Better I live!

61

12-02-2010

I’ve often wondered why the good Jesus decided to take my mother from me when I was so little; especially as everyone around me at the time seemed to think that I still needed her so much. Even my mum thought that I needed her soo much which was more perplexing. I wasn’t quite sure where she might go if she did die, but most people seemed to think it was a place called “Heaven” and it didn’t seem too bad. In any event “Heaven” wasn’t too much of a concern, ‘cause my mom had spoken to Jesus and he was going to make her better. “Don’t worry Marky”, she used to say, “I’ve spoken to Jesus and everything is going to be fine.” I was pretty impressed with this Jesus fellow, because after five years of the cancer eating away at her, she was looking a little worse for wear. Thank goodness there was this incredible thing that Jesus could do which everyone was relying on called a “miracle”, because after flying around the world several times looking for some other way of sorting the problem out, the miracle seemed to be our last resort. Anyway, mum was sure that it was coming and that was good enough for me.

No one really discussed mums health, or the deterioration of it much. I don’t think that would have been showing much faith in the imminent miracle that must have been coming any moment because she didn’t look like she could hold out much longer. Her breasts had been chopped off; not the clever way they locate and remove growths nowadays, and the lucozade wasn’t fattening her up much. She was also looking really ill. I don’t think my father was being insensitive when he said one day as we were travelling in the car, “You know mums going to die, don’t you.” “Yes, I know”, I said. It was an unusual moment, because I remember sensing that that was a very important thing he had just managed to tick off his list. “Good, that’s Mark taken care of”, I could feel him thinking as he moved onto the rest of the list. I don’t really remember how I coped with my life during that era, but it wasn’t difficult and it was far less demanding and pointless than it appears to be now, so all in all I remember it as a relatively happy time. I never spared too much thought about how poor dad must be feeling, but the Lord had his own happy plan for dad, so I guess it’s all good in the end.

Generally, I enjoyed the time, I spent with my mom. Especially the times when I used to talk her into driving me to Roy’s Toys shop on the corner of Windermere and Innes road in Morningside. It wasn’t far from home, but she said that she could see four of everything and even although I was only little, I had to tell her which car was the real one that was coming towards us. Sometimes I used to get my left and my right wrong and she would have to swerve violently to move out the way of the oncoming car. Those were fun times. Sometimes she would say that she was too sick to drive and I used to throw a tantrum and then she would drive. Sometimes my tantrum didn’t work further than getting her downstairs and  then I could see that she really was too sick to drive and I would help her crawl back upstairs where we could play mini cricket on the carpet or sometimes she would just climb back into bed and do nothing.    

There were a few times that I didn’t want to play with her. Once was on my eleventh birthday and I had some friends around and we were having lots of fun and then I was called upstairs because mom wanted to give me something for my birthday. I wasn’t happy to be interrupted, but went up-stairs anyway. I don’t remember who was there with her.

It’s funny how some memories are so clear to us and others are not at all clear. I remember a really bothersome rat at our old house in Lambert road. I don’t think we were still staying there, because we left and I was not much older than one and I don’t think that you can remember much when you are only one. Perhaps my father still owned it and the people that were staying there wanted him to kill the rat, because they couldn’t catch it and ‘cause my dad could do anything. Anyway...the rat in the house looked more like a mouse with its poor little head squished ever so awfully with his floppy pink tongue hanging on the dark steel plate that the big bar had come down and squashed his little head onto. The tasty looking little piece of cheese was still sitting there guiltily on the place where the mouse had sniffled too much rather than scampering for its life.

I think my granny, Nan, may have been there....also perhaps my auntie Doreen who was my moms sister and always there. My mom was whispering something at me, but I couldn’t really hear her very well and had to put my ear up close to her mouth. It turned out that she was whispering, “Happy Birthday, my darling.” She had her hand out....her thin little hand....quivering. “She got it herself”, someone said beside me. That this person, my mom, could do anything herself was a mystery, but perhaps it was before she was too sick like the way she was now. In her hand, with the weight almost too much for her,  was an ounce of gold that she had wanted me to have for my birthday and also probably something I could keep to  remember her by. Oh, if only I could have looked after that Kruger Rand, but that is another story all on its own.

My mother died a few days later. I was spared all the usual cheek pulling and smothering bosom hugs at the funeral because I think most people felt a little awkward and didn’t quite know what to say. Jesus got off scot free, it seemed, because even although he didn’t manage to pull that miracle out the bag at the last moment, his father, God, who was also him, but different, sometimes worked in ways that Humans were not clever enough to understand and “the Lord (who is also Jesus) works in strange ways”. Anyway, all the adults were falling back on that story, although my father was starting to look a little less convinced.

I thought that this was all a load of nonsense and sometimes thought that perhaps it was just a big joke that everyone was playing on me like when I caught my dad stealing Father Christmas’ beer and banana one night on Christmas Eve. I think he was so embarrassed to be caught by his son stealing Father Christmas’s banana and beer that he had to rather destroy my belief by owning up to the lesser sin of lying to me about the existence of Father Christmas all those years.

My father has been a prime example of good fortune and a blessed life in that had the good Lord not killed off my mother, he would never have met and married his current wife. Their current relationship is probably the reason I’ll struggle to get married, because they just set such a hard example to follow of what a happy marriage should be like. I’m not quite sure why Jesus had to make my mom suffer for so long just so my father could have two happy marriages, but perhaps it was to give him time to find the new wife. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know!

Then I was wondering why Jesus took her from me just to give my dad two happy marriages.  I was only ever going to have one mother and when she was gone, then I wouldn’t have one anymore. Well, Jesus had an answer to that to, but it took someone else’s misfortune to make me eventually see it so clearly.

It came in form of the tragic suicide of Lee Alexander McQueen. He took his life ten days after his mother died of cancer. He was unable to live with the grief of his mother having passed away. I’m not sure what their deal with Jesus was, but being gay, there are some fairly moderate and most fundamental believers out there that believe he had it coming anyway, not to mention the worst yet to come in the after-life.  Perhaps the good Jesus took my mothers life because in his infinite wisdom he realised that once I was old enough to realise that Heaven was just a figment of my imagination, if my mother was to die at that point, perhaps, just perhaps, I would have been soo unhappy that I might have taken my own life. It becomes all very confusing and I sometimes don’t feel quite clever enough to keep tabs on how it all works.

Michael Onfray has helped my understanding of it all in one of his books and explains quite well how It all gets very confusing, especially when one looks at justifications for the Crusades, the Inquisition, the French Religious Wars, the Saint Bartholomew’s  Day massacre of Paris’s Protestants, the stake, but not only that, worldwide colonialism, North American ethnocide policies, support for twentieth century fascist movements, and the centuries long temporal  hold of the Vatican over the smallest details of daily life.....not only that; There is clear exhortation on almost every page of the Koran to destroy unbelievers, including believers like Christians and Jews -  their religion, their culture, their civilisation....All in the name of a merciful God! So many different pathways to entrench the idea that precisely because of Gods existence, everything is permitted – in him, through him, and in his name, without the slightest objection by believers, clergy, the masses, or the ruling spheres.

If the existence of God, independently of its Jewish, Christian, or Muslim form, had given us just a little forewarning regarding hatred, lies, rape, pillage, immorality, embezzlement, perjury, violence, contempt, swindling, false witness, depravity, paedophilia, infanticide, drunkenness, and perversion, we may never have seen the likes of atheists. The rabbis, priests and imams with their great many of faithful followers doing good, excelling in virtue, setting an example, and proving to the godless  and perverse that morality was on their side. Obeying their relevant commandments and not lying, pillaging, robbing, nor raping or even bearing false witness nor murdering. Even more true to modern life – not plotting terrorist attacks on Manhattan, nor launching punitive raids on the Gaza Strip, or covering up the deeds of their paedophile  priests. At that point we would see the faithful converting their neighbours right, left and centre through the example of their shining conduct. Gods existence, it seems to me, has historically generated in his name, more battles, massacres, conflicts, and wars than peace, serenity, brotherly love, forgiveness of sins, and tolerance.

The biographies of Moses, Paul and Mohammed confirm how well they excelled in murder, torture and orgies of plunder. So many variations on the theme of loving ones neighbour.

The history of the human race unquestionably teaches the rewards of vice and the disappointments of virtue....whether God is or is not, he has never made anyone pay for insulting, neglecting, despising, forgetting or crossing him! Theists indulge in every kind of metaphysical contortion to justify evil in the world, while simultaneously affirming the existence of a God whom nothing escapes! Deists seem less blind, atheists more lucid.

I’ve never thought of Anthony Hopkins and considered that our thoughts could have been too alike, but our preconceptions of things very often turn out to be misconceptions.  Sometimes we have opinions or beliefs about certain things and nothing ever happens to give those thoughts a good shake so that they fall out of our heads like ill-grasping monkeys out of a tree. I thought Anthony, being the big Hollywood film star that he is, would have been more preoccupied with buying his next yacht than silencing the lambs. It was interesting to hear him say, “It’s nice to get a knighthood, but in the end it’s just the same old face in the mirror getting older and older – you have to shave every morning and you look at your face and think: this is it, this is the deal. And there is a wonderful harsh reality about that. Time is going by. I better get on with it. I better live.”