In Remembrance of Feelings

By Xlibris US

Theres an evil that spread destruction to everyday people like you and I. That malignant growth have pulled families apart and shredded their lifes forever. My book, In Remembrance of Feelings, is a seventy-one thousand word non-fiction monogram that touches on a childs demeanor and events as he watches his mother being torn to pieces by cancer. The complexity the child has are weighted by the isolation and the aftermath of what is next? And what to do? The inner conflict that he is faced with, offers an avant-garde approach by humanizing the emotions that plague him. In the book, as he makes sense of his tragedy [presented in regular print], he from time-to-time, reflects back and changes scenes (in bold print) to help get through his ordeal; and reminiscence about how it all started. Thus the scene changes in retrospect to further foster the chaotic mindset he is faced with. As well as, the emotional impact of how his nerves were singled out from the disconnection of his mind to the loneliness that repels his heart. The day to day survival of dealing with his mothers pain and the divide of his own life, in trying to appear normal on the outside, proves to be too much for the child to absorb. Therefore, he keeps his emotions retained in his domain. Only to be retouched and resurfaced when he becomes an adult. The writings of his ordeal became therapy of sort to combat cancer and deaths cohorts like depression, fear, and terror. There were good days they shared like walking in the breeze or hiding in the leaves. With a laughter that stretched their smiles, until reality sat back in and corralled her pain as she echoed for help. Then the internal fight goes on for both of them. He wonders if his mother will get any better, through the treatments she receives. And shes, hoping that the medication would relieve and ease her discomfort.

'In Remembrance of Feelings' is a story for all of us. My book displays a co-partnership with society's woes and the solidarity for the removal of pain that infiltrates when death follows cancer. My chronicles are society's anecdote. A hard pill to swallow when the infestation of cancer remains spilled to all sectors of our world

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499027686

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Dexter G. Thompson.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014910373

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4990-2769-3

                Softcover        978-1-4990-2770-9

                eBook             978-1-4990-2768-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/08/2014

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Mrs. Gladys S. Thompson

I couldn’t decipher her language as she stared at me, trying to express her feelings through eye contact, I guess. She had taken a turn for the worst. Her movements were real slow, and she had barely eaten any food for weeks. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. Our roles had reversed. She, the motionless infant like figure, whose eyes were barely opened as she lay in bed, while I was the adult, trying to understand her or what she was trying to relay to me as I looked at her. Almost glassy eyed in appearance, I sensed she was crying or maybe telling me good-bye in her own way. I was saddened. I didn’t want to be there, and I’m sure she didn’t want me to see her like that. It was only fourteen years earlier when she attended to me in a hospital where I almost died as an infant. The she I’m referring to is my mother. She was dying of ca ncer.

In a dreadful way, I walked aimlessly to the living room and sat on the couch. It was around 11:30 p.m., and I hadn’t done my homework yet. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. As I pondered and wondered, I drifted off to sleep, or at least, what I thought was sleep. Then suddenly sounds began bouncing around my head, which left me clueless and scared to what I had dreaded. The crying went on and on as the echoes bounced off every nerve in my mind. It couldn’t be, I told myself. I knew I was dreaming … I just had to be. The more and more I tried to convince myself, the more I curled up on the couch with a pillow, covering my head. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t force my inner self to cooperate. The more and more I debated, the louder and more distinct the cries and moans became. That time it was true. It wasn’t the sounds from the TV. It was the bellowing from my sisters; who sharp sounds became more profound as their yells blended in the open air, which fared well with the spell of death that lingered without a care.

To my muscles that failed me from the couch, I cradled. From my outspoken mind, but only on the inside, where I was so dazed and my mind completely mangled. How could I get up and face that morbid scene when time had stopped and ripped me of my dreams? I couldn’t take it anymore, the screaming and all, because every cry opened a different wound. I was damaged more times than my heart pounded, for death had its own shape of gloom. And terror wasn’t far behind to reissue and resume another blow, and how that duo messed with my mind so. But terror didn’t stop there, with its punishing ways. Terror had summoned me, as if I was a fugitive on an evil rant, to turn myself in to face the discord which held me in check. My mind was on a collision course with death, and soon my heart wouldn’t have anything left. To my dismay, terror had stalked me and found that I was its next prey. While the act of death beckoned me, punishing me to get up and go see what I was so desperately fighting against … seeing her just lying there in a demised state. It was completely horrible. Death and terror had wrapped itself around my heart and squeezed it greatly, not letting up and making sure that its clutches do the most damage.

Then the screams started again. Like a thorn in my side to my mouth that was so dry; and I had no place to hide, for my feelings were shot and my nerves were so compromised. But still, that thorn had penetrated all over my body. But everything wasn’t rosy. My mother, my bouquet of flowers, was gone, wilted away in a pain that she didn’t proclaim, and her life reign was only forty-one years. Terror’s pain had demanded me, compelled me to adhere to those tormenting sounds that became effervescent to my senses. And terror made its own provisions not to become silent, but for me to succumb to its presence, which engulfed my well-being. I felt like a glass tumbler that had been knocked off a table and broken. Pieces of my inner soul were flying through the air in slow-motion effects. Tumbling and rotating as my mind was pushing away from me. Trying to escape a most certain fate, of being confronted by my inner fears … that long, dark path of uncertainty.

My thoughts were all pressurized, ready to expand and blow out a lash of anger from the betrayal of God. God could have refilled her, refueled her life with the air she needed to perk up her lungs, for Momma to be whole again. Oh, how wonderful that would have been, not to have ended her shortened life.

Inside of me, my nerves were taking a beating. It was like one nerve grabbing hold on another nerve as they tried to huddle to get some relief from their distress. I was frozen. I just didn’t know what to do or how to relay what I felt on the inside. I was so lost and scared at that thing called death. Death had made me speechless. Death had confused me, and death had attached to its friend … sorrow. I fell in headfirst in that deep hole that sorrow provided. Sorrow had started the process of burling inside of me. It was the emotion that stung my senses and added venom to my veins. Then sorrow had weakened my resolve to where I was so empty inside. Then all of a sudden, death’s cousin came along … depression. Depression invited its way into the depths of my nerves, preying and stalking its gripping touch to all my sane emotions. Then eventually, depression wore my resolution down. Then I was left with only a shell of my inner soul, an outline of my character, and an abandonment of my feelings that bolted out into a convoluted spiral that drained me and pulled and tugged my inner state apart. I had nowhere to go. I was lost, and my feelings of helplessness entered into a confused network of synaptic sobs and axial anxiety where disorientation was becoming a common set with me. All of that confusion weighed on my mind and then added the extra burden of cluelessness to the equation. That toxic mix was surely fixed to add grief to my unimaginable situation.

My world had stopped. It was as if someone had wedged a piece of wood in my gears of time. As the gears jerked, so went my inner conflict of shaking nerves from the sounds I heard and the hesitation of thought, which led to the unhealthy dreams I fought in my mind, when cancer caused my fears to be elevated all the time.

The mood was just so confusing to me. Knowing what had just happened, I couldn’t distinguish whether to sit on the couch or start the longest walk of my entire life to see her like that. The distance to my mother’s room was short, but the cadence that fueled my heart was a mile a second. At that blistering pace, I still found it hard to face my running nerves, which dashed and curved themselves around death’s evil space. Either my steps became shorter or my mind had extended the pathway to her room. Either way, it pained me so.

Before I arrived in the doorway of her bedroom, the light that was cast from within was a bit brighter than normal. In the past, I never paid that much attention to it, the light, I mean. Why was the light that bright? I knew I’d been in there hundreds of times, I guess. Just like my feet that had declined me moments earlier, my hesitation, subsequently, followed through. The endless walk I took, which matched the endless screams that smacked me in my tracks, seemed to go on without faltering.

I couldn’t do it anymore. It was real bad. I need some help, God. I’d asked God to take me from there. I pleaded with God. My tension was relentless. Over and over, the sounds in there sent back overwhelming consequences to my already-damaged psyche. I was like the playback function from a tape recorder. My mind ran in circles. A continuous loop of fear that bounced all around me in the most profound way. But I couldn’t push the off button. I didn’t know how to. The gory sounds just recycled itself over and over again as it devoured me and cracked what bit of sanity I had left. I really didn’t fit in with the second-to-second displays of mournful discontent that was present. The atmosphere of cries that filled my eyes from the sights I’d seen didn’t calm me a bit from death’s evil scene. Why did death decide to pick my mother and my home that time of year? It was shortly after Momma’s birthday in the same month that Christ was born. If that wasn’t one hell of a psychological tactic for death to immobilize its frightful ways, then I didn’t know what. The pertinent thing I knew was the sobering reality of death and the barrage of weeps and shrieks that didn’t leave me alone. But no matter how death’s eyes, with visions open wide of that bleak and eerie sight, appeared to be my tormentor, when death captured me throughout that night. I wanted so desperately to erase my memory, which had stored visions of that evil scene to reprise a new sight unseen all around me. And sorrow, with its keen impulses, steadily drained me.

There were no equalizing forces to combat the wealth of terror’s mates that revealed my inner conflict and degraded all of me. That unbalance of those negative forces wasn’t fair, nor was it fair to take my momma away from my young world. As I mindfully preached to the heavens, all of my thoughts and remedies were completely jettisoned to the ideal of what I believed to be a sane approach. Instead of leaving the insanity around me and trying to contain the damage, and I could only hope for the better, but for my nerves, I couldn’t manage—for there was a more settling nature to intervene, from terror’s sight that had a covenant with death’s evil scheme.

I had hoped her transformation, when she left, wasn’t as painful as the pain I had witnessed those many days and nights before. My dreams were from a waking memory to the assortment of bad dreams I had before. My dreams were a gateway to a time of lost recollections, which bared many reflections from my mind, in which I had wished and prayed so many times to end my mother’s affliction. But as I hoped and dreamed, more signals were sent by me to the heavens for the restoration of what I once had, but to no avail. My prayers completely fell to the possibility of fulfillment and the indulgence of reverie that had reshaped my despondent outlook from what cancer and death took from me. So my hopes and dreams were from another round of nerves that lashed out for a new rendition of cries from side to side, as well as the cries on my inside that were threefold … ripping, tearing, and shredding, displaying all my earthly inhibitions that I couldn’t hold.

But my cries had sunk in and infiltrated the most topical layer of my damaged body. Finding out in that cruel way that my mother didn’t exist anymore was so very wrong and a senseless victory for death’s evil ways. It didn’t serve my mind any plausible reason for cancer or death to seal her fate like that. Only heaven knows the grasp of my terror. My chance of a desired ending fell as death shook the life from my mother. It was so bad that death’s network of buddies meshed its aftermath solely on me and my family who grieved. And my collected woes had grabbed a hold to send my message loud and clear: that I was deceived by death’s evil deed and how that deception gripped me so boldly. Through my anguish, no matter how death told its deed by adding a punishing blow upon me and made me stream a liberal cry that I bled even more and more on the inside. With no bandages to fix or thread to stitch my wounds and my sister’s cries still aloud with the affliction of hurt in the air of death’s evil smirk.

What did I do to upset you so, God? Even in my wildest imagination, I’d never thought I would be living without her or having this conversation with you to bring her back to me. I never thought my body could ache so! I hurt from my knuckles to my knees, and my eyes were blurred from the tears, I couldn’t see through my own pain and sorrow, not knowing what would follow. Time etched slowly by, leaving a lasting impression on my fears and my depression on the inside. Pain, sorrow, and all of death’s band of buddies was a by-product of cancer’s harmful scheme that attacked me like a wild wolf that ravished its prey,…tearing, yanking, and pulling at my insides as my nerves went limp.

Death refused to give me a break. It moved in like an unwanted guest that took over the mood and mannerisms that controlled and had its way with me while I searched my insides and noticed all the hideous debris that plagued me. Death also gave misdirection to my broken heart, hovering around, attaching itself to any unprotected nerve and injecting its repugnant ooze throughout my driven soul. But that was death’s effects and how it unfolded, its manner of operation, and oh, how it ruled. Death measured me from the start, stalking me with its omnipotent poison that latched and gripped its unearthly and rude shadow on my highly volatile metabolism. Linearly, death made me weak all over, causing me not to have an appetite and broke me down to a size of an angstrom, not knowing what to say or how to express my normal thought processes. Dimensionally, death stretched me. Death had distorted my numbed sense of reality while it circumvented every quartile of my body. My visual effect was nonshaped, all lopsided and distorted. Death backstabbed me as it prepared to take me out of life’s equation, by factoring in my mother’s death times the amount of grief and heartache that death caused by its sensational and emotional feeding frenzy that blanketed me. Death tore down my defenses like a wrecking ball to my building structures of life. And death’s presence ruled my inner works like Genghis Khan on a tyrant-filled day. Undoubtedly, that was cold. So went the night when Momma passed. There was no more light for her. No more getting up and talking to me, and no more looking at her sandy-colored to light-auburn hair. That would be a fraction of things I would miss, but all of me would surely suffer.

In my labyrinth of disjoined thoughts with diffused whispers from above and lessons untaught, what new path should I slide upon to keep my sanity whole? From down in my own darkness, my inner life unfolded. No separation of mind to thought or mind to avoid, but my uncontrolled madness brought me no joy at all. And the sea of endless cries and bellowing shouts carried comfort to death’s arrival to my decaying house. Though death rejoiced in all of its evil grandeur, then went the meeting of my nerves that were so unsure. And the pain that was left for me to reflect upon surely added weight to my bitterness and heartache. While my every emotion was labored then death injected its dutiful saber to my heart with a twist. Contorting and distorting its spiral screws to my nerves that I soon couldn’t resist. I was bundled and shell shocked with no place to hide and no refuge from the inside, with no gleaming light in which to guide me from death’s awful sight. And the air I breathe had no comfort or meaning to me, and my costly dreams quickly became reality. For me to sustain life I had no use for. Nor did I have use for the sites I’d seen with a montage of horrific scenes and gestures that made me cringe with death’s evil chorale. It’s the only tune that delivered so much ire and gloom from those haunting moods, to what was already my space, my elaborate tomb. In my own cryptic mind, with narrow halls and small compartmental stalls that housed my greatest fears of terror; and how it always reappeared. With every desperate measure, I tried to shift scenes, but my cries inside detected a new regime of lingering sobs while death continued to rob me, and again my nerves fled. Rummaging to find their way out as my sorrow grew and my will shouted, Oh, please and help me O Thee! For I know not what to do and death’s mood is all so new to me. That night was like forever, and my mind was slowly leaving me while my heart withered.

It was wearisome and difficult. There was no rest for my nerves as they continued to soak and bathe in the turpitude of villainous acts by death’s evil trap. I wanted so badly to add a coating to my skin and hope that the painful crying sounds wouldn’t come in and absorb all the screams that were aimed at me and reduce the carnage so again I could breathe. But death had enacted a cruel scene and played the part of humiliating life with my nerves that were so frail and so contrite. Yet still in my eyes, without surprise, there was no sleep for me, and my mind decreed an order of sorts. To be determined and demand death’s terror to stop and lie low and let my nerves catch up to fight death’s evil foes. But still I was hampered to save my will … my power of determination, I couldn’t conceal. At the same time, being provoked and manhandled by death’s confines with limitless thoughts that echo all through my broken mind.

My inner ear caught the brunt of my inherent noise, sending balling sounds that roared and shook my equilibrium to its core; and while death was going about its ways to cause all the mayhem that wasn’t going to soon fade. Chilling and desolate signs of a fury-fueled storm of grief that anger me to the point of locking up, yet my fears still flowed free. But not as free from the scared limitations that death had bounded me. Not as free to hold on to good thoughts where death’s sediment had grounded me to a complete halt. That was my life, so thick in dregs. I didn’t know how to flee. Maybe quicksand would have been a much better place for me. If I had a better chance, then my nerves would had been set free. And the strangeness my body felt was a complete mystery to me.

The dark side of death was abstruse and mystic. Death had its own language and verbiage, and the voltage it regulated was surely electrifying. And death’s unspoken words seemed to mock me. It spoke to me in clamoring style. It started with my sister’s cries, which seemed to echo for miles and miles, and continuing with me to see how much I could internally bleed. So that was how death got my attention as if it was a bell tower resonating its bombastic sound in radiating form. Just showing off its brazen ways as it touched me in resounding precision. And also, death’s voice sprouted out to my family and cultivated their cries like a chain-reaction explosion, leaving me nothing on the inside while my nerves were all broken and in a demolished state . It made me ask Why, God, why? all the time.

The walk to her room was not a comfort to my ailing soul. My snail-like moves matched the pensiveness that I had manifested. My feet were still heavy and taut, as if I had walked through waist-deep mud while my heart was sinking. I was diverted by the screams that hit me like a force field as I started to step in there, and my mind refused … I couldn’t go any further.

I ended up on the couch parallel to her room. I couldn’t go in. My sinking soul had taken a toll on my knees and nerves, and I was content just to sit there. I felt somewhat comfortable sitting on the side where the darkness was. I wanted to hold back my screaming, but inside my mind, that wasn’t an easy task. But the sounds from inside her room matched the inner gloom of my lonely room. Death pushed me to join in with that sad heart-filled chorus of streaming screams and menacing woes, but in my own conscience, I felt trapped and pulled to grab a hold, as my humility gravitated to my only sense of comfort … my ailing soul.

Like the fog that changed direction as the wind blew, so went my nerves every time a shout or a loud cry occurred. Those sounds just pierced my ears, and my mind went ballistic. I was tensed with sheer horror while my nerves dangled to the end of their own survival. Then the scenes shifted in my mind from the bellowed sounds that haunted me all around. The pointed calls shrilled and added walls that kept the awful sounds in but did nothing to alter death’s win. Death’s air dragged me like an uncooperative subject that had tried to fight back. With God on my side and heaven as my focal point, it didn’t mean much when all that convergence wasn’t enough, when death magnified its gripping hold on me. I was bombarded from all sides. Drafted in a military-type style where I had no choice to attempt to undo what was so dreadfully awful. And I marched to a bulge of needless shrieks and sobbing eyes which I still found hard to digest on the inside while terror’s pill just lingered to the dreadful side effects that were so painful and my mind was a complete wreck. Then my will had incapacitated me without my shield—my mother and her strong will.

I was left alone in that place, in my