Sorry bout the long post.

This picture reminds me of my mom many years ago.

She was noble.
Strong willed, well educated, smart and had the glow of elegance about her.
She taught her children well and had a bright and beautiful career ahead of her.

Her work was also the main source of income for our family.

She was a Financial Manager for a startup and she was unmissable. They [the company] were going places and taking her with them.

We were well off - but I was too young to care.

To her it wasn't all about the money either. She had a passion for what she was doing and she even managed to balance work time with her family.

My dad used to be a cop but...

When the government changed, opportunities for men of his ethnicity were not given much chance for advancement. He was a great cop though. I'm not sure how far he made it, lieutenant I think, but during the Apartheid protests he never, ever, gave his men permission to shoot at the (violent) protestors.

Anyway - he resigned and became an entrepreneur. He was doing alright but he didn't invest much time in it as he was looking after us kids as well.

Then one night a terrible thing happened.

My mother was attacked working late.
Monsters broke into the company building and ripped the jewelry from her neck and wrists.
Then they stabbed her a dozen or so times with a screwdriver.

They were wolves. Savage feral wolves.

She survived though, and drove home in the middle of the night bleeding and crying. She turned the handle and stumbled into the front door and onto the floor.

It was the first time in my life I ever felt AND understood what agony was.

My heart sank to my feet. It must have been adrenaline kicking in but what happened next is nothing but a blur to me.

She came home from the hospital a long time after that. All healed up!

Or so I thought...

You see, the wolves weren't gone.

They were in her head now. Eating her up. Slowly and agonizingly.

The light in her eyes were gone. Only embers remained.

She woke up in the nights screaming

She saw "demons" in the windows and had to take regular trips to the asylum to bring her back to the real world.

They gave her pills that blotted out her personality but took away the nightmares and the visions.

Slowly but surely she became less and less of who and what she was.

She stopped working.

She lost all ambition and as months dragged into years and years dragged into decades she got better then worse then better and most recently worse.

For the past couple of weeks she has been in, what i call, zombie mode. She sits there in front of the television. Staring at the floor with an unlit cigarette in her hand - then every two hours or so her neck bobs forward and she sleeps. Sitting up.

When she talks it's a mush of blurred words and stuttered lines.

When she walks she drags her feet unable to lift them.

The doctor found a way to bring a bit of her back by mixing up the dosages on the many pills she takes. But it's not consistent, she'll be fine today bad tomorrow.

Those people that attacked her.

They gave me a lesson in hatred and I had learned it well.

I hated them. I vowed to never forgive them.

I walked around with the image of these monsters in my head.

Hating everyone who shared their race.

My dad was trying his best to keep the family on it's feet.

Working, taking care of her and taking care of us took it's toll though.

We had a great family who stepped in where they could, but people can only do so much for you before you become a nuisance.

There is one thing my mom had always been doing though...

...Whether she was bright as daylight or as dull as 'zombie mode' she would always keep to her core principles.

She told me once to 'Stop being so angry all the time'

And I asked her how I could ever NOT be ANGRY.

She told me 'She wasn't angry. She wasn't sad. How could I be?'

She had forgiven them and prayed that they turned their lives around, and that they might be blessed.

I was angry at her for this but eventually I understood.

She didn't want them to have any more power over her anymore.

She taught me to forgive and helped me work through my feelings of hatred. Even in her state she had managed to make a semi-decent human being out of me...

But the ripples of that night never stop.

There have been attempts to break into our house twice and they succeeded once.

On all three occasions she turned into an emotional wreck for obvious reasons.

The final nail in the coffin.

They cut off the power yesterday. Paying exorbitant amounts of money on pills and doctors finally caught up with us.

I'm working now and so is my sister... maybe someday we'll be okay. But I don't know if she ever will.

Maybe one-day I'll wake up at 10:30 with the love of my life next to me. We'll have pancakes with syrup and I'll just know that everything is alright (:

Anyway if you made it this far, thanks for reading. I haven't ever talked about this with friends and as a family we don't dwell on the subject.

It's nice to have it off my chest.