Mallory's Camera

Night before last, I couldn't sleep for anything.

I didn't toss or turn. Instead, I just lay there in a Stygian paralysis where my body thought it was asleep, but my mind knew it wasn't.

When my mind finally let go of the room it was in, I found myself in another room—a little room in a house in Brooklyn with the letters A-N-N-E spelled out in the linoleum: My aunt's childhood bedroom in the House of Usher.

###

Many hours later, I was at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in New Paltz, laboring in the TaxBwana trenches. I had a particularly difficult assignment: a couple in their 80s, accompanied by their son in his 60s who was supposed to be some kind of financial whiz and yet who had neglected to bring in a single one of his parents' 1099-R forms. Instead, he'd brought in a series of canceled checks—which meant I had to do forensic accounting to reverse-engineer the checks and turn them into usable tax documents.

There were all sorts of other irregularities in their tax situation, too, plus their combined income was over $200,000, so I kept thinking, Why are you using a free service that is obviously designed for poor people? I mean, TaxBwana doesn't impose any kind of income limits on its services. But that's because simple human decency imposes limits on its services.

But simple human decency is easy to ignore.

###

Then I got a text from Ichabod: Just heard from Stew that Annie died yesterday.

Oh.



Annie was my aunt, my mother's younger sister. But we were close in age.

Complicated people interact in complicated ways, and we were complicated people.

We loved each other, but we did not like each other very much because people in my highly dysfunctional family did not like each other. And also, I suspect, because Annie had a deeply ingrained distrust & disdain for other women. Her own mother had abandoned her when she was 10, and this was the central defining event in Annie's life. She never thought about it, so, of course, she never processed it. And never got over it.

She was one of the most amazingly creative human beings I have ever met in my life. I mean, truly, she could do it all! She could write—published three novels, two of which are quite excellent, all long out of print. (This year, for Ichabod's birthday, I actually tracked those novels down so I could give them to Ichabod.) She was an excellent musician—entirely self-taught!—who played bass and fiddle in a series of rock 'n' roll & bluegrass bands all up & down the California central coast who were always on the verge of Making It Big. But never quite did. She was also a gifted cartoonist.



My complicated family. Sigh...

I was the sanest of the lot

And that is not much of a recommendation.



She died in circumstances that are truly horrifying to me.

One day while I was still living in Monterey—so, twenty years ago?—she called me & said, "Patty, it's the funniest thing but there's this word I can't remember."

"Word?" I asked.

"Word for this thing. It goes up & down on these tracks. They have one in Santa Cruz—"

"You mean, roller coaster?"

"Roller coaster! Yes! Thank you! That's it! I wonder why I couldn't remember it? It's like there was this hole in my brain where the word should be."

I date the beginning of her dementia to that conversation.



Shortly after that, my own life fell apart, and she was cruel to me in ways that stung deeply, implying that what had happened to me was my fault. (It was not.)

Intentionally cruel? Probably not: We were all so dysfunctional that we simply did not know how to be kind to one another.

But I moved 3,200 miles away—a diaspora of one—and stopped talking to her for a decade.

I started talking to her again when I learned she had fallen & broken her hip.

This was during COVID.

We tried to pretend we were a real family by doing weekly Zoom calls—Annie, me, Alicia (Annie's horrible daughter), & Ichabod, my caring, responsible son who somehow survived his own crazy mother to become a fine & decent human being.

By then, Annie's dementia was in full flower. She would sit there rocking back & forth making stuffed animals talk to each other.



Alicia is really a disgusting & horrible human being.

Annie's partner, Stew, loved Annie deeply no matter what and would have been happy caring for her forever.

But Alicia somehow got it into her head that Stew was sponging off Annie's money—

"Are you kidding?" I said to Alicia—while I was still talking to her. "Stew owns a house worth $2 million. His net worth is much higher than Annie's—"

But Alicia had always wanted to control & humiliate her mother, so through subterfuge, she managed to wrest power of attorney away from Stew and move Annie to Bend, Oregon, 550 miles away from everyone who knew & loved her, where she installed Annie in one of those hideously expensive & absolutely soul-sucking Memory Acres places.

And there Annie stayed for four years.

When Stew went to visit her there, he reported back that despite the hefty price tag, Annie languished on piss-soaked sheets and was force-fed drugs to keep her from crying.

So, it's a blessing that she finally died.



I am very, very, very sad today.

But what was it that Kipling wrote? The two, then, were beyond the Border. I would have prayed for them, but, that night, a real King died in Europe, and demanded an obituary notice.

I have a shitload of work to do. And I cannot indulge in feeling sad.