Ever ask yourself that question, LONG after the fact? Why didn’t I…make this small move or that obvious decision that would have cut off a disaster at the pass? An obvious disaster…
What WAS the matter with me that I failed to dispense the most obvious, simple-minded advice?
Sitting here thinking about my father’s painful marriage to the horrid Dragon Lady, whose real-world name was Helen… My god, but she was an evil thing!
When they came to me in the spring of their dotage — both widowed by the demise of their first spouses — and asked my permission to wed (yes! No kidding!!), why didn’t I say “ARE YOU CRAZY?” or maybe HELL, NO! AND STAY AWAY FROM ME WITH THAT BS!”
Of course, at that point I didn’t know how evil Helen was. And she was evil: that is the best word for her cast of mind.
My father was devastated by the loss of my mother, the love of his life. The one who smoked herself to death, sucking on the murderous tobacco corporations’ cancer sticks.
And when Helen moved in for the kill after they met in the old-folkerie where he moved after my mother died, he must have thought marrying her would salve his grief. A grief that was more profound than you or I can imagine.
Little did he know how much worse she could make it….
After it became obvious — after, alas, they were legally bound in marriage — that Helen was the meanest creature that ever walked or crawled over the surface of this earth, he understood how miserable he was. He took to taking a book outside, climbing into his parked car, and sitting there all day reading…having told the Dragon Lady that he was taking the car to the Ford dealership to be serviced.
She was so astonishingly stupid, she bought this story…over and over! How many times can you change the oil in a sedan, over the course of a month? of a week?
When the parking-lot car hideaway came to seem a little too transparent, he rented a studio in another nearby old-folkerie. Put a TV set and an easy chair in there. And repeated his story that he was taking the car to the Ford place. He’d sit there all day, come back to their apartment in time for dinner, and then have only an hour or two before he could escape from her again by going to bed for the night.
Eventually, one of the other inmates noticed that my father’s name was on a list of residents at the other old-folkerie…and, by way of torturing him and amusing themselves at Helen’s expense, brought it up one evening while they were playing bridge. My father was humiliated, Helen was rightfully infuriated, the marriage stank even worse than it already stank (which was plenty)…godlmighty!
Y’know… I might have headed that horror show off at the box office, if I’d had half a brain in my head. Because…when they came to me melodramatically one day to ask my permission to marry (!!!!! CAN you imagine?), I could have (should’ve, would’ve…) said NO! “No. Wait for a year to be sure you want to do this. Come this time next summer, if you still think you want to commit to living together for the rest of your lives, by all means do it. But don’t do it NOW.”
What WAS the matter with me?
Young, I guess. Self-centered. Stupid as a post.
My father was just miserable with that witch. Truly: I’ve never met a meaner human being.
I didn’t attend my father’s funeral, first because I wasn’t invited and second because by then that evil creature had chased me off with her unrelenting meanness.
Recently, I learned the Dragon Lady’s daughter’s family had her remains interred — or boxed up in an urn and set on a shelf — next to my father and mother’s ashes out in the mausoleum in Sun City. They’re all together there on a shelf.
Just horrifying.
If I’d had any idea they were up to any such outrage, I would have hollered HELL, NO! and sicced a lawyer on them.
One thing’s for damn sure: no one is setting my ashes on that shelf, goddammit.
I’ve arranged to be interred in the Close down at the church. Called out to the Sun City mausoleum to find out about moving my parents to the same venue, and learned that the bastards charge THOUSANDS of dollars to move a person’s remains out of their sanctified quarters.
Can you imagine?
That’s the Death Industry in America. They getcha coming and they getcha going. What incredible evil!