Eulogy for Diane

I write as therapy and I have a lot to say right now.  Because of a family history of secrets, it is important that I make my thoughts public.  Secrets I will no longer hold onto as they have festered for generations and need to be released.  I will piss off some family, but deal with it.  This is as much for me as it is for my mother.  I know how vocal she was and it is what she would want me to do.

My mother and I, her first born, have had a bond, unexplainable, yet heart wrenchingly turbulent.  There have been occasions when she was so present and strong in my heart. Over the last year or so I have found writing to be cathartic.  My guilt for not being with her more in her life is huge and painful. She was in and out of my life as a youth.  Something I found devastating every time it happened, and it happened often.   Had I known my first marriage wasn't going to work out sooner, maybe I would have focused more on saving Mom.  Could her life have been helped or saved?  I don't know...I know that sounds unreasonable, but I'm wallowing in guilt right now. 

I have come to believe that she needed to erase her past and her family to survive.  In her chosen community, she was known as "Georgie", a nickname given to her when she was young by her favorite uncle, Sam.  No one knew Diane.

A few weeks ago, I woke up around 3am with a surge in my chest of longing for her and a poem just came out of me.  I thought then about whether I would hear of her passing at all.  For years, I've been waiting for that call, hoping, at best she would be in a home, warm and safe passing peacefully as she deserved.  But, knowing, at worst she would be found crazy and homeless, frozen on a street, in a bush...well... you know the rest.  Some of us feel this possibility for our loved ones, but most cannot understand that my mother’s probability was huge for the later.  When I got the call, I assumed the worst.  Later, through second hand information I believed she did pass of natural causes where she was living.  For that, I was grateful.  But, when calling the coroner's office to get the death date, I didn't realize it was 3 weeks before when they found her.  More guilt and anguish. 

I owe no one an explanation for my Mom's life, but I owe it to her to honor her life as best I can.  So... here I am raw, it will take me a while to process, not just grief, but responsibility, huge loss for a life not well understood or able to quite grasp.

Before I get to bogged down in history, here is the poem I wrote when I was thinking of her, that most likely coincides with her passing:

    Her existence strangles my heart,

    I feel her gentle touch on the corners of my ear,

    longing for a superhero in me that can save her,

    knowing she is gone but still living.

  

    Too much weight broke the legacy denied,

    I see her broken soul in my heart's pain,

    Will I ever erase responsibility?

    Numbing memories of a broken soul

    One meatball

    One meatball

    You get no bread

    With oonnnee meeetballll

I am no poet, but when words come I write.  When they don't come in coherent sentences, which I'm most comfortable expressing, I let them be unorganized poetry (my apologies to real poets).  The little ditty about meatballs is one she made up and sang (in the highest falsetto) to my sisters and I when she was lively, glowingly present...usually on a Sunday afternoon with the record table playing a Spinner's song or a song from the Redbone album.  Of course, after a week of heavy, I mean, heavy drinking.  At that time, she and my step father were raging alcoholics.  My sisters can only speak of how they were treated under the influence.  I would stay with them off and on, but could always go home because I lived with my grandparents.  My sisters were not so lucky.  My mom and step-dad would be in a drunk stupor, very passive and fall asleep.  Most Sunday's my Mom was amazing.  My step-dad would take me fishing very early on Saturday morning starting his long day of drinking and I was in heaven.  BUT, I got to leave and go back to my grandparents’ house.  Again, my sisters did not.  They suffered....

Come and Get Your Love-Redbone

Hail (hail)

What's the matter with your head, yeah

Hail (hail)

What's the matter with your mind

And your sign an-a, oh-oh-oh

Hail (hail)

Nothing' the matter with your head

Boy, could that woman dance!

Diana Lynne McCaw was brilliant!  She was 1st chair clarinet in the high school band when in the 3rd grade.  They would sit her on phone books so she could see the band director, and be seen.  So talented on the piano, memorizing and performing Beethoven Piano Sonatas that her teachers tried to convince her mother to send her to a renowned teacher.  Being poor, that wasn't an option.  She quit the clarinet and the piano because she was bored and chose the drums.  Bored again.  Then while in high school when most were enjoying their youth, she became pregnant with me at age 16.  She could not be tamed! 

I see now in hindsight how the times were not a kind one for youth.  If you're reading this and your religion says, "abstinence only, or no contraceptive sex" go fuck yourself!  Don't read any further, I have nothing to say to you here.  This is about me, my experience, my guilt, my life, my memories, and most of all...My MOM!

She quit school, although very smart, and got married to the father who was just graduating high school himself. They moved into a tiny house that his father had allowed them to stay in.  No heat, no running water...winter approached and my mother made the tough decision to move home and call the relationship quits.  She had turned 17 two weeks after my birth; my father was 18.  Insane to expect this to be a lasting scenario.  I know...there have been people who have made this work.  But, boy, were the odds dim.  I'll tell you why.

At the age of 5 my mother had to learn to cook and clean.  She wasn't allowed to play with other children.  Why?  Her mother had contracted TB.  At the time, TB was treated by isolation in institutions in most states.  My mom's dad thought he was doing what was best by moving his family to Missouri where there were no such laws.  Unfortunately, he was working long hours on the oil pipeline as a welder and couldn't be at home much.  My grandmother was quarantined.  By the age of 10 my mom’s family was falling apart.  Her parents fought over custody of her, and custody was given to her mother with visitation by her father.  During all of this, my grandmother had been living in a duplex adjacent to my future step-grandfather.  My mother wanted nothing more than to be with her father.  I would learn many years later that there was a history for this dislike of her mother.  About 5 years after all this my mother, at 16 would find herself pregnant.

Because she was a minor, decisions were not her own.  So... she waited.  You see her father moved close by to stay with my mother.  When she turned 18, she was legal and me, my mom, and my grandfather got on a plane for Oklahoma.  She adored...and I mean adored her father.  And, apparently, he adored me.  He smoked Cuban cigars and would lay down with me for a nap, when apparently, I would pretend to be asleep, wait for him to doze...then hit him over the head with my bottle.  To which he would laugh uncontrollably for my benefit.  One day he found me in the middle of this bed.... box of Cuban's shredded in tiny pieces.  Yes...an entire box.  My mother glowed when she told me how he roared with laughter. 

About a year after the move to Oklahoma, my grandfather, the love of our lives, died suddenly of a ruptured aorta.  He was 46 years old.  My mother and I boarded a plane back to Kentucky and the story goes, she handed me to my grandmother on arrival and said, "I can't do this".   This is how I came to live with my grandmother and step-grandfather.  My step-grandfather became the only father I knew.  All I knew was constant emotional strife, so this man’s meticulous daily routine would never waver and became the desperate stability I so savored all my life. 

About 5 years later, my mother found the man of her dreams.  He was a horse jockey, she was but 5 feet tall herself and he probably about the same.  I remember vague memories of waiting for her on my grandparent’s front porch to come home from her dates.  He asked her to marry him....and he was a bigamist.  When my mother found out...she was devastated.  Knowing that she dodged a bullet wasn't much of a consolation.  At this point, it's only in hindsight that I remember the degrading words my grandmother would say to her.  How could she have much self-esteem at this point.  Did I mention, no photos existed in our house of my father or my grandfather.  When I asked questions of my grandmother, which I did rarely, she didn't want to talk about it.  While you may get a glimpse of my grandmother as being cruel, she was complex, loved her family dearly, but made mistakes I have tried hard to forgive.

A year later she met the dashing Spanish troubadour, triumph spitfire driving, young man who would become my step-father, from a distance, and the father of my sisters.  He was always decent to me, but not so much to my sisters.  It was obvious in hindsight, these were two people who did not know what being responsible adults looked like.  Why?  These two allowed their young children to go unsupervised while they drank heavily.  The house swarming with roaches because dishes were not washed and garbage was not disposed of.  The summer before my senior year in high school I so desperately wanted to be with this family, I hid the conditions of the household from my grandparents so I could experience freedom.  One night I was bite by something and my face swelled up so badly I was taken to the doctor.  They went to the race track regularly, so we never knew if we would be having tacos, fried chicken, or nothing.  Again, I could escape, but this was the life of my 8 years younger, twin sisters. 

I believe my step-dad suffers from the same type of illness as my mother, but that's another story.  By the time my sisters were in junior high, my mother would have her first nervous breakdown right in front of them.  I remember her mother's livid behavior because the doctors would not let her visit.  They said she only made her worse.  They were right.  My step-dad did what he had to do and took my sister back with him to California.  Their journeys with him were not good.  He didn't have a clue how to be an adult and they suffered for it.

Hindsight not only gives you perspective, it also allows time to reveal truths that may have not been known at the time, but probably sensed.  My biological father's family was one I never knew anything about.  So, over the years, I glamorized a life I knew nothing about; loving father, loving mother, loving siblings who just weren't allowed to see me.  Nothing could have been further from the truth, and I think my mother knew, even if she couldn't put it into words, that she and I should not be around that situation back in that tiny house with no running water or heat. 

I never saw my father, much less saw a photo of him, until about 15 years ago, well into adulthood.  I did, so very much, try to leave my past behind.  I had not returned to what was my hometown since college.  Things changed for me when I tried to find my real father and find answers.  Long story short, I correlated a trip home to my high school reunion and an opportunity to meet my aunt, who apparently was a nurse and helped deliver me.  She was one of the kindest souls I've ever met.  I spent hours with her looking at photos and hearing family stories.  The one that struck me hard was her father, my paternal grandfather.  He beat and raped my grandmother.

It matters to me little that I'm divulging long held family secrets.  Again, fuck you, to those that think keeping secrets in families is good, or those IN my family who are mortified by my divulging.  It destroys lives and generations of lives are affected by this gross practice of fear, it nauseates me.  All this time I thought my having to explain my grandmother being my mother, my step grandfather being my dad, my uncle and aunt being my brother and sister, was an embarrassment.  My conservative, mostly racist, family was an embarrassment.  I'll take that over a man who rapes and beats his wife.  A wife who is 3 times smaller than he, at barely 5' and he over 6'.  A wife who, by all accounts of her children (who all ran away from home before adulthood, because of said father's strictness...by the way he was a devote Gideon, his brother was a minister, and came from a long line of ministers) was the kindest, most loving person they knew.  This family is more fractured than any I have seen because of denial.

But, I digress....

Moral of the story, all families are a bit screwed up, but my two choices were doozies.  Right now, I morn not just the loss of my mother, but the loss of an amazing spirit that I know would have flown so high had she lived in a different time and place.  I know this in my heart.  Why?

My mother was the child of a woman who was very intelligent, but her life was that of a housewife.  Shortly before her death, my mom’s mother, I asked her if she had any regrets.  Her eyes lit up and she said, "I always wanted to go to college and study."  Her favorite subject, for which she was an A student, was Latin.  She adored it!  I now see why see pushed so hard to find a way for me to go to college, even though they had no money. 

Part 2 may happen later, if I have the courage.... hopefully it won't be as raw as this, but....my personal story is an added bumpy ride!