Mom & Dad: Vietnam Lives On
Are not really old enough to be having the kind of difficulty that they are, soft roast and potatoes from the pressure-cooker so that he can swallow, the new subdivision house, one level, in which he has his own small room just off of the wide, high-ceiling foyer with Persian, red-rug and blooming fuchsia Christmas cacti.
A tight and hot room that smells even in the new sheetrock of the mink of old man, and his skeletal figure even though he’s only seventy-four appears ninety-eight in its stiffness and liver spots, wrist watch dangling. Nothing like the Vietnam vets I sometimes see at the free, spiritual discussion group that meets here in Oregon on Tuesday nights.
Dale, who is still strong as an ox, nervously wipes the palms of his large hands up and down his thighs, comes in after digging razor clams and the other guy who wears rainbow suspenders and wolf howling at the moon t-shirts. The first does talk of having had suicidal feelings, but is the other one’s ride, the one who speaks of being an atheist until that time God spoke to him before taking his bic lighter to torch the thatch of roof, the women inside squawking like hens. He never took another shot and life has been a Jerry Garcia, smiling-snowcone-day ever since!
One thousand miles away, one thousand memories of hot palms and blown out radar towers. He didn’t want any of the hand-out’s, but after the stroke, his Percocet prescribed addiction on cut-off was a few years ago worse than the paper of agent orange affiliation that gave her some extra government dough, him now donning a stupid ball cap, camo with Viet Cong and finally the words that came back to his mouth after many a month of slurred silence, after decades of silence, the stroke and the VA low-paid nurses with smiles helped him to be just strong enough to admit he’d been in a war!
Bucket shots of buck shot through the head. That is what it’s like to have a stroked-out Dad who may have been ruined that first bright day they dropped him off on a tarmac and the other monkey’s howling at a guy with a college degree and newly shorn hair. Short straw, he said they’d given him, and sent him way deep, to where there was still a mist and smoke, Tet, tet, tet offensive and in this bleak, razed, rat-infested, haunted landscape he was saved!
He came back, and we, my brothers and me, were born, left with these, his drugged out lawn chair days and the whipping about of our mother, her plants, the Swedish meatballs she cooked in a cast iron pan thrown to burnt-orange linoleum, he in another rage.
And, mother? Mom is still making his meals and chauffeuring him (she refers to him as the wooden Indian) to his appointments all the while he yelling at her to, “Shut up!” And, that she is a worthless helper.
Last week she sent me a text saying she was dropping him off at the VA rest home, they had an open bed and the other women assured her she was suffering abuse. A word she’s never used.
A day later, just this past week, she went back to get him and this is the text update I got:
We were both miserable and I felt like I was betraying him.
Still, all bombs aside, I love them both.
Photo Credit: Creative Commons Vietnam War 1970
Brutal. Beautifully written. Brutal. I really hope this is more fiction than bio. The ending, though, is all too believable. Kinda like that phrase, "better the devil you know than the one you don't know," and something about loyalty and commitment, and familiarity does not always breed contempt (was it Emerson who said it does?). I love the specific details, the word choices, the feel of **this ** family unlike any other. As Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina : "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." You capture all that makes this family different from the Brady Bunch. He came back, and we, my brothers and me, were born, left with these, his drugged out lawn chair days and the whipping about of our mother, her plants, the Swedish meatballs she cooked in a cast iron pan thrown to burnt-orange linoleum, he in another rage... Mom is still making his meals and chauffeuring him (she refers to him as the wooden Indian) to his appointments all the while he yelling at her to, “Shut up!” And, that she is a worthless helper.
Yes, brutal. As they say, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Mind you a snippet of truth and not all of the story, of course there are softer moments...
Rose or gray colored lenses, all colors have their place.
That sounds like so much pain for everyone involved.
It’s the ultra-prompt prompt delivery technicians here with your melodious challenge for today: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-495-5-minute-freewrite-wednesday-prompt-saxophone
A few years back, we brought my grandmother to a "home" with Alzheimer's... her husband and son had both died, and she was living alone, but was unable to function safely and effectively. I remember being alone with her after we arrived, sitting on the edge of the bed...
She was looking out the window, and kept asking when my grandfather was coming to pick her up. She kept saying she wanted to go home, and was asking for her son - she did not remember that they both had died. A mercy, no doubt, but I remember having that same feeling of betrayal, despite her condition.
She desperately wanted to go home, but there was no home to return to. It had been cleared out during her previous stay at the hospital, and the people that made it home were gone. I knew that. She didn't. A tough spot, but I can't help feeling that it was wrong somehow.
Yes, I can relate. My great grandmother lived to 101 and was put in one months before she died by her own children who were in their eighties and couldn't help her if she fell. She hated it and they gave her drugs and she told me she couldn't swim out from underneath it. She was a problem because she wanted to go home and it was easier to just dope her. I lived 1000 miles away, had a family of my own and everyone said it was best, but there was a part of me who wanted to pull up the car and throw her in for an escape. Instead, we drove off and she died a month later, most likely pumped full of the pain killers she didn't need (that way she wasn't swearing and crying to leave, upsetting the other patients).
Uggh.
I understand your distress deeply - that is a horror, though it was not something you could remedy from the position you were in at that time. I have addressed the issue more fully here:
https://steemit.com/life/@bbblackwell/a-holistic-approach-to-social-issues