She wanted to come home today, but they wouldn’t let her. Helen’s in the system now, the jig is up.
Now I know why I was tense all day and couldn’t work, the reason for the disturbance in the force. My brother called from Tucson again late this afternoon with another update on my 89-year-old mother: official diagnosis of dementia. Why it took this long is anybody’s guess, but there it is. They’re holding her in the hospital until she agrees to 8-10 hours of home care per day, or else they’ll place her in a nursing home. Tomorrow morning she’ll decide, and that is not a scene I need to see. If only she had let us help her when she had the chance! Now no matter what she does, it won’t be voluntary. She’ll go out like a candle once she realizes she’s a prisoner.
I don’t know what’s going to happen, or whether we have any say. Things are rolling just a bit too fast now for my liking, but that’s the way she set it up when she threw me out three years ago. I’d like to think we could have eased her into a new life in as nice a place as we could find—not realistic, though. (No one wants to face that final step, right?) But I thought, a place in Austin, maybe, where she might have had some visitors. My siblings there were both out looking, until she trashed the plan. I even found a place for her in Taos, but she wouldn’t come. Now it’ll be a stranger in her house she can’t afford, or a nursing home she didn’t choose. No matter where she is, she won’t get good care because she’s mean (dementia) and paranoid. This isn’t how you want someone to go. None of this is going to “work,” in any case.
Because it’s my mother I’m talking about here, no matter what the history or what has gone before, there’s an open psychic channel. I can hardly bear the thought of loss of freedom, and right now the empathy is killing me.
That’s kind of a surprise, and probably not the last one, either.
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