Stockton County Cowboys Book 4: Branding Cowboys

Chapter 6: A Mother’s Son

Chapter 6: A Mother’s Son

Katherine Williams-Boxford, my mother, drank herself to death. At age sixty-five she had found a way of ruining her liver and the once-sturdy relationships she had with her two children, Cissy and me. Mother failed to seek help for her addiction, took on the role of skin and bones, and never believed for once that she had had a real problem, which were all typical in an alcoholic’s short life.

How many times had I insisted she go to AA meetings or seek out other conventional methods of help in her life? Too many to count. Never had she listened to me, which had ended up killing our relationship and dissolving any form of communication between us in her later years. And never had she listened to Cissy’s prying, unable to comprehend her daughter’s methodic remedy to Mother’s alcoholic binges.

Cissy claimed she had given up on Mother, never referring to the woman as her own flesh and blood. When Renner proposed to my sister, Cissy turned on Mother and never looked back. Katherine not only had lost her two children, but she had also lost a son-in-law and two grandchildren.

I had missed Mother and thought of her often. The last four years of her life were rocky, I knew, choosing not to be a part of them. Mother had found a love for drinking instead of her family and spent every evening alone with a bottle of gin or vodka. One can only do that for so many nights before it catches up with them, I knew, and maybe she did too.

The beginning to her end transpired two days before Christmas, four years ago. She was listening to Kenny Rodgers sing Christmas carols on her stereo, and consumed enough vodka for three men. She was dressed in her cotton robe and slippers, decided to get some fresh air, and escaped to her apartment’s balcony. The night was bitter cold, but she probably didn’t feel that way because of all the alcohol in her system. She carried her drink of choice to the balcony, sucked in the crisp evening air, and lost her balance, tumbling over the wrought-iron railing. Falling four flights down hadn’t killed her. Perhaps a Christmas miracle had occurred since she landed on a snow-covered row of English boxed pines, with her drink still in hand. Mother suffered from a minor concussion, a broken finger, and a two-inch gash along her right inner thigh, which a few stitches had mended.

Thereafter she fell from grace like an aged actress. She became disoriented almost daily, suffered from dementia, and continued to kill her liver. After forty-eight long months of living on the edge, she had passed away in her sleep, alone.

Cissy said I was like Mother, which bothered me to the core. That was one of the reasons why I stopped drinking. Another reason was that I kept seeing my mother fall from her balcony. All I could picture inside the folds of my mind was how the cotton robe around her middle loosened, her slippers slipped off her feet, and Katherine’s golden hair blew around her head upon her decline. It was a ghostly sight, I thought, which scared the hell of me, proving that fear was awesome therapy instead of having sessions with Dr. Stanley Banger on Ride Road. Maybe Cissy was right about me being like our mother. Maybe not. Time and staying sober could only prove her wrong.