May I Be Bold Enough...?
On Monday one of Chris's golf buddies called his cellphone and mom answered it. He basically demanded to to know what happened. Like what happened exactly. "I just talked to him the other day," he insisted, as though mom had bad intel and Chris was somehow still alive. It upset her. Kitty was there to hear the call and witnessed how it upset her, and even today while I was at Feagaville, mom talked about it like it just happened. She also showed me how a guy she contacted about getting clips of Chris's radio show had messaged her a series of the texts, and the first one was, "If I may be so bold, what happened?" I'll admit, when she showed the three messages to me, I didn't hone in on his request right away as the source of her anger. But she let me now. "SO BOLD?! IS THAT THE WORD YOU'D USE? DOESN'T HE REALIZE I'VE LOST MY BEST FRIEND? MY LIFE LONG COMPANION?" It didn't take me more than a second before I was angry about it too. The way Kitty was when she described the prior day's call. My response was something like, "Have him ask me. Let him come and ask me what happened, so I can tell him to piss off before I go over there and kick his ass." "Oh, Kitty would do it too," she replied.
After my day at Feagaville, I sent a message in our sibling group chat asking someone who was still on Facebook if they could drop an incendiary post about NOT asking our mom how Chris died. My thought was she could like it or share it, as a passive way of getting the message out there - don't ask what happened. Kitty wrote up something very kind and very reasonable, and within minutes mom asked her to take it down.
I don't get this point of view, but I need to. Mom has curated a very specific image on herself and her relationship with Chris's acquaintances on Facebook (as well as other social media). It is not real, but it's important to her. If she sees something she doesn't like, she ignores it. When she showed me the "so bold" guy's texts, her comment was that she wouldn't respond. She would leave him on read. "By not responding I AM sending a response. That's my message." To which I replied, "you really expect a 70-80 year old man to *get* that message?"
She's been saying "that's how I roll," a lot these past few days. And maybe it is, but me and Kitty both saw her response in person, and both times she was obviously upset. It seems like the "ignore and suppress" response is pretty fucking disingenuous. "If I don't like something, I won't dignify it with an emotional response," is actually very triggering for me. It's hard for me to accept. I cannot stomach it. And no amount of therapy is necessary for me to know why. It's because that's what I was raised on. It's how she treated *me* and my siblings. All of her children are loud emotionally. We don't do passive aggressive, and I gotta wonder if it's because her withholding fucked us up. Ironically, it was often Chris that would come out and tell us that we had hurt our mother's feelings, and that she was upset. She'd be in her room behind a closed door, and Chris would (verbally) crack skulls on her behalf. In his absence, I wonder if she'll have to change her tactics. She doesn't have him around to be her emotional mouthpiece. It's just another thing we've lost that is set to upend the family's dynamic.
It's not lost on me, that my immediate instinct to get a post up on Facebook asking people not to do that is a similar response to Chris coming out of the bedroom to be the heavy for her. So even though she asked Kitty to take the message down and must assume it was put up because I told Kitty about the "so bold" guy, even though that was her response, I wonder if it comforted her? I wonder if it made her feel honored or defended, or whatever she felt when Chris would be her emotional proxy? Now there's a question for the ages.