who are these people?

the news that precipitated my recent trip home was horrible. not a thing that had ever crossed my mind in its bleakness -- it skipped the generational sequence, ya know?

guilt and anxiety battled it out in my head and heart as i rode down to ny in the dark. the years of silence, preceded by years of hurt, misunderstanding, selfishness, and confusion. i mean, everybody's family has its own brew of dysfunction so why was i so poorly equipped to deal with my own? honestly? long ago, i just decided it wasn't worth it. from a very young age i was given no emotional foundation and while still a teen, the finances dried up too. caught up in their own anger, and still playing emotional tit-for-tat, i could no longer harness the energy for it. at first it was surprising how easily they gave up on me. then... not so much.

i was alone. for real.

my mother and grandmother had always been fierce. bitter disappointed tempests who often reduced me to tears by the volume and power of their rage. rarely did i fight back, hoping to let the storm pass without adding to the ledger for future accusations. it was astonishing how tightly they held onto every hurt -- actions from my childhood, when consequences couldn't be understood because i was a CHILD living in a very confused dynamic. expected to be truthful and kind, yet party to deceit so often it makes my head spin to think about it now.

years pass. who are these people? they are my family and they are old and sad and alone and afraid.

my father cried upon seeing me, couldn't meet my eyes and confessed a very difficult relationship between he and my brother. a sibling to whom i feel no familial tie, really -- i've met him twice and both times he was a sulky quiet teenager. my father's guilt over my mother and me was apparent. but... so? let it go already. yeah, you treated us both awfully, but my mother was impossible and so complicit, right? me? it was so long ago, whatever i felt is buried so deeply i now only feel uncomfortable at his emotional displays. he stepped up for once in his life and offered to help at least cart me around a city i forget is so big. thank you.

part of my grandmother's decline is par for her age, i suppose. heading towards 90 and having had several bad falls. nothing ever broke, but years of standing at work followed by years of sleeping on the couch (still!) cannot be good long-term spinal strategy. the true shock was her brownstone actually being the grey gardens i nightmared it would be -- the cats, the smell, the rotting walls, the filthy kitchen and bathrooms, the trash, the overgrown yard and undone laundry. bedrooms that had become giant litterboxes for feral cats. my mother had been living there and her room, bathroom and even the bathrobe still on her bed were just filthy. which meant she was unwell for a very long time. she had always been a fastidious housekeeper, eat off the floor if you wanted kinda person. let's just be thankful blogger hasn't added a scratch-n-sniff widget yet.

this was my first visit to a nursing home. it was clean and didn't smell! my mother was getting her hair done. she didn't recognize me. she was in a wheelchair. she looked a million years old. her two front teeth were broken, i'm guessing in a fall, (of which i guess there were many) but that seemed impolite to ask at this point. we waited over an hour for her to be finished and then for whatever reason, my grandmother was in a huge fit was to leave. i ventured alone the next day, contrary to my grandmother's determination that i join her at some old folk's hoo-hah at the church. my mother seemed "in the moment", i guess, but only just there. she responded to my remarks, but never more than a few words. she knew about obama though and was amazed i'd met him. (even though "he is not the right color to be president.") she holds her resentment still about her mother, my father and the aunt who was the one who finally bothered to track me down. she was either confused or ashamed about some issues, like where is your car, where is your stuff and what the hell happened? i lobbed softballs, but none of what she had to say matched anybody else's accounts.

so now what? exit my own life that i've built for better or worse? in its present state, i could not live at my grandmother's. even regular weekly trips down to clean wouldn't make a dint in the dire state of the place. my perilous financial state will not allow me to rescue anything or anybody. my signature anywhere could prove to be my ruin.

part of my own disavowal of emotional quid pro quo was that there never was any "quo". saber rattling and blackmail, yup, but the returns were miserly. so i'm stuck in this tail-chase of what do i *owe* them? again, it's all on me. my phone hasn't rang, no e-mails or notes in the post. i can make my own rules, i suppose, but again, i have no play-book.

i promised my mother magazines. i will start there.