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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 20h

Jesus this is brilliant.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=PGBy...

Diane Keaton - There's A Lull In My Life

YouTube video by Tamlin Nicholl

m.youtube.com

CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

It’s the calls I will miss. They were legendary. If I was with friends when she would call, they’d ask me to put her on speaker so they could hear what was so funny. She loved hearing them laugh in the background. I loved hearing her laugh.

Of everything, it’s that laugh I’m going to miss the most.

CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

I left before planned due to a storm. We hoped we could move her from the hospital to a place that could treat her, but yesterday in the late morning, my sister made the hardest, bravest, and most compassionate decision she will ever make, and Donna Marie Hilton told us she was ready to be done.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

Last week, after a surgery that was a failure, I traveled to Maine to see my mother for the last time. The strong, fierce, funny lady that I knew wasn’t there. It broke my soul. But I also got to feel her hand one more time. I got to tell her I loved her, and hear her tell me she loved me too.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

I finally got to have the mother I had always wanted. And I would have to stop her from telling me how proud she was of how her son had turned out.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

She made up for all the awfulness with the fierceness with which she loved me now. She insisted on calling Ken her son, and I think a few times loved him more than me. That’s not unusual, most do at some point in knowing us.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

When we finally saw each other, we grabbed tight, started to sob, and from then on it was clear we would never be separated again.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

So, when my sister was getting married and my mother and I were going to be in the same place for the first time in years, I didn’t know how I would respond. I would be there with my husband, a wedding she had not even known about until years after it happened. How would she treat us?

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

A few years later, on Christmas Eve, my mother said something terrible to me and we didn’t speak again for over a decade. I can’t tell you how hard that was. I’d lost her once, and now I’d lost her again, and it killed me inside.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

It also led her to throw me out just before my 16th birthday when it became clear I was gay. I think she thought within a year, I’d experience “the real world” the way she had gone through it and I’d be begging to come back. What she didn’t reckon on was how the gay community takes care of its own.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

She completed training to be a Certified Nurses Aide. She so impressed her instructor, graduating at the top of the class, she put my mom onto the National Registry of Nurses. In that church, she met Frank Hilton, who would become the husband to her, and father to my sister, that they both deserved.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

I will tell you until my last day that that is the only reason she lived to be 75. It gave her the inner resolve to throw her abuser out, give up drinking and smoking of various types, and know she deserved something better for herself.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

That’s also when I met her biological father. He had a tendency to drink a lot and then beat my mother’s face bloody and black and blue. Those were rough years. That’s why when I was 11, and I thought I’d found a church that would help and heal us, I led her to it.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

My new sister screamed and giggled… with delight. She’s been like that her whole life.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

That’s when I met Brandy Lynn, and she was my first unconditional love. My first year back with my mom, I went for Halloween as Casper The Friendly Ghost. Those that know me know how apt that is. Most 10 month olds burst into tears when they see a Halloween mask.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

This led to the first separation between my mother and I. I was given to my father, handed off to his mother when I became inconvenient. He refused to tell my mother where I had gone and for a long time, she did not know where I was. An accidental phone call led her back to me, and we were reunited.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

She thought she would escape by marrying my father. He and his family ultimately treated her like trash. Overwhelmed, she turned to what she had learned: numb the pain with drink and other substances.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

She was born into a family of alcoholism and neglect. She was primarily raised in foster homes, most of them cruel to a little girl who had already suffered some of the worst abuse you can imagine.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

She would impersonate the character Crazy Guggenheim from The Jackie Gleason Show by popping out her top denture plate, jutting out her chin and saying, “My father says I’m stupid, but my mother says I’m not, whadda you think?”

The woman was funny.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

She once called me to her bedroom with the full wave waterbed and asked me to sit on the edge and rock the mattress to help her get out of it.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 1d

The lady at the center of this picture is my mother. I remembered we had taken these during my first visit with her after the pandemic. I love that she’s laughing here. It is my favorite way to think of her, because in this family, we laughed A LOT.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 10d

Gearing up for one of those experiences that you hear about but can’t know the real feeling of until it’s happening to you.

My mother, in the next day or two, will be moved to palliative care. Hard to describe the feeling knowing this visit is likely the last.

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 12d

AND?

We met Leticia James and got to say THANK YOU.

CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 12d

At the VIP lounge for Jimmy Kimmel Live! at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Everything complimentary. My boy @iangray.bsky.social knows how to have a birthday!
#kimmelinbrooklyn

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CZKH DoAD @czkhdoad.bsky.social · 14d

Grateful for vaccines and my access to them.

Hooboy this year’s are kicking Daddy’s ass today.

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