Well, friends, things have certainly become very different around here. My oldest is away at college (although I see her frequently—this is the blessing in having a college athlete just a couple hours away—she’s got races and I can get there!). My mother is living at a nursing home. I thought about calling it “sub-acute rehab” or “long term care,” but really in the end it smells like a nursing home, looks like a nursing home, and I am sure there is some stationary from the 1980s that says “St. Mary’s Nursing Home.”
So, it’s a nursing home.
The darkly funny thing is that both my daughter and my mother are living adjacent and intermingled with convents. Nuns are part of their day-to-day. We are not Catholic. Neither even really knows what a nun does with her days; but both have favorite Sister Marys, who pray for them and in the case of Lily, stand at the ready to make sure Lily and the other athletes in the required NCAA study hall are on top of their coursework and staying on the straight and narrow.
My poor mother, well, she can no longer walk straight and I imagine that walking on a narrow path would prove impossible. She fell on July 27—breaking 8 bones and hitting her head. The bleed in her brain that resulted stopped itself—self resolving! How great!—but things were left behind, pulled down through her brain in an avalanche of white matter changes, and as the blood cleared, the damage to her was evident in every reverberative step backwards while walking to places she can’t remember.
It's all shit, friends.
I am her only living child. The living part matters very little because even when my brother was alive, he would not have had the cognitive ability to help. I am not very certain my half-sister is dead, but either way, she disliked my mother. And my dad is long gone; he was so old from the get-go, I never expected him to be of any help. I spend a solid portion of my day yelling at the dead, who would have been of no help even if still alive.
It's been very productive.
I’ve also divided the people I know into two categories: The askers and the forgetters. The askers ask about my mom all the time. The forgetters do not, they’ve moved on (I mean it is an entirely different season since the fall of July!). The thing the askers and forgetters have in common is that neither group really asks about me—no questions really about how I am coping with my mother with newly discovered dementia that will require care that costs $4000 a week for the rest of her life. If I was asked, I would not answer in a way that was pleasing to myself or the party of inquiry. I guess it is all better that no one really asks, because then they might feel compelled to offer solutions to things that cannot be solved in pleasing, tidy ways. Sometimes, things simply are what they are.
Which is all shit. But sometimes that is the state of things.
Trish, I've thought a long time about what you wrote, trying to think of just the right words to share in response. But in the end, I realized there are no perfect words. I can simply tell you that my heart breaks for you and your family and your mom. You've been thrust into yet another stage of caregiving and one of the toughest, in large part because, as you wrote, people don't ask or don't understand or maybe really don't want to know since aging and its hard parts are something we want to avoid thinking about, let alone experience. Life has its beautiful moments that cause us to gasp at their awesomeness. But it can also REALLY suck and all be shit. There is no fairness, no equal division of pain so that we all get the same amount. Don't stop shouting for people to remember and sometimes answer questions in ways that are unpleasing. Any way you feel is okay. I love you.
ReplyDelete