*names have been changed
I'm in a Nonfiction workshop class right now, and we've gotten some pretty interesting, funny, and painful pieces over the last four months or so.
But one has never hit my so hard as this one piece that I just read from this girl in my class, Nicole.
It takes place in a service home for memory-challenged adults and seniors, and she's sitting in with her mother that has a severe case of early onset dementia.
This would be shocking in itself, but then it gets worse. Nicole's narrator describes a scene before her mother was placed in this home, when Nicole's aunt was visiting to help care for the family. Nicole comes down into the kitchen after hearing a gasp and finds her mother and aunt crying, only to find out that "your mother just asked me to kill her."
Nicole's response: "oh!"
She goes on to explain, at the utter confusion of her aunt, that she and her siblings were so used to her mother's death pleas that the question had lost its "shock value."
This part pushed me to tears, after sitting on that thought for a while.
I mean, I can't imagine the heartache and confusion and shock that would come over me if my mother ever told me she wanted to die, and then asked me to do it. Like, double punch to the face with that.
So for me to find out that this girl that I have gotten to know through her writing and through her comments in class for the last four months has had to go through that makes my heart hurt for her. And even more so when I realize that she not only so accustomed to her mother's behavior and condition that she can write about them in such a flippant way, and then reveal this part of her life to a class of sixteen near-strangers...i just can't really fathom the depths of this person.
I can't even start to bring up the loss of my grandfather nine years ago, and this girl is constantly living in this situation, having it rip open her heart day after day.
I...I just can't.
