Terminus Est

[smokingboot]

Maybe a big post, maybe not. Angsty though, and very heavy, but this is a marker and I need to write it down.

So. My mother is a paranoid schizophrenic, untreated, with many years of the illness behind her and a delusional world more real to her than this one. Occasionally she had what seemed to be psychotic episodes. Now, she is entirely gone. Gone physically too, she left the country and her flat, and the housing association wanted it back. They were told (presumably by a neighbour) that she wasn't there anymore, so they told housing benefit who stopped her rent. But the housing association wanted her/me to pay the rent anyway. How? They knew she wasn't their tenant anymore, that's why they told the benefits people!

My mother knows nothing of this of course. She sends panic stricken postcards from Europe begging me to empty the flat or 'everything must be lost.' Gritting my teeth, I spent months trying to get a copy of the keys - housing association didn't have one, little brother did but first couldn't find it and then couldn't get over his Asperger's Syndrome/nervous breakdown/lazy arse crapness to post them to me. I got to her flat only to find his keys wouldn't have helped- British Gas had broken in and changed the locks. A gentleman from British Gas came and broke in again for me. And there I was.

Every paper ever, meticulously filed, my degrees, her pension details, premium bonds, divorce papers, NVQ details...letters to Tony Blair and the Queen about how the watcher was destroying her, placards about the torment - that word three times in one paragraph - the man who made her put her head in the microwave, who introduced various diseases into her system, who injected her with isotopes, babblebabblebabble coherently written by a screaming mind. Were it not for the powerful love and friendship of larians who took a day off and travelled 200 miles to help me, I would have got nowhere.

Little house trying not to be tragic, tiny things, a mother of pearl spoon she loved,serving spoons shaped like geese, pictures of flowers, pretty little things, perfume bottles, a scrupulously clean place, the place of a neat dead person. Plastic sheets covering the lights, so the watcher could not beam things into her mind. Gaffa tape round the corners of the room. So many photographs. Why bother? The past is not our friend.

Things bagged, things done, I said goodbye to the house and thanked it for trying for all those years. I will burn those papers that have no use, and if she doesn't want her lladro porcelains I'll sell them on Ebay. I recall shaking the hand of the housing association representative and apologising to her for all the trouble. I joked, saying that if things went well, she would never see me again. 'Oh,' she said wistfully, 'You looked just like your mother when you said that.'

Comments

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Me too. But thanks for hugging so tightly *hugs back*