So this week C-PTSD looks like me making myself run late so that I can actively recognize and address the feelings of panic that it causes. On the way to work that went sideways when I hit poorly planned and executed construction area that had randomly popped up.
For the uninitiated, during the summer in PA, construction is serious…and in mountain roads alternative routes can get slim. For the record, they are normally pretty well executed and cause minimal delay. This one was not that. This one was blocking 4 directions of a rural mountain intersection during morning commutes….and they were only working on a section that could be easily bypassed. But I digress.
Anyway, this sent me into a tailspin that escalated to me out of the car screaming at this flag pole holder…which is utter bullshit on my part, but there I was. Fortunately I am medicated and realized I had boiled over and hopped in my car and headed back home. That was yesterday. I didn’t make it in today either. Hopefully tomorrow I will feel like I have decompressed enough that I can engage the public in a safe and healthy manner.
What does that have to do with todays art posting? Very little except this came out while I was wading through some of the shit that always circles my head when I end up here. This time I played with the thought for a while and picked up a pen. The writing below is what ai pulled out of my rant typing discussing the reasons for this drawing.
Black Widow Witch is a 9×12 pen and ink drawing of a black widow with a particular witches head.
When I was a teenager
we moved into my great-aunt’s house
to help take care of her.
A surgery changed her.
She came home confused,
distant from herself.
She still smoked. Still loved White Castle
like it was the finest food on earth.
Then a stroke,
and a nursing facility.
By then she had already
given the house to my parents.
That was called fortunate.
Otherwise the house might have gone
to pay for her care.
We were poor.
Poor enough that doctors were avoided,
dentists did not exist,
and every expense had to become an emergency
before it was allowed to matter.
My mother had scarring in her vision.
The impairment was real.
I have known people with far less sight
who worked for decades.
From twenty to sixty,
she did not hold a job.
The house helped.
Years later, my father got cancer.
Incurable, treatable —
a chance at years.
Toward the end, I was kept away.
No one announced it.
Information simply stopped reaching me.
The distance was treated
as though I had made it myself.
He died the day after hospice
delivered his pain medication.
My mother said that at bedtime he told her,
“Say goodnight, Dick,”
a line from a show he liked.
By morning he was gone.
The story was that he took too much
on purpose. One last act of love.
At the time, I accepted it.
Now I wonder who decided
that was what happened.
Whether the medication was counted.
Who handled it. Who was awake.
Why I had already been kept away.
Helping with the estate,
I saw enough of the finances
to leave me with questions
I had not known to ask.
Within six months
she was dating a man
from her grief group.
I liked him. He treated her well.
Comfortable. Capable.
The kind of man who had prepared
to stay independent a long time.
Then he became sick.
She cared for him.
After surgery, a sudden stroke.
Perhaps that was all it was.
A known complication.
Perhaps my great-aunt’s stroke was ordinary too.
Perhaps my father died
exactly as my mother said.
Perhaps every document was proper,
every inheritance deserved.
Only a confused woman
who gave away a house.
Only a husband with treatable cancer
who died the day after the medicine arrived.
Only a new man, another surgery,
another sudden stroke.
And always my mother
still standing afterward.
She never built a career.
Never earned a pension.
Other people became sick.
Other people died.
Property changed hands.
Money remained.
And now my mother is wealthy.
The woman from a family
too poor for dental care
has a retirement most working people
will never reach.
Maybe that is luck.
Maybe some people stand close
to the right doors when they open.
I am not accusing her of anything.
I am saying I have questions.
Whether my great-aunt understood what she signed.
Why I was kept from my father.
What happened during his final night.
What the estate contained and where it went.
But my mother does not speak to me now.
My brother helped push me out.
The firstborn son
is the one not allowed in the room.
Estrangement is not evidence.
Wealth is not evidence.
Timing is not evidence.
A house, a bottle of medicine,
a stroke after surgery —
none of it is evidence.
Each fact stands alone
with an ordinary explanation.
But I have lived long enough
to see them standing together.
And I cannot stop wondering
how a woman who never worked
became the only one
who always seemed to inherit
what remained.
