"For them that think death's honesty won't fall upon them naturally life sometimes must get lonely'
-Bob Dylan
In 1982 I interviewed the Jesus And Mary Chain for Creem and in the middle of the accompanying article, allowed it to go off the deep end as I detailed a terrible break up I was going through. Creem, to their credit, printed it. And ever since then, I have felt no distance between the subjective and the objective. In a Thanksgiving back in 2009 I wrote about a girlfriend aborting what would have been my child.
And here I am remembering my Mom's death.
The quote above means only one thing to me: that when you are about to die, you have run out of places to hide.
I saw my Mom once between 1979 and 2010 when she died. Spoke to her a handful of times. And she cut me out of her will. So I think it is fair to say we didn't have the best of relationships, This wasn't a case of faults on all side, it was 100% her fault. I saw her in 2009 and let it drop but I never had the slightest doubt as to the sort of person she was.
If I ever did, the manner of her leaving it proved me right. Bad tempered, upset, when forced to speak to one of her daughters she snarled, "Ok, you spoke to me" and slammed the phone down on her. When she thought she was going to live, she called for a Priest (another sister who took care of her is born again), when she thought she was going to die, she called for a Sheik.
And in the end, death imparted upon the ability to drop the mask and be horrible and more power to her. She was never better in life than in its leaving. I don't agree with harrison's positive energy crap, positive energy is in being who you are and death imparts on you the freedom to be precisely that. My Mom didn't invade Poland and whatever lifes she hurt doesn't amount to more than a hill of beans. But she needed the freedom of death to become what she was.
She was a horrible woman who found some degree of freedom in death.