TheBanyanTree: [UpperBranches] It's Over

[Monique Colver]

Being at peace is the best place to be at a time like this. Much love.




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Monique Colver
Colver Business Solutions
www.colverbusinesssolutions.com
monique.colver at gmail.com
(425) 772-6218


On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 10:56 AM, Linda DeMerle <twigllet at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> We were at the state fair on Saturday, when my phone began ringing. It was
> my brother, Martin.  Kevin asks,
>
> “What does he want?”
>
> I suppose I could have told him had I answered the phone in time. I called
> him back, cautiously, since contact from him usually results in my being
> expected to do something I’d rather et glass than do, but I did and there
> was no answer. I had a feeling. Hm.
>
> Once home, I did the unthinkable and pulled down the menu on my smart and
> sassy phone to see that he had called again, but even more surprising, so
> had my brother, Don. Okay. It’s going on.
>
> Don, first. He is the one I am closest to, he is the sensitive and
> sardonic one with a rich gallows humor that gets me. Calling Don back
> confirmed my suspicion. Dad, their father and my stepfather since I was
> about 2, had died.
>
> Don and I were and are noticeably calm and unemotional. Kevin says,
>
> “Is is sort of like closing the book on a long agonizing story you’d
> rather be over?”
>
> Something like that. We didn’t say much, Don and I, we both already know
> how the other thinks and has felt all the way to our darkest corners about
> Dad.  My sister-in-law, Mary, has told me that I am the only one he talks
> to about these kinds of things. Probably because we understand one another,
> our experience turned out to be far more similar than I could ever guess,
> where our siblings, Martin and Joan, got a different Dad. Over the past 20+
> years, Marty got relegated to the redheaded stepchild table, also, but
> after Dad’s second wife died a few years ago, he decided he was going to be
> in Dad’s life whether Dad wanted it or not. Dad didn’t want it and did what
> he could to hurt and dishearten Marty, but, Marty took it like a grown man
> with an infantile father and was even feeding him on his last day. It was
> then he discovered that Dad hadn’t been eating, drinking, taking meds
> properly or answered his phone for his follow ups from last month’s trip to
> the ER where he was diagnosed with work-related cystic fibrosis and.
>
> This week was 25 years since our mother died. It’s been on my mind…25
> years on August 25th…maybe it was on his, too.  Marty says, no, Dad was
> just thinking he was “beating the system,” once again and this time it
> backfired.  They got him to the ER by ambulance, got him into bed, changed
> IV’d up and he was gone.
>
> I feel pretty detached, having not been a part of his new family for much
> of the past 23 years. He remarried and gained 3 adult children while he
> proceeded to either ignore or insult his own until most of us just gave up
> and went away, raising our kids without grandparents. We also raised our
> kids without the terror or a drunken, cruel patriarch and so all of the
> lonely holidays turned out to be something different…a sacrifice to
> pretending that everything was okay while he fawned over his new family and
> pointed his crooked, smashed finger at the rest of us with one hand and
> whiskey in the other. Backing me, a grown woman, married, with children,
> into a corner with his fist. Wrestling a three-year old to the floor and
> slamming their head onto it, followed by explaining to me his philosophy of
> discipline through the door I locked him out of.  Taunting a a child was he
> scooped ice cream from a five gallon tub.
>
> “You want this ice cream? You can’t have any of this ice cream. This is
> grandma’s ice cream.”
>
> My mother had begun to protest and try to reason with him.  Me?
>
> "I hope it makes you feel like a man to deny ice-cream to a three year
> old, because it’s the closest you are ever going to get.”
>
> I wasn’t afraid of his fists, anymore. I was a mother, damn it, and if
> there is anything brings out the car-lifting adrenaline of a mother, it is
> a threat to her child.
>
> So, it’s over. I am not going to calling hours because I am not very
> interested in hearing people who don’t know the real him talk about what a
> cool “man’s man” they think he is, as a cousin likes to put it. I have no
> interest in being scolded by people he’d delivered a sob story to about how
> he never sees his children.
>
> I’d told my husband that if they decided to pull out all of the stops and
> give him a Catholic Mass, as they did for his previous wife, I was not
> going to sit in the little mission church of my childhood where I sat with
> God on Sundays and then went him to his brutality and listen to lovely
> eulogies after all he had done to my mother. That’s been decided against,
> so I can manage the whose-whatsit that’ll go on at the funeral home.
>
> My brothers are removed and enraged, respectively. I’m at peace that it is
> over.
>
> LL
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> __________________________________________________________________________
>
>  We are no mere writer's support group; we are supporters who write. -- MB
>
>  Monique: http://moniquecolver.blogspot.com/
>  Wolfie: http://wolfsinger.wordpress.com/
>  Our Dee: http://cbg-dee.blogspot.com/
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>
>