HOW I CONTINUED TO LET HER LIVE LIKE THAT, CONTINUED

Or, WHY DIDN’T YOU DO THIS, WHY DIDN’T YOU TRY THAT:

An exercise in exploring my myriad spiral of options down to the thinnest fractal, looking for wormholes in time and space which I could then exploit to go back in time and do everything right.

• I could have intervened earlier.
• I could have been more persistent.
• I could have hired a lawyer who specialized in elder care, had her declared incompetent, and taken over the management of her medical and financial affairs.
• That’s actually a very difficult and lengthy process and I would have been unlikely to succeed.
• I still could have tried.

This next one bothers me most, because it was just a logistics issue, and it would have been simple enough to solve it, which I even knew back then, I could figure this out, but I didn’t:

• I could have gone in person to the agencies I called.

Except I don’t know how to drive. So every time I went to my mother’s house or doctor or wherever, I required a train and multiple cabs. (This is before ride-share.)

Still, I could have taken a cab from the train station directly to the Department of Buildings in her town, made as much noise and filled out as many forms as it took to get someone’s attention:

Hey! This house is uninhabitable and should be condemned. Let’s go there, right now, and bring your wrecking ball.

So that’ s what I should have done, and because I didn’t, I am negligent in my mother’s death.

Irony is useless but it keeps ironing:

About six months after my mother died, I was declared the legal owner of her property.

I did not evict her fifth husband, because he was schizophrenic and broken and had nowhere to go.

I also felt sorry for him.

It’s not like I could have sold the land anyway.

But I was sorting through the three mortgages and ten years of unpaid property taxes to see if there was any value left in this lovely two acre plot with a small pond and a festering dump in one of New York City’s more desirable suburbs.

And out of the blue, I got a message from a guy from the Department of Buildings, shouting and incredulous, “Hey, you’re the owner of the property at blah blah blah? You gotta do something about this place. It’s a health hazard.”

And of course I took the opportunity to call the guy back and say (to his voicemail), “I FUCKING KNOW IT’S A FUCKING HEALTH HAZARD, YOU DUMB DICKSTUMP, I REPORTED IT TO YOU FOUR YEARS AGO, AND YOU DID FUCKING NOTHING.”

(Caps + no exclamation point = not yelling, just speaking loud and emphatically.)

BUT. I only called them once.

I like to make it sound like I called every agency multiple times. In most cases, I did. E.g., I had multiple calls with Adult Protective Services and the ASPCA. Both of them eventually closed their cases without any action.

I only called the Department of Buildings once.

And I didn’t go there in person.

Because I am a childish failure who never learned to drive because I’m afraid to.

And I could have taken a cab but I just…didn’t.

I wasn’t even smoking full-time that year.

I was still on this self-imposed pot diet where I could only smoke ¼ of a joint per day, and it had to be after 6pm or when I was done dealing with people.

I did this for three full years, and every single day of those years I spent living for the ten minutes I got to smoke in the bathroom.

Then Deepwater Horizon happened and I relapsed.

It was like the old commercial, “Take the Nestea plunge,” where a man stands at the side of a pool, arms outstretched, and falls backwards into the water with a look of bliss.

So I can’t even blame the addiction that I love to blame for everything.

It was something else that kept me from calling the Department of Buildings more than once.

Something else stopped me from taking the train and a cab and going there.

So here it is: Proof that I let her live like that.