I needed my sister's email address this morning (I noticed that my emergency contact at the yoga studio was still mom, who left us in December 2016) and so I pulled up AOL on my phone to find her email address. Apparently I stopped using my AOL address for family stuff a while back, because the most recent email I discovered was August 2012.
And, what an email thread it was. Apparently sent in the middle of one my late brother Tom's early hospitalizations (alcohol related pancreatitis and liver disease) - when HIPAA was keeping the family at bay and in the dark. We all knew (or thought we knew) what the score was but Tom was claiming a rare form of Hep he picked up in the prison, and mom was initially going along with it.
She finally unloaded on him at the hospital (telling him to get help / rehab / recovery), and reported back to us (ALL CAPS, her usual email style) - and we traded a few replies with her, commiserating with each other. When Tom was released from the hospital, he went to live with mom for a time, who nursed him back to health (and kept him sober) despite being just a few short years from her own health beginning to fail.
Kind of a sobering Tuesday morning, to have dug that up by accident. Mom started to go downhill at the end of 2015 and passed at the very end of 2016, yet here she was. No idea when Tom began hitting the booze hard again, probably when mom started to fail, maybe earlier. He hung on a few years (drinking steadily all the way down, controlled flight into terrain, we graphed his package store purchases out of curiosity after he passed), went acute in April of 2019, passed two months later in June of 2019.
So a visit from two ghosts this morning....leaving a bit of sadness in their wake.
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