Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [26]
So when she told me she was dying, even though I didn’t think she was dying, I tended to believe her. I said, “I’m not sure you’re dying, Mom. Why do you think that?”
And she said, “They know what’s wrong with me, but they’re not telling me. They know I’m dying.”
So I called her doctor. “When my mom says she’s dying, is there any validity to that?”
“No, Michael. There’s no reason to believe she’s dying. She’s just experiencing a lot of pain and jumping to conclusions. This is very common. Just make sure she doesn’t take too much of the Ativan. It’s just feeding her delirium.”
So I hid the Ativan and made sure she didn’t take too much. And this made her furious. When she noticed this, she started looking around the house in every possible hiding space, saying, “Michael, where is the Ativan?”
And I’d say, “Mom, I can’t give you the Ativan.”
And she’d look me in the eye with a sternness I had only seen when I was very young and say, “Michael, I am your mother. And if I say get me the Ativan, you get me the Ativan.”
And I’d say, “Mom, like fun am I getting you the Ativan.” I’d try to make her laugh. But it didn’t really work.
The situation got worse. Where at first she had told me she was dying, over time she became philosophical and started theorizing about the afterlife. She pulled me aside on a number of occasions and, as though she had just been given some secret news that she wasn’t allowed to share, she said, “I’m going to hell.”
And I said, “Mom, you’re not going to hell.”
She looked at me as though I was naïve. “Yes, I am. You don’t understand these things. I’m going to hell.” And then she’d start crying. And I’d hold on to my mom like she was my kid, like she had held me all those years when I was a kid and I fell down or had my pride trampled on by a bully at school.
And holding back tears, I’d say, “Why would you possibly go to hell? You’re the kindest person I’ve ever met.”
And she said, “There are things that you don’t know about that I’ve done. And now there’s nothing that can be done because I’m going to hell.”
I’d try to make light of it. I’d say, “If you’re going to hell, then we’re all going to hell because I had you as the front-runner for heaven. You’re heaven’s number one draft pick.”
She wouldn’t laugh. There wasn’t a lot of laughing in this period. I’d laugh myself so I wouldn’t cry. I didn’t want to show any weakness or any fear that she was in fact going to hell.
My mom eventually got better. Years later, she still feels pain, but not in the way she did in that period of time. It’s rarely discussed in my family. But I’ve never gone back to church. I can’t support an organization that convinced my mother that she was headed for eternal torture. Like hell am I going to a church like that.
PATTI AND THE BEAR
My sister Patti always intimidated me. We didn’t seem to have anything in common. She was eight years older than me, and by far the most rebellious of my siblings.
In high school she convinced my parents to chaperone a school trip to Austria. While there, some of our distant cousins invited my parents to their horse farm. Patti showed up at the farm after having been on a drinking tour of some of Austria’s finest ale houses. She was fourteen. And plastered. During lunch, my mother noticed that Patti was acting aloof, so she tried to include her in the conversation.
“Look, Patti,” she said. “They have horses!”
Patti, with the fury of a British parliamentarian, shouted, “I hate horses!