Satan's Inferno

There's a reason I'm not a personal fan of writing non-fiction, not even the creative type. It's the most challenging class I have this semester. Opening up chapters you have closed can have its effects. But you either make the choice to let painful memories, regrets or whatever else bear you down or build you up into a better human being. Never judge by the outside. Everyone has a story.

Xoxo

Satan’s Inferno

By Shaire Blythe

           Japanese people are likelier to die, both by accident and by suicide, on their birthdays than on any other day. A study focused solely on the United States between 2009-2013 claims young adult males, more than likely American Indian or Alaska Native were to commit suicide.

            My mom wasn’t Japanese, it wasn’t her birthday, she wasn’t a young adult male or fully American Indian or Alaska Native, and it wouldn’t have been an accident.

*

            Multiple sclerosis is a fucked up disease. The Multiple Sclerosis Foundation claims that more than 400,000 people in the United States have it.

            It’s main focus of attack is the nervous system. For my mom, one day, her entire body went numb while lying in bed. She tried to move her fingers, her toes—anything. She thought she was paralyzed. I guess, technically, briefly, she was. I can only imagine the fear of going from a healthy woman in her late-twenties to a vegetable in the course of one night.

            Unable to move, she laid in her queen-size bed for about ten minutes. As if God had made a joke, laughing, “Just kidding,” the feeling came back to her.

            My mom went to a doctor as soon as she could. They told her there were white lesions on her brain.

            At least, that is how the story was told.

*

            I had a front row seat to multiple sclerosis’ destruction without tuning into the show for the longest. I knew there was something odd about the four-pronged silver cane kept on the passenger’s side of my mom’s car. Sometimes she would slide it out of its place and take it in Walmart with her or inside Clark Elementary. I never saw anyone else’s mother with a cane, and I was the only one with my arm out, escorting my mom as if I was the perfect gentleman, guiding her to our destinations.

            Helping her, sometimes my feet dragged at the pace of a moving sloth.

            “Slow down,” she said, when I went too fast, nearly dragging her along. Maybe I would huff or roll my eyes, wishing my sister was there to do the escorting that time.

            Helping my mom around was just for then, I thought. Some days, she didn’t need the cane. Some days, she walked perfectly straight with her back erect and legs kicking out similar to a sober man being tested for sobriety.

            With time, I knew the cane would go away and I wouldn’t have to be called out of class to usher my mom in to eat lunch with me and my third grade peers.

*

            My mom fell down at CVS once. I remember it was during the wintertime, because she wore this yarn-like shawl that went to her ankles. It was her favorite and mine too. She even wore it at work during the summertime. Lourdes Hospital always kept the basement cold for the women in medical records, and my mom is cold by nature.

            I loved snuggling up to her when she wore it, and occasionally wrapped myself inside while she wore it. I am cold by nature too.

            My mom became a little bit colder after her fall in front of everyone at the pharmacy. A man jumped up from his waiting chair to help, and I rushed over as well. She swatted helping hands away, blubbering, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I just have MS.”

            Her cane laid sprawled across the carpet. She had fallen on it.

            When we made it back to the car, tears began to stream down her cheeks.

            “Mom, it’s okay,” I said. “No one laughed.”

            I must have hit a nerve because she yelled at me, saying nothing was okay and I should’ve made her go through the drive thru instead.

*

Multiple sclerosis doesn’t do well with heat.

I had been driving to Cash Advance. I couldn’t turn on my air condition. My second-rate Impala would go hot on me every time I tried. There wasn’t a man around the house and I didn’t know how to change my oil without a fickle of doubt in my mind. My mom knew how to change oil, but not much else. I hadn’t taken it to a shop yet, fearful of what might be wrong and the price to fix the issue. So far, all of my problems since I had bought the car ran in the hundreds, which I didn’t have time for.

That day, the sun was beaming directly on our heads. The air being breathed in was hot; the touch of it on my skin was smothering, icky. At this time, I had never been in a sauna, but figured that was what it must have felt like.

The windows were down, but my mom was still fanning herself, sweat pouring out of her pores. She weighed a little over a hundred pounds then. The heat was easily getting to her. We had gotten into a heated argument—over God knows what—before leaving the house. The car was not only filled up with God’s glorious heat wave, but Satan’s inferno.

When we got to the loan-thieving place, I helped my mom out of the car. She couldn’t walk on her own anymore, not even from the reclining chair in her bedroom to that queen-size bed three feet away from each other.

Not much was said between us. I just gritted my teeth when she asked me to sign the papers for her—like always—to get another’s five-hundred dollars in her wallet, because her bony hands were giving out on her.

My mom used to have the prettiest signature, delicate. Back in elementary school, I would try to forge her signature for test grades that were mandatory to be seen by parents. At this time, a senior in high school, I didn’t care to sign her name for any reason.

She must have sensed my attitude. She began hollering at me the second we were back out the door, the sun blazing down. Her arm was hooked in my arm.

“You are so ungrateful,” she said. I had gotten her into the passenger seat and was settling myself behind the wheel.

Ungrateful? I didn’t see how.

I was the only one still around, pivoting her dead weight from her power chair to the toilet seat, rattling pots and pans in the kitchen to serve a warm meal on her tray just for her and recording her finances in my checkbook to ensure her account wouldn’t overdraw.

I was there.

I stood up for myself.

I don’t remember how.

But I couldn’t take her bashing anymore.

The heat was scorching.

It must have been over a hundred degrees.

My entire body was numb from the warmth.

The heat must have really gotten to my mom too.

“You know what, how about I just kill myself so you won’t have to worry about me anymore?”

*

My mom almost died by accident. I woke up an hour before work. I went to her room to check on her. The brim of her glasses were below her nose. Her head was nearly slumping off of the hospital bed that was mandatory for her progressive multiple sclerosis.

I wasn’t oblivious that maybe she had simply fallen asleep that way and was knocked out from watching her late-night commentary shows, but the air had this dead tone ringing in my ears and attacking the aorta of what little heart I had left.

            “Mom?” I called out to her.

            There was no response.

*

            There were so many medicines at my mom’s bedside. At this time, I wasn’t monitoring if she was taking them, which ones she was taking or anything. I was supposed to be the child, not the adult. But I guess I hadn’t played that role since I was eight. I liked to make believe, but I was hardly a kid.

            When she said she would hang herself from her ceiling fan, I didn’t believe her. She was too weak to step on her bed and stand on top of it. But she had all of those medicines—medicines I didn’t know the names too because they were long and complicated.

            I be damned if I was going to allow her to kill herself. If anyone had the right to kill themselves, it was me. I was in hell. Not her.

I took care of her. No one took care of me.

*

            I thought Dante’s Inferno had a realm for suicide committers. Maybe the seventh circle of violence is relatable. When one commits suicide, it is a violent act infringed upon your own body. But maybe the fourth circle of greed could be linked. It must be greed driving one to commit suicide, disregarding the loved ones they will leave behind. Even the fifth circle of anger can have some relation, because can’t one be angry with the world around them, thus propelling them into committing the act? And what about the worse of them all—treachery. God gave everyone life. He doesn’t intend on anyone to end the very gift He gave.

            He must cry every time one of His children cuts their lives short, unable to see the blessing of being alive.

*

            I had this clear plastic belt in the back of my closet that had orange trimming. My dad had bought a pair of capris from Goodie’s that it came with and a matching frilly blouse. I grew out of the clothes, but kept the belt.

            In Seventeen magazine, there was an article on girls chocking themselves until they passed out. It gave them a high, a rush.

            One girl wanted to feel the high, but she had no one around to choke her. She thought using a belt would work if she hung from her bunkbed.

            I wondered if using a belt and hanging from my bunkbed would work too, but I didn’t want to only become unconscious.

*

            My mom fell between the back door screen and wooden door. Most of her body was outside on the concrete, but her fingertips could touch the stone of our house floor.

            I tried to pull her up into the seat of her walker so I could push her inside the house. It was extremely hot outside. The heat had gotten to her.

            I was too weak. My back was going numb day and night from constantly picking her up and pains were randomly shooting up as I sat in Mrs. Holt class, trying to explain Lady MacBeth’s role in literature. I couldn’t get her up. Not this time.

            “Just drag me in,” she cried, sweat pouring down her forehead.

            I shook my head. There was no way.

            She slammed her dirtied palm on the door’s divider. It was the only way.

            Hooking my hands around her forearms, I heaved dead bodyweight inside the house until the screen door struck the bottom of her tennis shoes. She asked to be left where she was until she could catch her breath and build strength up to try and help me lift her.

            I collapsed on my dresser in my bedroom, next to her lying flat on her stomach in the hallway. She wailed out unlike anything I have ever heard till this day, beating her fists on the carpet. She was like a three-year-old throwing a fit because they weren’t given the candy they wanted, or so desperately needed.

            A deep cry sat in my throat, but I only allowed tears to stream from my eyes. I didn’t let her see them.

*

            My auntie told me to take my mom to Lourdes Hospital and tell them that she was a danger to herself.

            I didn’t know hospitals handled people who wanted to kill themselves.

            I couldn’t go past the heavily secured door on the psychiatric floor. I watched as they scooted me out of the way and took the handlebars of the wheelchair my mom sat in. My mom wouldn’t say a word to me as they took her away, but I didn’t know what else to do.

*

            The nurse in the emergency room told me my mom was running a temperature over a hundred and might have some infection from her catheter. I found her right in time, and thank God I was home.

            When she was stabilized and we were alone, I sat at the edge of her bed and told her I loved her.

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"It's not bravery at all. It's therapeutic. It's me getting real with myself. And if I can be of some help to others in some way, whether it's letting them know they're not alone or that they can survive whatever hardship they are facing, then I will." -- Shaire Blythe