Survive

Survive, stay alive
Through the thick and the thin
Survive, stay alive
Until it all ends

                                                 --Jimmy Buffett

My mother survived some ordeals. She survived the Great Depression; getting hit by a car; driving her own car into a house; walking into a bank window; being a passenger on a plane that had engine trouble over the ocean and had to return to Spain; an assault in Bermuda; an operation in which the doctors apparently didn't expect her to survive when I was a small child; an alcoholic, abusive husband who abandoned her and five kids; and drug- and alcohol-abusing sons. She possessed a certain grit and passed that along. My cousin once said that side of the family had longevity, if you took even reasonable care of yourself. In the end, she couldn't outlive herself, but my mother was testimony to human beings' capacity for survival.Maybe DNA uses us as tools to pass itself on, but some DNA has more success than others. I suppose I have that to thank her for, and, now that I have kids, I am grateful for possessing the capacity to survive.
Survival, and not just survival, but also being at least somewhat productive, takes stamina, even for people who don't battle demons to the extent that some of us do. I think that's why some people end up killing themselves--they just get too tired to summon the resources necessary to continue. I wasn't familiar with this guy, George Saunders, until I read a piece in the New York Times. The article also mentions David Foster Wallace, about whom I also didn't know anything. So I did a little digging. David Foster Wallace apparently was an unusually intelligent person and writer. He also apparently suffered from depression for years, couldn't handle the side effects of the medicine that helped him, stopped taking the medicine and hanged himself. Maybe he just got tired of it. Tired of living in his own head and unable to get out. Tired of trying to summon the energy just to live with himself. Tired of being tired. I'm speculating, but I do have some insight.
I suspect my mother survived even more than I know. Perhaps their family dynamics were just so foreign to me that I'm way off base, but something compelled my mother to construct an alternate reality. I witnessed my grandfather doing things that belied her contention that he had the qualities of a saint. As a younger man, though, I didn't consider my mother's actions, or those of her siblings, unusual. I guess when you're young, things are what they are. I didn't know any different. But then a friend gave me a reality check when I related to him an anecdote: My uncle arrived at our house, and my golden retriever reacted somewhat overzealously, so my uncle did what anybody else would do--he reached around and started masturbating the dog. Jerking off the golden retriever. I considered it funny as a 14-year-old at the time, though that friend told me it was fucked up. Another time, while getting our pictures taken at my cousin's wedding, the goofy photographer was setting us up and said "let's do something different." My uncle's response? "How about if I blow my son, would that be different?" The photographer said it would be the strangest thing he ever saw.
My mother had an unusually strong attachment to her siblings. She frequently consulted me about decisions, such as when buying a new car or even a dishwasher. Or investment advice. Then she would ignore whatever guidance I gave, generally after I had done some legwork, and often did what her siblings suggested. I recall lashing out at her when I was an adolescent and she was considering new cars. She had told me how she valued my input, since I would be traveling in the car with her frequently, and then she went out with her brother and bought something without affording me the opportunity to have any say. I felt important and then, suddenly, small.
So what went on in their house, the house at which I spent so much time as a child? I distinctly remember the sensation of floating while at my grandfather's house. Floating down the cellar stairs. More than once. I chalked it all up to dreams, since these episodes occurred while I was in the bedroom. Then somewhere along the line I recalled having read that victims of abuse can have out-of-body experiences as a coping mechanism. So I put into Google what I considered a few relevant search terms, and discovered dissociation. I have no memory of abuse at my grandparents' house, though I vividly recall what could have been dissociation and the strange sensation that accompanied it. Was I sleeping, and was it a dream? Or was I seeking sanctuary in a safer place? And I do have distinct memories of other abuse, by a teacher and my cousin's boyfriend, with whom I was in bed in a trailer. With the teacher, it was in a bed in a hotel room. And, again, either I cut out before the abuse escalated to the point of genitalia involvement or it never got that far. But those incidents did involve unwanted physical contact. I wish I could remember. I wish I could go back in time and bear witness. I wish I could have retribution. but most of all, I wish I survived the way my mother did, by creating my own alternate reality.