January 23

Made it through another year without my mother.

Aside from some truly weird and morbid dreams about her corpse showing up in various disturbing places (and sometimes in various disturbing pieces), the second year wasn't so bad. Definitely better than the first one was, by a longshot. That first year kinda sucked monkey dicks, and I'd heard that the second could be even worse. But nah, it's just getting better.

I am very glad to be getting some peace. Her death coming after a decades-long slow motion suicide plunge might have made things easier--I was already braced for it when it came. The years of dreading the inevitable end were much worse than the real thing. At least now I'm free of the waiting, and she's free of the everything else that sucked for her.

Last night I had another tower nightmare. I have these a lot, and I hate them. Usually they involve having to go to the top of a very high building, against my better judgment, then trying to get back down again when the building begins to sway and distort and fall over. Ever since I started having them, the leaning tower of Pisa gives me cold chills.

Sometimes in these dreams, I'm clinging to rickety fire stairs outside the building. Other times I'm inside, lost on the 78th floor. Occasionally I try to take an elevator only to plunge to the bottom with that horrible sinking sensation in my belly, or I get hauled back to the top and have to get out and start all over again. Last night's was one of the latter.

If you're really into dream interpretation from a Freudian standpoint, I gues you could blame this theme on a repressed fear of teh cock, but it's not. I'm just very afraid of tall buildings. Five stories or more makes me very uncomfortable, but I can handle it. 10 or more means I will try not to go inside. Fifty or more stories and I need to drink alcohol to stop the panic, even if my room's only on the 25th. Conventions in big cities always fuck me up because of this. You just know that sucker is going to come down right on top of you. If you're, you know, me.

Meanwhile in real life, functionality is restored to my brain. Life goes well. I'm currently tired as fuck from the day's errands, but it's a good tired. An honest tired, earned with productivity and sweat. I'll spend tomorrow working on the comic so I can update on or before Monday.

Ah, Monday. A nice arbitrary day for a nice arbitrary change of schedule. You may have noticed that Saturdays appear to be cursed lately. Oh wait, that's just me sucking. Ho ho.

A Thanksgiving Post

This is a photo of some large eyeglasses. If you unfocus your eyes for about 30 seconds, you'll see a little kid hidden in the background:



Mom's note on the back of the picture says I was seven years old. Oh, how I long for the simplicity and ease of fetus-larva time, back when my eyes were still blue. Before I got weird; before my nostrils started growing and never stopped.

The obvious comparison does not evade me, but at least it's spelled different:



This is Mom and my older sister. I am fairly sure I did not yet exist when the photo was taken, because Mom is smiling and happy. It's clear from my sister's troubled expression that she has some idea what's about to happen to her. Muahaha.



My mom was a natural redhead. I love the shape of her nose. It's good to see her looking young and happy instead of like a ziplock baggie of white dust and pulverized bones in a small silver box with Swarovski crystals on it that plays showtunes when you turn the star-shaped crank.

I still have the necklace she's wearing. She wore it daily for something like 30 years, and now the eyelet is worn clean through. I have those rings, too, in another ziplock bag. This bag has a biohazard symbol on it, and a label with her personal information printed on it. The rings are no longer wearable because they were clipped off her fingers by medical staff when she went to the hospital for the last time. I'm not the jewelry-wearing type anyway, so it's all good.

Today I give thanks for the best parts of a weird as fuck childhood. Cheers!

LUKA IS A PIMP

I have a video of my mother telling the camera that "Luka is a pimp." It was taken a month before she died and was originally intended for posting on my website. Now it's the only recording of her that I have. Well, okay, there was that audio tape I secretly made in 2004 of my sister screeching at her for five minutes over nothing, but that would be a pretty lame memorial so it doesn't count).

I should feel like the fact that this unique film clip contains my mother calling me a pimp instead of giving meaningful advice or telling me where the family gold is buried is not the epitome of TOTALLY AWESOME, but secretly I know damn well that it is.

Today was a hugely productive day, but very boring to retell--all art commissions, arm warmers and keychains that I have addresses for have been mailed out. Laundry, dishes, cleaning, gym run, all done and done well.

Here's a cool picture from my upcoming photo post. It looks like shit small so fullsize for great justice.



It's the full October moon snogging the sun behind a bunch of clouds.

$10.96

Today my PC alarm clock failed to go off, and I missed my dental cleaning appointment. After rescheduling for tomorrow, I decided to be hard on myself and pick the worst task on the list for my day's project as a punishment.

So I went to Wells Fargo to cancel my Mom.

Honestly, I expected some kind of bad news. Overdrafts. Penalties. Fines, fees, lectures. Something to chastise me for not doing it sooner, for letting this bit of business drag out so long. I've been putting it off for a year and a half. I worried about what would happen when I went in and found out how much I owed the bank as the only survivor of our shared account. For all I know I was liable for her debts or something now that she's gone.

I have been worrying for all this time that somewhere, somehow, giant debts were piling up. But I didn't want to go and straighten it out, because I thought the news would be bad, and I was a coward.

But I never suspected $10.96.

At the bank, the teller told me Mom's accounts were already closed, except for one checking account that was listed as inactive. I didn't owe them anything for taking so long, and in fact, they seemed to take a customer waiting for ages to close a dead family member's account as a matter of course.

I had come in planning to tell them my Mom had died. As an excuse, almost, when I knew damn well I should have done it all sooner. The teller said she was sorry for my loss.

And then I went into an office, and a very nice banker re-opened the account for purposes of shutting it down. It took maybe two minutes to run through the paperwork, and then she handed me a piece of paper detailing and endorsing a check for the balance of the account, which I signed.

$10.96, all that was left in her account. The last money she ever owned. The last money she ever cried over. My mother died in poverty, so much poverty that a bigoted funeral director held her ashes hostage and she missed her own charity funeral.

Such a tiny, pathetic amount of money. $10.96 she'll never get to break on another stupid pack of that gum she liked so much, kicking off a huge fight with my sister over finances. Jesus wept.

Cleaning out her stuff after she died, I found a Tarot card torn to pieces in a keepsake box. When I looked it up on Google, a website said that particular card held strong connotations of financial and emotional ruin, ill health and shitty luck. Ripping it up must have been like writing her autobiography. All that suffering until you just can't take it anymore. First she killed the card, then she killed herself.

The banker came back with an envelope that was sealed shut, handed it to me, and told me it was done. I was trying to hold it together. She was very nice and I thanked her for her help, but I barely made it out of the lobby alive.

I'm still crying. I think part of me is going to keep on crying forever.

Her world was so small and empty and helpless, and now it's gone, traded in for $10.96 and a pile of dust.

I want a refund.

Happy 123 Day!

I made it. My first anniversary, marking a whole year since the doctors gave up and turned off the machines.

In your face, Mom! Wherever you are (other than in a little box on my shelf, I mean).

Things to do today: eat tasty food. Drink liquor to her memory. Go back to bed and hope for it to be 124 day soon.

Burn Baby Burn, Disco Inferno!

Another fucked up dream. This time people were trying to cremate my mom inside an apartment building, only the fire kept going out. Then it turned out other people had gone inside the building during the cremation. There were charred corpses everywhere. I was terrified to go back in with the job partly done, but I did and the half-skeletonized mess was unbelievable. I didn't want to see my mom like that but every body I stumbled across looked like it could be her.

Almost a year later and I'm still having disgusting dreams like this. I'll blame the most recent resurgence on the curious way winter alters the quality of my dreams, and leave it at that.

Jesse made me super-warm rainbow arm socks for Christmas! I will post pics as soon as I find a working camera or get mine going again.

My change jar is almost full again. I'm thinking I might get myself a nice expensive crystal or fossil specimen if there's enough in there. It seems kinda profligate, but the change jar is my annual splurge fund and all I want for Christmas is rocks anyway.

Packing Up My Mother

I'm in kind of a morbid mood.

Today I packed up my Mom and all the little trinkets on the shelf--the lock of hair I sheared off after the funeral, the crystals she gave me, the little fossil one of Seebs' forum friends sent with their best wishes when she was sick, that sort of thing. This was the hardest part of moving for me, and I was seriously dreading it. Finally I decided this was stupid, and I should pack the hardest stuff first and ignore my conscience's wailing that I should have saved it for last out of respect for the dead.

I don't like to spend too long looking at the box because it still freaks me out to think that there's nothing left of the woman who created me except a box of gray dust that can be packed in a box and put out of sight like some meaningless souvenir. I also worry that when I pick up the box I might think something unworthy, but that's probably an OCD thing.

After I finished wrapping the little Buddhas and crystals, I folded her old monogrammed washcloth around the music box and packed it up along with the photographs and seeds and notes I found lying around her room after she died. So that's done with.

While I was doing all this, I found her box of Tarot cards and shuffled through them to see if she'd added any scraps of paper with sayings written on them (something she really loved doing in life, which made the mundane cleaning portion of dealing with her death a lot easier and harder on my spirit at the same time).

There weren't any notes that I could see, but the Five of Pentacles had been torn right down the middle. Rah said it was a negative card, so I looked it up and found out it signifies ill health, rejection and poverty--the three hardships that defined her life.

I didn't find the other half of the card anywhere in the box. I hope she fucking burned it.

On the bright side, now that I've dealt with Mom, it's out of the way and the rest of the packing should be bland and simple.

To combat my dust allergies, I've moved the air purifier into my room. The difference in air quality is substantial. Just to see what would happen, I sprayed some cinnamon air freshener near the machine. Ten seconds later, the scent was completely gone. I then realized that I haven't even smelled cigarette smoke from Jesse's level of the house since Seebs bought the machine. It's amazing what this thing can do--it even emits white noise, which I find comforting.

Ashes to ashes, allergens to allergens... Story of my life.

Adventure On A Stick

Wisdom of the day: "Whoever said "Pain shared is pain halved" never clicked a link to Eel Girl."

On Sunday, Rah and I went to the State Fair. We parked a mile away and walked to the back entrance. I brought a couple stacks of one dollar bills and my camera, so we were pretty much good to go for entertainment.

We drank fresh apple cider, laughed at the truly unfortunate chickens, marveled at the scarecrows and pirate-themed flower arrangements. Then it was time for lunch. I had an absolutely nasty fry-bread taco. The meat tasted like sweet red bean paste, only greasier. After lunch, we had ice cream at the dairy place and hit the midway. Rah rode one of the vomit-inducing rides (I was afraid to stand near it because the gondolas looked like they could come off and hit me).

We threw balls at urns, darts at balloons, and magnets at tiny floating plastic fish. I won a stuffed lion at the fish game, and Rah won a tiger. We put them in my bag and they tried to make ligers on the ferris wheel. We shared a gondola with two teenaged lesbians who made out the whole time.

I rode the Restroom Ride, which had a really long line and wasn't that exciting. I thought the thrill of germs was maybe a little bit overrated. We got on the whirly swing ride (my hair got everywhere and people below were waving at me). When I got off the old dude in charge of the machinery gave me a lecture about how I should never ever cut my hair and that men love it. He was really sweet.

After we used up the rest of our tickets, we went to the bazaar and ogled the fair wares. I bought a little ceramic elephant with terrifying big eyes. I decided I needed it because Mom used to collect elephant figurines, and it reminded me of her.

Next to the elephants were little red Buddhas, and that's when a funny thing happened.

Keep in mind that I do not normally think of fair kitsch as a place to look for signs from beyond the grave, but I'll make an exception here, because I found a laughing Buddha who has my Mom's face. It's the most uncanny thing. When I look at him, I see her smiling back at me.

I wasn't even surprised at the time. It was like, "Well, duh." Mom is exactly the sort of person who would appreciate a three-dollar Buddha with ties to the beyond. And so the Buddha is on my shelf now, along with the elephant. As soon as I figure out which way is East, I'll point the elephant that way. All Mom's elephants used to point East, though I never even asked her why that was.

At the end of the evening, we got Vietnamese egg rolls (a little pasty and bland but still pretty good) and walked back to the car. My feet hurt the entire next day. I'm pretty sure we walked about ten miles at the fair.

I wish I'd gone more than just once. That was a lot of fun, and I'm already impatient for next August so I can go back. Maybe I'll even ride the Octopus this time. Haha, yeah right. I will DEFINITELY muster up the courage to eat something on a stick, though.

My Hamster Wheel Heart

I'm feeling lonely and abandoned, and Mom is getting more dead with every passing day. (There's your spoiler. Now you don't have to read the rest of this entry! You can just skip on down to the final paragraph).

Sometimes I feel like it's gonna crush me if I don't keep moving. I don't have anyone I can talk to, so I keep finding new things to distract myself with, and that keeps on being just barely enough.

I wish I knew how real people dealt with major life crises. I'm not doing so hot, from a purely practical standpoint. Emotionally I'm recovering, but there's this whole 'real world' where things seem like they're fucked beyond my ability to fix them.

I've got an unpaid YMCA bill because I forgot my membership when Mom got sick. Do I call and tell them what happened? No. I don't want to be on the phone anymore. The phone is a place where terrible things happen far away and can't be taken back, and I don't want to tell a stranger what happened to my mother and hear the words coming out like some kind of cheap excuse for why I didn't pay my dues. So the bill's gone to collections and my credit's fucked even more.

I've still got that bank snafu that's been going for months. I'm on Mom's Wells Fargo account, and they might have ME on the hook for her credit payments now, but do I call them and tell them she's dead? No. I can't seem to handle even that.

The emails been building up for months. My brother is leaving angry messages on my phone about the bank thing and whatever else is going wrong. Do I answer them or call him back? No. I don't want to know what else has fallen apart.

It sounds like such a bloodless and lazy way to dodge responsibility, but that's only because I can't put into words the unbelievable enormity of the helplesness and inertia and that's been with me for months. I've been overwhelmed by emotional extremes from every direction and now all I want is to be left alone. I don't know why I can't fix this. I'm good at doing so many things, why can't I handle a few simple phone calls?

This winter, not two months after Mom died, my best friend since the age of 12 dumped me. These were two kinds of loss I'd never had to deal with before, and suddenly they both were happening at once. It was like being smashed between two Mack trucks headed in opposite directions at high speed.

To put it mildly, the timing sucked. Rain got me through the whining and hysteria. Mostly we watched movies and drank bizarre alcohol. And then, having ignored the real world for months at a time, I found that I was starting to feel a little bit less like dying.

And then Rain moved out.

She'd been intending to go for months and months, but needed to save up the money. I had made my peace with her leaving way back in the fall, before everything turned to shit. But now she was packing up her stuff in the aftermath of two other people leaving me, and bad things always happen in threes.

I was also chock full of self-pity because I felt like I wasn't outgoing or social or interesting enough to make her choose me instead of the many awesome and hip friends who were waiting for her in Asheville. But when she moved and didn't die or stop talking to me, I calmed down again. Sort of.

Fast forward to late June: I'm still standing in the wreckage of all the things that fell apart in my absence. Want to know my shameful secret? I barely care about what a mess I've made. It's like it's all happening to someone else. Maybe this is my brain's way of coping with everything--depersonalize and screw the consequences. I dunno. I'm not a shrink.

I do know that if it's not immediately connected to getting me from one day to the next, I don't want to hear about it. I'm obsessing over soft and comfortable clothing. I'm taking long leisurely walks by the lakeside. I'm hanging out on the internet reading stupid drama that people actually think is important. I'm reading books again, something I haven't found time for in years.

I'm getting by. I'm even happy, most of the time. But then I'll see some kid losing his mom in a comic book or remember something Mom said and start to cry, and that kind of fucks it all up for a while.

But it's not so bad, as isolated depression goes. At least I never have to look forward to losing my Mom again, wondering if the next phone call will be the one letting me know she's died in her sleep. No more standing over her at night, listening to her breathing, afraid that she might stop if I leave the room.

No more wondering just how much misery I can stand--I finally know. Anything you throw at me. I won't land on my feet, and a judge surely wouldn't award me points for style, but I fucking dare you to try and stop me getting up again.

Here endeth the ruminations. I hope you guys liked reading it as much as I enjoyed wading through all that pent-up negativity yet again! It was a blast! :)



On the happy side, I spent 4 hours clambering around the Lilydale hillside and riverbank. I took pictures, collected dead dragonflies, ate homemade chicken onigiri, and stuffed various marine fossils into my pack. Turns out, I do all right on my own.

Hey, it's a start.

Out on the Lake

I was in bed, about to fall deeply asleep, when my cel phone began ringing. I had it set obnoxiously high during the trip to Nebraska, and forgot to turn off the ringer after returning to the Twin Cities.

It was my brother, and he was pissed at me.

Backstory: This X-mas, I went home to visit Mom. It was awesome, and the last time I saw her alive, except when she was lying in that god damned hospital bed, which really doesn't count. She gave me her credit card and told me to spend a certain amount while we were out on the town. She did her checkbook dance to make sure she could afford it, and all was well.

I accidentally took the card home with me to St. Paul with me, and since she was in the hospital barely two weeks later, it got lost in the shuffle. And at some point during the insanity of our first trip down to see her in the hospital, I used the card twice. I stayed well under the limit of what she had given me.

Well, my brother is furious. He claims that the card had never been activated and my using it has ruined his plans to have it cancelled on account of her death, or something. He wasn't very explicit on the details, and I was half-awake. After hanging up, though, drowsiness fled and I spent the rest of the night undergoing horrible dreams that left me feeling even more exhausted upon awakening.

It sucks when the initial glow of reconciliation fades, but I can't say I'm surprised. I've been waiting for this unhappy moment for a while now.

Mom's the one that kept me tethered to that place and that part of my life, and she's gone now. I have burned some bridges, many for good reasons, some because I was wrong.

In a way, I'm perversely glad that, with Mom gone, I can cut myself free from my past without hurting the one person who rooted for us as an ensemble cast. But is that really the most graceful way to honor her memory, knowing how important it was for her that we all learn to share a planet? How far should honoring someone's wishes go before it becomes living for the dead?

There's a point where I will have to say "I love you, Mom, but my siblings and I are better off in a long-distance relationship." She'll understand, but she will be unhappy about it. I think what's really going on is that I know I'll feel guilty about the decision, and attributing the guilt to the emotions of a deceased person allows me to put a step between myself and regret, thus making it slightly easier to make a hard choice.

My sister has two modes, super-happy and incandescent with rage. She is famous for jumping back and forth several times in the course of five minutes between these extremes, and it's become a little bit pathological.

Sample conversation from memory:

A. Dude, don't take that road anymore, the potholes will destroy your car.

Me: It's okay, the car I'm driving has really good shocks. It hasn't bothered me yet.

A: I WAS JUST TRYING TO FUCKING HELP YOU! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!

Me: I just meant--

A: STOP INTERRUPTING ME! I WAS JUST TRYING TO GIVE YOU SOME GOOD ADVICE AND YOU DON'T EVEN FUCKING LET ME GET A WORD IN!

Me: I didn't mean--

A: YOU DID IT AGAIN! YOU WOULDN'T EVEN LET ME TALK! YOU KNOW WHAT? FUCK...YOU! *hangs up*

She hasn't been physically violent in years and I've learned to stay out of her way, but things are not good between us. It stems, I think, from miscommunication. She believes that when I get calm and quiet during arguments, it's because I am looking down on her for all her inadequacies and flaws, judging her.

The truth is that I get quiet and stop making eye contact in arguments because I'm scared shitless of provoking her rage, or if it's too late for that, of giving her new fuel.

She blows up because she hates herself and is projecting her faults onto my silence or downcast eyes. The standoff can't help but escalate unchecked because she won't calm down and I can't make her NOT see hidden hatred in my every move. We're like two countries on the edge of a full-scale nuclear war.

Neither one is able to let the past go. She's still mad because she thinks I'm laughing at her. She also knows I blog about her behavior and that the portrait is not kind. For my part, I'm mad because she went insane one time and invited her drug friends to come into my house and take home whatever belongings they liked.

This is not something we can just put behind us or patch up. I cannot forgive her because she's destroyed our trust so many times. I either trust someone or discard them; there is no middle ground. With my family, I can understand a little of how I grew to be this way. But it's cold.

And she can't prove to me that she's a different person, because any sudden moves from her direction immediately throw me into Def-Con 2, and I'm sure it shows in my demeanor.

Sadly, this standoff resulted in one of her famous explosions during a visit with Mom. She wanted to paint Mom's nails, but I had already been warned not to do so by a nurse because they need to check her nails periodically for cyanosis. She listened briefly to my explanation, then got the idea I was talking about the inconvenience of having to move the finger-clamp monitor from finger to finger, and overrode me with her plans to get around the problem.

If I could go back in time and NOT have taken that brisk tone with her on the third repetition of the cyanosis explanation, I would do it in a heartbeat. I had to know it would set her off. It did, and she snarled at me and stormed out, ending her first visit of several days in negativity. If there's one thing we didn't need in that dark and horrible room, watching Mom gradually slip away, it was yet another shallow feud ending in the words "No, I've been DISMISSED. You have DISMISSED me." followed by storming out of the room.

For my part, I blame stress and grief and maybe even a subtle urge to just get the explosion over with. I don't know. It was bad. At least Mom knows how we are and, even if she was aware of the mess, would understand that this wasn't a relationship-ender, but merely the latest in a long line of failures to see eye-to-eye.

My brother and sister are also at odds with one another. He's had it with her temper and unpredictability. She's furious that he (as the youngest) was given Power of Attorney over herself (the oldest).

He's angry that she argued with Mom's decision to intubate and scared her with dire warnings so that she was not in a good place when she went under.

She's pissed that he retaliated by not giving her the password for daily status updates over the phone, thus causing her to be left 'out of the loop.'

He's pissed that she blew up on the Baptist minister at Mom's unplugging. She's furious that he made her feel unwelcome to Mom's wake, resulting in her not attending either the wake or the Baptist service.

And now she's extra mad because she ended up not even hearing about the Mormon service, and couldn't go to that. In my opinion, she made her desires plain by choosing not to come to the other services, and her anger and rejection and tendency to derail conversations led to an unfortunate mistake, resulting in her not being invited to this final service .

She says she would have wanted to go, but she bears some responsibility for making it impossible to please her. If either one of them had been willing to behave like an adult, even an angry adult, it would not have gotten to the point where one of Mom's own children didn't go to any of her services. He snubbed her, and she reveled in the rejection and turned it into Law.

She will regret this later. I know I sure do.

And by letting their squabble occupy so much of their time that they both individually chose to leave their other sibling happily ignorant of Mom's sickness, hospitalization or the high likelihood that she wouldn't make it this time, they have both blown it big time with me.

I tried to tell myself they didn't mean to ignore me until it was too late to say "Goodbye" or "I love you," but all it would have taken was one fucking phone call. One email. Before she was intubated, she even asked them to call me, and they didn't. She asked them to call me and they didn't.

I've tried to put the outrage and anger behind me, but I'd have to be a Zen monk to not feel a sense of absolute, crushing rejection. If either one of them had called me, I wouldn't have spent the days before her intubation playing fucking video games without a care in the world. I would have been on the phone telling her to be strong. Reading to her. Trying to keep her company.

I get that when someone dies, a natural response is to try to make sense of it by creating a villain. Your kid falls off a jungle gym, so you sue to remove playgrounds from schools. That sort of thing. You want closure, so you dwell on the things that weren't done, no matter how trivial.

This is different. This was the single most important thing any family could do for its out-of-town members during a crisis, and I got left by the wayside because they were busy snipping at each other and forgot about the real world.

If one or the other had forgotten to contact me, all could be forgiven because it wouldn't have been too late. But they both knew they should call me, both knew Mom wanted them to call me, and both failed to do so without having any explanation for it later other than "I forgot."

This is a hurt that can never be righted. I have to live with it. So begins the struggle between my mother's very good reasons for us to love one another and stick together, and my urge to scorch the earth between us forever.

But back to the money thing. My brother is having trouble making ends meet now that Mom's SSI is no longer helping pay the rent. I'm sad to say that my wealthy relatives have been oddly silent since she died. My aunt actually told my brother not to pay the Funeral mill, and to just take a $2400 hit on his credit and get on with his life.

She does not understand that credit is actually quite important to members of the working class; she was just trying to be helpful. She did collect $700 from her church and friends to contribute to the cremation fund, though, so that's nice.

My grandfather lives on an Ohio lakeshore and has a nice boat. Apparently he lives off of the interest of the family estate. He married Grandma and became step-father to her kids, but he has never bothered to bond with any of them or their own children. It's funny, but I was 22 when I finally realized why he had always been "out on the lake" or "out on the tractor" every time we asked about him during Grandma's holiday/birthday phone calls. When Grandma was sick for the last time, he pulled the "no, you can't speak to her, you'll just excite her" shit on MY Mom, and it devastated her.

Still, he sent along a hefty $500 to help pay for his step-daughter's cremation. Grandma would have smacked him, but she died a few years ago and was frail enough by then to have made little impact anyway.

I gave my brother $1000 to help with expenses. I have no steady job, no money, no husband or wife earning bread, no inheritance that I know of. When Grandma died, she did so with full intentions of including her kids in the will, but he will probably leave everything to his vile yuppie spawn anyway and we will be offered their second-hand clothes and scuffed yard sale furniture.

(True story, one X-mas the people in this family invited my Mom and siblings over for gift exchange. They proudly presented us with taped-shut garbage bags of castoff clothing. I remember one of the other gifts we saw changing hands that day was a set of keys to a very nice car. Top shelf people, really top shelf.)

I raised the money via the internet. I think it's pretty funny that people who have never met the woman coughed up more than my rich grandfather to see her decently cremated and returned to her children, but there you are.

But now my brother is mad at me for spending the money Mom gave me for a Christmas/birthday gift. I didn't realize that it would cause him trouble. I'm cutting up our cards and closing the shared bank account to avoid future mishaps, but I've failed him because he is under stress and I've just gone and added to it.

My family is broken. Mom, I'm sorry, but I don't see this working out without a miracle. Even with a mountain of past transgressions more or less forgiven, we will never be friends. It was good that we siblings were able to come together (with some thorns) during this crisis, but what comes next? What comes after there's no assholes left in that scummy redneck town to gang up on?

We three siblings have always been a source of anguish for my Mom. She watched us grow from contentious little Welfare brats into adults whose rocky loyalties simultaneous pleased and horrified her. We've all been taught by long experience to believe that every little needle-prick is the point of a dagger. It's too late to pretend that a new start is possible, and we're too jaded to want to waste our efforts. And yet, now that she's gone and it's no longer we three against the world, we've lost our excuse to remain family.

Lonely, yes. I don't want to disappoint her, wherever she is, so I guess I'll just keep trying to fix this until I can't anymore. Sometimes all you get is a shallow phone relationship, and sometime's that's enough.

Out on the lake... there but for the grace of God go I.