hell month is back

Well, a lot has been going on and I don't even want to talk about it but I've promised myself I will document my journey as long as it lasts.

What you may not know about me is that I was born late in life to my parents, they were more the age of grandparents to me and, in fact, I am basically the same age as my sister's 4 children so we all grew up together. My mother (their grandmother) took care of them a lot when they were younger because their parents were working and going to school which was nice for me because I had siblings to play with. Even after they moved away and we weren't able to be physically close every day she never forgot a birthday or holiday. I had grandparents who didn't give a fig about me, never sent me cards or presents, so I was envious.

While most people my age are dealing with parents in their 70s, my mother is 97. Yeah, that's old.

For most of her senior years she has been relatively healthy mentally but in the past year we have entered the dementia zone.

I think I talked about it briefly how during that horrific month of December last year she started having hallucinations and delusions and ended up in a lock-down psych ward at the local hospital and that's where I spent my Christmas. I still don't have total recall of that month. I was doing some serious grieving of my own for Taz, my entire world had been blown apart and my life would never be the same and suddenly I had to deal with the greatest crisis my mother had ever faced. I felt completely and utterly alone, not a single member of my family even cared about what was going on. I don't know how I got through it, I can't even let my mind wander back there because it's too awful.

Well guess what? It's starting up again! Aren't I a lucky gal?

After they pumped her full of anti psychotic drugs she stabilized enough to go back to her assisted living rooms. Well, not really, she had a bad fall and for a while it looked like she might die from swelling/bleeding outside of the brain...all that happening just a month after my husband died from bleeding inside the brain. Good times.

But then that didn't happen and eventually things got back to normal except that I could see a lot of decline in her mental capabilities. I kept up my bi-weekly visits, sometimes more often, but it was increasingly hard to talk to her because she would forget everything we said from visit to visit. But she never forgot the important stuff.

So I've been looking forward to a quiet and more pleasant holiday season. I did end up enjoying my birthday, in fact, I had just gotten home from my last post-birthday outing (movie with my kids) when I got the calls - my mother has started having hallucinations and delusions again and now she's added wandering. She would get up, this woman who has barely moved from her bed for a year, and go out walking the halls of her facility even getting on the elevator because they found her on a different floor. She told them she was waiting for a man to come by who was going to propose to her even though he'd been married 4 times before. She always has very complicated back stories for her delusions.

Obviously this wasn't safe for her (the wandering, not the fake proposal - I would love it if someone would marry her and take care of her!) and after getting her checked out for potential infections which could be causing this (no infections), they determined she needed to move to the nursing home part of the facility and out of assisted living. We had entered the final chapter.

Of course all of this would be easy if she could just move and everything stayed the same but, of course, there's money involved and she doesn't have any (which may explain why my family stays uninvolved) so suddenly I have to do a bunch of running around trying to secure a funding source. If only I had leave at work so I could get paid but I used all of it with my broken arm so all this running around is costing me money I don't have.

And then there's the issue of cleaning out the rooms she's just vacated. I have been given very little time to do it because she's being charged for every day the room isn't released. But darned if it isn't pretty hard to pack up boxes and move furniture with just one arm. I've been told by the doctor not to carry anything more than 2 pounds with my bad arm until he gives the all clear. So I worked in her rooms both Saturday and Sunday (spending gas money to drive 80 miles each day) and it still doesn't look like I've done anything. And I don't want to just let it all be trashed because she's still alive and will be upset if she thinks it's all gone so I have to take much of it home to my house to store it until she no longer is aware.

And then there's that - I visited her both days and she still recognizes me but she doesn't have context for what year it is or anything that's happened in her recent life. She asked me if I was married because she doesn't remember Taz even when I showed her a picture. And it just broke my heart to have to say out loud, again, what happened to him. I burst into tears and I haven't done that in a long time. It still didn't make much of an impression on her except then she started the endless asking if I had a boyfriend, was I dating, do any of my friends' husbands have friends they could introduce me to, was I bringing a date for Christmas dinner, etc. I finally had to tell her that there was absolutely no one out there who was even interested in dating me to get her to stop. And that hurt...because it's true.

But the worst was yesterday when I went to visit her again after packing up a box - I can only drag one box out to the car at a time and it's so hard to pick it up to get it in and out of the car. I wondered if she would remember I'd been there the day before. She not only remembered, she had somehow convinced herself that I was coming to get her out of that place and take her back to live with me. She was crushed when I told her that wasn't going to happen.

And then I felt awful.

No matter how old you are, there is just something about hearing your parent say your name in that disappointed voice that is like a knife through your heart. She kept asking if she was ever going to get out of there. In her mind, she was living a normal, busy, productive life just yesterday and then suddenly she's forced into this. She doesn't remember that she's basically been bedridden for years now. She needs 24 hour supervision and I can't do that and work to keep a roof over my head.

It's not like it's been an easy road with my mother all these years, she has always been a difficult person, but at least I always had Taz to talk to about all of it. He was amazingly understanding and would let me pour all my frustrations out and then hold me while I cried, telling me one day we would be free of the burden and could just have fun together without that obligation. Now I'm doing this completely by myself and I seriously don't know if I can. I've tried so hard to be strong through everything that's happened this past year but going through this on my own is almost more than I can bear.

I think I need a Christmas miracle.