An Open Letter to My Forest Fire

This piece has been brewing for, oh, about seven months. Thanks to my writing group for your invaluable help with this one.

An Environmental Portrait of Sorts

I grew up with a source of trauma who, in adulthood, lights up my nervous system so effectively, I just call him my forest fire. I ran into him yesterday. 

As a boy, my slight, blond brother would demure, “Is this okay?” (voice lilting up, eyebrows raised) every single time he ordered Alaska king crab legs when my family went out to dinner (read: Every time). 

He knew full well, as we all did, that Dad was keeping up with the Joneses with credit cards. In 1980s Medina, Washington, that tab was adding up. Drunken fights don’t lie or hide much, even in a sprawling ranch house with slate floors, all the rooms, a sparkling swimming pool. My childhood was Izod and gold jewelry worn with a background soundtrack of Mom towering over me, screaming “I wish I’d never married you!” to Dad while Dad stared at Fox news, drink in hand. 

Mom became “Mumsy” to me, beloved “Nana” to my kids. But that was much later. 

My slight, blonde brother became the muscled man - remaining hair carefully shaved - who, decades later, snarled to our mother (in hospital, again), “If we got you an emergency-button necklace, would you use it?” 

Let’s call brother “Alaska King.”

Not short, but not tall either, he let his voice do the intimidating. Narcissists really ought to at least try and hide their crazy, I remember thinking that day. Our mother couldn’t; she had advancing dementia. 

Out of the Forest, Into the Fire

I’ve rehearsed what I would do in this moment for years now; gone over it in my head, with the kids. If we see him, wherever we are, we get out of there. No chance for him to insert his body between me and the car door so I can’t close it. No chance for him to lean into the car window and scream obscenities at me (over my kids, then still toddlers strapped into kiddo car seats) because I accidentally insulted his masculinity by being a strong woman in public in his presence and now there’s No. Going. Back. Just go.

Well, I did it. Last night, Aslan - no longer the needy, daddy-orphaned nephew, now sporting a ‘stache of his own, in a black Kpop baseball cap, taking on his late daddy’s height and presence, if still only 14 - and I were walking down from the forest of Lacamas Lake Park after a particularly lovely mother-son problem-solving, bonding conversation. I look out at the parking lot, and my body reacts before my mind registers: Panic. No, it couldn’t be him. Minimal hair (Dad’s legacy); carefully manicured to look like Geddy Lee from Rush on the face; oddly, shaved sideburns reminiscent of my late Walter; shoulders of a hobbyist Spartan Race contestant; gut that almost kept up. It’s him: My forest fire, standing in front of a car parked just downhill from where I’m strolling. Who is that with him? The silver-haired woman is getting something out of the back seat, she is not his wife - NO. My midwest-relocated Sister on vacay, too? Escalate this one to a two-alarm fire. I think I said, “Ohmigod.”

I return my stare to Alaska King just as he notices me. I lock eyes with him, breathe in. Hold his gaze just long enough that at least I think I don’t look scared. Shock on his face at seeing me. Then, feeling Aslan’s presence still beside me, seeing what I’m seeing, I fix my eyes on our car in the next row out, whip my keys from my purse and say with conviction, “Let’s go.”

“CHARITY!” with emotion, as to someone long lost (calling upon his well-cultivated acting skills from high school). I speed up. “Charity!?!” again, tone annoyed this time, the voice cut off in the closing door as Aslan and I both hop in, lock those (beautiful, strong, safe) doors - an unloading carful of teens to our left looking over curiously, now. Phew … doors locked, now I can relax. I look over at Aslan, “Whoah!” and smiled, eyes wide. We both let out nervous sighs. Mindfully I start the car, mindfully I back out of our parking spot - I’m in no hurry, now - and ever so chill, I leave the parking lot onto Everett, head back home. Not once do I look over at the forest fire still smoldering in the parking lot. In a minute, I do pull over once to make sure the tailgater making to kiss my bumper isn’t him; it’s not.

We’re free.

But … I’m left with the feeling of something unsaid.

Portrait of A Late-Stage Capitalist Family

A family, once mine. Copyright original photographer, probably JC Penney- or Sears-employed. 

This is the kind of photograph that would never see daylight if I had shot it in my portrait studio. Nope. Early 1980s JC Penney (maybe Sears?) was, apparently, a little less discerning.

I see Dad, in what passed for his daytime smile (the 5:00 just-started-drinking, not-tipsy-yet smile was more real); sister, “I look beautiful in spite of …” (yes sister, always). My brother and I, clearly tensed and ready for the next bout of family unrest to start at any time. And my mother - “Mumsy” to me and, later, “Nana” to my kids, because she’d be damned before she’d let anyone call her “Grandma” - smiling daggers in the direction the photographer directed her to look. Daggers.

Sister, nine years my senior, was perennially indifferent. Apart from being very occasionally welcomed into her dark-purply maroon hued teen cave to listen to Beatles records - a high honor, to me! - she kept a steady distance from me until I was in college, when she decided cultivating a shared hatred for Mom would be useful to her. It felt like a shaky sisterhood foundation to me, but I was glad she actually wanted to connect, and in the emotional desert that was my family of origin, I tried not to be too picky. I gave it a good go for some years, until my request for something a little more meaningful led to her shooting her voice up several octaves and chanting taunts at me like the kids on my grade-school playground while she followed me around Mom’s property. Dissociative episode on her part, maybe? That was October, 2012, the month before my husband died. Undiagnosed symptom or not, it hurt, and struck me as really strange behavior for a 50-year-old grown woman with a master’s degree in psychology. (I hear she’s licensed to prescribe, now. Buyer beware.) That was pretty much it for me, with Sister. I was done.

My brother, Alaska King, was just a year and a half my junior. Unfortunately, the positively crippling amount of bullying I took in our big-money Medina, Washington, grade school found its outlet in me treating my brother like an annoyance when we were young. I wasn’t kind. I hurt him, and it was not okay. What I think hurt him more, though, was the positively constant scorn of our father. Oh, Dad wasn’t fun for me, either; but something about that wound, from our dad, was especially damaging to my brother. Alaska King developed coping mechanisms that included keeping the women in his life - not least, me - spinning in self doubt that, over my lifetime, entirely too many friends and lovers spent entirely too much time trying to help me sort out.

I’ve been remembering this one preteen episode lately. We were sitting across from each other over our favorite “Spy Hunter” video game, waiting for our restaurant table while Mom and Dad drank in the bar. I said something “wrong” - or maybe I just beat him in the game. Alaska King reached over and sank his nails into the back of my hand, staring into my eyes. I still have the scar.

That was probably a character-development red flag. 

Regardless, back when we were kids, he was mostly good to me. I should have been good to him. By the time I was in early high school, I realized the error of my ways, repented to him (I clearly remember standing on that terrazzo floor outside his room in our home on Marseilles Drive in North Miami Beach, where Dad got transferred demoted to in the mid ‘80s), apologizing through those shuttered doors. From then on, I proceeded to look up to him solidly, Renaissance man that he was, and still is. Pencil artist, guitarist (he could play Adrian Legg fingerpicking songs better than Adrian Legg himself, no lie: Here’s a snippet of the song AK played (better) for my wedding: “The Irish Girl”), composer, martial artist. Hell, my peers in martial arts were still calling me “____’s sister” a decade after I was still training - when he was long gone from the mats. He was always finding some new talent to explore, then master. From high school, through college - he was the first person I came out to, in a brief stint out of the closet until later in life - I admired him, right up until I finally, finally saw him clearly, just after our mother died. (His latest exploration? Jewelrymaking - with my plundered inheritance, Mom’s estate jewelry collection. I’ll give you a “statement piece,” Alaska King: Look in the mirror.) 

I should have known, honestly. Alaska King wanted to look up to our father, but something in Dad’s past had a claw in Dad. Mom, brother, sister; Dad habitually cut us all down before we had the chance to do that to him, especially in public. I guess A.K. decided to look up to what was available. Way back when we were superhero movie-watching (TV-babysat) kids, you know who he idolized? The villains. We were all hard-core Trekkies, my family taking every Star Trek movie in on the big screen. The Supermans, too - loved those. But the characters Alaska King idolized were always, always the bad guys (I wonder if his firstborn knows what his name almost was, in those two weeks it took to name him! It was getting a little awkward, I tell you, by week two). And as I look back to still photos of 1980s General Zod, I even recognize the expression on the now-adult Alaska King’s face. That man has RZF (Resting Zod Face). 

He was telling me who he was, even back then. But, I never paid enough attention.

Neither did our mom.

Healing

In my adult years, Mom and Dad worked hard to make up for the neglect of our youth. They never stopped drinking, never wanted to give therapy a go; but with careful, gentle prying, I had learned they both came from trauma of their own. I never even got a toe into Dad’s past, but there were clues. Mom literally started shaking like a rocket breaking up upon reentry into the atmosphere when we approached her past, but eventually I learned that, among other things, she was SAd when she was seven - with the blessing and encouragement of her Midwest high-up mucky-muck Episcopal bishop father. 

I valued and accepted the gestures of healing that were in their capacity to give, and passed many evenings in conversation and canasta with them in their custom-built Ridgefield ranch home, the last hurrah of their 80s Medina, WA insurance-man fortune -  surrounded by too many cats, to which wall-to-wall pastel, soiled Karastan carpeting testified. There were still some drunken fights, but I came to respect the way my dad would not utter one word against my mom after she’d fallen into bed - even if, some nights, she deserved it.

Alaska King

Dad died suddenly in 2008 - his will either never made, or never allowed to see the light of day; I still wonder which. Regardless, from that very first sibling convo at McMenamin’s - “What if we need to sell the house for Mom’s care?” - Alaska King defiantly slammed his keys on the table in answer. He never wavered: Her house was going to be his. Mom had steadily worsening chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), Crohn’s disease, and more. This became a significant point of contention between myself - the one who had been telling our chronically drinking, chronically smoking (self medicating!) parents I would care for them in their old age since I was a teen - and Alaska King. When my husband died unexpectedly of heart failure in 2012, I called my brother and cried, “We have to fix things, we have to, because Walter’s dead!”

Our reprieve lasted two weeks. Nana’s home, on arguably one of the loveliest remaining pondfront sites in Ridgefield, Washington, had long been in his sights, and he wasn’t going to stop now. He’d been slowly taking it over since Dad was still here; filling their garage with fixer-upper Ducatis and antique cars; then taking over the garden room with band practice that never really ended, eventually transitioning that room to a remodeling project. He transformed Mumsy’s beloved garden room into a porn photography setbuilding site (Because of course he took up professional photography. I hear there was a veer in a more respectable boudoir direction, eventually.). As he took over the house, Alaska King took over the narrative, took over Nana’s finances, took over Nana’s legal proceedings, and took over what little remained of Nana’s life.

My kids and I would take Nana out to scout for houses with in-law quarters. We’d been doing that since before their dad died, actually. This part of the conversation was always the same:

“Come live with me,” I asked her constantly, right up until two weeks before her death.

“If I’m getting myself into trouble, you’ll come rescue me … ?” she always asked.

“By the time you need rescuing, it will be too late,” I would reply, sadly. 

Alaska King’s appropriation of her house and 5-acre property started long before her steep health decline, but it got much harder to watch that last year, once she started landing in hospital from neglect.

The middle child, I was the family scapegoat. Certain behaviors - ADHD, and anxiety, for example - were displayed by literally every member of my family of origin, but I was the only one disparaged for them. To my face and behind my back, I was the “weaker” one born with “nerves close to the surface.” I was also the teen who suggested maybe we should look for more substantial ways to connect with each other than buying a mountain of Christmas gifts with thousands of credit card dollars. I was also the teen who poured whole bottles of hard liquor down the kitchen sink on some of Mom and Dad’s worst fight nights. I didn't get much credit for these efforts to heal our family - or at least shake it awake.

Now, I faithfully listened to Mom’s cries for help - valid, I could clearly see - gave her sound advice, then watched her inevitably run back to the man of the family now - her son - for reassurance she would will herself to believe. Having come of age in the 1950s, Mom would not waver on her need to lean on a man, the only man left in her life, regardless of his designs on her home and her most valuable stuff, which left me powerless to actually do anything to help. Plus, Mom followed the directions of people she feared. She trusted me, but she didn’t fear me. 

Nana’s Last Year of “Care”

The first time she landed in hospital, Nana had stopped eating or going to the bathroom for days. No one else in the house of six had noticed.

The second time she landed in hospital, she’d spent an entire night vomiting and having diarrhea simultaneously, shivering in wintry cold, with the bathroom window open, far away across the room from the toilet on which she was stuck. No one in the house of six had heard her cries.

“If we got you an emergency-button necklace, would you use it?” Alaska King sneered at her in the hospital, in front of me. He argued that she couldn’t have been stuck on the toilet for six hours, it must have been only four.

From about 2014 until her death, every incidence of neglect, injury and being taken advantage of she suffered due to her care (or lack thereof) was recorded in my emails to purportedly concerned, but actively uninvolved extended family. On my birthday, the year before she died, I finally decided to call Adult Protective Services. I spent that birthday evening carefully compiling every incident for my report, until I had a solid timeline of five incriminating years that even lifetime-gaslit me couldn’t explain away. But part of me still wanted to believe, somehow, all of this wasn’t what it seemed.

Long story short: Adult Protective Services isn’t, especially when they’re investigating a persuasive narcissist who cultivates likeminded friendships, some with cops.

My Mumsy’s last hospital visit came over Valentine’s Day, 2019. In that last year, her hospital stays were the only times I felt safe to go see her, so the kids and I would dash over immediately, and spend as much time with her as we could. Back in the time after both Dad and my kids’ dad had died, I used to host her overnight for Downton Abbey binges, both of us with port in hand - two widows leaning on each other. I’d beg her to stay longer after cooking her breakfast. We used to take the kids to Portland Nursery for plants that now grow tall and strong on my property. Now, our relationship was relegated to phone calls that hurt so much I was, finally, trying to distance myself even further, for the sake of my sanity, and my kids. The summer prior, I’d already told her I wouldn’t be at her funeral. I knitted myself a woolen headband and fingerless gloves over that last hospital stay, so that I would have them to remember her by. I’m wearing them as I type.

Her dementia was advancing, but she still had moments of great lucidity. That last visit, in the cold February garden I wheelchaired her out to see (ironically planted by Portland Nursery, a pretty sign informed me), she said sadly, “I want to see Spring!”

In another one of those moments - in this, her last hospital room - she told me she realized the dynamic she’d created in us kids. She realized she had set herself up for how we treated each other - and how we, individually, treated her. And she apologized to me, for that. For all of it.

But in those final days, she gave me something else, too. Mumsy’s last unlikely gift came in the form of the most upsetting voice mail I have ever received.

“Help,” she cried, out of breath, over and over - first frightened, then angry - 11 times. The next morning, she was dead. It was March 1, 2019. 

Her last voice mail was my “I’m sorry,” my “I wish I’d listened to you,” my “Forgive yourself,” and my, “Forgive me.”

All This to Say …

I may have played the role of family scapegoat, but Sister, Mom was your scapegoat. She knew that.

Alaska King, Mom was your ticket. She knew that, too.

Mumsy’s house and Mumsy’s stuff was never my prize; Mumsy, herself, was my prize. Frances Elspeth - not “Fran,” never “Fran,” or “Frannie,” she hated that; “Mumsy” to me, beloved “Nana” to my kids - was my person.

And - her shined, wood-paneled, imaginary Chris Craft yacht, overflowing with toxic emotional baggage that directed her choices, notwithstanding - she knew it.

Charity Feb lives and writes on The Herbalist’s Homestead, a progressive little hobby farm rebelliously tucked into the southwest hills of Camas, Washington, USA. She photographs portraits in her home studio under the business name Portraits of Connection by Charity Feb.

#Elder #ElderCare #Narcissism