CODA

I was finally out of my mother's reach, but I was traumatized and still inconsolable over my father's death. Most of what happened in my life between 1981 through 1995 was ugly. It would take too long to relate everything that happened, so I'll be as brief as I am able.

In 1982, I married the kid who took me to California. We eventually made our way back to Brooklyn and then to Western Massachusetts. We separated in 1984 and divorced in 1985. Why? I was screwing his brother behind his back.

In 1984, I started dating a guy who was even more mentally and physically abusive to me than my mother had been. When we first started seeing each other and I told him how my marriage ended, he laughed and said, "I'm your punishment." And I was so demoralized that I fucking bought it and let him terrorize me for a long time. I finally got out of the relationship, but I still have physical scars to this day. I never took legal action against him because I was too frightened to do so.

After this, I was with an absolute gem of a man whom I married in 1990. He treated me kindly and with love. He had first been a friend to me and had seen me through the horrific end of the previous relationship. By this time I was becoming someone I recognized very clearly---I began to verbally and physically abuse this man. It enraged me when he just stood there and took the abuse, or when he grabbed my wrists to stop me, just as my father used to grab my mother's wrists to get her to quit punching. However, unlike my mother, I was always horrified over the abuse I doled out; that's when it occurred to me that I wasn't quite as far gone as I thought I was. I started counseling, but I never was able to admit to my psychologist what I was doing to my husband or to myself. As if I hadn't already fucked things up enough, I decided I wanted an open marriage, and brought another man into the house to live with us for a time. I watched myself destroy my marriage, and I didn't know how to stop doing so. I felt cut off from everyone and everything. I also felt ashamed of myself for hurting my husband, and incapable of knowing what a real relationship was like.

In early 1995, my husband bought a computer and we both joined America Online. I started making Internet friends with whom I had a lot in common: we had shared interests in music, books, cooking and many other things. It occurred to me that meeting people in this way could be a new beginning for me. Very gradually at first, I began to build friendships with others. I liked hearing about people's everyday lives because they seemed so normal to me. Even though they most likely had skeletons in their closets, these friends had more stability in their day-to-day existence than I had ever had in mine.

One of these friends was a musician like me; we also had matching tastes in music. We would spend hours chatting via private messages and comparing our CD, tape, and vinyl collections. At one point, my husband watched the interaction between me and this friend, and said, "You're going to marry this guy." I laughed.

Damn if he wasn't right.

Over the next year, "this guy" Matt and I fell in love. Right then, I swore that I would be a different person---that I would never abuse anyone again. I have kept that promise.

My husband and I split up.

I moved back to California again so I could be with Matt. We were married in 1998, surrounded by many of our online friends.

From that year to this, there have been so many different challenges: miscarriages, the loss of a pregnancy at five months' gestation, chronic illnesses, misunderstandings, the passing away of friends and family, growing apart, and then growing closer again. We both sought therapy to help us with these issues, as well as with Matt's chronic depression and my anxiety and PTSD. I felt myself becoming...normal. Boring. No longer on the rollercoaster. I loved it. I still do.

My mother was diagnosed with dementia and Parkinson's disease in 2005. We spoke very rarely in the last five years; I really didn't want to have anything to do with her. The last words I ever heard her say---in 2007, or thereabouts---was that I had been a total disappointment to her. I shrugged and hung up the phone. My family kept begging me to call her, but I politely refused.

So she died (presumably badly) in a nursing home in Florida this past May. My brother Joel was the successor trustee of her living trust. He called to let me know she had "left me something". Fine. After the estate was settled, her lawyer sent me a copy of my mother's trust documents--Anne had left me ten percent of her estate and Joel received ninety percent--along with a letter stating that all assets were depleted because of my mother's healthcare and maintenance costs. No surprise there; at least not to me. However, I think Joel was pissed off about this. We don't speak very much; he and I have had many disagreements over the years, but I believe he thought there would have been something left for him. Consequently, what happened next was something I should have expected.

I had always been told that when my mother died, I would receive the jewelry my father had given her. Now, she was completely paranoid about her jewelry, as its value was extremely high. She would have new hiding places for it in the house every two days or so, and she always knew where it was. As part of the residue of her estate (along with any other tangible personal property), Joel and I would have had the right to divide it 90 - 10.

So I called Joel and asked him about the jewelry. He denied any existence of it and hung up on me.

I was utterly pissed off. I saw the jewelry as all that was left of my father. I knew she never appreciated what he'd given her and, if I had some of it, I'd value it much more than she ever did. And I also wanted something that would symbolize restitution for all she had done to me. I knew Joel was lying to me---he had the goods and wasn't about to give them up. So I decided to retain an attorney in an effort to get Joel to relinquish ten percent of the jewelry. I prepared an outline for the consultation, and then....


(here it is, kids---that which you've been waiting for for the last three days!)


How would I be any happier with that ten percent? Would I be any better or worse off with or without it? How could it make up for all the abuse I experienced? Who the fuck was I kidding, that I wanted it in memory of my father? It would just serve as a reminder of things best left behind.

If I was given that share of the jewelry, I would never have real closure in my life. I would never truly leave my past behind me.

And, after all, it was just...stuff...a pile of things to which society and economics have ascribed some sort of value and importance which has nothing to do with me getting on with my life.

I tore up the outline.

She's dead.

It's over; it's really, finally over, after forty-eight years.

That is a bequest far more valuable, much more important, than any tangible inheritance.