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carose59"Evidence?! Evidence?! I Spit On Evidence!"*
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Pat used to do this thing that drove me crazy. I’m overly sensitive, physically, in a number of ways, and one of them is, I hate being stroked. Rub your fingers over my arm more than a dozen times, and it starts to hurt. The back of my hand is even worse. Pat liked to hold my hand in the movies, which was nice, but then she’d start stroking the back of my hand with her thumb, which would then start hurting, and I’d have to make her stop.
I’m telling you this because there’s a tendency when somebody dies to forget they were flawed, they weren’t perfect. I don’t care if people want to think Pat was perfect; it’s me I’m having trouble with.
It’s the way the human mind works; we think in absolutes, in dichotomies. If Pat was Good, I must be Bad.
So I try to remind myself of her failings, of which that was a minor example, but I'm not here to say bad things about Pat. I remind myself of her imperfectness, then I feel like a bitch for doing it, which puts me right back where I started. So I’m going to do something new.
I was a selfish bitch long before Pat started showing recognizable symptoms of muscular dystrophy. For that matter, I’ve been a selfish, egocentric, whacko bitch with delusions of literature most of my life. Crazy, wanting to be somebody else, always trying to slide out of reality because it didn’t feel like it fit right, crying over nothing, selfish, awful, selfish. Always. Right from the get-go. A lot of bad things happened to me when Pat started getting really sick, my mind started protective maneuvers, but that’s not when I got selfish or bitchy or crazy or mean. I was always all of those things.
That’s my new mantra: I was always an awful, selfish bitch.
Doesn’t sound like much, does it?
But here’s why I think it’ll work better than the other, you aren’t a bad person line: I’ve never believed that. I’ve always thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me, so telling myself there isn’t doesn’t work.
So, I’m a bad, selfish person. But Pat loved me. That’s not a defense, it’s a fact. She loved me beyond all reason, and she didn’t see me as a bad, selfish person, she didn’t think I was mean to her; I know, because I asked. A lot. And this was before she needed me to look after her, it was when she could have walked out the door whenever she wanted, just taken the car and gone. She wanted to be with me, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, she wanted to be with me. She didn’t see herself as stuck with me. She really, really loved me. (I know, it doesn’t make any sense to me, either.) Whatever I was doing, I wasn’t doing it completely wrong. And Pat wasn’t a victim of my bad bad badness.
I’m trying to hang onto what I believe I know of her. Not being able to trust myself, my perceptions, the things I remember, or think I remember--that makes it very difficult to say anything definitively. I find myself saying, “Pat always liked--” and stopping to correct myself, to qualify, to say, “At least, I think she liked it,” whatever it was. Because how can I be sure? Particularly, how can I be sure if it was something I liked? How can I know she wasn’t just humoring me? She would, you know, to make me happy. (We once watched a TV show for two years before I found out she didn't really like it, she was just watching it because I wanted to.)
But if I didn’t know her, did anybody? If I let myself doubt everything, does she just disappear into maybes and I thinks and waffling and doubt? How can I write about her if I have to keep qualifying every definitive statement I make? I’ve lost her already, but I can’t lose my ability to write about her, not just because I need to write about her, but because who else is going to? Someone has to write about her, someone has to say who she was--what’s the point of spending your life with a writer if that writer doesn’t even write about you after you’re gone? I mean, there has to be some upside to living with an egocentric lunatic with delusions of literature.
I’m a bitch, but I did pay attention to her, I did know her. I just have to keep telling myself that, and I have to keep writing.
*Dr. Rameau
-:- -:- -:- -:-
Pat used to do this thing that drove me crazy. I’m overly sensitive, physically, in a number of ways, and one of them is, I hate being stroked. Rub your fingers over my arm more than a dozen times, and it starts to hurt. The back of my hand is even worse. Pat liked to hold my hand in the movies, which was nice, but then she’d start stroking the back of my hand with her thumb, which would then start hurting, and I’d have to make her stop.
I’m telling you this because there’s a tendency when somebody dies to forget they were flawed, they weren’t perfect. I don’t care if people want to think Pat was perfect; it’s me I’m having trouble with.
It’s the way the human mind works; we think in absolutes, in dichotomies. If Pat was Good, I must be Bad.
So I try to remind myself of her failings, of which that was a minor example, but I'm not here to say bad things about Pat. I remind myself of her imperfectness, then I feel like a bitch for doing it, which puts me right back where I started. So I’m going to do something new.
I was a selfish bitch long before Pat started showing recognizable symptoms of muscular dystrophy. For that matter, I’ve been a selfish, egocentric, whacko bitch with delusions of literature most of my life. Crazy, wanting to be somebody else, always trying to slide out of reality because it didn’t feel like it fit right, crying over nothing, selfish, awful, selfish. Always. Right from the get-go. A lot of bad things happened to me when Pat started getting really sick, my mind started protective maneuvers, but that’s not when I got selfish or bitchy or crazy or mean. I was always all of those things.
That’s my new mantra: I was always an awful, selfish bitch.
Doesn’t sound like much, does it?
But here’s why I think it’ll work better than the other, you aren’t a bad person line: I’ve never believed that. I’ve always thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me, so telling myself there isn’t doesn’t work.
So, I’m a bad, selfish person. But Pat loved me. That’s not a defense, it’s a fact. She loved me beyond all reason, and she didn’t see me as a bad, selfish person, she didn’t think I was mean to her; I know, because I asked. A lot. And this was before she needed me to look after her, it was when she could have walked out the door whenever she wanted, just taken the car and gone. She wanted to be with me, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, she wanted to be with me. She didn’t see herself as stuck with me. She really, really loved me. (I know, it doesn’t make any sense to me, either.) Whatever I was doing, I wasn’t doing it completely wrong. And Pat wasn’t a victim of my bad bad badness.
I’m trying to hang onto what I believe I know of her. Not being able to trust myself, my perceptions, the things I remember, or think I remember--that makes it very difficult to say anything definitively. I find myself saying, “Pat always liked--” and stopping to correct myself, to qualify, to say, “At least, I think she liked it,” whatever it was. Because how can I be sure? Particularly, how can I be sure if it was something I liked? How can I know she wasn’t just humoring me? She would, you know, to make me happy. (We once watched a TV show for two years before I found out she didn't really like it, she was just watching it because I wanted to.)
But if I didn’t know her, did anybody? If I let myself doubt everything, does she just disappear into maybes and I thinks and waffling and doubt? How can I write about her if I have to keep qualifying every definitive statement I make? I’ve lost her already, but I can’t lose my ability to write about her, not just because I need to write about her, but because who else is going to? Someone has to write about her, someone has to say who she was--what’s the point of spending your life with a writer if that writer doesn’t even write about you after you’re gone? I mean, there has to be some upside to living with an egocentric lunatic with delusions of literature.
I’m a bitch, but I did pay attention to her, I did know her. I just have to keep telling myself that, and I have to keep writing.
*Dr. Rameau