I know a lady who never said no to her three kids to the point where her eldest had the severe incestuous symbiosis Fromm and I were talking about. At 21, he never held a job or a woman. He quit college to follow his passion of figuring out how he could sop his mom and the world dry replacing an entire life of gimme gimme pain with pleasure. The extrinsic reward facade got the better of him. Life began and ended with mom, which no man would ever want to admit. He was a living, breathing man of a fetus. Never seen anything like it. He is currently on a fentanyl patch for a phantom pain. That drug packs a punch to knock a birthday cake eater out and face down in his frosting. I have a witness who told me so.

His mom ... she inherited alcoholism. She drank to all the yeses she obliged her kids with. She drank while she warmed their baby clothes in the dryer before dressing them. She drank the health of her marriage away. She drank instead of divorcing. Her sons prowled around for street drugs to share with her, said the bird not the horse. The Graffix poster in their bedroom was acceptable I guess. Her husband took to drinking too.

I never saw her drunk. I saw her buying liquor at the grocery store several times. I saw her on something but was told by her optimistic sister, my mother-in-law, that she didn't drink anymore. She was, whenever I saw her, one of the nicest, most giving people I've ever met.

None of this matters, except for the last line you just read, because she is dead as of yesterday. 40 something and suddenly. Her family breathed her and I'm not sure what will come of them.