One HELL of a life (Part 2)
The strangest thing happened on our way over to Italy in October of 2000: I suddenly and spontaneously felt much better. I still have no explanation for this but, getting of the plane from JFK to Rome, it felt as if layers of accumulated sewage were lifted from my skull and I was no longer experiencing the usual symptoms.
Shortly before our departure from the US, we had to decide what to leave behind and to whom. My mom (thank goodness) insisted on bringing all of my books. We also brought over my computer (a Packard Bell with Pentium processor that had held up for a good six or seven years from when I started studying computer science) but there was just no way to make all the hardware changes necessary to switch from a 110 volt system to the European standard 220 volts. It was much simpler and cost less to just buy a new system.
We stayed for three months with my mother’s sister Gaetana and family. It was boring because my books had not yet arrived and there was only my cousin Dimitri’s old computer to play around with. But these were still the days of dial up in Italy and I could go online for at most an hour. The rest of the time in any case the room was occupied with my cousin studying for his law degree or professorship (or whatever it was at the time). I did manage to get to some bookstores and buy a few books and also, having well learned Italian by this time, read some of my cousins collections which included a little bit of Umberto Eco and a lot of stuff about freemasonry and conspiracies.
After three months with my aunt, we found a very nice apartment in Cervinara (my mother’s birthplace) in the province of Avellino in the region Campania. It was deep south Italy and not much if you were looking for work or to make a living but aesthetically and naturally it was Magna Grecia. My books had arrived from the US and I had a new computer, was living in another country and was still very young at 32.
I would take the train to Benevento or Naples every other week to pick up some new books (actually NEW books, that is, not books from a used bookstore as I had been used to in the US). I rapidly accumulated several shelves of books in Italian to go along with the collection I brought from the states. I was, once again, reading continuously, but it was unfocused and very eclectic reading.
I began to think of going back to school, but there was a huge bureaucratic process ahead of me in that direction. My credits could not just be transferred one to one to an Italian university. I would have to order all the necessary documentation from Albany, get this paper notarized in Naples, get that document and fill it out from the American consulate.
One document, in particular, took an entire year to arrive from the US. I became exceedingly frustrated and angry and began taking this out, to some extent, on my mom and on Italians in general.
I would take long walks around the area or walk down to the downtown area of Cervinara and began having experiences like those I had in that horrid summer just before my departure for Italy. I believed the girls were talking about me in whispers, that people were against me and that I was being singled as a a target of couples walking by me and flaunting their relationship in from of me as if to rub it in and pour salt in the would of loneliness and sexual confusion that had never properly healed.
This lasted only for about one spring and summer and then I started to have the constellation of physical symptoms (what I call the “Beast” had come back) that I described earlier. It came back with a vengeance and I was constrained to give up the prospect of going back and taking up where I had left off at University of Naples. Those prospects had seriously diminished in any case because of all my five years of study in the US only two and a half years worth of credits would be accepted and I would have to take 3 or 4 classes just to get what is called a mini-laurea here in Italy.
I went back to studying on my own and gradually the years just passed until my mother had reached an age where she could no longer take care of herself, cook and clean and all the rest of the things that she had always done for both of us. I would not have to become the caretaker (at least to some significant extent) and in fact I took up the challenge and burden with a certain pride and a sense of purpose in life.
While in Italy, I began seeing a decent psychiatrist after having undergone some more CAT scans and MRIs. I actually grew fond of here and felt I could at least say whatever was on my mind. She did not just ignore what I said and increase medications.
About 15 years after I arrived in Italy and during the period when I had begun essentially taking care of my mother and my own needs, I started to feel, out of nowhere, worse than anything I had yet felt in my life. It felt as if my head had become detached from my body; I could no longer read or use the computer. It was as if a huge barrier had been placed between me and everything surrounding me. I tried but could not even read. I stayed in bed in a sort lotus flower position and just sat there doing absolutely nothing but waiting for the day to pass so I could finally try to sleep. I still managed to sleep and this became the only way I could avoid experiencing the horrifying symptoms. It stayed that way for about two months, with my mom being forced to do the impossible with the help of aunts.
It got so bad that suicide became the only option I could see once again. The problem was that pills and medication do not come in bottles in Italy but in these sort of packets. I thought “I can’t continue” and opened all the packets and downed as many pills as I could with water. I went not quite unconscious but into a sort of stupor that, along with the empty packets of pills on the floor, made it obvious that I had attempted my first suicide attempt in Italy. I was somewhat anxious that my relatives would not react with love and concern like my mother but with shame and anger because I had stained the family name.
The reaction was almost totally the opposite though. I was put in a hospital in Benevento and my cousins came to see me every day with magazines, newspapers, food and compassionate concern. During my first stay in the “Rummo” hospital at Benevento, I actually opened up a little and made some friends who I could talk to about economics, politics and other things. The doctors on the staff were not at all what I expected. My mom had depicted Italian hospitals (at least the mental wards) to me as close to old-fashioned state mental asylums in the US. But none of it turned out to be true. I got out after two weeks and things seemed to go better.
To make a long story a little bit shorter, I made two or three more attempts to take my life and ended up in the same hospital ward. My mother had now reached an age and a health situation where she needed 24 hour care, 7 days a week. The family brought in outside help.
My mother did not take well to the idea of someone else coming and doing the housework at all. One consequence or side effect of her degenerative dementia was a depression combined with open frustration and fits of anger. At first, we had only one woman caretaker who cleaned the house, washed clothes and ensured that mom was taking all her medication on time. She took care of the grocery shopping and a few other things.
She cooked for both of us. This was totally unbearable for mom who would rail against her fate and her new assistant almost continuously. She was an excellent cook but my mother began refusing to eat and asking me, out loud, why I was “eating the shit” that she prepared.
Mom no longer left the house and her cognitive faculties continued to decline over the next two or three years. I had to witness this transformation of the strongest and most self-reliant person I had ever known gradually but inexorably into complete dependence and helplessness.
Eventually, my family decided it was time to have two assistants, one who would take care of things during the day and one to stay overnight in case of emergencies. Mom had begun refusing to eat at one point. There would be a daily struggle that could last from two to three hours in which the nursing assistant would shout at the top of her lungs and try to force my mom to eat. It was all useless. I honestly believe that she simply could no longer tolerate food at all. Her cognitive faculties had degenerated to the point of no longer recognizing most of the people around her. She stopped watching television and just sat on the couch in the kitchen staring into the walls or at nothing at all.
After about a year or year and a half, she had lost so much weight that, as my brother observed on a visit to see her for the last time, she was down to bare flesh and bones, had bruises all over her body, and made my father’s last days look mild by comparison. Her whole trunk had become deformed in such a way that one of her legs was up near her chest and the other was sort of wrapped around it. She did not recognize my brother and finally reached a state where she seemed absolutely no longer present in the room but just staring blankly and emptily into space while people tried to communicate with her. She was bed-ridden and has four or five IVs sticking out of her arms. My family though it was best to keep her at home where she had 24 hour care, was surrounded by her family and had all the medical treatment available that she could get from a hospital since one of my cousin’s husband was a general practitioner and an aunt was a retired nurse.
I felt the world collapsing around me and started to feel physically incapacitated, unable to sleep for weeks and with a new and strange pain in my foot that became an obsession. My cousin asked if I would like to go and stay in the hospital to be examined thoroughly and, unstated, where I would not have to witness the ungodly struggle that my mom was confronting every night with fevers, delirium and apparently unbelievable psychological pain. She had, by now, been hallucinating that my father or her father were talking to her and she would wake up shouting in the middle of the night from nightmares and pain.
I was admitted to the hospital and remained there while my mom died. My cousins and the chief psychiatrist at the hospital had been consulting without my knowledge and had apparently decided that I should be kept for a few more weeks until all the funeral preparations and the funeral itself had passed.
Now, I live alone on my disability income and still deal with all the problems I described in this brief autobiography. I have my laptop and all of my books and still try to learn whenever I can and try to make something of what time and ability is left to me.
