RJ Smith – 2020

My mother Harriet “Tish” Smith is dead. She died, much like in her life, alone, unhappy and afraid. It was sad, yet predictable. She abandoned everyone who ever loved her. Until the age of five through eight we lived in Ossining, New York, just a hop and skip from the famed Sing-SingPenitentiary where Albert Fish, America’s first serial killer was electrocuted in January 1936. Even the Son of Sam once sat behind those cold iron bars. The place is legendary.

Before the age of eight, I had a lot of friends and my brother and sister would come over to see us at Christmas (they had a different father). Mom had abandoned them a few years previously.

My brother Larry and sister Laura lived with their dad who thankfully took ’em’ in, raised ’em, loved them and made a safe comfortable life for both. They were raised normally, had a sheltered existence and grew up with friends, school, and a typical American childhood in the seventies. Both excelled at school and eventually went on to college. They later raised families and I’m so happy things went well for them.

I took on ALL the fear, fright, abuse and sorrow for all of us. My path would be much different. I didn’t have a daddy, or at least that’s what Tish told me. It was a convenient time to say he died in the war.

It all began in the dead of winter on Christmas Eve. That’s when mom stabbed a boyfriend named Freddie, (Read: Santa Claus Killer) carried me out of the house and put me in the Camaro. Arriving in New York City, she pointed to a bodega, shoved a bunch of bills into my small hands and sent me to buy her a few packs of Salem cigarettes (nobody cared back then). As soon as my feet dug into the dirty snow, the Camaro pulled away from the curb abandoning me right there and then.

I was her youngest child and yet, there I was crying on 42nd Street & 8th Avenue.  Snow tumbled from dark ominous clouds, sirens shrieked in the distance and someone was screaming for their life.

Aventura, Miami 2017

Now, close your eyes and imagine this: An eight-year-old abandoned in 1974 times Square, surrounded by peep shows, porn theaters, drug dealers, It was a place littered with snares, nightmares, and agony. That’s where I’d grow into my teens… on the streets, learning that life and surviving at any cost.

So, on February 28th, 2020, when I got a phone call from my older brother who lives in Utah, I wasn’t expecting him to ask me to get down there. Apparently Tish had cancer and had just received her second dose of chemotherapy. I knew nothing about it, we were estranged despite my attempts in 2017 to reconnect and get to know her.

So, now, here I was, four-hundred miles from Miami and my brother wanted me down there. He gave me the neighbor’s phone number and I promised I’d call. Apparently, Tish had been found two days in a row on the floor. She couldn’t talk, couldn’t move, and had a 103-degree temperature. So, I did what any good son might and called North Miami Fire Rescue.

Calling Larry and relating what I’d been told and what actions I took, he asked me to drive down to “see what’s up?” I can assure you, I never in a million years ever believed I’d be the adult sibling who’d get in a car, rush 400 miles to the hospital and hold her hand as she lay in Aventura Hospital and Medical Center. That first night, the doctor told me she was dying and that I should contact the family. Although my brother cared, that was the extent of anyone who gave a shit. Laura was there for a few hours too.

When I first saw her, something happened in me. Deep down where the past nags in the gut, all the anger, disappointment, frustration and hatred I had for her, the person responsible for Hell on Earth for that young boy who grew up on the streets of Manhattan. It evaporated, it was almost like everything that I went through ended on her death bed. A sense of relief came over me.

One of the last things she mumbled to me was this: “my kids aren’t here but I guess after what I did to them they wouldn’t be.”  That would be the closest thing to “I’m sorry” she would allow herself to say.  I got to say goodbye, called a priest who gave her last rights and the very next morning at 7:30 a.m. she let go of this thing called life.

Sometimes in our lives, we allow things to follow us around like a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. Pain, regret, and anger are hard to resolve. Yet in the end, those we hate most seem to be pretty easy to forgive.

UPDATED: 17 March 2020