{"id":52,"date":"2008-03-25T09:34:36","date_gmt":"2008-03-25T14:34:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=52"},"modified":"2018-10-31T15:17:24","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T19:17:24","slug":"morphine-drip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=52","title":{"rendered":"Morphine Drip"},"content":{"rendered":"

My grandmother is dying. <\/span>I spent a long weekend in <\/st1>West Virginia<\/st1> saying goodbye and watching my family quietly fall apart. <\/span>It\u2019s weird, really, to have inane family bullshit spin out of control around her deathbed. <\/span>Weird because, well, we\u2019re poor. <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019d be one thing if my grandparents were loaded, because I can understand pettily fighting over the fate of millions of dollars while a loved one slowly slips away on the bed beside you. <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not even fighting, really. <\/span>The family is, more or less, dismissing the event. <\/span>It\u2019s a sound strategy, often used by lower life forms and truckers: <\/span>If you can\u2019t see it, it can\u2019t see you.<\/p>\n

My family is emotionally distant, anyway. <\/span>When I was growing up, a good, solid slap on the back of the head meant \u201cI love you,\u201d and saying \u201cI wish you were dead\u201d was an extreme term of endearment. <\/span>That was mom, and thank god she killed herself, because talk about cancers on the soul\u2026 Dad, well, he left when I was 12. <\/span><\/p>\n

My family used to have money. <\/span>Ice cream, of all things. <\/span>A big name in the DC area. <\/span>The singular supplier for the White House from JFK to Reagan. <\/span>Secret recipes (the secret is actually in the process, not the recipe) stolen while my dad\u2019s father worked on a dairy farm in <\/st1>New Jersey<\/st1>. <\/span>He brought the \u201cRecipe\u201d back to DC and, because my family is also one of the lesser founding clans of <\/st1>Silver Spring<\/st1>, MD<\/st1>, used some cash to set up an ice cream parlor. <\/span>Great timing, too. <\/span>The Depression was upon us. <\/span>Everyone wanted to escape one way or another.<\/p>\n

By the time I came around, we were doing very well. <\/span>I remember being moneyed and, yes, money is happiness. <\/span>When people tell you that money doesn\u2019t lead to happiness, ask them if they\u2019ve ever had money. <\/span>I mean, real money. <\/span>True that money can\u2019t buy happiness. <\/span>What it can buy, though, is the freedom to pursue happiness.<\/p>\n

My grandfather died in 76 and left the company to dad, who spent the next ten years embezzling everything. <\/span>When he had finally created some secret empire somewhere, he took off. <\/span>And he cleaned out everything \u2013 from the salaries and pension of about 50 employees to my little kiddie account, which only had about $400 worth of allowance money in it. <\/span>He even cleaned out my mom\u2019s small personal accounts by forging her name.<\/p>\n

Then he vanished but good. <\/span>PI\u2019s couldn\u2019t find him, regular cops couldn\u2019t, nor the IRS. <\/span>He resurfaced after mom killed herself in 99 to sue me for her estate \u2013 which was worth $100,000. <\/span>Except she owed the IRS $150,000 because she had decided to stop paying them in 1995. <\/span>When that surfaced, dad dropped his lawsuit and let me shoulder the responsibility of her estate, which was bankrupt.<\/p>\n

He finally died in 2007. <\/span>Late stage emphysema. <\/span>I sat at his bedside for six hours and watched him suffocate. <\/span>It was a touch disturbing but, in hindsight, strangely gratifying. <\/span>Except that he died in massive debt, as well. <\/span>He\u2019d long spent or given away the millions that he stole, and had been supporting his emphysema for seven years \u2013 buying oxygen and paying doctors out of pocket.<\/p>\n

Medicare? <\/span>Nope, because, when he died, and his death was recorded, the IRS showed up in my life yet again. <\/span>Whereas mom had spent the last few years of her life avoiding the government, dad had dropped off the radar in 1976. <\/span>He hadn\u2019t paid taxes since then, and had hidden himself away. <\/span>Often doing business under his father\u2019s name, and keeping non-existent people on the payroll at the family company. <\/span>(Part of the embezzling scheme, I suppose.) <\/span>In fact, as far as the government could tell, he hadn\u2019t existed since 76. <\/span>Which might be why he was able to so completely vanish between 86-99.<\/p>\n

A weird aside: I tore his house apart looking for answers. <\/span>He bought a house and had it triple-mortgaged to the hilt in 2003. <\/span>In that house, he had five pieces of furniture. <\/span>There were vast, empty rooms. <\/span>No pictures, no cards, no letters, nothing to indicate that he existed prior to 2003. <\/span>In the front closet was his briefcase and the clothes that he wore when he walked out of my life in 1986. <\/span>The briefcase was full of all the papers from that day, seemingly untouched. <\/span>You can get deep into that because, obviously, he had moved at least once since vanishing in 86. <\/span>Did he always put down his case and hang his jacket as if he had just come home from that fateful day? <\/span>I suppose it\u2019s kind of sad and lonely but, really, fuck him. <\/span>I asked him, when he sued me in 99, why he left, and took all the money, and never tried to help, and he answered: <\/span>\u201cI thought it was best.\u201d<\/p>\n

Huh?<\/p>\n

Smarter and wiser, I walked away from dad\u2019s estate (which owed bills to everyone on Earth) and dodged the 15 month probate bullet that consumed my life after mom died.<\/p>\n

My grandparents had hitched their wagon to dad\u2019s star early on and, when he left, they lost everything. <\/span>Then found themselves having to support my dysfunctional mother. <\/span>My grandfather is 82 and he still has to work full time just to meet the monthly bills. <\/span>Often driving upwards of a thousand miles a weekend for special consulting jobs. <\/span>Money that turns right around to providing 100% support for his youngest daughter (52), who is a passive-aggressive version of my mother.<\/p>\n

Mom was just aggressive. <\/span>My aunt has the same squiggle in her head, but it\u2019s tempered by two great controlling factors: <\/span>She\u2019s dumb and she\u2019s a coward. <\/span>Sure, maybe it was the drugs, but mom was always wildly confident and violent. <\/span>And she was smart. <\/span>A dangerous trait for a schizoid psychopath.<\/p>\n

So we come to today. <\/span>My grandmother is the mother I never really had, so I\u2019m a wreck. <\/span>In fact, I\u2019ve turned to my secret stash of painkillers. <\/span>Totally ineffectual when I was suffering from Trigeminal Neuralgia, they have since proven to possess a certain recreational worth. <\/span>I\u2019ve been up for about 60 hours straight, and I\u2019ve driven a thousand miles in that time, and confronted great demons, so I had this little headache that just begged for the old brick-to-the-head dose of oxycontin. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been much of a recreational drug person. <\/span>I\u2019ve only ever tried pot a few times, and I\u2019ve never enjoyed it. <\/span>And my adult life was spent in a haze of heavily-medicated pain that was never enjoyable, either. <\/span>So now I\u2019m at a weird place where I feel like I\u2019m too old to get into drugs, but would like to nonetheless. <\/span>There\u2019s no real point to it, though. <\/span>Even after brain surgery, I didn\u2019t bother with the oxy too much until the operation-related pain started to consume me. <\/span><\/p>\n

All a good thing because, now, on the two or three occasions a year where my back\u2019s out, or I\u2019m looking to escape something horrible like Battlestar Galactica getting canceled, just a little oxy does it. <\/span>5mg and I can sit back and spend an hour saying to my inflatable dinosaur: <\/span>Maybe there is inherent good in Mankind.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some elements of my family trace the problems with my mom and aunt back to my grandparents and beyond. <\/span>We\u2019re not emotional. <\/span>Not at all. <\/span>A hug and an \u201cI love you\u201d is, often, too much to ask. <\/span>It\u2019s there in times of dire need, and it\u2019s known, but there\u2019s really something missing. <\/span>There\u2019s no real sense of support. <\/span>There\u2019s enabling, and entitlement, but not really support. <\/span>So my aunt, at 52, bleeds my grandparents dry. <\/span>Here\u2019s a woman who makes 50 grand more than I do and, thanks to the fact that I started a publishing company, has an overall debt that\u2019s 10 grand short of my current hideous debt. <\/span>Yet, driving out to <\/st1>West Virginia<\/st1> to see my grandmother, she can only afford five bucks to help with the gas. <\/span>Once there, instead of visiting my grandmother, or supporting my somewhat shattered grandfather, she burned through a couple grand shopping for shit stuff at Wal Mart and West Virginia Strip Mall Boutiques. <\/span>Which is roughly like giving a couple grand to a wino to fish used Chinese food cartoons out of a dumpster for your collection.<\/p>\n

This is her problem \u2013 and her weekly routine. <\/span><\/p>\n

Try to talk reality to my aunt and it\u2019s tears and blubbering. <\/span>Fake migraines and heavy duty medication. <\/span>Or that maddening thing that crazy people do: <\/span>\u201cMy therapist says\u2026\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

I hate it when nutcases throw up that soft science bullshit. <\/span>Your therapist is treating you. <\/span>It\u2019s a very specific thing. <\/span>Observations with your therapist should not be shared or applied to other people\u2019s lives. <\/span>That all falls under sharing your prescriptions with people, in my book. <\/span>It\u2019s also a slippery slope to try and offer advice when your first words are admitting that you\u2019re not able to deal with your own problems, so you\u2019re paying someone to help. <\/span>Not that my aunt offers much advice. <\/span>She treats her therapist more like a religion \u2013 a crutch. <\/span>Instead of trying to improve, she embraces her dysfunctions simply because her therapist has diagnosed them. <\/span><\/p>\n

My cousin, who, at 14, weighs about as much as my car, can eat three huge breakfasts in a row (we\u2019re talking IHOP, McDonalds, and Bob Evans), and recently announced that she was \u201cproud\u201d to have \u201cmemorized her birthday\u201d is the one who gets the most benefit out of my aunt\u2019s compulsive spending. <\/span>If she wants it, she gets it. <\/span>From piercings to horses. <\/span>Yes, live horses. <\/span>Like the animal. <\/span>And, because they live in the suburbs of a city, that means the stupid animal needs to be stabled somewhere, and needs someone to take care of it because my cousin can\u2019t even flush the toilet or get out of bed (she hates flushing the toilet so, monthly, it literally overflows with shit and piss and whatever, which is when my aunt finally takes action and cleans it out).<\/p>\n

Not surprising, then, that my grandmother\u2019s death becomes, simply, a side show to the increasing psychosis of the family. <\/span><\/p>\n

I should, by now, be a bit stronger when dealing with this stuff. <\/span>But my grandmother\u2019s death is hitting me harder than I thought because, you know, I loved her. <\/span>Deeply. <\/span>She\u2019s a great woman, and has really been the reason I\u2019m here today. <\/span>She and my grandfather saved me from true darkness. <\/span><\/p>\n

Last weekend, while my cousin sent text messages and photo messages to friends, and while my aunt begged my grandfather to give her his car (like, for good), I took some private time with my grandmother and thanked her, said goodbye. <\/span>She\u2019s pretty much brain dead, and has been for days. <\/span>Off the machines, the doctors are just little her die slowly with a morphine drip cooling her pain. <\/span>I don\u2019t know if I was talking to myself or if she could hear me, but at least I had that moment of humanity. <\/span>Now all I have to do is sit back and watch my family go insane. <\/span>No peace for the living.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

I wrote this article last night, in a bit of a haze myself. My grandmother died at 3:40am, March 25th. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My grandmother is dying. I spent a long weekend in West Virginia saying goodbye and watching my family quietly fall apart. It\u2019s weird, really, to have inane family bullshit spin out of control around her deathbed. Weird because, well, we\u2019re …<\/p>\n

Morphine Drip<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[240,241,168,124,85],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-death","tag-grandmother","tag-harmony-grove","tag-nachos-family","tag-west-virginia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1209,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/1209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}