February 2nd would have been my dear mother’s birthday. She would be turning 90 years old had she lived. I write about my mood swings all the time. We called mom’s bipolarity her “nervous condition”. She passed away from heart and kidney failure in a nursing home at the age of 54. She’d been hooked up to a dialysis machine, in a vegetative state, for over three years. Her first stroke was in 1972. The stroke which completely paralyzed her occurred the following year. The last time I saw her was in 1974, when my siblings and I imparted to her the news of our father’s passing following his 13th heart attack. I abandoned her, believing her mind was gone. I didn’t even attend her eventual funeral. We know now that stroke victims are cognizant of what’s happening around them, but at the time I believed she was mentally gone. If I have one regret in my life, it’s that I abandoned my mother. On my yearly Mother’s Day post, my readers always console me for beating myself up about this misjudgment. I was 21 years old in 1974. I wrote the following poem in 2005, after decades of not coming to terms with my actions, or should I say inactions. I was pretty much a “mama’s boy” while growing up. I still have her loving handwritten “crits” on my early poetry and on the last page of my novel. (She wrote: “Don’t change a thing.”) Happy Birthday Mommy. And, again (and again and again.) Please forgive me.
“No Stroke of Luck”
Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
March 9, 2005 4:02 p.m. pst
I
She wanted to “escape the Mexicans”
No matter that Los Angeles was part of Mexico once
No matter that most of the street signs were in Spanish
As was the name of the town
No matter that my siblings and I had made many friends
(and a lot of Mexican descent) and really didn’t want to leave home
No matter
Dad deferred to Mom’s rants and uneasy nervousness
Dad dialed the number of the real estate agent
Dad secured a place in Glendora, far from “the Mexicans”
And though the family felt ripped from existence in El Monte
Torn from friendships and high school shenanigans
I didn’t mind too much, as I graduated that year,
And college life loomed fifty miles away the next semester.
Sis and bro took it all badly, and emotions erupted
Escalating erratic behaviors
Eviscerating complacent dreamscapes
And planting the family in unforseen circumstance
The nightly dinners grew upsetting,
But Dad deferred to Mom’s state of paranoia after all
Sis and bro became rebels
And I didn’t pay too much attention to it all
When confronted with the brick walls of academe
Which collected my attention spanning the new decade
Mom was growing more agitated
I’m sure Dad and my siblings noticed more than I
And I, her “little genius” and most beloved
grew farther from her, and this probably
added to her insumountable troubling episodes
But I hardly noticed
Preferring to spend time at the library
between school classes and worktime hours
I would get home late at night,
open my own door with my own key,
and slip inside my own “apartment” within our home
I would get up early and bathe,
then climb in the car for the fifty mile drive to school
before eight in the morning when class started.
I didn’t see a lot of the buildup
I didn’t pay attention to the wrenching dissimilarity
of Mother’s actions.
The slow nervous laughter of unforseen calamity
didn’t pierce through my hedonistic armor
The fast sure slipping into manic obsession
didn’t register with me, but it did with my family
Quarrels seemed to grow in number and intensity
I would quarrel with my siblings,
gaining chokeholds on bro in the kitchen
I would quarrel with my Mother,
Even as her nervous calamity grew larger
as a black cloud of coincidental animosity
And the night before she was struck down
Was one of the nastiest quarrels in our household
II
That Christmas was the last of feigned happy times
opening presents which presented a modicum of laughter
and less tears than usual
But come the spring, the evil sprung up again,
Sis and bro were finally getting settled
And high school daze descended upon them in Glendora.
They were children, really, and the pleasant auras of
new friendships and undiscovered lands
occupied their misery and supplanted it entirely
Like any older brother, I would greet their new friends,
And make friends of my own, including sis’s best friend
who became one of my girlfriends.
The night of long knives in our household
followed a trip to the medical center the day before
I had driven Mom in for a checkup
because she “didn’t feel right”
After all, she seldom “felt right” in those last days
leading to the stroke
The doctor (after an interminable wait) gave her a
clean bill of health
“nervous problems”
take two of these and call me in the morning
I can’t remember the subject of the quarrel
Only that there was one, pitting Mom against me
And at 19 I felt I should finally “get my say”
After all I didn’t need to be in the (new) family home
I could be in a dorm at SC with my friends.
I certainly didnt’ need the fifty mile drive.
I felt we shouldn’t have moved anyway
Just like everybody else (except Mom)
I went to bed crying, and so did Mom,
but we didn’t “make up”
the stroke hit her the next morning,
and Dad didn’t go into work, but took her to the hospital,
which in essence she never left for another four years.
III
I found out when I got home from school in the evening
We visited Mom in her room at Kaiser Permanente
Slick floors and the ever present alcohol smell
White robes and IV tubes
the first stroke was not bilateral
Only one side of her body was rigid
Memory has clouded and I don’t know if she could speak
that first night
but in time she grew stronger, and she did come home
for about a week sometime later
until the bilateral stroke finished her sentence
IV
Time has not been kind to a memory I forgot years ago
The particulars of bad news tend to filter fast
as sands hurtling through an hourglass with a
foot wide opening
Days fade to weeks fade to months
This was no stroke of luck,
And it ended quick her pluck,
Mom’s body took it’s toll, and the fee was very great
With a bilateral, all muscles freeze
There is no speech, nor would it seem recognition
Nor did she appear as Mom to me anymore
The family put up great facades for the nightly trips
which seem to have lasted for years, but there were only two
From nightly, to weekly, for sis, bro, and me
But Dad kept the vigil, relating to unheard ears
the events of the day.
Nothing was normal, my grades began to suffer
Dad kept having more of his heart attacks
as the pressure burdened him so
Mom was relegated from hospital to nursing home
Money fled the bank accounts, both hers and Dad’s
The smell always overwhelmed me during the visits
And I can’t say I looked forward to them at all
They were a hindrance in an otherwise full life at school
And with friends, discovering booze, dope, rock and roll and
sometime romance, the “other life” rarely made an appearance
Two years of visits, and I needed a vacation
A vacation from everything.
Young people are filled with angst and ennui as a rule anyway
And my situation seemed to fill me with insufferable agony
So I left for a vacation in the Summer of 74
And Dad, who never stopped his nightly trips
Had his 13th and last heart attack when I was
somewhere north of Frisco camping out.
V
Mom of course couldn’t attend the funeral,
as she was hooked up to a dialysis machine
The day was overcast even though it was the middle of summer
when I, my sis, and my bro trekked to the nursing home
to tell Mother the grief stricken news
She couldn’t cry, but she did
And something within me snapped shut,
I made a terrible decision that day,
One which I regret to this day,
In fact, the only regret I harbor after living
over a half century is this one.
I never visited Mom again after that
She lost not only her husband but her oldest son
I felt as if she had been gone for two years,
And for me, cutting the umbilical held finality
Her eyes looked like dark marbles
Her sweet dispostion had quietly melted
somewhere between El Monte and Glendora
She was a cipher, a cardboard facsimile
She was not my Mother
And I left that afternoon never to return
VI
I have called myself a poet,
But poetry seldom tells the truth when the truth
Cuts as deeply as this does now pondering the outcome
I am sure as salvation that I have been forgiven
By sweet Mother’s soul
I am positive that I have nothing to worry about in perpetuity
That I have not become an evil being because of my youthful
naivete.
Two more years and she finally passed away, softly, and with no troubles
Her death certificate reads heart failure
Her broken heart stopped beating at last.
I didnt’ attend her funeral
To me she was already dead
VII
Poetry spoke to me in the years following at times
Yeilding petty purpose when confronted with the ills
of my behaviors
My suicidal urges at once escalated, and thanks to
good friends, and counseling, and prayers to Jesus
in time I was able to come to grips with the situation.
In time my sis, my bro and I got back together,
but only for a little while, before the family completely
rent itself out of existence.
I gave my sister away at her wedding.
I made love to my brother’s female friend
We split the furniture in the house three ways
(I had to sell the house following my Father’s death when
I was made executor of Mother’s estate at age 20
so Mom could gain Medicare benefits to pay
for her stay in the nursing home,
which cost almost ten grand a month if memory serves.)
Of course in time everything heals, including bad memories
And I forgot Mother’s face and Father’s care.
I slipped deeper into an alcohol and drug fueled abandonment
which didn’t straighten out until well into the next decade.
The decades passed,
And here I am, still here, still writing, still upset
But no matter what ever happens
I cannot turn back the hands of time,
And I cannot apologize for my inept decisions
All I can say is I’m sorry, Mother, for escaping you
As you tried to escape those “Mexicans” in El Monte
You were my rock for many years, and when you
started to crumble, I just couldn’t take it,
And I fled
I’ve been fleeing ever since
I know I can never go back home
because it doesn’t exist
And will never exist anymore
sorrow seldom soothes the savage hurt
I cry with dry eyes
and lift my voice to you in Heaven
Where absolution sighs
And let this be an altar to my ineptitude
thirty years later.
BEHIND THE POETRY: For those who’ve never seen this before in these pages, I just want to say this was the most difficult and painful thing I’ve ever written, and it’s still quite painful to read. MFN/ppf
Posted: February 01, 2013 7:39 AM
Here on my blog, I used to feature a “revolving header.” All versions of the same design, with the logo and the AllThingsMike graphic, and usually themed along with my profile pic, a morph of which features a lot of those is always in the upper left hand corner of the page. The “design” of my blogpage doesn’t change much (it really displays neatly on my Kindle tablet, but I need to remove the various embedded flash files, which are passe in HTML5 
) Over nearly a decade, however, I have created, in my handy digital picture editor, a vast collection of interesting headers. I’m going to display some of them for you now. I probably won’t go to the trouble of “dating” them. All have appeared on this blog over the past eight years. In no particular order: 
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