The truth about Charlie

- A story about family.

Personal narrative. That story that lives within you and without in the people you love. But it’s never quite the same. When you start having long and detailed conversations about your personal history with those who were there when the action went down, you’ll find that your story is dynamic. As if your memory plays with your imagination to thread through everything you thought was reality. So much so that you begin to wonder about truth and whether there is any real, objectifiable evidence of it out there, or whether everything is only a matter of perception.

How you see things.

How you saw things.

Charlie and I saw a lot of things together. From the first time I sat on his lap, drew the comb out from his inside jacket pocket and ran it through his Brylcreemed hair. I opened his cubby hole one morning, my mind filled with unbounded curiosity, my legs dangling toward the floor of his Datsun. There was a magazine bound in a tight roll and all I could see was half a smile and one nipple staring at me. Charlie looked at me and told me to close the cubby, which I did. Because we shared the same language. It was unspoken but we each knew what the other person meant. I have found this is extremely rare in people. But I only found that out later, when I was older. After Charlie died.

Let me just say that Charlie and I had been intimate. We were born from one headspace although there were some fifty years or so that separated us. I had seen him drunk, paraletic, with piss running down his legs. He had seen me suck condensed milk from a tin without stopping until I stood to puke all over the back yard.

There was no space for advice to live between us. Charlie was wise enough to abandon the arbitrary lectures that went hand in hand with relationships between adults and kids. He loved me exactly for who I was, and I simply returned the favour.

Then came the day he started to forget. Small things. Like where to put the key into the ignition. What day it was. That he was supposed to come and fetch me at twelve to go for chicken pie, chips and gravy. That our staple diet consisted of chicken pie, chips and gravy with a side of coke, and Smarties for desert. He forgot to buy condensed milk. He couldn’t remember the route to work.

At first I covered for him so my family mumbled about his old age. Then came the days that no amount of lying or maneuvering on my part would rescue. I remember screaming and crying and begging them not to take him to that special place. Charlie told me that old men and women went to die there. Without his independence, Charlie said they may as well put a revolver to his head and pull the trigger.

My folks had earnest late night conversations in between days when we were called from Checkers or the chemist or the cinema to fetch the old man. By that time my ma had put his name, our address and phone number like a tag on all his jackets. He looked like a disheveled Auschwitz prisoner with that tag, and because he had started forgetting to eat. So I would sit on his lap and comb his Brylcreemed hair like I always did amidst the consternation and hushed adult conversations.

And then he was gone.

Until Sundays when I was taken in the car with my folks, my brothers and sisters to visit. Then there was no him and me, only us. The forced awkwardness of familial obligation.

Given our relationship had lurched into crisis I had no other choice but to cut my extra-murals short and drive all the way out to see him on my bicycle. And there we would reminisce about the days we spent at the car wash, or reading stories or going to the cinema.

And then I was gone.

Came that day when he looked at me with those big old empty eyes and I saw that he had struggled to keep the fragile bird of my memory alive in him, but that the fight was too fierce. Merciless and too long. After months of scrabbling bloody tooth and nail, he let go and I slipped from his grasp.

Still I came on my bicycle day after week after month. And on Sundays with my ma or pa, who took it in turns to watch the old man waste away to nothing.

In the week I would sit by his bed and hold his hand as he shook and twitched. Other times I would read him Don Quixote by Cervantes. Or retell him the stories about the movies we had seen together. Frankenstein and King Kong versus Godzilla and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. He would look at the ceiling or he would sleep, it didn’t matter. At times I thought I did it more for myself than for him. But on a couple of rare days he looked at me and those big old empty eyes would focus into a small moment of clarity. He would see me and smile, and I would tell him again that I loved him. Which I did every day until the day he died. His hand slipping gently from mine. His story taking its last breath in his rib cage.

Interesting thing, personal narrative. The way our stories live and dance in ourselves and the people we love, hate or live with. How they walk on two legs and grow like legend. How they grow a lot like love.

Thank you to Sunday Scribblings for inspiring people to write.

My gratitude to Charles and Charlie. This is just a story but without them I would have nothing.    

Comments

[Mandy de Waal]

@tobymarx: Thanks so much for your visit and comment. Really appreciated.

@Eileen: Our stories live and walk in the people we love. And then when those stories begin to die while the people we love live on it is devastating. Thank you for sharing such tender memories.

[Eileen]

I can believe it is fact. My grandmother died of Alzheimer's, or more properly, with it. I watched the whole thing go down. How at first in the nursing home she remembered me, and then she didn't remember me, but would ask about my two little black dogs. When she quit asking about the little black dogs, I knew she was not there anymore.

[tobymarx]

What a beautiful, deeply touching story. Your
writing is compelling and wonderfully transparent, Mandy. Thank you for this.

[Mandy de Waal]

@Morts. Thanks babe. Coming from you high praise and I am grateful for your visits and comments. I don't have a nan anymore so miss that. Just picking up the phone or having that ability to connect.

@daisyfae. Thanks. I am a big fan of yours, so this means a lot. Ja and the things you never thought you'd do, and what they mean long after.

@gautami tripathy: Welcome and thanks for the visit and comment.

[gautami tripathy]

Very engrossing post!

[daisyfae]

good fiction finds resonance - and this one did. snippets of memories with my father... i never thought i'd be the one assisting him with his undergarments when he ws in the hospital, but i did... fighting to the end to preserve his dignity and comfort...

this is beautiful. thank you...

[morti]

damn woman... you can WRITE.

you slam dunked me mentally into a booth at the old market cafe - PC+G... and a soda float with my nan, and getting to keep the extra mini milk container from her tea... then up the high street to the woolworths pick+mix counter for takeaway 'dessert'.
the very best memory for a sunday morning.

i can read your tales over and over again - and find something new to take from them each time.

this time... i'm going to grab a cuppa and phone my nan.

[Mandy de Waal]

@paisley: Thanks so much. It is mostly fiction, sort of knitted together from memories of my father and grandfather. But most of the fabric is fiction.

@Robin. Thanks so much. Really appreciated.

[Robin]

A beautiful, poignant, painfully accurate description of what it is like to lose a loved one one piece at a time.

[paisley]

this was really wonderful... i am unsure if it is fact or fiction,, but either way,, the way you wrote is was purely compelling....