Sympathy for no one July 31, 1985

  

Toms River.

It’s been eight hard years since my mother moved here from Paterson, of feeling trapped by her decision, a decision made for her, in spite of her.

Now she has to make a decision for someone else and she’s puzzled about it.

Grandma needs an operation on her eyes – cataracts – and my mother is worried about the details, about the danger, about the money.

Ted, grandma’s youngest son, doesn’t want to hear anything about it.

“It’s a simple operation,” he said matter-of-factly, unsympathetic to a fault, and worse, insensitive to my mother’s feelings.

He’s always been one of the great non-caring, not-wanting to hear about other people’s troubles kind of person, except on a very superficial level.

He’s always managed to decide things for other people without caring what impact those decisions had on the people he decided things for.

He was one of those (along with his brothers) who sent my mother to Graystone Park mental institution when I was younger, reluctantly as it turned out because they all worried over how much it would cost, refusing to send her to a better hospital where she might actually have received – if not a cure – then something other than electro-shock therapy.

I never saw her undergo the procedure, but once saw the machine used in her doctor’s office when I was very small, something akin of a medieval torture device.

Installing in Graystone was not enough, the family insisted I accompany them every Saturday to visit her, unaware of just how much damage this caused me, since there were times when she refused to believe I was her son.

More advanced medication stabilized her. She went for her shot every two weeks like clockwork and it kept quiet the voices she said she heard, voices that told her to kill herself, which – in horror as I watched – she tried to accomplish.

Later, when I was away on the West Coast and Ted made plans to get married, he and others moved my mother in with my grandmother into an apartment on Trenton Avenue in Paterson, where my mother served as room mate and caregiver, washing and medicating the perpetual wounds on my grandmother’s legs.  The arrangement last for several years even after I got back, until suddenly, my mother started hearing the voices again.

Ted then decided I should be the one to sign her back into Graystone because I did not make much money and so they could not charge me anything.

“Put her away,” he said. “You’re the only one of us they can’t collect anything from.”

I refused. I was not going to be the one to sign my mother into that hell hole. As it turned out, I didn’t have to. The problem was due to the medication and her change metabolism, which had made the dose she took less effective. They changed the dose and the voices ceased.

Then Ted decided to move his family to Toms River and could not leave Grandma behind. He wanted me to move in with my mother, and again, I refused. I had just turned 26 and started my own life, and the last thing I needed was live with my mother – a very selfish act, I made up for later by taking in Ted’s suicidal brother Ritchie, when I lived in Passaic.

Ted opted to take both Grandma and my other south with him – a fortunate thing since it extended my grandmother’s life by at least a decade, having my mother there to feed and care for her.

Talking to Ted is often difficult, since he is obsessed with money, and so he doesn’t understand me or even his other perpetually unemployed brother, Frank, who wanted something more than industrial slavery.

I remember trying to talk to Ted a few days after Louise left me. He didn’t want to hear it, nor felt any sympathy about my losing my baby as well as my wife.

I’m not saying Ted is unkind. He cares very much about his wife and kids, but he’s remote, unable to grasp other people’s concerns.

He has not been ungenerous at times – since he did take my mother with him if reluctantly, and later took in Frank for a short time, and Ritchie for an even shorter time before I took him in.

Ted has a blind spot that won’t allow him to see or understand some things. Maybe this is a result from his time in Vietnam, since I recall him being more sympathetic prior to his going there in the mid-1960s. Maybe he only has so much sympathy stored up inside him, and he needs to parcel it out to those who had closest to him – such as his own kids. I don’t know.

 

 1985 Menu

 


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