Kryptonite

Little did I know the extent to which Tressie and Finch had taken complete control of Mother the last two years of her life. I suspected something amiss when my emails to her bounced back; I changed email addresses and often followed up with phone calls to check that my mother received my messages. At one point, Finch blocked both my phone and Lee’s phone from ringing into Mom’s house. I adapted by setting up a secure, unlisted phone number through my Gmail account. That became the only way I could reach my mother during those last two years.

On rare occasions, when Dave and I were in the area visiting his family, we managed to sneak in a visit to her. We set up these without our sisters’ knowledge. But of course, she told them later on, never able to hide those kinds of secets. They were furious when they found out we had been there. Really, they were furious with Mother for wanting to stay connected to me, and I worry that they punished her severely for it.

The last time I saw my mother, she threw out one final blow at me. She waited until Dave was outside retrieving the mail to let out her menacing personae of long ago. I should have seen it coming; she had been ranting about her ungrateful granddaughters, the Methodist church, and her burden of being an orphaned schoolgirl. She had once again claimed that Tressie’s new husband was scheming to get the family land, that Lee’s wife didn’t like her, and that Finch and Tressie were treating her as though she were incompetent.

Revved up on her resentments, she then turned on me and seethed, “I will never forgive you for the lies you told about me.” Behind her eyes I saw the old familiar face of an abuser. It paralyzed me momentarily. The face quickly vanished as soon as Dave came back into the house.

Lee would later describe our mother’s last weeks as tragically abusive. She was a veritable hostage in her own home. The avarice that Tressie and Finch seem to have harbored toward me reached fever pitch in these final days, when they forced her to sign a last will and testament that reeked of undue influence. Had they been wise, they would have steered clear of vexing Lee in their covetous greed to inherit the entirety of our mother’s estate. But their rage spilled over onto him as well, and so Lee and I teamed up to challenge the will through a probate lawsuit against our two sisters.

Probate Squabbles

Lawsuit litigations rarely unfold according to schedule. But I felt angry ours dragged through the holidays.  Frustrating stalemates in the processes of discovery and mediation exposed raw, emotional roots of our dispute.  My sisters’ refusals to answer truthfully their interrogatories, their endless blocks of procedure, and my brother’s rage over a lifetime of exposure to their witchy brew made for a nasty, twisted path of reactionary sniping over the stuff of Mother’s estate.

A small blue pebble, a run-down cottage, and a few acres of land all seem to wield powers as debilitating as Superman’s dreaded Kryptonite. It is as though the devil was pulling strings attached to the limbs of their psyches, jerking them like helpless marionettes through a macabre tango.  Their contorted jabs to and fro projected the shadows of their tortured souls into the air as they lurched around the dance floor, searching in vain for peace.

My sisters demanded that Lee relinquish a star sapphire that he once gave to our mother. The more Lee insisted that it had little value save for sentiment, the more they escalated its worth, to the point where they are certain it adds $60,000 to the estate inventory. Then they quarreled over Lee’s purchase of the family cottage years ago. It’s a glorified shack, there’s no lakefront, yet now it is a priceless mansion in their claims. In turn, Lee and I demanded Tressie to account for underpaying Mom for land, and for persuading her to sell the family building without ever seeing the money for the sale.

Deadly, paralyzing poison leeched out of the irreconcilable fissures of our stalled litigation. Watching my siblings writhe under a spell of otherworldly rage, I sensed their frequencies resonating with sympathetic resonance within me. I decreed them shards of a virulent Family Kryptonite. So long as I avoid prolonged contact with immediate kin, these shards remained dormant. Re-activated from being around them, the shards began to disintegrate my spiritual sense of a self healed of my past. Affirmations of trust, hope, gratitude withered in the face of this newly-blooming rage

Reverting back to savage instincts to survive on my own, I defaulted into folk theology of if/then conditions, my child’s view of God.  In the face of sibling tantrums I showed an outwardly calm demeanor. Inwardly, I was just as bloated as they were with a hideous rancor. I disavowed all substance of miracle and grace in my life. My moodiness sounded as bizarre as beatnik poetry set to twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg (just imagine that for five seconds…).

On the work front, my tolerance for bad actors in the music business evaporated completely in a rehearsal – I made such a scene one time that the management was called in. It didn’t matter that I was right, that certain people were indeed jerking me around. My temper had become unmanageable. I had to call upon all my mental health resources for damage control.

I mused to friends how startled I had been at the rage I hurled at God. It first peeked out after the debacle at the funeral home and later, then stood at the forefront of my consciousness when my sisters produced a surprise last will of our mother. God was supposed to have protected me from further hurt!  This was supposed to bring closure to my mother’s life on my terms. Once again it seems, my sisters had wrested control of the narrative by laying claim to all of her money.

Pumping up righteous indignation, I partnered with Lee to sue our sisters. Our case outlined clearly their many abusive acts, and we were going to bring them to justice. God would be on our side, because I was good and they were bad.

The evidence of my sisters’ wrongdoing is neatly bound in a thick notebook in my possession. Its reality vindicates both me and my mother, breaking the curse of our respective silences. Pam, a high school chum, also has a copy because Tressie waited weeks before sealing the court documents. They were available for public viewing for quite some time, down in the county courthouse basement record. My friend made at least one copy.

Simmering in the shadows of my consciousness, green embers of the Family Kryptonite glowed in the warmth of my metastasizing anger. Yes, the embers radiated in heated agreement, I had been betrayed, let down, foolish for believing in a loving God who cared for me. Mother seems to have died unrepentant, planning to stick it to me one last time by leaving me nothing. Her final salvo spat at me from the grave, “I hate you!  I bequeath to you nothing!”

“Honey, God doesn’t prevent evil from happening,” quipped a friend. How I managed NOT to slap her gives proof that a Higher Power exists…Her words hissed like water thrown on hot sauna stones. The steam, toxic and gleaming greener for my rising rage, seemed to taunt me with a realization that I once again chumped myself with magical thinking that some Divine Being would cast magic over this mess.

Holding onto a shard of Family Kryptonite in my pocket, I felt bitterness creeping in. “Everything is God’s will” meant to me, “Only the stupid eat these plates of crap with joyful gratitude by telling themselves it’s a fancy meal.” The noxious green shard encouraged me to hedge my bets just in case it turned out that there was no reward for me in following a path that is righteous or good.

This fatalistic mindset battled with the unconditional love that had healed much of me. It wouldn’t let go, even as I screamed that I don’t understand anything. Had the well of renewal I imagined sustaining my path of recovery run dry, or had I discovered that it had a shallow bottom?

Neither, it turns out. I had rendered myself incapable of drawing from the well, disabled by the Kryptonite I still gripped. Letting go of it meant certain pain, for the water had to reach the deepest parts of my wounds.

I looked to Dave, hoping he knew a way around this. Exhausted as much as I was, his answer nevertheless pushed me toward a point I knew was inevitable.

“You’ve come so far, and then this rage and resentment and blame explodes and destroys stuff. You can’t be like them, you can’t keep holding on to this poison.”

“It’s gonna hurt. I’m tired of this.”

“Like you aren’t hurting now? Don’t you see the cycle revving up, over and over again? You can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep doing this.”

“So then I just let go and let God, and I’m all happy like it never happened?

“You don’t have to keep replaying this front and center, like that’s the foundation of your entire identity.”

“Well who am I, then, without all of this?”

“Oh, Sadie, you are so much more than all of this. You think I’d stick around if this is all there was to you?”

“Tell me more…”

More letting go. More grieving. The upward spiral metaphor (thank you CW) and Maurice Ravel’s lovely funereal piece, Pavan for a Dead Princess entered my mind’s ear as I recalled the sorrowful horn melody. I had been a motherless child in many respects. Years before my mother died, I had penned a letter to myself about being dis-inherited:

Scrappy Little Mutt:  Monologue for a Princess

Dear Princess –

As the Executor of an inheritance, you are to receive, it is my legal duty to inform you of the conditions and terms of this bequeathment.

Let me begin with a familiar phrase. “The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth.”  You are not meek. But since you are only six years of age, and perhaps not yet understanding of such verses, let me explain.  You shall not inherit earthly possessions. The land, the forest, and lakes where you play by day, that which you call home, shall not be yours. Therefore, I advise you to make haste in creating thorough and careful sketches of all that the land is to you, all that it nurtures within you. Paper and ink will not suffice, and you are too young to draw these details with your hands. So, use that which is not rooted to the earth to record the shape of your homeland – that is to say, your imagination, your soul, your senses. Put it to music, and it will remain with you forever.

You may have been led to believe that, being a princess, you are entitled to a kingdom. May I remind you of your favorite story, wherein the protagonist insists that every little girl is a princess. Even your child’s mind should be able to deduce the impossibility of this scenario in physical reality. A kingdom for every girl?  Really now, it is time to grow up and stop courting childish fantasies! But since you may feel distressed at the news of receiving nothing of material value in your inheritance, I will explain further

You are a Princess, that much is true. But princesses reign over many different things. What no one has told you until now is, you are a Princess of Scraps. Not of the food scraps in that other fairy tale, where someone was being starved and she had to eat what was thrown out for the livestock. No, your princess qualities are related to the non-material inheritance.

You are a quilter of sorts, but not like your sister who has sewn heirloom pieces of clearly organized design that hang on her walls as elegant tapestries. Her scraps of cloth are clean, cut from patterns, and you savor the feel of that fabric between your fingers. Your scraps are not cloth, though. Your scraps are far more creative. Sounds of the earth, like the trees you hear. Sounds of music that you and others make.

Let me reassure you that this is a rich inheritance coming to you. It just lies in scraps, scattered across the land, scattered across time, and in pieces perceived in others you are destined to encounter along your journey. Your scraps are things you must find on your own. No one is going to give you directions on where to find these scraps, what to do with them, how to put things together. Use the music that flows so freely in your soul to organize it all.

My role as executor of your inheritance is to dispense items drawn from your soul’s life song. A more earthly inheritance is something ready-made, put together by someone else, and handed to you. As such, the terms of your inheritance are that you must piece together scraps of information, advice, affection, skills, ideas, love, anything you can find. And there is plenty to find!

If you will but channel the emptiness of your heart, the brokenness of your spirit, the pain of your wounded soul through those haunted eyes of yours, you will light a powerful searchlight to find these scraps of truth. These will create the song of your life’s work.

You will inherit much more than you can imagine now. No one values you now, a child of six, and no one will, until you put yourself together on your terms in accordance with the terms of life. You will, ultimately, inherit your true self and all the scraps that you gather toward composing your being as a uniquely whole cloth.  This inheritance can be shared as you wish, with as many beneficiaries as you wish.

The experience, strength, and hope that will one day radiate from your quilt of scraps has the power of transformation, a truly magical gift. The combination of others’ wisdom and generosity that you sew together with the thread of your being will become your legacy, to yourself first but also to those seeking kingdoms unknown.

EXTRA: For a short supplemental anecdote with musical excerpts related to this chapter, click this link: FriendSounds