Saturday I lay in bed all day struggling for breath, depressed, and wallowing in self-pity.
I’m sick. I’ve been sick for about two weeks. Bronchitis, I suspect. Being an asthmatic, I am subject to it a few times a year at least. Last Sunday’s trip to the ER seemed to be one spoke in the wheel of a particularly nasty round.
My nurse is gone. My champion. My defender. My comforter and my protector. She is my aunt, and she died of brain cancer about three years ago. If she were here, I couldn’t help but think, she would’ve already bounded in with all of her authority and mirth and said “Let’s get you to a doctor! You’re gonna lie in that bed and rot!”
There was another time when I was hospitalized with pneumonia. She came and spent the day with me, brought nail polish and gave me a pedicure. She stayed until almost night, and only left at my urging. In contrast, when my mother visited she went by the mall first, arrived in the evening, spent about twenty minutes, and left. But hey, she visited.
Among so many other things, my Aunt was a bright light in the dark places in my life.
Tears filled the mask I wore as I took number three of four breathing treatments that day. Broken sobs expelled the medicine that was supposed to open the airway that grief constricted.
Sometimes I ache for her.
In Harlow’s Rhesus Monkey Experiments, she was my comfort monkey. My mother was the wire cage. My mother is an addict who struggles with mental illness. She vacillates between horrifying bitch to nice but emotionally fragile and that’s in one sentence.
My mother also lives with me, a horrifying codependency I’ve found myself tangled in and one I am slowly working my way out of. She is my grown child and my abuser. She was my childhood playmate and now she is my adult responsibility. My mother deserves a book, not a blog post. I’m leaving her alone for now.
There was a time in my youth when I was on the couch burning up with a fever. It was 104 and climbing; I had taking all the Tylenol I could, gotten in a cool bath—nothing would bring it down. My aunt came in and saw me in that condition and was furious at both my mother and grandmother for not having taken me somewhere. She peeled me off that couch, took me to the nearest after hours clinic and paid the fee herself (I didn’t have insurance at the time).
I lay there as I coughed awhile after the breathing treatment and thought of that day. Oh, how I wish I could have done that for her.
I looked down at my little stash of supplies…water bottles, fruit cups, etc. No nurse would look after me that day. There would be no Florence Nightingale to come to my rescue. Mine died, and she could never be replaced.
Truly, no one looked in on me. No one called. I drifted in and out of fretful sleep between refrains of “FUCK YOU!” from the wire cage monkey who had gotten loose in the kitchen. I spent the day in bed feeling sick, feeling sorry for myself, and in between asking God to give my aunt just one more kiss from me.