samueldeckerthompson - Tumblr blog

[samueldeckerthompson]

My mother, Cassandra Decker, died yesterday, and I'm not sad about it.

Mom wasn't an evil person, she wasn't even a bad person, in fact, she was extraordinarily sweet, kind, and giving, and she always did her best to be the best mother that she could be to her three children.

Unfortunately, she also inflicted untold trauma on me for the vast majority of my life.

These statements would seem to be in opposition of each other, but they are both true, she did indeed try her best, I have no doubts about that, but her severe mental illness almost always stood in the way of those efforts.

When I was still in elementary school my Mom began to do a lot of strange things;

She randomly dressed up as a clown at a soccer game, ran out onto the field and stole the ball from the ref.

At my baseball game when I made all-stars she stood in the crowd yelling vile insults and taunts as I tried to pitch, causing me to walk three batters in a row and hit the fourth.

One Christmas I received the most amazing toy car from an Uncle who lived in France, she forced me to destroy it with a hammer, saying my Uncle was a warlock and the car was possessed with an evil spirit.

One evening she picked up our heavy solid oak kitchen table and flipped it over on myself and my little sister, the cops were called, and they wrestled her out of the house as she screamed and wailed with rage in just one of many instances where I'd witness her being arrested for bizarre and sometimes violent behavior.

At that point she was diagnosed as being paranoid-schizophrenic and bipolar-manic depressive. She spent a couple months in an institution and although her meds would help intermittently, she was never the same again.

From that point forward, she'd generally have at least one major mental break each year of her life and spend a month or two in the looney bin.

Visiting her there as a child and young adult was just horrific, sometimes she'd be strapped down, other times doped up and almost comatose, another time I remember her holding a big ole palo verde beetle and absentmindedly petting it as if it was her favorite cat.

The last straw for visits there was the time she suddenly decided to cover herself and the visiting area in her own feces.

The tragedy was she'd always try to get her life back together after these episodes, but each time she was starting from scratch, during the time she was away she'd have lost a job or been evicted, all her stuff would get ransacked by roomates or stolen by neighbors if the cops didn't lock the doors when they took her away.

At one point she even went to beauty school, obtained her license, and opened her own salon. I was so proud of her, she was doing well, but it was in a rough part of town, hard to make a profit, and eventually the stress there caused another episode and she lost that too.

My sister and I each tried having her live with us at different times, but I couldn't make it work as I just wasn't willing to subject my kids to the same trauma I experienced.

The final time my mother lived on her own I showed up to check on her after not hearing from her and found her completely naked, sitting in her kitchen shivering and starving, babbling about how an imaginary government agency she called AARDVARK was monitoring her and she couldn't move from the floor or she'd show up on their radar and they'd know she was there.

The last thing she'd eaten was a rotisserie chicken that had apparently been on the counter for many days as it was rotting with bugs and maggots all over it. I vomited in the sink, and then helped her get dressed, she was so frail and feeble. An ambulance came and from there she mostly became a ward of the state, living in group homes for people with mental health issues, which was horrible for her during the months when she was sane, but surrounded by the lunacy of the other patients.

I tried to keep in touch, take her out to lunch, let her see her grandkids, had her over for Thanksgiving, birthday parties, and stuff like that, but as she was aging she started to become abusive, saying all sorts of awful things, and I began to withdraw and detach myself from her so I could protect myself and just focus on my children.

The last time I really interacted with her was not too long after my big brother died, which affected me profoundly, and she kept feeling the need to tell me that my brother was an evil person and would definitely spend eternity in fire.

I'm an atheist, but her insistence on repeating this led to me just cutting her off.

From there she developed dementia/Alzheimers and really seemed to go downhill quickly, and this ultimately led to her death.

Last night my eldest daughter was asking me if I had any happy memories of her grandma, and I just couldn't think of one in that moment, every memory that came to mind throughout the entirety of my life with my mother was bad, 100% trauma, dark thoughts just overshadowed everything,

but today I can remember that way back in the beginning she was a realllly good mom. She was an incredible cook, like world class, and I remember her teaching me things in the kitchen. I remember her helping with my homework, doing arts and crafts projects, and she'd sew clothes for us, and even make incredible pro-level costumes for Halloween and school plays. One day I came home and said I needed a bull costume with really big horns for a school play, she went out and bought fur and sewed me a full length costume with a long tail and somehow used paper mache to make this super realistic bull head with horns and everything. When I showed up for the play all the other kids just had horns cut out of paper that were clipped to their hair, and I was moved to the center of the stage to become the focal point of the whole play. It was incredible.

Also, she is the one who taught me to love to read, we used to all just lay on couches for hours and read, so much so that in 4th grade I was testing at post-college Ievels in reading comprehension and grammar.

My mom also taught me the beauty in writing poetry, and how cathartic it could be. Her poetry was actually the first I read as an adult. Unlike my pithy poems, hers flowed gorgeously and was dripping with flowery language in the old style of centuries past.

So, in the end, that's how I'll try to remember her, as a loving, caring, and talented mother who just got sick and never recovered. Hopefully in time I'll learn to let go of the bad memories and more good ones will come to me, but at the very least I'll always owe her a debt for giving me the gift of poetry.

I'm glad you finally have peace, Mom.

Cassandra Estella Decker

2/2/50 - 11/1/23

PS: I'll never get over how strange it is that such vivacious young people eventually become this decrepit older version of themselves as you see my mom devolve into in this last photo. Life is such a tragedy.

[samueldeckerthompson]

My mother, Cassandra Decker, died yesterday, and I'm not sad about it.

Mom wasn't an evil person, she wasn't even a bad person, in fact, she was extraordinarily sweet, kind, and giving, and she always did her best to be the best mother that she could be to her three children.

Unfortunately, she also inflicted untold trauma on me for the vast majority of my life.

These statements would seem to be in opposition of each other, but they are both true, she did indeed try her best, I have no doubts about that, but her severe mental illness almost always stood in the way of those efforts.

When I was still in elementary school my Mom began to do a lot of strange things;

She randomly dressed up as a clown at a soccer game, ran out onto the field and stole the ball from the ref.

At my baseball game when I made all-stars she stood in the crowd yelling vile insults and taunts as I tried to pitch, causing me to walk three batters in a row and hit the fourth.

One Christmas I received the most amazing toy car from an Uncle who lived in France, she forced me to destroy it with a hammer, saying my Uncle was a warlock and the car was possessed with an evil spirit.

One evening she picked up our heavy solid oak kitchen table and flipped it over on myself and my little sister, the cops were called, and they wrestled her out of the house as she screamed and wailed with rage in just one of many instances where I'd witness her being arrested for bizarre and sometimes violent behavior.

At that point she was diagnosed as being paranoid-schizophrenic and bipolar-manic depressive. She spent a couple months in an institution and although her meds would help intermittently, she was never the same again.

From that point forward, she'd generally have at least one major mental break each year of her life and spend a month or two in the looney bin.

Visiting her there as a child and young adult was just horrific, sometimes she'd be strapped down, other times doped up and almost comatose, another time I remember her holding a big ole palo verde beetle and absentmindedly petting it as if it was her favorite cat.

The last straw for visits there was the time she suddenly decided to cover herself and the visiting area in her own feces.

The tragedy was she'd always try to get her life back together after these episodes, but each time she was starting from scratch, during the time she was away she'd have lost a job or been evicted, all her stuff would get ransacked by roomates or stolen by neighbors if the cops didn't lock the doors when they took her away.

At one point she even went to beauty school, obtained her license, and opened her own salon. I was so proud of her, she was doing well, but it was in a rough part of town, hard to make a profit, and eventually the stress there caused another episode and she lost that too.

My sister and I each tried having her live with us at different times, but I couldn't make it work as I just wasn't willing to subject my kids to the same trauma I experienced.

The final time my mother lived on her own I showed up to check on her after not hearing from her and found her completely naked, sitting in her kitchen shivering and starving, babbling about how an imaginary government agency she called AARDVARK was monitoring her and she couldn't move from the floor or she'd show up on their radar and they'd know she was there.

The last thing she'd eaten was a rotisserie chicken that had apparently been on the counter for many days as it was rotting with bugs and maggots all over it. I vomited in the sink, and then helped her get dressed, she was so frail and feeble. An ambulance came and from there she mostly became a ward of the state, living in group homes for people with mental health issues, which was horrible for her during the months when she was sane, but surrounded by the lunacy of the other patients.

I tried to keep in touch, take her out to lunch, let her see her grandkids, had her over for Thanksgiving, birthday parties, and stuff like that, but as she was aging she started to become abusive, saying all sorts of awful things, and I began to withdraw and detach myself from her so I could protect myself and just focus on my children.

The last time I really interacted with her was not too long after my big brother died, which affected me profoundly, and she kept feeling the need to tell me that my brother was an evil person and would definitely spend eternity in fire.

I'm an atheist, but her insistence on repeating this led to me just cutting her off.

From there she developed dementia/Alzheimers and really seemed to go downhill quickly, and this ultimately led to her death.

Last night my eldest daughter was asking me if I had any happy memories of her grandma, and I just couldn't think of one in that moment, every memory that came to mind throughout the entirety of my life with my mother was bad, 100% trauma, dark thoughts just overshadowed everything,

but today I can remember that way back in the beginning she was a realllly good mom. She was an incredible cook, like world class, and I remember her teaching me things in the kitchen. I remember her helping with my homework, doing arts and crafts projects, and she'd sew clothes for us, and even make incredible pro-level costumes for Halloween and school plays. One day I came home and said I needed a bull costume with really big horns for a school play, she went out and bought fur and sewed me a full length costume with a long tail and somehow used paper mache to make this super realistic bull head with horns and everything. When I showed up for the play all the other kids just had horns cut out of paper that were clipped to their hair, and I was moved to the center of the stage to become the focal point of the whole play. It was incredible.

Also, she is the one who taught me to love to read, we used to all just lay on couches for hours and read, so much so that in 4th grade I was testing at post-college Ievels in reading comprehension and grammar.

My mom also taught me the beauty in writing poetry, and how cathartic it could be. Her poetry was actually the first I read as an adult. Unlike my pithy poems, hers flowed gorgeously and was dripping with flowery language in the old style of centuries past.

So, in the end, that's how I'll try to remember her, as a loving, caring, and talented mother who just got sick and never recovered. Hopefully in time I'll learn to let go of the bad memories and more good ones will come to me, but at the very least I'll always owe her a debt for giving me the gift of poetry.

I'm glad you finally have peace, Mom.

Cassandra Estella Decker

2/2/50 - 11/1/23

PS: I'll never get over how strange it is that such vivacious young people eventually become this decrepit older version of themselves as you see my mom devolve into in this last photo. Life is such a tragedy.

[samueldeckerthompson]

[samueldeckerthompson]

[samueldeckerthompson]

[samueldeckerthompson]

I know it's not easy, these phones and all their apps are designed to be extremely addictive, but you get enough time on it, you know you do, you don't need to be pointlessly scrolling when those little loves of your life are right there in front of you waiting to create new memories. Live in your life, live in your moments, stop letting it all slip away just so you can be a voyeur into whatever nonsense the rest of the world is up to. Prioritize your children!

[samueldeckerthompson]

She wanted to be free again,

to remember how to breathe again,

to learn to drink and flirt again,

without the fear of a man

causing her pain,

to just enjoy the moment,

to relish the electricity of his touch,

without expecting it would lead to much.

She just wanted to live free again.

-Samuel Decker Thompson

[samueldeckerthompson]

Time takes so much time to reminisce over,

I can spend a day thinking about a moment,

my nose tricks me into thinking the scent of you still rests in my sheets,

and I'm off to the races

to that night you put me through my paces,

it was a lifetime ago,

this bed has grown cold,

I am weary and old,

but still pretending that time was just once upon a yesterday.

-Samuel Decker Thompson

[samueldeckerthompson]

[samueldeckerthompson]

When women give life

and men so frequently take it

you need not wonder why

these spindly legged fawns

begin to fear so early on

that they could ever make it

as they prance through the treacherous forest

of young adulthood

under the watchful eyes

of these predators

who lie

in full length camouflage.

-Samuel Decker Thompson

[samueldeckerthompson]

I've wandered for a thousand lifetimes,

in search of my eternal home,

and there's nothing cute to announce here,

it doesn't exist in your cold embrace,

so the quest continues,

I must move on.

-Samuel Decker Thompson

[samueldeckerthompson]

I hate when people tell me that, I'm not sure why, but it just rubs me the wrong way, on at least two different occasions I've mentally checked out of first dates the moment they've told me to stand up straight, even though we were otherwise clicking. It just seemed like a huge red flag for them to already be talking down to me as if they were my mother, and as if I couldn't possibly already be aware that my posture wasn't ideal. I know I look hella better when I stand up straight, but I just find the effort to be exhausting, and the truth is there's a reason I started slouching in the first place. I have really bad vision, and I learned early on that if I was looking too far ahead, where things started getting foggy and blurry, I'd miss cracks in the sidewalk or other obstacles that would trip me up, so I just started looking down when I walked, and focusing on just a few feet ahead of me, and it solved the problem ... and oddly enough, that outlook seems to work well with everything else going on in life, I just focus on my present, the eternal now, and don't worry too much about a future I can barely fathom off in the distance.

So, anyway, mind your business, don't tell me how to walk, only my mom gets to do that. Otherwise, I do what feels right for myself in the moment, and you should too.

[samueldeckerthompson]

I search for love in the bottom of a glass,

remembering midnight trysts of years past,

I'm dying of thirst,

so I drink my pain,

knowing I'll never see any of them again.

-Samuel Decker Thompson

[samueldeckerthompson]

It is a rather sad and complicated truth that the toughest, most self-reliant, unoffendable people with a great sense of humor and immense creative talent are often the ones who have suffered the greatest abuse and trauma in their youth.

While, on the other hand, the weakest, most fragile people, who tend to lack motivation and work ethic, were often given a childhood full of material possessions, love, attention, and support.

-Samuel Decker Thompson

[samueldeckerthompson]

It is a rather sad and complicated truth that the toughest, most self-reliant, unoffendable people with a great sense of humor and immense creative talent are often the ones who have suffered the greatest abuse and trauma in their youth.

While, on the other hand, the weakest, most fragile people, who tend to lack motivation and work ethic, were often given a childhood full of material possessions, love, attention, and support.

-Samuel Decker Thompson

[samueldeckerthompson]

What a piece of crap poem, I'm just as offended as you are that it exists.