The Los Angeles Death of My Youngest Sister

    This past weekend was spent saying good-bye to my youngest sister Carolyn. Carolyn, the youngest of six (I’m the eldest), spent the last five years of her life in Los Angeles. She moved to LA because of a job opportunity after having experienced a severe bout with breast cancer that led to a single mastectomy. I always felt there were other reasons for the move but these reasons were never addressed.  Carolyn made it a point to visit her family back east on at least two occasions, and her daughter, Alyssa, who lives in Manayunk, certainly made frequent trips out west to be with her mom.

   Carolyn’s closest age related sibling was my brother David, born just a year before her. David and Carolyn grew up as a set; they were toddlers together while we, the older siblings, were pretty much in a different orbit. David was diagnosed with severe mental retardation before his first birthday. Mental retardation was the term they used then. Today’s term is developmentally disabled, which really doesn’t explain a whole lot. Developmentally disabled is a cumbersome word and does not explain the depth of the “disablement.” David’s classification was ‘severe-profound,’ meaning that he would always have the mentality of a 3 or 4 year old.

   The news of David’s disability hit the family like an atom bomb. My mother was especially affected. David’s childhood was rough on everyone. He’d throw his dinner around the kitchen, run and scream and bang his head against the wall. Other times he would fight my mother as she changed his diapers. These spells or tantrums were part of his mental malfunction, and they were horrific. It finally got so bad that he had to be sent to a private school for MR children.  

  David spent several years at home before he was sent away to school. This meant that he and Carolyn grew up as proxy twins. Carolyn’s childhood can then be classified as unique. Because of David’s condition—he had to be watched all the time—Carolyn probably experienced those early years as a time when she received less attention than David. It’s also probably true that she felt the trauma connected with David in a more direct way than anyone else in the family.

Alyssa, Carolyn's daughter

    Carolyn married twice, her first marriage resulting in a boy child, my godson. Her second marriage produced a girl. Her second marriage lasted 23 years; she and her husband lived in a large house in Pottstown, a country house next to a vast cornfield. After that marriage ended, she began life as a single woman in an apartment complex in Roxborough just off Henry Avenue.

Christopher, my godson, aka The Joker 

   She hated being a single woman. Like my mother before her the prospect of going through life as a single woman without a man just wasn’t tenable. My mother remarried a crazy Welshman. That marriage lasted until my mother’s death, after which the Welshman did his best to traumatize the family.   

   Carolyn acquired a boyfriend, a Korean-Hawaiian-English mixed heritage guy with a love for guns, extreme right wing politics, and 24/7 weed obsession. I liked him at first despite certain eccentric behaviors like showing off his stash of guns, some of them assault weapons that he kept hidden in the bedroom. The boyfriend, or G, loved talking about the coming New World Order, an apocalyptic time when globalist police forces would confiscate all guns and implant chips in American citizens. The signs and symbols were all over, G said, beginning with the fact that Michelle Obama is really a man. One of G’s favorite obsessions was looking for photos of Michelle Obama in form fitting dresses that seemed to show a penile bulge.

Christopher, my godson, aka The Joker

    “It’s coming, it’s coming,” he’d say when I’d dine with the two of them.   Carolyn went along with G’s exhortations to keep the peace but during the process she couldn’t help but believe some of G’s pronouncements.

   

   While dining in Carolyn’s apartment, G would show us the new guns he purchased. Some were rifles, some handguns, some assault weapons. G stashed them in beautiful boxes as if they were valuable jewelry. Watching G display his many guns often made me wonder what pleasure he derived from keeping so many of them, especially since he could never fire them because he didn’t belong to a shooting range. I had to remind myself that he was preparing for the coming Apocalyptic war.   

Michelle Obama is a man!

  Lonliness in life is a terrible thing. All of us want to be loved and most of us want a special someone, a “we,” to complete the singular isolation of the stand alone “I.” But this human need sometimes causes many mismatched unions, and getting out of a mismatched union is often one of the hardest things to do in life.

 Good times

   As G kept getting weirder and weirder, I kept trying to see what Carolyn saw in him but I eventually gave up because I reminded myself that Carolyn’s needs were not my needs. Having crazy beliefs is not a crime, after all.    

   Carolyn’s death was not an easy one. At the time of her death she was living with G in LA. She’d been quite sick for a couple of months before G realized that he had to contact her daughter.  The family knew that Carolyn wanted nothing to do with costly hospital treatments and operations that wreck the body just to extend life by six months. When she had breast cancer five years ago she refused chemo and radiation but opted for a Canadian drug which worked to keep her healthy until just recently. She liked to say that her refusal to go the chemo route kept her brain and intelligence intact. “Chemo brain” was often the subject of her jokes.

   Something happened between Carolyn and G during the last year or so. At one point they stopped being partners. G’s endtimes obsession had eaten into his brain. He became one of those crazy psychotic hermit types who have lost touch with reality. 

   With Carolyn’s cancer now resurfacing as lung cancer, G let the days and weeks pass so that her sickbed came close to being her deathbed. At the 11^th hour G told Carolyn’s children: “If you want to see your mother alive, you had better come to the apartment now…”

   The children arrived in a flash and convinced Carolyn to go to the hospital. G opted not to accompany Carolyn to the hospital although he found the energy to remind her children that he was taking Carolyn’s car once the inevitable happened.

   Carolyn died the following day at Harbor UCLA. Her children were in the room with her when she died.  G was home alone, preparing to ward off the children when they came around for a few of their mother’s belongings. When that happened, G finally had a chance to use his guns when he warned them not to take anything out of the house. The police were called. G was apprehended but  no shots were fired. 

   The Apocalypse that G had been waiting for had finally arrived, only in a way that he did not expect. 

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

         From The Philadelphia Free Press, City Safari Column, January 16, 2020