for the past week or so i've been thinking a lot about my uncle gene.
he's one of my mom's siblings; the only boy. my mom was oldest, gene was next. there were 3 others behind him.
gene killed himself last year.
i'll never forget the day i heard that news. annie was driving me to work. it was a carpool day. my cell phone rang and it was my mom, sobbing. she first asked if i was driving, and i said, "no, but i'm being driven." she wanted me to pull over if i had been driving.
she then somehow managed to tell me that gene was dead. her brother had killed himself. i immediately broke into tears. annie didn't know what was wrong, but she pulled over and watched me cry into my cell phone. i tried to comfort my mom --who was incredibly distraught-- and trying to make sense of it myself.
after the inital shock, i told mom that if she flew to RDU, i could drive us both up to virginia to take care of whatever needed taking care of. so she did, and a few days later mom & i were headed to manassas.
what we found there is difficult to describe. i didn't know my uncle all that well... i have vague memories of gene being really fun & goofy at family reunions, but the last get-together had been decades in the past. my mom probably purposely chose to keep a lot of things from me, but i really could have used more background before stepping foot into his house.
apparently, gene had been slowly descending into depression, paranoia and insanity for some time. we walked into his tiny shack of a house with his son and his friend, marti, and encountered a scene like nothing i could have imagined. the front room had no floor. you had to walk on beams to get to his one liveable space... a tiny, unheated, filthy kitchen that also housed his bed. cigarette smoke and the kerosene heater had turned everything white to an ugly shade of grey-orange. there were piles and piles and piles of aluminum cans to be recycled. bags and bags of beanie babies. a bathtub full of craft supplies. unopened christmas presents stacked on the rafters where the ceiling should have been. and just mounds of *stuff*. things he'd collected over the years that had no meaning to us. things that didn't make sense. notebooks of scrawl that were too difficult to decipher. my mom broke down and cried when she saw it all.
she'd tried to save gene several times before by sending him samples of zoloft when he was too poor to see a psychiatrist, and by mailing him letters of support and suggestions for help. in the end, none of it did any good. he'd had enough. he'd carefully packed his truck with things he wanted his son to have, left a note on the drivers seat for him, then attached a hose the the exhaust of his saturn and started the car. his friend, marti, found him the next morning when she came to take him for an appointment with a social worker.
the reason this has been on my mind so much lately is that the one-year anniversary of that event is approaching. i hate that i can't remember the exact date, but maybe it's better that way. i asked my mom if we were going to have a memorial service for him, like we'd all discussed when we were up there, communing together in virginia.
she said she wasn't even interested in attending anything like that. and not because she didn't love her brother, and not because she wanted to avoid the site of his death... but because she hates marti.
marti was gene's friend for many, many years. she, i suppose, was his girlfriend, too, though i'm not exactly sure how intimate their relationship was. it's clear that marti meant the world to gene, and that she was his connection to a sane world.
marti, though, is married and has children of her own. but marti's husband knew about gene. mom still can't get past all of this, though.
i've tried, over and over, to help mom forget marti's marital status. i tell her, "marti clearly loved gene. gene loved marti. everyone knew about everyone else, and no one was upset... except for you. let it go." but she can't. and she continues to refuse to participate in any memorial ceremony that has anything to do with marti.
from what i understand, the rift goes deeper than just the 'affair' (if you can really call it that) between marti & gene. i guess during marti's care of gene she was constantly searching for the root of his illness and kept coming back to his family. his mom, specifically. my mom's mom. marti apparently would contact my mom for 'dish' on the family, and would try to pin gene's mental instability on whatever history mom dredged up.
this sharing didn't last very long, though. it's no surprise that mom got tired of having her brother's insanity pinned on the woman that gave birth to gene and mom. it begins to reflect a little badly on mom, i guess. so mom's got this whole pent-up history with marti, and the marital status just is the icing on the cake.
i just find it tragic that mom can't forget her anger with marti and find some way to memorialize gene with her. gene loved both of mom and marti and he wouldn't have wanted these two women to be so disparate.
Posted by xta at November 18, 2003 02:30 PM | TrackBack