The Cruel Diary of Truth – Marlin Nelson

Never an I Love You

A life reduced to introspection, with no vehicle of diversion.

A Reference to a Serial Killer?
An Island of One
Why Write This?
The Coercive Cudgel
How It All Ends
Additional Reading

A Reference to a Serial Killer?

Big Ed Kemper,^[1] after decapitating his mother, placed her severed head on a mantel and screamed at it for hours. That’s how I believe I’ll experience my mother’s death—screaming at the corpse, not the decapitation. In interviews following his incarceration, he revealed that the reason for this was that, while she was alive, he could never talk to her. She was an abusive, overbearing, domineering termagant, and with his personality and behavioral issues, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Edmund Kemper had no voice. Fortunately, I’m not plagued by the issues that plagued Kemper. My mother, on the other hand… well. My mother is a lot like Kemper’s mother was—abusive and controlling, a stealer of voices.

…à la Ed Kemper, scream at her corpse for hours.

Her entire life is shrouded in secrecy and is likely haunted by trauma, though she never sought professional help. She carried anger, bitterness, insecurities, and a ruthless need for control her entire life. She’s also a thrasonical, Whited Sepulchre for whom, inexplicably, everyone in the world has conspired to “disrespect.” She thrives on complaining, making excuses, and justifying her behaviors by rewriting history, always making herself the victim, never the villain. Unfortunately for her, the historical product of destroyed relationships sits at the end of her trail of justifications. To make matters worse, she now…

An Island of One

She hasn’t changed; she won’t: It’s high neuroticism with adjacent psychological problems in a near octogenarian. Now, unfortunately, neurological problems and one of the dementias have complicated things. This is unsurprising; my maternal grandfather had Alzheimer’s (I remember helping find him once when I was a child after he went missing). But this isn’t about that. This is about my thinking, on occasion, that after she dies, I may, à la Ed Kemper, scream at her corpse for hours. It’s complicated. She is nearing the end zone and is aware of time’s caress. From time to time, when speaking extempore, she’ll make offhand references to her mortality. The problem is that she is essentially an island unto herself, having driven everyone out of her life.

I’m the only family she has left. I don’t mean living relatives; she has relatives. She has two brothers and a sister. She speaks—now—to one of the brothers and has no relationship with anyone else. She never had a relationship with her mother, whose name I don’t even know. A third brother died a couple of years ago. She has no relationship with her only other offspring, and her handful of “friends” are mostly her church sisters who are merely vectors for gossip. I guess, in an archipelagic sense, this is what happens when you’re a serial destroyer of relationships: you end up surrounded by other islands. But in this case, there’s no actual connection to the other islands.

Even her friends. Her childhood friends and friendships she made as an adult all faced the same banishment. All it takes is disagreeing with her, or taking the side of her “opponent” in a conflict (real or perceived), correcting her, or pushing back against her incessant desire for dominance. That’s it. Swift, coming down like a verdict. Any inquiry into “How is So and So?” receives the same canned, rehearsed, threadbare, inquiry-killing response: “They’re disrespectful.” It perplexes and frustrates.

Why Write This?

Why am I writing about this? I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to “say” it; maybe it’s because she’s never said “I love you” to me. I have exceptional episodic/autobiographical memory, ironically, something she used to brag about when I was a child. But even today, if you visit her house, there are no photographs of me… It’s as if I don’t even exist. Also ironic, among the many other photos of people I don’t know, she has a single photograph of her other son, the one she has no relationship with. The thought actually makes me laugh. But I’m her lifeline. I’m the one who was always there, always helping, always doing. This is due in part to disguised coercion wielded like a cudgel by her, and my own emotional parentification.^[2] Alas, die Eule der Minerva fliegt.^[³^]

Why am I writing this? Who knows? It’s therapeutic, I suppose. Thinking about Big Ed Kemper and what I learned about his life, maybe that’s the reason: Maybe I don’t want to be screaming over a dead body one day, and this might be the best way to release that scream now, preemptively. Kemper also said, later, that he wanted to end the power his mother held over his life. An irrational, perpetually combative, and domineering personality can do that to a person: render them powerless. This is especially true when it is someone you trust, depend on, and expect to love and care for you as a child. It’s even more true when it’s someone you are supposed to love and respect no matter what, because, you know, disguised coercion^[5] masquerading as societal norms.

The Coercive Cudgel

Guilt is an effective coercive cudgel. There’s that. It works because you’ve learned to internalize your parent’s bullshit narrative. It works because the coercion, entrenched for years, becomes obligation, silent dissent, and acquiescence. My mother wielded coercion like a cudgel. She established walls to keep tenderness at bay. Her existence was merely to regulate everyone else’s behavior, never her own. She influenced outcomes and dictated the conditions required to maintain dominance. She controlled others’ behavior: their speech, how they sat, stood, talked, and ate; what they could and couldn’t touch; what they could and couldn’t do. In fact, her desire for dominance and control was to the extreme that she would “shut down” whenever anyone pushed back against her abuse. This, of course, was another exercise in coercive control. It was the ultimate manifestation: If you don’t do what I want, when and how I want, then I’ll stop talking to you forever. Resistance was futile.

At almost 80, she still threatens to “shut down” (her words, not mine) if she can’t get her way. It’s weak, ineffective, pathetic manipulation. She always rewrote the narrative, manipulated history, aligning it with her agenda. And as she aged, she began hoarding plants: all green, non-flowering, non-fragrant plants. She keeps them inside and outside her house. I’ve always theorized that the reason for this, besides the psychological issues already driving her hoarding disorder,^[6] was control. Plants don’t talk back. They don’t resist or push back, providing her the opportunity to exert complete dominance over their existence. I could be wrong… Sure. But here’s the thing: when one’s psychology and personality traits go untethered for decades, they become identity, in a manner of speaking.

At her age, ironically, she has lost all control—the only thing she ever demanded. This is evidence in the plant hoard: it’s inexplicable. It’s not a flower garden. They don’t bear fruit. They don’t provide anything a typical garden provides: neither shade nor enjoyment. They’re plants: potted plants she has placed in other pots—all spray-painted white. In fact, she doesn’t really care for them; they’re durable. This isn’t even control; it’s control by proxy, governed by a procurator. Keeping plants as the spectre of control—that’s it. None of this can be rewritten; the history is still being written.

How It All Ends

Despite my imagination, I don’t actually see her death being adorned with such flourish. Kemper had issues that I don’t. His life was also different. And although marred by a hardscrabble upbringing, I’ve had the fortune of learning how best to deal with her personality. That being said, what will it be like? How would I know…? When she had a cancer scare some years ago, none of her “friends” visited her; not once. After the worst of it had passed and she had the first of several surgeries, her reverend and his wife visited her. I don’t know how to explain that other than to propose that perhaps those people are aware of her psychological makeup and choose to avoid her when possible. I could be wrong… Sure. But if one understands the fruit, one need not bother with the rind. There was never an “I love you”; that doesn’t exist inside her. Much of this realization and acceptance came with time, well into adulthood, life, and knowledge. It’s all hindsight. But as Hegel wrote in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right: “Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.”^[7]