The story that Michael always told about his mother’s suicide went like this:
“One day, things had gotten so back that basically, I took the shotgun and told her that it was her or me. In the moment, she finally realized what she was doing to me. And that night, she killed herself.”
He had been her caregiver for 14 years. She had had countless unnecessary operations. She threatened suicide frequently, and he never knew if he’d come home to find her dead or alive. She begged for the pills that stopped the pain all the time. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia because she had the delusional, paranoid spells that are not uncommon in some kinds of porphyria. He tried to have her institutionalized at least twice, but she either could not tolerate being hospitalized or the people who were supposed to care for her could not handle it. And so she came home.
And things got worse and worse for Michael. But he tried to pull himself out of it. Eventually he started to lose some weight and work out, and he found a girlfriend on the internet, who opened a window to a different life, and he started to pull away from his mother, I think. In retrospect, this all seems kind of familiar. That window into a different world let him get some perspective and pull his head out of the tunnel a bit. He started traveling to America, to Baltimore, to see that girl. And even though that relationship was troubled, too, it was still an escape. And, I’m guessing, his mother could feel the pulling away, and that escalated her depression and craziness, and, well, we all know the end of that story.
He always said that he had no regrets. I’ve always wondered to what extent that was true.
But now I think, probably pretty true. Because he’d been through a hell that was much longer than mine, and the relationship was different from his and mine… filled with resentments and anger as well as some kind of love.
And so I sit here and wonder about that. I wonder if I will tell this story to someone else one day, and be able, at some point in the future, to say, “I have no regrets.”
Because in some ways, I have no regrets. I did everything that I knew how to do. And then, when I ran out of things to do, I tried desperately to stay alive, to put myself out of the tunnel that he’d led me down. It’s not what he wanted to do, but it’s what he did. I could not figure out how to save someone who could not help himself at all, and so I had to save myself. As surely as he gave that ultimatum to his mother, he forced that choice on me. And I loved him, will always love him, but I love my son and my niece, too, and I love my family, and all in all, I would like to stay alive. I have fought very, very hard to be the person I’ve become.
I can’t say that there are no regrets, though. I regret so much I could not save him, that I could not make him feel loved and safe, that I could not give him the will to live, that I could not track down a solution that would really work, that in the end he was angry with me, and that if he had to die and end the pain, I could not hold his hand and be with him. Or do something more than close the door because I could not bear to look. That part breaks my heart more than anything. I regret the future that we didn’t get to share, the person he should have been allowed to be, the pain and sadness. I regret that I can’t remember the happy times without the sadness, and I regret that I can’t tell the illness from the person, in a lot of my memories.
I would like to step back from this, somehow, and say, no regrets. But I cannot imagine it will ever be like that.
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