Their Everywhere, Their Everywhere

It is 3:45AM and I was awakened from a sound sleep by a pounding on the walls. I woke up with a start and went to Ma's room to find her swatting imaginary bugs off the walls with her slipper. When I turned on the light they disappeared. Thank God Ma keeps her slippers handy to dispatch the pesky varmints. This is the first time we had visitors that required chasing off in a long time. Kind of missed them. Things have been weird lately as Ma plods haphazardly towards the promised land. Her decline is accelerating and I find myself apprehensive every time I leave the house or return. If she is sleeping I wait to see her breathe, when she is not where I think she should be I seek her out. It is a funny feeling, kind of a hole in the pit of your stomach that never quite goes away.

I have to take Ma to the doctor later today and I am not quite sure what he'll find. She is laboring to breathe and coughing much of the time. The delusions are obviously real to her and I suspect?/fear? she could end up in the hospital. This would put me in a position of having to decide if she should go into a nursing home. This is already a source of conflict between my brother and I as I had her committed 30 years ago when she had paranoid delusions and he hasn't quite forgiven me for that. It needed to be done then and it may need to be done now. I suspect that it will put a severe crack in our relationship, an obviously irreparable crack. If he held on to the emotions surrounding the first commitment for 30 years, this one should last till the grave. Why is it that I am always where the rubber meets the road? The one who gets to do all the dirty work and put up with the recrimination that comes with it. It is a lonely place. Right or wrong you lose. He is emotionally unable to participate in her care or her placement in a home and that leaves me to do the dirty work again. I resent it and embrace it at the same time.

This is a difficult time for me as my Father passed last year and this weekend is the anniversary of my first visit to his grave site at the National Veteran's Cemetery in Bath, NY. I have decided to go back to have a chat with Dad on Sunday to help me sort through this most perplexing time in my life. It is a most solemn and reverent place and I really need to be near the one I am most like. My Father and I were two irreverent peas in a pod. Sarcastic Irish wits with a jaundiced world view that leaves no circumstance exempt from a dark verbal interpretation that minimizes the seriousness of life. I really feel alone in the world without him here. No one with the ability to interpret life in the unique way that only skeptics can appreciate. I remember when I came home from a two day bender with a tattoo I was unaware of. He noticed it while eating breakfast and asked me what stupid pill I had taken that would lead me to mark my body so I would have identifying marks. The way he put it was that I would never amount to anything and now I could not even rob banks because I could be identified by the tattoo. A Father's love for his first born can be a very strange thing. I really need a strong support figure as I deal with Ma's decline and my Brother's ambivalence about the things that need to be done.

I fear that I won't know what to do with myself when I don't have anyone to take care of. No madness to interpret, no imaginary varmints to run off in the dark, no toilet paper to buy. What will I do? Who will I become? My identity has been so involved in the care of my Parent's that I have forgotten what not having to take care of someone is like. I look forward to it and dread it at the same time. It has added a dimension to my life that is indescribable, a sense of value and worthiness that has been lacking since my children grew up. I guess I am afraid of not being of real value to someone I care about. It certainly appears to be a lonely place.