She killed my mother: no question of that. But…did she do it out of stupidity? Or out of malice?
I grew up in Saudi Arabia, where my father worked for ten years as a harbor pilot for ARAMCO, steering tankers and freighters in and out of the port at Ras Tanura. The country was as Third-World as a country could get, a marvelous incubator of toxic disease.
One of those diseases was amoebic dysentery, a gawdawful and potentially fatal infestation with the local germs that lurked in all the food…especially in fruits and vegetables. Anything that we ate had either to be fully cooked (as in cooked to mush!) or soaked in Clorox to disinfect it.
Well. My father worked with a guy who wasn’t too bright, and said guy had a wife who was even less bright.
And she just didn’t get the message about sanitizing ALL the food.
One evening they had us over to their house for dinner. I was in the kitchen watching and playing around — at the time I was about ten or twelve years old. There, I observed that our hostess didn’t bother to sanitize the cabbage she used to make our salad. She even handed me — a little kid! — pieces of this unclean produce, which I scarfed right down.
Fortunately for me, I had pretty strong resistance by that time, after spending nigh unto ten years in the bowels of Hell. But…my mother did not.
She ate that salad, and shortly thereafter came down with a roaring case of amoebic dysentery.
She damn near died of it. Years later, I learned that there was a moment when her doctors thought she very probably would die.
But she didn’t. After weeks in the hospital and then in bed at home, she eventually recovered.
Sort of.
She never really fully recovered. But she went on with her life.
A truncated life.
The upshot of the unholy infection and its ungodly treatment was that some time later she did develop an abdominal cancer.
And yes: that killed her.
Understand: The wives who were brought to Arabia with the men working for the Company were required to sit through a lengthy course in how to prepare food safely, and how otherwise to protect their families from the diseases to which simply living out there would subject us.
That idiot woman knew not to serve up unsanitized produce! Yea, verily: She knew to soak those greens in Clorox and rinse them well before making a salad of them.
Interestingly, neither her husband nor her young son would eat the stuff. “Don’t like cabbage,” we were told.
I believe she deliberately tried to make us sick.
She could not have not known that the produce had to be mightily sanitized before it could be served to people who were to eat it.
Given that fact, it’s my belief that she purposely served us unsanitized cabbage in the hope that it would sicken us.
And it worked. It sickened my mother enough to do her in, ultimately.
Did she do it on purpose?
Could be. But…on the other hand, there’s an outside chance that she truly didn’t know what she was doing. My father regarded her husband as one of the stupidest men he’d ever met. So…who knows? Maybe they were a matched set. Maybe she really was so stupid that she didn’t bother to sanitize the produce before serving it up to her guests.
Maybe.
Doesn’t matter: Stupid or cunning, the upshot was the same. She killed my mother.