly longer bit that I posted elsewhere a month ago.  It was in hopes of convincing a particular someone that deeply personal, even painful matters can be talked about - not necessarily openly like this, but even privately with, say, someone who cares.

Pretty sure she's put me completely out of her head at this point...  : (