Extra points for subtlety

On the phone today, my mother says to me, 'I wanted to let you know that Papa is dying,' in an off-hand kind of way, as if it were sandwiched in between items on a grocery list. Cheese, bread, dying great-grandfather, milk, beans.

She then went on to let me know that I wasn't going to be expected to come home for the funeral since they weren't going to go because of an on-going quarrel with the rest of the family.

In my last years of high school my mother stopped working so she could take care of my great-grandparents. It was a wonderful thing to do--except that it very quickly gave her a reason to begin to construct her martyrdom. All the sacrifice that she made and all the hard work she took on. She's absolutely right: she did sacrifice and she did take on a lot of hard work. But she did it voluntarily, which, as far as I'm concerned, gives her no right to complain about it. The roots of the fight with the rest of the family stem from this. The rest of the family wanted to find an assisted living home for my great-grandparents and eventually a nursing home, once they needed it. Certainly not ideal--I think that nursing homes are vile and essentially are garbage dumps for old people. I'll have no problem consigning my mother to one for various reasons, but I'll do everything I can to keep my father out of one. (On a side note, I saw Il n'y a plus rien, a play by Robert Gravel on Thursday night--it dealt with nursing homes. It was comedically depressing.)

Back to the story.

My mother, however, didn't want to put them into assisted living and offered to build an addition onto our house--to be paid for by the sale of my great-grandparents' home--so that they could still be on their own but also be close by if they needed help. The old house was just too big with too many stairs. My great-uncle in particular thought that this wasn't such a good idea, because it seemed that my mother would be benefiting from it in the long run: double the size of the house but don't pay for it. I'm rather inclined to agree.

Of course, I don't know the full story. She claims that they didn't want to help at all. Point finale. Maybe. I don't know. In any event, we now have an in-law addition on our house which was only ever half-inhabited since my great-grandmother had to go into a nursing home before it was finished--Alzheimer's. A horrible, horrible disease. I pray I never get it. Some days when I've gone to visit her when I'm home she's fine and knows just who I am--although is usually a bit fuzzy beyond that. Other times, she has no idea who I am. But she's always as friendly and caring as she's always been. At least some things don't change.

On top of all this, my mother has decided that she wants to move to Florida. She's sick of the winter and the snow. She complains that her $30,000 pool is useless for half the year. That's too bad, I guess. I'll be $22,000 in debt when I finish school next month. I realise that I have two little brothers who will need to go to university at some point in the future, too. And obviously that pool that we used to have, which seemed to work just fine for me was just not good enough for them. And she just had to have that Eddie Bauer edition Ford Expedition. SUV's are the New American Dream. She feels safer in it, she tells me. She doesn't support Bush and doesn't support the war in Iraq. I've not asked her how she feels about Social Security. But she supports SUV's which, as far as I'm concerned, is the same as supporting Bush and the war. But SUV's are just symptomatic of a much larger problem in American society and this post isn't about that, so I'll stop here on that topic.

When she said that I didn't have to come home, I told her of course I would. She pointed out that we would have a private wake for about an hour, so as to avoid the rest of the family to whom she doesn't speak. She said that she'd have a mass said for him at Church--mind you, she never goes herself, but you have to do these things. But we won't go to the funeral.

I didn't correct her because it's not worth arguing about before the fact.

They won't go to the funeral. But I will.

I have no quarrel with the rest of my family, no matter how crazy she claims they are. I've not even lived in the country for the past five years, so I can't be implicated in any way. I have a right to go to my great-grandfather's funeral and if it means starting World War III, as she seems to imply, then so be it.

As for them moving to Florida, well, it'll give me less of a reason to have to go visit them. Everyone else I care about will still be in Massachusetts, family-wise. It's kind of funny, considering that when I was a year old my father and mother moved to Florida and my mother hated it--it eventually led to their divorce, although there were certainly a number of other problems in that relationship. Now she wants to move back. Apparently my 13-year old brother is also sick of the snow (because he never goes out and plays in it...because he's too busy sitting in front of the TV playing video games and eating pork rinds or something horrible like that--I'm not making this up. He really does eat pork rinds) and my 8-year old brother is looking forward to getting a dog (apparently you can't have those in Massachusetts--and don't get me started on the family track record with dogs).

Look out FLA USA.