Catharsis -- an experience or feeling of spiritual release and purification brought about by an intense emotional experience; or in psychiatry the process of bringing to the surface repressed emotions, complexes, and feelings in an effort to identify and relieve them, or the result of this process
My family is …crazy, unorganized and sometimes downright ridiculous.
We are greatly extended, joined by siblings full and half, but we only sometimes get into particulars.
We love, but never freely, stealing our hearts away as if they were rare jewels.
We fight and bear our grudges for decades; in short, we are stubborn like mules.
Death doesn’t exactly become us, but it’s a surefire way to get us together, So folk can be eyeballed, whispered and wondered about over anything and whatever.
Our wealth we measure in dirt. Who gets it and who don’t – and oh my lord, the feelings that get hurt …
There are cooks and crooks, Some of us are mean and envy green. We are stubborn, we are proud and you could never call us unclean.
There are drinkers. There are smokers. Some of us enterprise while others are just loafers.
It seems as though our shit is never straight. It seems as though for everything we are late.
Late to show up; late to pay back; Late with apologies and the sincerities they lack.
Quick to tell you what one cannot offer, Quick to shut the door when one cannot be bothered.
Yet just as quick to come around to smile and to preen, At the slightest hint of abundance from which one may glean.
It is painful and it is with the greatest of disdains, To watch a family turn its back on a loved one who remains …
My mother is … my sole|soul inspiration. Resilient, she shrugs her shoulders and sighs as diagnosis after diagnosis seems to call her name. Stroke. Check. Kidney cancer. Check Breast cancer, too? Check. Diabetes. Check.
I could be angry at all the times I pleaded with her to go to the doctor, but I’m not. For one it’s no use now, just a waste of all the energy it takes for us to look forward. Forward to days when the strength in her right arm returns to where she can open the jars with which I struggle.
Instead I am utterly amazed and have seen for perhaps the first time with my own eyes what dignity looks like. I see, too, assurance and grace and fortitude. And in her perseverance I find my own. When she cries, I cry; but if she does not then I cannot.
Still, tonight I find myself weary, heavily burdened in heart and mind. I am too tempted to ask why her and there are moments when I want to actually take the words “this is all apart of God’s plan” and ball them up and set them on fire. Fortunately my printer is out of ink and I have no matches.
I am … tired, feeling older than I think I need to feel, but certain I am just to feel as I do. I think I am just as resilient as she is; equally determined and growing in assurance. Grace, however, well, that’s just laughable in itself and the subject of perhaps some other post.
This is not a tough choice though. I have only one mother and she’s my best friend. Her eyes blinked slowly yesterday, measuring tears that tried not to fall and ask me not to leave. The wavering in the voice that spoke, “No, you have your own life now. Don’t worry about me,” cut me to the bone as I realized that her life is my life. I know her the best – without thinking, without questioning, with only a look I can tell what she needs, when she needs it and how she wants anything. It’s a perfectly natural conclusion I’ve drawn that just as she’d never let just anyone take care of me, that if in any way it could be helped she would be by my side, I shall reciprocate and be by hers.