I Thought I Was Over My Mother's Murder

Hello, readers, assuming there are any readers actually out there.

I started writing about my life – anonymously – a few months ago. I did it partly on the suggestion of my shrink, who knows I enjoy writing fiction (in fact I have an account on here that is not anonymous, in which I write short stories.) I've found it incredibly cathartic and in fact was even thinking “hey, I'm not even sure if I need to go back to him anymore. That's how good I feel!”

Oh boy, was I wrong!

But first, let's get a bit into my past and what is one of the most painful memories for me:

My mother died in spring of 2014. This was an incredibly difficult time for me as my family's dysfunction, which had always been there and I had managed to hold at bay for most of my adult life (basically by making it obvious that it would be in your best interest not to fuck with me), was already out in the open now.

The Cold War between my sister and the rest of us had gone fully nuclear.

Basically, as my parents grew older and weaker, she found she was able to manipulate them more than she could in the past. Plus, she told terrible lies about all of us to her friends, who seemed more than willing to become soldiers in her battles against us. She is a master manipulator and basically if you aren't going to be her foot soldier, you will not be in her life. (The best example of this is when she had a friend come to my parents' 50th Anniversary Party, start a fight with my rather volatile youngest brother, and try to shoot and kill him. But that tale is for another day, and suffice to say I basically saved my brother's life.)

She also realized that if she went to the police and made false claims of sexual abuse and elder abuse and the like, she would have us on our heels.

I still don't know why she found all of this necessary. My two brothers and I were more than willing to have absolutely nothing to do with her. None of us have ever really liked her, as she was a lying, conniving monster from the moment she plopped out of the womb. But she projected her hatred onto us and assumed we hated her and wanted to destroy her as badly as she wanted to destroy us.

Her battleground was my mother's affection.

I won't go fully into what happened back then. I certainly will at some other time, but for now, let's just say in late 2012 or so my mother was diagnosed with both dementia and diabetes and her memory and overall health plummeted. In fact, it was only a few short months after that 50th anniversary that she lost a leg just below her knee.

And with that, my sister turned up the heat so to speak and the family strife reached all new heights.

That is when I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: why not get mom and dad to move out west to be around my youngest brother and his family, and thus, their only grandkids, and away from her.

My mother loved the idea, which meant my father was fine with it. My brother here on the east coast said he was fine with the idea too.

When my mother told my sister, she said, and this is a quote: “No, you're not. I won't let you go. I will not let you make a fool of me.”

And, no, I do not have any idea what that means.

So she killed her.

And she was never held accountable for it.

But that's not what this essay is about. This essay is about how I knew this was a horrible thing that happened and it took me years to feel like I had “gotten over it.” (Of course, not fully. How the hell do you “get over” something like that?)

But I have at least put that memory and that pain sort of into the background of my life. It no longer haunts me like it used to. I'm not happy about it and I despise my sister with every fiber of my being and will to the day I die (hopefully after her so I can visit her on her death bed and laugh in her evil fucking face: “in pain, b****?” “Scared?” Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.)

Then I decided to clean out some old files from my computer.

But a few weeks ago, I decided my computer was a mess. I had tons of files just sitting on my desktop in no particular order. I had files and files of old things I would never use anymore. So it was time to clean it all up.

That's when I ran across all of the old files I kept because I always feared some sort of lawsuit or even criminal case against me. I knew I was innocent, but the lies my sister told about me were frankly horrendous. (She would call the police from her apartment across the city whenever she knew I was at my parents' and claim I was abusing them, for instance. One time she even said I was abusing her when I hadn't even seen her in months. They searched my parents' house to make sure she wasn't there.) (She lived an hour away, by the way.)

Not only was there a lot of painful paperwork in there, but there were also a few videos I had taken. They were actually videos of me talking to my mother on speaker phone.

It was weird hearing my mother's voice again. She's been dead 7 years now.

But the worst thing was the pain and the fear and the weakness in her voice.

She was crying and saying how sad she was and how she couldn't wait to get out west to be away from it all.

She was saying how upset she was that her and my sister couldn't be friends.

She was saying how she was afraid of my sister.

I didn't cry. I don't have tears left for any member of that family. (And, for the record, my mother was no saint. You'll learn that if you read my other stuff. But she was still my mother and she was a scared, weak old lady. One would think that alone would bring out some sort of sympathy. For my sister, it was like blood in the water and the shark that she is went in for the kill.)

(I guarantee if my sister knew I was writing this and saw that last sentence – a horrible assessment of someone – rather than being ashamed or mad, she would be proud.)

(That fucking monster!)

But it brought back all of the memories again and all of the anger and the pain and the stress and the depression came back.

And I stopped writing.

At the time, I was working on a short series about my history with anxiety and the myriad ways it has expressed itself over the years. It was really good work, as it brought up memories I had completely forgotten about. For example, I had completely forgotten all of my rituals and compulsions when I played basketball as a kid, or even when I just walked down the block. I really think it was doing me a world of good.

And I really felt like I was on the rise. I was eating better; I was working out everyday; I was writing, both here and my fiction; I was growing more intimate with my wife (my problems in that area are a part of the anxiety that I hadn't even addressed yet in the series.)

But that sent me into a tailspin.

I've eaten like shit; stopped writing; stopped working out. I even went out drinking one night in a crowded bar despite COVID, and had to sleep on the couch for a few days until I tested negative.

I knew it was bad, but I had forgotten just how bad. I keep hearing the pain in her voice, and reading the web of lies my sister wrote to the court when we went and fought for guardianship for my Alzheimer-riddled father, well, that's brought back all of the anger. Especially knowing I am not the monster that POS portrayed me as. In fact, she is that monster.

But at least I am back writing. If you've read this far, thank you. I intend on getting back to this and getting back on the rise.

I worked out this morning.

And I finished the last of the girl scout cookies last night, and still want to puke.

If this is interesting at all to you, please continue looking at my writing. And feel free to send me some encouraging words.