A Debby Downer of a Story

Hey friends, I’m giving away a few calendars to people who have subscribed to my blog for a year or longer. If that is you, DM me your address and I’ll Red-Rover it right over. (To my ESL readers, this is a reference to a childhood game)

CW: cancer, molestation, sexual harassment

Note: I call my aunts “tias”, my maternal grandpa is my abuelo

This week really smacked me in my metaphorical nuts in a way that was not at all consensual or arousing. I’ve been intentionally vague on my social media out of respect for my cousins’ wishes, but for you, my intimate little audience, I will explain what has been going on.

A few years ago, I helped take care of my aunt as she went through stem cell replacement therapy. She had been battling multiple myeloma, which is a blood and bone cancer with a pessimistic prognosis. At best she would live for another ten years, at worst she could be out of remission sooner rather than later. The latter turned out to be true. It’s been a bit less than three years. We got the news around Thanksgiving that she would have a year or less to live. For a while I didn’t know what to do. I felt paralyzed. My dad asked me to call her, but I couldn’t. I was scared what calling her would mean. Caring for someone during their final year of life is traumatic, even if it can be rewarding. I knew I wanted to be there, but I also felt particularly powerless because she was out of remission in the middle of a deadly pandemic, and I couldn’t fly back and forth, exposing her and my other family members to whatever I might come in contact with between flights and work. There was nothing to do other than to be present to talk through this moment, which is worse. I can do work and not have to think too deeply about the crushing inevitability of my aunt dying relatively young. If I was just helping her around the house, I could busy myself with tasks, but talking to her as she processes her inevitable death with her mind intact, is incredibly heavy. And my aunt has always been the most vivacious person in the family. She knows how to enjoy life. She would hop on a plane to vacation with her friends at a moment’s notice. She kept a bottle of rosé on hand. She was supposed to be the next matriarch on my paternal side after my grandma passed. She had expected to grow old, to see her children get married, and maybe have a grandchild. But now, it was clear she would not live to see any of that.

When she had gone through stem cell replacement, it seemed like she had hit her lowest point. The treatment involved receiving high dose chemo for an extended period, until her immune system was totally stripped away. Then they introduced the stem cells and hoped it would take, and that her immune system would rebuild itself. Everyone knows that chemo takes away your hair, but it’s the things they don’t tell you that are the hardest. One is that it doesn’t take all of your hair. It takes some of your hair, and not even all the hair that you might have wanted. My aunt was disappointed she had retained her armpit hair and most of her pubes. She would wake up covered in hair she had lost during the night with unpredictable patches of hair remaining on her body. She lost three inches in height, and her skull shrunk. Her light brown skin developed large dark patches from the chemo burn, and those patches itched and crawled at night, keeping her awake. She developed a shuddering tick. Her taste buds changed so that she didn’t like the foods she once loved. She said everything tasted metallic and wrong. I walked with her around the chemo ward. She was strapped up to one of those rolling racks that hold a million and one bags dripping a complex cocktail of drugs into her fragile system. Doing a lap around the ward was like running a 5k for her at the time. She was very sad to be dealing with this at such a young age, and even sadder because I was taking care of her instead of her children. She appreciated me, and loved me as family, but I wasn’t her son or daughter. I was the person with the most flexibility in my schedule who was able to do the job. I could do it because I was a stripper and I could take a few weeks off because I wasn’t beholden to a boss. She was not happy I was stripping, but she enjoyed the benefits, like everybody else in my family, without recognizing the origin of my availability.

She recovered little by little in the subsequent few years. She regrew her hair and was able to go back to nursing at the army hospital. In fact, she was working until Tuesday evening when she developed a headache even hydrocodone couldn’t relieve. One of my cousins happened to be visiting, so he drove her to the hospital. Unfortunately, because Oklahoma is a shit show and nobody is taking covid seriously, the ER was packed full of people waiting for care, some of whom had been there for upwards of three hours. My aunt and cousin waited for care for over an hour. Eventually my aunt was admitted, and the doctors found that her headache was a subdural haematoma. She had had a brain bleed and needed surgery. My other cousin flew out. My other aunt flew out. I was about to buy a ticket until my mom called me and talked me down. She asked me if I knew anything about the kind of surgery my tia was getting, and I replied that I didn’t. She informed me that my tia was getting the kind of brain surgery where they would need to remove a piece of her skull to drain the bleed, and because of the variety of cancer drugs my aunt was on, there was a good chance she would develop a second haematoma if the doctors weren’t delicate. The recovery for the surgery would last at least a week, possibly a month or longer depending. And she would likely be sedated for an extended period, and kept under 24/7 hospital care. Because of covid, she would not be allowed to have visitors, so if I flew out, I would likely not be able to see her anyway. I would just be in the potential covid cluster of my family members, twiddling our thumbs, waiting for any news.

I didn’t want to go to Oklahoma. I hate it there. It’s so ugly and dead during the winter. The weather is harsh, and the people are proudly ignorant most of the time. It’s not all bad, but it is mostly bad. I was not looking forward to the idea of ringing in 2021 in such a godforsaken place, so my mom didn’t need to do much to persuade me. Yet, I felt even more helpless. There was nothing I could do, and my aunt’s condition was tenuous at best. Normally I’m a bit of a rock for my family. I am calm in an emergency. For whatever reason, everyone confides in me. Normally, I would be there to be a grounding presence. I’m good at settling disputes and communicating between the generations. From afar, my helpfulness is limited. I could check in and talk down my cousins’ anxiety to some degree. But I wasn’t there. And I couldn’t be.

Thankfully, surgery went well. There were no major complications, but it did signal an important turning point in my aunt’s life. It was clear that from this point on, my aunt would be unable to live alone ever again. Between the recovery process of retraining her motor skills, and the threat of additional haematomas, she would need constant care. She would likely need to go from hospital to hospice. My aunt has always been such a fighter. The fact that she continued working as many days as she could after she was told she would have only a year to live demonstrates her will to survive. But she has been in constant pain lately. Even her high dose opiates have done little to abate her suffering.

On Christmas, we facetimed her. She had intended to go to bed early, after a sleepless night the day prior, but we interrupted her to wish her a happy holiday. She was in bed with two tissues sticking out of her nose. She had been getting nosebleeds all the time lately. This was the only way to stop the bleeding, or at least prevent it from staining her sheets. She was lying in my grandma’s bed. She had decided she was going to renovate my grandma’s house, even though none of us wanted to live there. She wanted to preserve the family home and hoped that eventually we might change our minds. We all knew it was a project she would likely not live long enough to finish, but it was giving her purpose, so perhaps it was helping in some way.

At this point, the only drug that eases her pain is morphine. It’s not one of those drugs I like to be around. I conflate it with death, and those final moments with my grandma, dripping morphine into her mouth from a tiny syringe. It was the only thing that would ease the look of anguish from her face, but it also put her to sleep almost immediately. There’s no getting up and about on morphine. It’s the kind of drug you take to pass time until the end, to ease the pain of dying. I know a lot of people believe that dying can be quick and painless, a candle blown out in the middle of the night. But that’s not the kind of death I’ve seen. Death is ugly and painful. There is no dignity to it. There is no grace at the end, sparing you from the way you’re ripped from life.

Both of my grandfathers also died this year. I had become estranged from them for different reasons. My abuelo, my maternal grandfather, was a shitty father to my mom. He was a serial philanderer; a man who never accepted his gay son; a man who insulted my grandmother at every opportunity; and a man who did not believe my mother when she told him she was being molested. In fact, for that last bit, he and my abuela encouraged my mother to forgive her uncle who was molesting all of his nieces at the time. I always hated him for the trauma that that negligence inflicted upon my mother and me by extension. Not all borderlines are created, but I think my mom was pushed to her psychological edge by her traumatic childhood. Between being beaten by my abuela for crying as an infant, and being starved in utero because of my abuela’s own struggle with mental illness, my mom had every card stacked against her. And I blamed my abuelo for at least partially facilitating it. My abuelo died in a painful way that took many years. It was a combination of dementia, heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems that finally ended it. But along the way, by step abuela had extorted my parents for money, threatening not to inform my mom when her father passed if they didn’t pay up. Meanwhile she was being scammed by some guy over facebook who she was sending money to, hoping she would find love again after my abuelo’s passing. She was in charge of giving my abuelo medicine, but instead of following the instructions on the pill bottles, she would play doctor, doling out what she thought he needed without paying any mind to what the doctors had prescribed. Half a pill here, two pills there. It was utter madness, and happening in Puerto Rico, so there wasn’t a great deal of recourse available to my parents. Eventually she ditched my abuelo in a nursing home and stopped answering my parents’ calls.

The nursing home was an additional ring of hell. There seemed to only be one phone available in the facility that was passed around to patients and administrators as needed. The administrators wouldn’t give a straight answer as to how my abuelo was doing. My mom suspected it was to get families to continue paying facility fees even after their loved ones passed. When my abuelo passed, he had been in and out of consciousness for several days. The nursing home attendants didn’t tell my family until the last day, when it was clear he was on his deathbed. My mom would have hopped on a plane in an instant if she had known anything about his condition during the days prior. Instead one night, she got a call that he “wasn’t looking good”. Then hours later, he passed. I didn’t really care, but my mom was torn apart. She said, “He was the only person I had left who truly loved me.”

My other grandfather died around the same time. Papa Wayne had wanted to die for years. He would have been happy to have died a decade ago, but life kept giving him more and more time on this planet. When I was younger, I had been very close to him. I was his golden child. We would spend hours playing card games or scrabble, and debating ideas. He was the person I wanted to drink with most when I came of age. But of course all of that came to a sudden end when my grandma died and he finally had his opening to proposition me. It started off with him trying to initiate contact. He wanted me to kiss him on the mouth. I played it off as an old timey eccentricity. Then one day he had me sit beside him on the couch and started to stroke my leg. The man was old as sin at that point. His hands shook with age, and it didn’t take much for me to stand up and leave the room. But I was so confused. I knew what I felt had happened, but I didn’t know how to rationally comprehend the experience. When I recounted the story to my tias, they both couldn’t believe such a thing could happen. They were sure I had misconstrued what was going on. They encouraged me to go back to see him, to ask what he had really meant. In retrospect, my mother was horrified that they had been naive enough to encourage me to possibly expose myself to additional trauma for the sake of “keeping the family together”.

I will never know if it was dementia or the culmination of years of grooming, but when I came to him asking for an explanation, he laid out how he had been sexually interested in me since I hit puberty. He even went on to muse about how sex with me might work since his penis was dead to the world. My head spun, my blood chilled. It was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had, and I have had ***many*** traumatic experiences. It was at that point that I knew I would never be able to see him again. I had to mourn not only my grandma, but also my grandpa. We put him in a nursing home, and I never spoke to him again. I don’t even remember how he died. I know my family was protecting me. My dad thought that I would be angry with him, that I wanted him to die, but wrath wasn’t my prevailing emotion. I felt grief. I had wanted to be there for him during his final years. I never wanted him to die alone. He had always been a lonely man. I was the one person he connected to. It hurt being denied the means to process grief. But in retrospect, perhaps my dad was a little right. I was pissed that after years of being a diligent grandchild and caretaker, because of something he did, he would likely cut me out of his will. He was the only person in my family who might have left me anything in death, and because of his own shittiness, I would once again get screwed over. Everything that I had hoped to get would be signed over to charities and my antivaxxer aunt who spouts conspiracy theories, but who decided to take care of him through his final days, even after what he did.

While this year has been one of my luckiest in many ways, it has also exacted quite a bit in return. My aunt is still sedated and intubated. The doctors want to get her off of the breathing tubes, but she is still struggling to breathe on her own. We don’t know when she will recover enough to speak or what that will look like. We don’t know if she sustained any brain damage. We are all just waiting for word on what to do next.

And that has been my holiday season ★

I know this entry has been a bit of a downer.

Would it be any better if I told you that I started last week with a threesome with Mr. Robinson and his fuck buddy? Definitely a hard turn in the opposite direction. I will share the story at some point probably, but it’s a little hard to go from processing a family member’s final days to a wacky story about a threesome. For now, this is what I have the capacity to write, but next week, hopefully I’ll be back to business as usual.

Thank y’all for waiting for this latest story. I appreciate you sticking with me through a harrowing year.