28 Years

Earlier this week came an anniversary date that I long ago learned to brace myself for. On December 9th, 1996, my mother passed away from complications after a long battle with leukemia. She was 57.

Diagnosed seven years earlier, she had undergone various forms of treatment during the interim. Initially, though, she and my stepfather had been conned into believing that her health issues were a result of the mercury amalgam fillings in her teeth. They spent inordinate sums of money and lost essential treatment time funding this snake oil seller's scam. Her illness was probably a “secondary malignancy” caused by high-level radioiodine treatments for a thyroid condition she developed before I was born. 

By the time she understood this and began getting traditional medical treatment—moving to Texas to be within miles of the colossal M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston—her body had suffered badly from the ravages of her disease and she was desperate for anything that would help.

While she was away, I was left to my own devices in our ancient country house and became somewhat feral. I always had a rebellious nature, but without parents in the home, I was my own master. Mental independence evidently runs deep in the Bare DNA. When they were home, we had many clashes over homework, grades, chores and getting up for church. I was an insufferable freethinker and I refused to conform to her rules. I was a smelly teenager with a smug attitude and she was away getting treatment most of each year. It did not always make for pleasant reunions. 

I did not fully understand the seriousness of the situation; thinking that she would eventually be okay and that she would come home bearing a clean bill of health. Other kids had both parents still together. Some hailed from broken homes but had stable and caring parents. I had an empty home, with a visiting family that was preoccupied with medical care and the cost of treatment.

They were gone for much of my high school career when I needed adulthood modeled to me in preparation for my own. They missed my graduation. When they were home, things were painful. I resented their absence but also had grown used to the inordinate amount of freedom it granted me. The worst part was that the woman who was my mother was being fundamentally changed by her illness, making her unrecognizable when she was home.

At least two treatments that were supposed to put her illness into remission didn't work. Both were brutally painful and required prolonged stays in clean rooms until her immune system could bounce back. Despite her willingness to try medicines that were still experimental, her long-term prognosis was not hopeful. Some of the meds made her hallucinate or caused her to feel physically weak and mentally woozy. Along with her treatments came chemotherapy, which caused her to lose her hair and nails. She truly suffered. 

It became obvious that she was also experiencing severe depression. When they were home, she lay in a funk, trying to find the will to just get up. At his wit's end, my stepfather took her to see a psychiatrist who recommended electric shock treatments to alleviate her emotional pain by “resetting” her brain. I don't know if they helped her depression, but they made her vague and disconnected, almost childlike. She stopped being angry at me, but my stepfather doubled down, maybe trying to make up for when they were not home.

By my senior year, I was staying more and more with my childhood best friend, whose parents gladly put up with me while giving me a place to stay. I remember how novel an experience it was. Here was a family that had always been together. There were no stepparents, no multiple households, no disease or depression. It was like finding an oasis in a desert of loneliness and emotional upheaval.

I planned to enroll in a college in Indiana with my friend and I was trying to convince my father and stepmother to fund this idea since my mother and stepfather had all their cash soaked into her treatments. When I made it clear that I intended to move to Indiana, I think that it pushed my stepfather over the edge. Part of my contract with him had been to take care of the house and grounds while my brother maintained the family HVAC business. Graduating and going off to school, although always part of my plan, made him aware of the fact that he had lost a lot of time at home, too and that I was essentially an adult.

Looking back, it is apparent that the challenges of living in two states were wearing on both of them. I now understand that he was torn. He wanted to be home, but he didn't know how to give up on my mother. She wanted to be home but was at the mercy of his inability to acknowledge the inevitable. These were concepts too harsh for me to understand then, though and like all teens, I was stupidly self-absorbed most of the time. 

When it became obvious that they had run the gamut of treatment and nothing else would work, my grandmother begged to let my mother come home and be with her family. If she was going to die, it needed to be with those who loved her. My stepfather refused to give up, pushing her treatments and her frail frame to the extent that the doctors would allow. This became a point of contention in the wider family and I think that this was when I also started to feel bitter and betrayed. As it turned out, though, it was only the beginning of the coming pain.  

A lot of what follows is a blur to me, now. I can remember my school experiences and have pleasant memories of friends, but the details surrounding my mother are misty between when I got my high school diploma and when I departed for Indiana and the halls of post-secondary education. Just before I was set to start my first year in college, my stepfather insisted that my father pay to fly me to Houston. I spent a weekend with them in their little caravan. It was the last time that I would see my mother alive.

A week before the first semester finals began, my brother called me. It was a Monday night. Our mother had passed away. They paid for a ticket for me to fly home. My stepfather had to have her brought back and the arrangements were made. Even though Christmas was coming, none of us had any urge for the holiday. People from our church gave us a tree and put up lights, feeling it was a necessary if not sufficient attempt at keeping the time of year in our hearts. I don't remember my mother’s funeral, especially the number of friends of mine who came to the services. I remember carrying her casket into the funeral home, but I have no memory of the services or the trip to the cemetery or her interment.

I played several gigs with our band that holiday period, and then I was back at school. To this day, I have no memory of how I got back there. The finals that I missed were held over for me for the next year and I remember that I didn’t complete at least one. I was aware of a blank spot in my life, but it felt strangely malleable. It had been so long since I had spent any time with my mother, that it felt for all the world like she was still in Texas.

Life goes on. I had my first very serious girlfriend during that time and, eventually, my first serious heartbreak, but made some good friends and lasting memories. I think it was clear to everyone though, that I was slipping along on the surface of life as if in a trance. My grades suffered and so did everything else. 

After that first year away, my stepmother informed me that, regardless of my loss, my grades were not good enough to justify going back to that school at those tuition costs. I came back and began attending a community college and worked at a coffee shop across the street. I took the bus each day and came back each evening. Things just kind of went on like that. I took my driver’s test and got my license, but I have no memory of it, though I passed the first time.

Things seem choppy, sporadic, as if I was not recording during some of it, while other memories are clear and bold and like they happened yesterday. I remember having a horrible fight with my brother, who screamed at me while out practicing driving. I remember coming home upset and being comforted by a woman who had been a longtime friend of my stepfather and mother, who was now living in our house. I remember that my stepfather was drinking again, after many years of sobriety.

‘Regular’ memories don’t begin again until the following October. My brother and stepfather had a fight and the police were called, all while I was at work and class. I came home to my stepfather telling me that I was being kicked out of the house and that I had to let my father know and everything had to be gone by the end of the week. I know that I called Pop Bare to tell him and he did help me get as much as we could into his truck, but there were things that my brother had to take, as well, which he kept for me at his house for a long time. 

I retain a strong memory of my mother’s furniture and other large possessions that we couldn’t take going onto a bonfire as we drove up the small lane, leaving my childhood home for the last time and feeling empty and more alone than in my entire life. For years after that, I would wake up from a vivid dream of trying to stop him from dumping her sofa onto the flames with a front-end loader.

I know that I saw my stepfather at least once after that, but I cannot now remember for what reason, but something tells me that I had racked up some long distance fees. His mother fell ill not long after that, and I went to see her in the hospital before she died, but I don’t know if I spoke to him, then. By the first anniversary of my mother’s death, everything in my life had changed so significantly that I was unrecognizable to myself.

I stayed with my father and stepmother for several years after that and even went back to a state school. I had a job and some stability. When Pop’s second marriage was circling the drain, though, I left and moved to a small town in northern Pennsylvania where I had friends from when I was much younger. It was a traumatized attempt to start things anew, but half-hearted at best. Once again, I had been forced out of a place of stability that had been considered home, though this time not by death or illness, but by a selfish and hateful stepmother who tried to lure me into a pitched battle against my father. All this within a few years of my mother’s death and my exile.

A few months after I moved, I wound up meeting the four people who would really change my life forever and, for the first time since I was 12, in a measurably positive way. On the last day of August 2001, I moved to Asheboro and became a resident. The rest, as they say, is history.

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At age 40, when I discussed this portion of my life with a psychotherapist, not long after I came out as an alcoholic to my family, he said the reason I couldn’t remember much of it was because of trauma response. The unsettled nature of my upbringing, the emotionally harrowing life within a very dogmatically religious household, the divorce of my parents when I was still basically a toddler, my mother’s obsession with homeopathy and scam doctors and the fact that I was essentially abandoned from age twelve until I was 19, all contributed to my ongoing inability to have solid memories about my mother’s illness and disease. He called it dissociative amnesia and said that it might be years before those memories were clear.

The things I do remember do not cast my mother or her second husband in a good light, especially now that I have broken away from and deconverted from their (and any) religious belief. During that ongoing process of deconversion, though, I worked hard to reconcile my earlier memories of my mother and the later version that seems vague and tenuous. As an adult, I know that diagnosis of a serious disease does not come with a manual for how to handle it, costs incredible amounts of money and gives no real time for tending to one’s emotions. 

My brother, who had her longer, remembers a version of her I don’t know if I ever knew. He retains the greater pain, both because he was older when she died and because I think he was closer to her. My own rebellious nature probably estranged us well before my terrible teens kicked in. He also visits her grave from time to time: a thing that I will never do voluntarily. 

I’m still a little angry at her, mainly for being duped by a con artist when she ought to have been getting medical treatment, and for adhering to a belief that made her life worse and her disappointments greater. I’m also angry that she didn’t come back to us at the end, but there is nothing I can do to change that. It took me years and being surrounded by loving and supportive people for me to truly grieve and move past the worst of the pain. I didn’t really get over her loss until after I stopped drinking and got into a recovery program. 

In 2021, as our family was preparing for Thanksgiving, I was once again reeling. On a whim, I looked up my stepfather to see where he was.To my lasting shock, I learned that in February of that year, he had been killed in a house explosion when several large ‘packs’ of lithium batteries for his ultralight plane caught fire and blew his house up. No one from his family thought to alert my brother and I. But there again, I refused to take my kids and wife to see him while he was actively drinking, which I learned from my brother who had gone to see him. The echo of the memory of my mother’s possessions on the fire was still sharp enough in my mind and I couldn’t bring myself to see him like that. I also made my peace with him, though and any resentment has long ago morphed into empathy for what he was going through and the pain of his loss. The man was married 4 times and three of them died, either of aneurysm or cancer. That deserves pity and forgiveness.

Twenty-eight years later, I am still saddened by my mother’s tragic end. Nothing ever fills the wounds left by the loss of a parent. Parents are supposed to eventually die and let us step into their role, but not when so young and when their children are not yet adults. If she had lived, my life would certainly be different, but I often wonder by how much. It can seem hard to acknowledge that a parent’s loss is actually beneficial. For many years after she was gone, I was distraught, hurting in my core, lost, betrayed, devastated. Many of the biggest flaws of my adulthood and challenges for me to deal with likely come as a direct result of my upbringing—and lack of parental presence. We can stand in criticism of our parents for who we have become or we can take responsibility and try to be better despite their failings and frailties. It is a choice we all have to make.

Sometimes I miss her terribly and I can still conjure that empty feeling, where once a loving, if flawed and piously misguided, maternal presence was. I look at my reflection and see the Bares, but Micki says I look like my mother. I hope that the best parts of me come directly from both my parents (and that I have done a far better job as a stepparent than either of my stepparents did for me). I know that she and I will never have the conversations we might have had if she had lived but we are spared arguments about faith and con artists. She never had the chance to meet Micki, our boys, or our granddaughter. She never met my brother’s second wife and his children. If she was a sometimes hard and unfair mother, I believe she would have been a loving and adoring grandparent. 

We cannot know how things would have been, but I suspect that, if she had lived, she would have disapproved of my life and I would have disapproved of hers. Over the years, though, her loss has dimmed to an ache, and the inability to find reconciliation between us has ceased to be a barrier to my healing and growing. 

Twenty-eight years later, her loss still echoes in my psyche. It has shaped every aspect of my adulthood for good or ill. Hopefully, I have come out the other side of my grief at her loss as a better man. Even so, I still miss her sometimes. 

This one was for you, Mom. 

In memory of

Ruthie A. Bare

1939-1996