30 Days of Haiga 2017 Day 19/OctPoWriMo 2017: Day 1: Opening a Can of Worms

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Verse and text manipulation by the Real Cie

Cie's Notes:

With the addition of prose, the Haiga becomes a Haibun.

This is today's Haibun. As it happens, the prompt for 30 Days of Haiga and the prompt for OctPoWriMo both work well for today's post, so I'm going to use this  Haibun for both. 

This is not a happy little tale of colorful flowers and chirping birds, unicorns farting rainbows, or boy meets girl and they live happily ever after in a glorious palace in twoo wuv forever.

This is my story, it's sad but true, about a crazy old curmudgeon that some of you knew.

Let's go back to my childhood now, boys and girls, so maybe you and I can understand some of the things that make me the way that I am.

Even today, when I am approaching 53 and my mother will be 79 in the middle of next year, my relationship with her is still complicated. But I won't convolute things by talking about the current dynamic between us. For now, we will stay with the incident that happened long ago which prompted the creation of this Haibun.

When I was a young child, no more than five or six years old, my mother took to singing The Hearse Song to me.

The Hearse Song dates back to the time of the Crimean War. Here are the lyrics.

"Don't you ever laugh as the hearse goes by,
For you may be the next one to die.
They wrap you up in big white sheets
and cover you from head to feet.
They put you in a big black box
And cover you with dirt and rocks.
All goes well for about a week,
Until your coffin begins to leak.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle on your snout,
They eat your eyes, they eat your nose,
They eat the jelly between your toes.
A big green worm with rolling eyes
Crawls in your stomach and out your sides.
Your stomach turns a slimy green,
And pus pours out like whipping cream.
You'll spread it on a slice of bread,
And that's what you eat when you are dead."

When she reached the line of "that's what you eat when you are dead," she would poke me in the belly and laugh. I would run to my room screaming. My parents found this quite amusing.

A little background on my mother. On her mother's side, she came from a very strict religious family, the kind which believed in End Times prophecies. One such relative believed that even the legs of tables needed to be covered and that animals such as cats were Satan's creatures because they are prone to lifting their tails in the air and showing off their privates. Pretty much everyone was thought to be going to hell because there were so many rules that it was nearly impossible not to break them.

This family did not produce a lot of happy people.

I don't know much about my great-grandmother on this side of the family as she died before I was born. I do know that she had a lot of children, the last one of which was born when my mother and aunt were already in their teens. This child fell off a piano stool and injured her back when she was two years old. She subsequently developed meningitis and died. I saw the picture of her in her casket. I initially thought she was lying in a bassinet. When I was younger I thought this picture was "gruesome." Now I just find it sad, and, in its way, beautiful. These were people who came from a time when there were not a lot of pictures taken. Sometimes a "memento mori" was the only image they had of a loved one.

My great-grandmother was a stout, sturdy woman. She was only five feet tall and weighed around 300 pounds. I am not pointing this out to shame or berate her, and I do hope others who may choose to comment will have the maturity and courtesy not to do so as well. From learning more about her and the other members of the family, it's clear to me that she had endocrine problems, which I share. I'm taller than she was, courtesy of my father's side of the family, but I have a large body type, which my father's slender relatives would find shameful and something that "needs to be dealt with."

My great-grandmother died from acute myelogenous leukemia at the age of 79. Within the space of a year, she went from 300 pounds to 95 before passing away.

My great-grandmother held beliefs such as a red moon being a sign of a coming war. She was also extremely religious, and, inadvertently, religiously abusive. The superstitious beliefs she clung to came from her predecessors and were passed down to her descendants.

When I entered puberty, my bipolar disorder onset, but being type 2, which is harder to diagnose, the true nature of my psychiatric condition was misdiagnosed until I was nearly 40. Looking back, it was easy to see the ways in which the religious paranoia and the bipolar disorder fed each other. I used to study my Bible, particularly the Book of Revelation, for hours on end, looking for prophetic signs. I was devoutly religious until I got into my late teens when encountering far too many judgmental and hateful people calling themselves "Christian" caused me to start questioning my faith.

I went through a New Age phase which lasted nearly 30 years and also ended in disappointment as New Age ideals share more than a little of the judgmental, victim-blaming attitudes of Christianity. 

At this point in my life, I'm an agnostic. I dislike organized religion and feel it spreads a lot of harm, but I acknowledge having met people of faith who are genuinely Christian in their attitudes. I find full-on Atheism far too depressing, and, while most Atheists I know are good people who simply don't have any religious or metaphysical beliefs, I can't tolerate the acerbic sort who love to sneer at anyone who does. Thus, I fall in the middle and garner criticism from both sides.

I no longer fear the worms, but I still can't sleep in total darkness. It feels too much like being trapped in a coffin. Also, I've left instructions with my son that when this old carcass goes belly up, he is to arrange for it to be cremated. Although I'll no longer be in it, I can't abide the idea of it being stuffed into a coffin and buried in the ground. 

My attitude about my corpse is similar to my attitude about the zombie pancreas which currently resides in it. When I inject the insulin necessary to maintain my life in a body with a non-functional pancreas, I gleefully think: "take that, you stupid zombie pancreas! I don't need you after all."

With my vacated body, my thought is "fuck you, Worms. You ain't getting none of this!"

However, I still wish I could reach back in time and tell the frightened and overly sensitive child that I was that it's okay, that the worms aren't going to get me, that it was wrong of my mother to sing the Hearse Song to me.

My mother wonders what I did to cause myself to have all my endocrine and psychological problems. I've never said it out loud because it wouldn't be worth the trouble, but my thought is always "I'm related to you."

And now you know what you're all dealing with. So you can avoid it like the plague, which most people do. Or you can stick around because there's lots more to come.

~Cie~

Here's the Hearse Song as performed by Harley Poe for your listening pleasure.

Prompts: